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The Pursuit of Hungriness: 250 Years of American Food Innovation - The New York Times

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:48:24 +0000

America’s food history is short, compared with the ancient cuisines of the world. Some of its greatest hits were imported, and not everyone loves its outsize influence on the rest of the globe. But one thing is clear: 250 years of eating, cooking and innovating have produced a distinct and abundant culinary culture.

With help from several food historians and writers, we’ve developed a decade-by-decade tour of the most important dishes, books, movements and inventions that have shaped the national diet.

Like anyone who declares they’ve found the best burger or the perfect restaurant, we are prepared for a fight over our selections. See you in the comments section. At the end of this article, you can cast your vote on the next big innovation.

1770s The Johnnycake

Hunger is an unexpected enemy during the Revolutionary War, when more than twice as many soldiers die of malnourishment than fall in combat. But the troops persevere with the help of a simple Native American recipe of corn and water cooked over a fire. It’s one of several Indigenous practices adopted by early settlers, like smoking food, using fish as fertilizer and growing the “three sisters” — corn, beans and squash — together.

1780s Mac and Cheese

When Thomas Jefferson travels to Paris in 1784, he brings along James Hemings, an enslaved man who has worked at Monticello since childhood. Hemings studies French cooking, and when they return, he cooks at formal events hosted by Jefferson. One dish he serves is macaroni pie, an early version of macaroni and cheese made with noodles boiled in milk, layered with cheese and baked in a Dutch oven. Like Hercules Posey, another enslaved chef who cooked at the highest levels of society, Hemings, who becomes a free man in 1796, helps a young nation assert its culinary identity.

1790s A Revolutionary Cookbook

Americans are still cooking a lot like Brits when Amelia Simmons publishes “American Cookery,” the first cookbook written by an American, for Americans. It marks a break from the Old World expressed through food. Although she includes plenty of British dishes, the book introduces recipes for what will become Thanksgiving staples: pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, which Simmons pairs with turkey.

1800s The Ice Trade

Food options are limited if you don’t live on or near a farm. Meat must be heavily salted, dried or smoked to keep from rotting. Milk spoils within hours. Fresh produce wilts in transit. Frederic Tudor, who will become known as “the Ice King,” starts harvesting ice from New England rivers and lakes, packs it tightly in sawdust and ships it around the globe, revolutionizing food preservation. At first, ice is a luxury item or a necessity in hospitals, but by the late 19th century, homes have ice boxes. The wooden crates, lined with zinc or tin, are filled by regular ice deliveries.

1810s Canned Food

Another leap for feeding a growing nation: The first American food-canning factory opens in New York City, using a technique developed in France. It allows food to be harvested in rural areas and transported by boat or rail hundreds of miles away without spoiling, and lays the foundation for the industrial food-supply chain. (Until the can opener was invented, in the 1850s, people used hammers and chisels, axes or just threw the can in the fire to melt the lead soldering.)

1820s The Dawn of Fine Dining

In what is now New York City’s financial district, the Swiss-Italian brothers Giovanni and Pietro Delmonico open Delmonico’s, a tiny pastry shop that will become the first à la carte restaurant in America. Its printed menus and private tables covered in white linen are a novelty at a time when eating in public is usually done at communal tables in taverns or boarding houses. The restaurant creates a safe space for women to dine without a male escort, and raises American cooking to an art form with dishes like baked alaska and Delmonico’s namesake steak, cut thick, cooked to order and basted in butter.

1830s The Graham Cracker

The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, who preaches that mass-produced food, meat and alcohol overstimulate the body and lead to corrupting sexual behavior, inspires a recipe for a bland, unsweetened cracker made with his coarsely ground whole wheat flour. He encourages people to bake the crackers at home, and his “Grahamite” diet becomes such a national fad that commercial bakers start making them. The cracker lays the groundwork for countless, lucrative American health-food kicks and wellness movements.

1840s The Arrival of Chinese Food

At the peak of the California Gold Rush, Canton opens in San Francisco. It’s the first Chinese restaurant in America, featuring the diaspora cooking that will evolve into the Chinese American cuisine we know today, when Chinese restaurants can be found in nearly three-quarters of the nation’s counties.

1850s The Automated Harvest

Harvesting wheat by hand requires large crews working for days. But with widespread use of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, the task can suddenly be done in hours by fewer hands. Farmers, who can plant and harvest more acreage, have surplus grain to ship to Europe, creating a global market for wheat. Much of the rest goes to feed workers who migrated from rural areas to work in urban factories. The American food system starts its march toward what will become Big Ag.

The mechanical reaper was invented in 1831, and an automated thrasher that extracted grain from the cut stalks came a few years later. Neither of the expensive machines were widely adopted by farmers until the 1850s. Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis, via Getty Images

1860s Mass Immigration

German, Irish and Chinese immigration peaks, to be followed decades later by a second population shift that will eventually bring another 20 million immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — along with their cooking and food traditions. A century later, another immigration shift will introduce food from countries like Mexico, Vietnam and Korea into the American culinary vernacular.

Coming to America, a Global Spread

It’s hard to imagine the national menu without the foods brought and inspired by immigrants, and now served in every corner of the country: pizza, hot dogs, chop suey, tacos, gyros, fried chicken, injera, pierogi, sushi, samosas, bagels, kimchi and lager, to name just a few.

Josef Scaylea/Corbis, via Getty Images

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Associated Press Photo

Ira Gay Sealy/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Jerry Cooke/Getty Images

Dick Whittington Studio/Corbis, via Getty Images

Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Matt Stone/Boston Herald via Getty Images

Kevin Fujii/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images

AP Photo/Richard Drew

From top left to bottom right: Josef Scaylea/Corbis, via Getty Images; Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Associated Press Photo; Ira Gay Sealy/The Denver Post via Getty Images; Jerry Cooke/Getty Images; Dick Whittington Studio/Corbis, via Getty Images; Underwood Archives/Getty Images; Matt Stone/Boston Herald via Getty Images, Kevin Fujii/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press; Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press; Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images and AP Photo/Richard Drew.

1870s The Refrigerated Rail Car

Although grain, live cattle and other food can be shipped across the country by rail or waterways, anything perishable has limited distribution until the first refrigerated rail car comes along. Packed with ice harvested from frozen lakes, it allows meatpackers like Swift and Armour to ship beef nationwide, and spawns the modern meatpacking industry.

1880s Coca-Cola

The chemist John Stith Pemberton is happily selling his wine tonic infused with kola nuts and coca leaves when his city, Atlanta, votes to ban alcohol. He pivots, removing the wine but leaving in the caffeine and the cocaine (almost all of which is removed by 1903 and completely gone by 1929). Marketed as the ultimate “temperance drink,” Coca-Cola rides a wave of local anti-alcohol movements and the late-19th-century soda fountain craze. The company becomes the model for what M.B.A.s call “omnipresent marketing,” slapping its distinctive red logo on mirrors, calendars and other everyday objects.

1890s Home Economics

The notion that domestic work should be viewed as a profession requiring scientific efficiency, proper nutrition and structured kitchen design is given a formal name at a conference in Lake Placid, N.Y. The event is organized by women in academics, science and the culinary arts who regard the kitchen as the first line of defense against disease and social decay.

1900s The Pure Food and Drug Act

Inspired by “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s stomach-churning exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, President Theodore Roosevelt orders his own investigation, and pushes through the first major federal laws, including the Federal Meat Inspection Act, that regulate the safety of the nation’s food supply.

1910s Piggly Wiggly

The Memphis grocery store is the first in the country to allow customers to stroll the aisles and select their own food, rather than hand clerks a written list and wait while they gather the goods and tally the bill. It is also the first to use open shelves, list the price of each item and create checkout lanes staffed by cashiers.

Shoppers at the first Piggly Wiggly stores used hand-held baskets. The grocery cart, introduced in the 1930s, was initially unpopular because men thought they made them look weak and women thought they were too much like baby carriages. Poland, Clifford H./Library of Congress via Getty Images

1920s Sliced Bread

A machine that can slice and wrap loaves in seconds, invented by the engineer Otto Rohwedder, debuts in 1928 at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. Within two weeks, sales jump by more than 2,000 percent, and a phrase is coined that will endure as the American linguistic yardstick for innovation.

1930s ‘The Joy of Cooking’

This seminal cookbook by a Missouri homemaker forever changes how recipes are written. Its warm, conversational, step-by-step style of instruction creates a template on which food blogs, cooking shows and videos will be built.

1940s Cheetos

To feed its millions of troops in World War II, the military turns to food science. Orange juice is reduced to concentrate, potatoes are dried into easily reconstituted flakes and Cheddar is dehydrated and pulverized. But the war’s end leaves mountains of surplus cheese powder. Charles Elmer Doolin, riding high on the success of the Fritos he created 16 years earlier, fries extruded puffs of cornmeal and coats them in the powder. Dozens of other food companies take advantage of food technology developed for the war effort, ringing in the heyday of ultraprocessed foods.

1950s McDonald’s

Ray Kroc’s first franchise opens in 1955 in a Chicago suburb. Kroc decrees that every burger patty will be exactly 1.6 ounces, condiments will be applied with a calibrated gun and garbage cans will be emptied the moment they look full. Consistency and automation will help American fast food grow to an $800 billion global business.

White Castle became the country’s first fast-food chain in 1921. But McDonald’s took the form to new heights of popularity and systemization, using the “Speedee” assembly-line method developed by Richard and Maurice McDonald. Bbc Archive/getty Images

Chain, Chain, Chain

The country’s car culture and midcentury baby boom drive an explosion of roadside restaurants that cater to families seeking a quick, inexpensive meal.

Logo from 1921 to 1983 White Castle

Logo from 1953 to 1961 McDonald's

Logo from 1956 to 1975 Carl's Jr.

Logo from 1954 to now In-N-Out Burger

Logo from 1950 to 1967 Dunkin' Donuts

Logo from 1950 to 1972 Whataburger

Logo from 1959 to 1978 Kentucky Fried Chicken

Logo from 1957 to 1969 Burger King

Logo from 1958 to 1970 Pizza Hut

Logo from 1962 to 1972 Taco Bell

Logo from 1960 to 1963 Chick fil-A

Logo from 1969 to 1972 Wendy's

Credits from top left to bottom right: White Castle, McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., In-N-Out Burger, Dunkin’ Donuts, Whataburger, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Chick fil-A, Wendy’s.

1960s Soul Food

Since the 1910s, Black families have been migrating north from the South, bringing recipes for dishes like collard greens, fried chicken and black-eyed peas. The term “soul food” emerges with the civil-rights movement, as that style of cooking takes on added significance as an expression of Black American culture.

1970s Farm-to-Table

Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s French-influenced restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., pioneers a culinary movement based on local, organic ingredients and the people who grow them, propelling the spread of farmers’ markets and eventually improving school lunches. The restaurant is essential to the rise of California Cuisine and, later, regional food in America.

1980s Lean Cuisine

Stouffer’s low-calorie frozen dinners embody a new era that turbocharges America’s diet culture, arriving as obesity rates are climbing, home cooking is declining as more women enter the work force, and Americans are looking for more sophisticated culinary choices in the freezer case. The marketing success of elevated diet food paves the way for Snackwell’s cookies and other portion-controlled, low-fat or low-carb products.

1990s Food Network

Although public television has already produced stars like Julia Child and Martin Yan, a fledgling network dedicated solely to food and cooking turns chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay into superstars and starts the media careers of Rachael Ray and Ina Garten. A flood of cooking shows, competitions and food documentaries follow.

2000s Organics

The U.S. Department of Agriculture establishes national organic standards, a set of regulations dictating how food must be grown, raised and processed to be sold with the USDA Organic label. The rules follow decades of pressure from environmentalists, small farmers and parents with eco-anxiety. What begins as an anti-establishment movement to promote health will generate $70 billion in food sales by 2025.

2010s The Delivery App

Four Stanford University students invent DoorDash in 2013. Given a huge boost by Covid shutdowns, DoorDash and competing apps will be used at least once a week by almost 30 percent of Americans and occasionally by another 44 percent.

2020s

A.I. Impacts?

Just halfway through this decade, Americans are being bombarded by scientific and technological advancements that promise to radically change the way they eat. More than 12 percent of the population suppresses hunger with the jab of a needle, and others are experimenting with food and supplements to maximize health. Algorithms spark viral cooking trends and run the restaurant industry. Robots cook. Scientists can make real dairy and meat from cells. And who knows what impact artificial intelligence will have?

Special thanks to the journalist and culinary historian Laura Shapiro; Ashley Rose Young, a food historian, author and curator of American history at the Library of Congress; Paula Johnson, the curator of food history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; Helen Zoe Veit, an author and professor of history at Michigan State University; and Leni Sorensen, a scholar, historian and food provisioner.

Alex Marshall - The New York Times

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:32:05 +0000

Alex Marshall

I’m a European culture reporter for The New York Times, based in London.

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What I Cover

I report on major news — such as thefts from the British Museum — and write about life across Europe, focusing on stories where the arts illuminate wider social or political issues.

One day I could be writing about the future of the Parthenon Sculptures, the next profiling the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ve explored how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected artists, dancers and pop stars in both countries; looked at how rap music became the lightning rod for Sweden’s problems with gang warfare; and investigated when — if ever — looted artifacts will be returned to their countries of origin.

My Background

I joined The Times in 2018 to cover the arts and entertainment across Europe. Previously, I was a freelance journalist for the BBC and The Guardian, among other publications. I also wrote a book, “Republic or Death!: Travels in Search of National Anthems”: Researching that took me around the world, including stops in Paraguay and Nepal, meeting with guerrilla fighters as well as composers.

I grew up in Goodmayes, a town on the fringes of East London, and as a teenager got started in journalism by writing my own music fanzine, then selling it in dingy music venues in the British capital. I still spend a lot of my spare time in such venues, hoping to discover my next favorite band.

I also spent a decade as an environmental journalist, covering climate change and, less sexily, waste policy. I still use many of the skills and knowledge I learned in that time, including how to analyze government and business data and how culture intersects with green concerns.

Journalistic Ethics

My work often involves reporting on complex or challenging issues, such as allegations of inappropriate conduct against movie stars. Whatever I’m writing about, I strive to tell the full story, as fairly and accurately as possible. I also take seriously the values and standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook.

As a culture reporter, I write about concerts, plays and art shows and sometimes accept free tickets for events to aid that reporting, but I’d never accept remuneration from any cultural institution, or let any hospitality influence my work. I don’t go on press junkets and, if I travel for work, The Times pays my expenses.

Contact Me

Email: alex.marshall@nytimes.com
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New York Times

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:07:07 +0000

The Return of Blaming and Shaming in Public Health

How a Family of 3 Lives on $500,000 on the Upper West Side - The New York Times

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:21:38 +0000

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Rent is not the largest monthly expense for Anala Gossai and Brendon O’Leary, a couple who live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That would be child care.

They spend $4,200 each month on day care for their 1-year-old son, Zeno.

“We really liked the center,” Ms. Gossai, 37, said. “Neighbors in our building love it. It’s actually pretty middle of the road for cost. Some were even more expensive.”

The rent for their one-bedroom apartment is $3,900 per month. Space is tight, but the location is priceless.

“We’re right across from Central Park,” she said. “We can walk to the subway and the American Museum of Natural History.”

‘Middle Class’ in Manhattan

Ms. Gossai, a data scientist, and her husband, 38, a software engineer, met in graduate school. Their household income is roughly $500,000 per year. While they make a good living, they try to be frugal and are saving money to buy an apartment.

They moved into their roughly 800-square-foot rental eight years ago when it was just them and their dog, Peabody, a Maltese poodle. Now their son’s crib is steps away from their bed. They installed a curtain between the bed and the crib to keep the light out.

Like many couples, they have discussed leaving the city.

“When we talk about the possibility of moving to the suburbs, we both really dread it,” Mr. O’Leary said. “I don’t like to drive. Anala doesn’t drive. I feel like we’d be stuck. We really value being able to walk everywhere.”

Ms. Gossai is from Toronto, and Mr. O’Leary is from Massachusetts. In New York City, wealth is often viewed in relation to your neighbors, and many of theirs make more money. The Upper West Side has the sixth-highest median income of any neighborhood in the city, according to the N.Y.U. Furman Center.

“I think we’re middle class for this area,” Mr. O’Leary said. “We’re doing OK.”

The couple tries to save about $10,000 each month to put toward an apartment or for an emergency. They prioritize memberships to the Central Park Zoo at $160 per year and the American Museum of Natural History at $180 per year.

Their son likes the museum’s butterflies exhibit and the “Invisible Worlds” light show, which Mr. O’Leary said felt like a “baby rave.”

A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:24:20 +0000

The post A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How. appeared first on Economic Innovation Group.

Iranian and African journalists denied necessary World Cup visas, sports press association says - The Athletic

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:47:25 +0000

The International Sports Press Association (AIPS) has written to FIFA claiming that “many” Iranian and African journalists have been denied the necessary visas to cover the World Cup in the United States.

The letter, sent on June 5 and published on the AIPS website, was addressed to Bryan Swanson, FIFA’s director of media relations, and Jochen Steinhoff, FIFA’s head of media operations & services.

AIPS president Gianni Merlo wrote: “We find ourselves facing a long-standing and unacceptable problem for us journalists: the denial of entry visas to regularly accredited colleagues.

“There are many cases: Iranian colleagues, African colleagues, some of whom have been given single entries, so if their team goes to play in Canada or Mexico and they follow it, they can no longer return to the States. The cases are countless and, I repeat, unacceptable. Politicians always say that sport unites and builds bridges between young people in countries in conflict, but in this case, we are going in the opposite direction.

“We believe it is important to allow colleagues to attend the event and work, because their presence will be crucial to the image of sport and what it represents, especially in a country like the United States of America, where freedom of the press is a must.

“I hope FIFA can do everything possible to secure visas. We’re already significantly behind schedule, and many colleagues have already lost the opportunity to use plane tickets booked on time, and they’ll also face significant additional expenses.”

The U.S. State Department has been approached for comment.

A FIFA spokesperson confirmed it has received the letter, adding that “the ability to enter host countries are ultimately consular and immigration matters.”

Multi-entry visas would be necessary particularly for teams who have group stage games in the United States but also Canada or Mexico.

Ivory Coast, for example, have a group game in Toronto sandwiched between two games in Philadelphia, while Senegal’s final group-stage game is in Toronto, and they may need to return to the U.S. for knockout games. Tunisia’s first two games will be in Mexico before their final group game in Kansas City.

AIPS ordinarily appear to have a strong working relationship with FIFA. Only in April, dozens of representatives from AIPS visited at FIFA’s Switzerland HQ. AIPS even gave FIFA an award for the Best Press Facilities Award for 2025, rewarding FIFA’s approach to press operations during the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States. FIFA president Gianni Infantino attended only one press conference during the entire tournament.

“We appreciate and respect the important work of the media,” Swanson told delegates. “We understand journalists have a job to do in covering FIFA’s activities and we do what we can to support you, whether at our tournaments and events or elsewhere. All we ever ask is to be reported on with fairness and balance.”

The question of visas to enter the U.S. for the World Cup has been a major talking point since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. He campaigned on the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and his administration has increased the stringency and vetting of visa applications. This has included travel bans implemented against nationals of four countries who have qualified for the World Cup: Iran, Haiti, Senegal and Ivory Coast. There are also some visa bond measures in place for Algeria, Cape Verde and Tunisia.

The travel bans include exemptions for athletes, support staff and immediate relatives of those who would compete at the World Cup – but not for travelling fans or media.

The situation once again places Infantino under the microscope, after he personally decided to award Trump a FIFA Peace Prize in December.

Only this week, following a meeting with Trump, Infantino wrote on Instagram: “America is ready to welcome the world for the FIFA World Cup 2026, and in today’s productive meeting, I thanked (Trump) and his Administration for their continued support of this truly global event.”

Speaking during Trump’s first term in 2017, while the U.S. was bidding to host the 2026 World Cup, Infantino said: “It’s obvious when it comes to FIFA competitions, any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup.”

Additionally, as part of the United States’ joint bid with Canada and Mexico to host the World Cup — dated May 2, 2018 — Trump wrote to Infantino and said he was confident that “all eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination”.

Throughout 2025, during the first year of Trump’s second presidency, Infantino repeatedly reiterated that “America will welcome the world”.

He said: “Everyone who wants to come here to enjoy, to have fun, and to celebrate the game will be able to do that.”

A U.S. State Department spokesperson told The Athletic on Saturday: “The United States is well prepared to welcome legitimate travelers from around the globe for the largest and greatest FIFA World Cup in history.

“At the same time, the Administration will not waver in upholding U.S. law and the highest standards of national security and public safety in the conduct of our visa process.

“We adjudicate each visa application on a case-by-case basis after rigorous review and thorough vetting to determine whether the individual is eligible under U.S. law.”

Deliverance From 27,000 Feet - The New York Times

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:53:02 +0000

Five Sherpas surrounded the frozen corpse. They swung axes at the body’s edges, trying to pry it from its icy tomb. They knocked chunks of snow from the body, and the shattered pieces skittered down the mountain. When they finally freed a leg and lifted it, the entire stiff and contorted body shifted, down to its fingertips.

The sun was shining, but the air was dangerously cold and thin at 27,300 feet above sea level. A plume of snow clouded the ridge toward the summit of Mount Everest, so close above. When the Sherpas arrived — masks on their faces, oxygen tanks on their backs — the only movement on the steep face came from the dead man’s frayed jacket pockets. They were inside out and flapping in the whipping wind.

More than a year of exposure to the world’s wickedest elements had blackened and shriveled the man’s bare face and hands. His hydrant-yellow summit suit had dulled to the hue of a fallen leaf. The bottom of his boots pointed uphill. His frozen arms were bent at the elbows and splayed downhill over his head. It was as if the man sat down for a rest, fell backward and froze that way.

The Sherpas picked at the body and used gestures and muffled words to decide how best to move it off the mountain. The ghoulish face and bone-white teeth scared them, so they covered the head with the jacket’s hood.

There was no time to linger. That altitude is called the “death zone” for good reason. The Sherpas knew from experience how difficult it was to scale the world’s highest mountain. The only thing more daunting might be to haul a dead body back down.

The man’s name was Goutam Ghosh, and the last time anyone saw him alive was on the evening of May 21, 2016, when it was obvious that he would become another fatality statistic, soon frozen and as inanimate as the boulders around him.

Ghosh was a 50-year-old police officer from Kolkata, part of a doomed eight-person expedition — four climbers from the Indian state of West Bengal and four Sherpa guides from Nepal — that ran out of time and oxygen near the top of Everest. The four Bengali climbers were eventually abandoned by their guides and left to die. Three did; only one, a 42-year-old woman named Sunita Hazra, survived, as did the guides.

From left, Sunita Hazra, Goutam Ghosh, Paresh Nath and Subhas Paul shortly before their summit attempt at Mount Everest in May 2016. Sunita Hazra

At the time of the tragedy, the climbing season for Everest was almost over. On their way to the summit over the next two nights, the last two dozen of the year’s climbers had come upon Ghosh’s rigid corpse on a steep section of rock and ice.

To get around him, climbers and their guides, sucking oxygen through masks and double-clipped to a rope for safety, stripped off their puffy mittens. They untethered the clips one at a time, stepped over and reached around Ghosh’s body, and clipped themselves to the rope above him.

Some numbly treated the body as an obstacle. Others paused to make sense of what they saw — a twisted man still affixed to the rope, reclined on the slope as if he might continue climbing after waking from his awkward slumber.

Apparently abandoned at his time of greatest need, he was a mute embodiment of their worst fears. One climber stepped on the dead man and apologized profusely. Another saw the body and nearly turned around, spooked by the thought of his own worried family back home. Another paused on his descent to hold a one-sided conversation with the corpse stretched across the route.

Who are you? Who left you here? And is anyone coming to take you home?

3D model and animation by Jeremy White | Satellite image from DigitalGlobe

The Ultimate Conquest

Mount Everest occupies a rare spot in the collective imagination — a misty mix of wonder, reverence and trepidation. Hundreds of people successfully and safely reach the summit most years and return home with inspirational tales of conquest and perseverance. Other stories detail the occasional tragedies that leave a few people dead in a typical year. Those disaster stories are now their own genre in books and film.

Where most of those stories end is where this one begins, long after hope is gone — the quiet, desperate and dangerous pursuit, usually at the insistence of a distraught family far away, to bring the dead home. The only search is for some semblance of closure.

That was why the Sherpas with their oxygen masks and ice axes had come this far, this high, more than a year later.

The four Indian climbers, from a vibrant climbing culture in West Bengal, were like so many others attempting Everest. They saw the mountain as the ultimate conquest, a bucket-list item that would bring personal satisfaction and prestige. They dreamed of it for years and made it the focus of their training. As motivation, they surrounded themselves with photographs of the mountain, from their Facebook pages to the walls of their homes.

In other ways, however, they were different. Climbing Everest is an expensive endeavor, something to be both bought and earned. Many climbers are middle-aged Westerners — doctors, lawyers and other professionals — with the kind of wealth that the group from India could not fathom. Some spend $100,000 to ensure the best guides, service and safety.

These four climbers measured monthly salaries in the hundreds of dollars. They borrowed money and sold off possessions simply for a chance. They cut costs and corners, because otherwise Everest was completely out of reach.

Ghosh shared an apartment with eight members of his extended family. Paresh Nath, 58, was a one-handed tailor who barely scraped by with his wife and young son. Subhas Paul, 44, drove a small-goods truck and used his father’s pension to pay for his Everest attempt. Hazra was a nurse, married and raising a son.

They knew one another from the climbing circles of West Bengal, connected more by their common mission than strong friendships.

About 5,000 people have reached the 29,029-foot (8,848-meter) summit of Everest at least once since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary first did it in 1953. Nearly 300 people have died on the mountain in that period, according to the Himalayan Database, which tracks such things.

Nepal officials estimate that about 200 bodies remain scattered across Everest. A few are so familiar, so well preserved by the subfreezing temperatures, that they serve as macabre mileposts for the living, including one corpse commonly called Green Boots. Other bodies remaining on Everest include those of George Mallory, dating to his fatal attempt in 1924, and the guide Scott Fischer, part of the 1996 disaster depicted in “Into Thin Air.”

Most of the bodies are far out of sight. Some have been moved, dumped over cliffs or into crevasses at the behest of families bothered that their loved ones were someone else’s landmark or at the direction of Nepali officials who worry that the sight of dead bodies hinders the country’s tourist trade.

More and more, however, families and friends of those who die on Everest and the world’s other highest peaks want and expect the bodies to be brought home. For them and those tasked with recovering the bodies — an exercise that can be more dangerous and far more costly than the expedition that killed the climber in the first place — the drama begins with death.

When someone dies, those left behind, from climbing partners on the scene to family and friends half a world away, are immediately faced with enormously daunting decisions and tasks. The rituals, customs and logistics of what happens next are always different.

There are practical considerations, including whether to search for the bodies of those presumed missing or dead, if that is even feasible, and whether to recover the body or let it rest eternally where it is. There are emotional considerations, maybe cultural and religious ones, often in the name of closure, which can mean different things to different people. There are the wishes of the deceased, if those were ever communicated. There are logistical concerns, including danger and cost, local customs and international laws. Sometimes, in some places, recovery of a body is not just wanted, it is needed, to prove a death so that benefits can be provided to a family in desperate need of financial support.

All these things came into play after the bodies of three men from India were scattered high on Everest in 2016. The dim hopes for rescue kindled into demands for recovery, led by the West Bengal government.

Within a few days, in the short window between the last of the season’s summit attempts and the start of the summer monsoon that racks the Himalayas and shuts down the climbing season until the following year, a recovery team of six hired Sherpas tried to find the deceased and carry them down. They had neither the manpower nor the time.

The first they found was Paul, the delivery driver and a part-time guitar instructor who lived with his sprawling family, including his wife and 10-year-old daughter, in the small town of Bankura. He was steps from the well-worn route below Camp 4, roughly 26,000 feet above sea level. He was faceup, but only the toes of his boots stuck out of the fresh snow. It took four hours to chip and pry him from his icy grave and another 12 to drag him to Camp 2, where a helicopter carried the body to Base Camp.

A few days later, thousands crowded Bankura’s rough and narrow streets for a miles-long procession of Paul’s body, which was carried on the open bed of Paul’s small truck. The procession led to the banks of the Dwarakeswar River, where the body was cremated and the soul set free, according to Hindu tradition. There was heartache, but also closure.

Subhas Paul, left, and his guide, Lakpa Sherpa, at the summit. Subhas Paul

Subhas Paul’s daughter, Susreeta, and brother-in-law Shayamapada Das. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Bishakita Paul in the bedroom she shared with Subhas. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Back on Everest, above where Paul’s body was extricated, two of the Sherpas moved up to Camp 4. At roughly 26,000 feet, higher than all but about 15 of earth’s peaks, it sits at the edge of the oxygen-depleted death zone and is the last rest stop for climbers before their final push to the summit. The Sherpas searched the abandoned tents, some shredded to ribbons by wind, until they found the body of another of the missing Indian climbers. They knew it was Nath, the tailor, because he had only one hand, the other lost in a childhood firecracker accident.

Raging winds kept them from climbing any higher in search of Ghosh, and the men were called back. The summer monsoon was on the way, ending the climbing season. Everyone rushed to pack up camp and get off the mountain. Ghosh and Nath, left dead in the death zone, would remain on Everest for at least a year, and maybe forever.

The thought of Ghosh somewhere up there — alone and frozen, or maybe wandering around the Himalayas lost and crying into the wind for help — haunted his wife, his brothers, his mother and all those who lived in the cramped home off Old Calcutta Road, hundreds of miles away. Kolkata lies on the improbably flat and vast plain of the Hooghly River, a slow and wide offshoot of the Ganges in eastern India. There is nothing, not even a hill, to poke the horizon, and the thought of a mountain like Everest feels as far away as another planet.

And so his wife, Chandana, kept the vermilion sindoor in the part of her hair, and the red and white bangles on her right wrist, to indicate that she was a married woman. She would not remove them until she was certain she was a widow. She left the calendar on the wall of the bedroom turned to May 2016. In her mind, that was when time stopped.

“I still believe he is alive,” she said in her home in February. “I am not a widow. I am the married wife to Goutam Ghosh. Not a widow. Unless I see him, and we cremate him, I will not change.”

In the steel town of Durgapur, 100 miles northwest of Kolkata, Nath’s wife, Sabita, tried to move on. She and Nath were poor, even by Indian standards, and she had no money to bring the body home. She and her husband never spoke about what to do if he died, but now she convinced herself that he would want to be left on the mountain. He dreamed about Everest so much that a photo of the mountain was one of the few things that decorated the chipped concrete walls of their bedroom.

The two of them sat side by side through countless nights sewing backpacks and jackets to sell to support his quest. People in town marveled at his ability to cut and sew with just one hand, just as climbers wondered how he could navigate the ropes and harnesses used in mountaineering.

Sabita let herself imagine that she might awake and find him sitting behind his sewing machine. The couple’s 9-year-old son silently pretended that nothing had happened, that his father was simply on a long trip.

That’s what happens when the body is left on the mountain. Death feels like hearsay. Only the body coming through the door at home could make it something more than a haunting phantom in the imagination. Its return could bring honor and closure. It might not answer all the questions, but it could end the nightmares.

But even if it could happen, even if the bodies of Ghosh and Nath were found where they were last seen, and even if impossibly huge sums could be raised to pay to recover them, and even if there were people willing to risk their own lives on Everest to honor the dead and appease the living, nothing could happen right now. It would have to wait a year.

The climbers paused at the Balcony on their way to the summit. Sunita Hazra

The Summit Within Reach

On the afternoon of May 20, 2016, Ghosh, Nath, Paul and Hazra anxiously rested inside a tent at Camp 4. They wore oxygen masks and bright, bulky snowsuits filled with down. They sipped tea and munched crackers. There was little chatter.

They did not know one another well, but formed a ragtag group of modestly accomplished climbers, joined by their individual desires to summit Everest and their common need for a low-budget expedition. All had spent 10 years or more saving, borrowing and raising money for an Everest expedition. They found a company popular with West Bengali climbers that charged them each about $30,000, cheaper than other outfitters but still a daunting sum, far more than any of them dreamed of making in a year.

Adding to their desperation was that it was their third attempt in three years. Their 2014 quest was scuttled by an avalanche that killed 16 Sherpas, ending the season just as it was about to start. The 2015 season was canceled after an earthquake rocked Nepal in late April, killing nearly 9,000 people. It caused an avalanche that roared into Everest Base Camp, killing 18.

Now, finally, after weeks at Base Camp and on the lower slopes of Everest, they were within reach of the summit. If all went well, they would be back at Camp 4 within 24 hours, on their way home to India, where Everest summiters are revered as conquering heroes. “Everesters,” they are called.

In the early evening, after dark and later than they had planned, they emerged from the tent, each with a guide. (Guides in the Himalayas are often called Sherpas, though not all are part of the ethnic group of Sherpa, from which many take their surname.) The sky was clear and the moon was full. A line of headlamps slinked up the face of the mountain above them.

The summit of Everest cannot be seen from Camp 4, but much of the route can. It leads up a series of ropes, used by every Everest climber, that are tied to anchors drilled into the rock and ice and set by Sherpas at the start of the season.

The route leads across a barren ice field, sliced with deep crevasses, and shoots up a steep and rocky slope until it reaches a small flat spot, a burr on the side of the mountain. The landing is known as the Balcony, and from there it is two hours or more along the exposed, knife-edged Southeast Ridge to the South Summit — at 28,700 feet, it would be the world’s second-highest peak, if it were considered separate from Everest. From the South Summit, the top of Everest finally emerges in full view, tantalizingly close up a serrated ridge.

The round-trip journey from Camp 4 takes some people less than 12 hours, and experienced guides and climbers know that it should take no more than about 18 — 12 hours up, six hours back. Most follow a rule that at a predetermined time — rarely later than noon — all climbers still moving up should retreat. Prolonged exposure is dangerous, and sometimes deadly, because of the unpredictability of afternoon weather, the limited number of oxygen bottles that can be carried and the toll caused by extreme elevation and temperatures.

A woman and two guides were the first of 74 people to reach the summit that day, at 3:36 a.m., according to the Himalayan Database. The last recorded time for climbers reaching the summit was 11 a.m.

The West Bengal expedition stood at the Balcony well after dawn, resting and taking in the majestic views of snow-covered peaks and cloud-shrouded valleys. There were four clients and only three guides because Nath’s guide appeared to stay behind at Camp 4, for reasons never understood. Other climbers were already coming down, having reached the summit hours before.

The Base Camp manager for the Indian expedition received a radio call from Bishnu Gurung, the only one of the group’s guides with experience reaching the summit of Everest. He said he recommended to the clients that they turn back, but they refused.

“I told them, ‘If we are still on the Balcony at 10 in the morning, how can we reach the top?’ ” Gurung said.

Ghosh cried at the prospect of giving up, Gurung later said. Paul began ascending on his own.

“I stopped there just to check if he will return back if I didn’t continue,” Lakpa Sherpa, Paul’s guide, said. “I thought he would listen to me. Sherpas can’t use force or hit him in that situation. They are our guest. All we could do is convince. As he wasn’t convinced, I followed him.”

Only Nath was persuaded to turn back to Camp 4. The three other Indian climbers persisted. The three guides joined them, carrying a dwindling amount of oxygen and a growing sense of dread.

“I thought that I won’t return back,” Lakpa Sherpa recalled.

Paul Pottinger

‘It’s Late’

Throughout the late morning and early afternoon, dozens who had reached the summit descended past the Indian climbers. Paul Pottinger, a Seattle doctor, reached the summit at 7:48 that morning. He wore a camera on his head to record much of his daylight descent on the rope, a one-way lane used by both those going up and coming down. Negotiating past oncoming climbers can be a slow, clumsy and dangerous exercise.

Pottinger passed Paul and his guide, Lakpa Sherpa, well below the South Summit. Lakpa Sherpa asked for the time. Pottinger lifted the sleeve of his jacket to expose his watch, visible to the camera. It was 10:23. He repeatedly told the guide that it was 10:20. He later speculated that the guide wanted Paul, his client, to hear how late it was.

“Who climbs Everest without a watch?” Pottinger said months later. “Now I wonder if he had a watch. And I wonder if he was really saying, ‘Please tell my guy to stop because I can’t.’ ”

Minutes later, Pottinger passed Pasang Sherpa, Hazra’s guide, climbing alone. At 10:45, on a particularly steep pitch at an anchor tangled in a knot of ropes, Pottinger passed a group of three: Ghosh, Gurung and Hazra.

“The timing could scarcely have been worse for all of us, jammed together at the steepest section of the day,” Pottinger wrote in an online diary of his expedition. “But they made it by and continued up. How many more people will be headed up at this time of day? Damn it’s late. But, as before, I said nothing to them about this. And, as before, it haunts me to this day.”

Paul and Lakpa Sherpa reached the summit at 1:45 p.m., according to the camera later recovered from Paul’s body. There were 31 photographs taken at the summit over 16 minutes.

The others in their group — Ghosh, Hazra, Nath and their guides — were somewhere below.

Sunita Hazra in a tent at Base Camp. Sunita Hazra

The view from Camp 3. Sunita Hazra

Goutam Ghosh turned the camera on himself. Goutam Ghosh

The last photograph of Ghosh taken with his camera appeared to be at the South Summit at 1:57 p.m. He wore an oxygen mask. He held flags and banners that he had carried in his backpack. A video recorder dangled around his neck. Ghosh turned it on.

Wind whipped through the camera’s microphone, but not enough to obscure the sound of Ghosh’s quick-paced breathing. It was as if Ghosh were checking himself in a mirror. With a bare hand, he lifted his sunglasses to his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot. He pulled his oxygen mask to his chin, briefly showing his teeth and his gray-speckled mustache.

“Goutam,” a voice said, and Ghosh glanced in its direction, put his mask on and reached to turn off the camera. It was the last record of him alive.

Yet Gurung, Ghosh’s guide, apparently kept going, alone. About 40 minutes later, he photographed himself 21 times with Ghosh’s camera at what appeared to be the summit. There was no sign of Ghosh.

(Hazra, the lone survivor, said that she reached the summit at about 3 p.m. There is no evidence that she got there. She has petitioned for a summit certificate from Nepal’s Department of Tourism, the arbiter of such matters, without success.)

The expedition setting out from Camp 4. Sunita Hazra

Stop or Continue?

In the area above 8,000 meters (over 26,000 feet), from Camp 4 to the summit, a dearth of oxygen and brutal weather kill those who dare stay exposed too long. As altitude increases, atmospheric pressure decreases, and with the thin air comes less oxygen for the lungs and the bloodstream.

The body tries to overcome it by sending more blood to the brain, which can cause swelling, leading to symptoms like headaches, nausea and exhaustion. At extreme heights, a condition known as high-altitude cerebral edema can also cause a lack of muscle coordination, impaired speech, confusion and hallucinations. As the body continues to fight for equilibrium, it sends blood to the lungs. High-altitude pulmonary edema results in coughing and major breathing problems.

The sun’s strong rays at high altitudes can burn the skin and eyes, causing snow blindness. The subfreezing temperatures, exacerbated by perpetually strong winds, cause frostbite, killing the skin and the underlying tissue, especially in the extremities.

Confused and numb, climbers sometimes react to the onset of hypothermia by shedding their clothes, believing they are burning up, not freezing to death. It is why those who die in extreme conditions, like the ones on the slopes of Everest, are often discovered in a state of undress.

An image from the video camera of Paul Pottinger, a Seattle doctor, on his descent. The climbers coming up the mountain include Goutam Ghosh; his guide, Bishnu Gurung; and Sunita Hazra. Paul Pottinger

Back in West Bengal, vague and inaccurate news reports spread quickly on May 21: The climbers had reached the summit. The houses of the climbers filled with friends offering congratulations and customary sweets.

By nightfall, however, the festive moods faded. Updated reports from Everest arrived. The West Bengali climbers were lost on their way down.

That evening, down at Camp 4, the first group to leave for a summit attempt included an experienced American climber and photographer, Thom Pollard, and his Nepali guide.

They first passed a Sherpa, then another, both cold, scared and without oxygen. Then they came across climbers below the Balcony. One was a woman. One was a man in a yellow snowsuit, lying sideways across the hill, still attached to the rope. His hands were uncovered. He appeared close to death.

Options for would-be rescuers are few at such extreme altitudes. Climbers carry finite amounts of oxygen, just enough for their own expected need, because of the weight of the canisters. They worry about their own survival, knowing that extra time exposed to the elements can prove fatal. They are often in a depleted state, physically and mentally. Even if they have all their faculties, they have paid tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps devoted many years of their lives, to this one day, and might be reluctant to abort it all for a faceless stranger whose needs cannot be assessed easily and who, most likely, speaks a different language.

Pollard and his guide stopped, discussed the situation and continued past.

“I’ve wrestled with this for a year,” Pollard said from his home in New Hampshire.

Pollard and his guide were the first to summit on the morning of May 22, at 2:40 a.m. On their descent, still in the dark, they were relieved to see Hazra was gone. There were marks in the snow where she had either scooted downhill or been dragged away.

But Ghosh was still there, splayed on the slope and now alone.

“He was dead,” said Pollard’s guide, Lhakpa Gyaljen Sherpa. “I shouted: ‘Hello, hello!’ There was no response. Looking at his face, he was dead. That’s why the others must have left him.”

Like everyone else who went up and back for the remaining days of the season, they stepped over him, clipped out of and back onto the rope around him, and continued down.

Sunita Hazra’s memories of that night are spotty, but she remembered leaving Ghosh, her closest friend on the expedition.

“I told Goutam, ‘You must come,’ ” she said in the living room of her home near Kolkata. “I thought if I started moving downward, he would follow me. I had neither the strength to help him or to even look behind me to make sure he was coming.”

She believes she would have died, too, if not for Leslie Binns, a British climber who was ascending above Camp 4 when he found her with her mittens off and her jacket unzipped. He gave her a shot of oxygen, which lifted her energy, but soon realized she would not make it to Camp 4 on her own. He aborted his own summit attempt to drag, encourage and cajole her downhill.

They soon discovered Subhas Paul, in a dazed and hypothermic state of his own. Binns slowly coaxed the two Indian climbers down, sharing hits of oxygen and trying to lift them when they collapsed. They lost track of the roped route. Paul fell into a shallow crevasse and flailed his arms.

Binns eventually made a decision to try to save one or the other. Figuring Paul had energy to expend, he chose Hazra and escorted her to a tent.

“When I got to Camp 4, Subhas was not behind me,” Hazra said. “I thought he was there. I thought Goutam and Nath were somewhere safe.”

Some in Camp 4 later awoke in the night to someone shouting, rhythmically but incoherently, over and over. They presumed it came from within the camp, part of another expedition. No one ventured into the dark to explore.

When climbers emerged from their tents in the first rays of sunlight, they realized the shouting was from Paul, about 100 yards uphill from camp. He had been out in the elements for at least 32 hours.

Hazra and Paul were reunited with their three guides in the tent. They did not know where Ghosh and Nath were.

By midafternoon, persuaded by doctors from other expeditions to get to lower altitude immediately, the group was on its way downhill again, without Ghosh and Nath, carrying the last bits of oxygen it had stashed at Camp 4. Paul soon collapsed.

“Subhas started getting very weak,” Lakpa Sherpa said. “He wasn’t getting better even after supplying oxygen. His hands froze. We tried very hard to rescue him from there.”

Two guides stayed with Paul. The third led Hazra downward, but soon left her behind, feeling he was in worse condition than she was, suffering from frostbite on his hands and feet. Darkness came, bringing snow and wind.

Alone, Hazra fell and broke her wrist. She had frostbite on her hands. Eventually, the other two guides caught up to her.

“I understood from the Sherpas that Subhas sat down to rest,” Hazra said at her home earlier this year. She began to cry. “And they left him,” she said.

Hazra and the guides made their way to the icy landing spot above Camp 2, where a helicopter winched Hazra to Base Camp. Ferried to Kathmandu, she was hospitalized for her injuries. A few days later, she received a hero’s welcome at the airport in Kolkata.

She knew little of what happened behind her, up the mountain. At about the time that Paul, Hazra and the three guides left Camp 4 to descend toward Camp 3, another Indian expedition returning from the summit spotted Nath off the trail in afternoon light. He was upright and alive, mindlessly digging into the ice with his one hand.

Nath was carried to Camp 4. His eyes were swollen shut with snow blindness.

By the next morning, the last day that anyone would summit Everest for the season, Nath was too weak to hold a bowl of soup. He died in a tent at Camp 4.

Goutam Ghosh was still somewhere higher on the mountain. At least 27 people stepped over him on their way to the summit and again on their way down before the season ended and the mountain emptied for most of a year.

Mount Everest. Josh Haner/The New York Times

A New Season

Every spring, as hopeful climbers from around the world trek to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, an elevation of about 17,500 feet, to begin acclimating for a summit push in May, a team of local Sherpas is hired to create the season’s route up the mountain. They establish the course up more than two vertical miles that hundreds of others will follow.

First, the “icefall doctors” set ropes, ladders and makeshift bridges through the notoriously dangerous, ever-shifting Khumbu Icefall immediately above Base Camp. Others keep moving upward, setting anchors and stringing ropes until they reach the summit. The process can take weeks, and is often delayed by bad weather.

Only when the ropes are fixed to the top does the Everest climbing season open. It usually lasts only a few weeks, squeezed between the route opening in early May and the projected start of the monsoon at the end of the month.

Everest is rarely climbed at any other time of the year. That meant the rope-fixing Sherpas were likely to be the first to see Ghosh and Nath, if their bodies were still there from the year before. The forces of wind, snow, ice and gravity could have moved them or hidden them.

Nath was last seen in a tent at Camp 4, at more than 26,000 feet, which gets battered into something unrecognizable from one year to the next. Ghosh was last seen higher on the mountain, clipped to a rope on a steep section called the Triangular Face, just below the perch called the Balcony. If that rope from last year’s route was damaged — perhaps by a falling piece of ice — Ghosh’s body could have fallen and disappeared for good.

There were three major reasons the Ghosh family desperately wanted Goutam’s body returned. The first was emotional. The idea that he lay near the summit of Everest, alone, exposed to the elements, left to serve as a tragic tourist marker for future climbers, was nearly too much to bear. And they wanted answers about what happened. Maybe his body could provide those answers. Maybe that video camera around his neck, if it was still there and still worked, held clues. Maybe there were memory cards from his camera in his pockets or backpack. Maybe a message for the family. Something.

The second was religious. Hindus believe the body is merely a temporary vessel for the soul. Once the soul is severed from the body through cremation, it is reincarnated in another body. Like most in West Bengal and across India, the Ghoshes were devoutly Hindu. To them, closure required a cremation, and all the ceremonies that came with it.

The third reason, as important as the others, was financial. Legally, in India, Ghosh was considered a missing person. Only when a body was produced, or seven years had passed, would the Indian government issue a death certificate, which the Ghosh family needed to gain access to his modest bank accounts and to receive financial death benefits like life insurance and the pension he had earned as a police officer.

Ghosh was a police sub-inspector, the second in command at the local precinct of the Kolkata police. It was a good job that paid about $500 a month. Ghosh was a talented player of tabla, the Indian bongo-like drums, and sometimes performed with his wife. He took army courses to become an adept equestrian and was known in the neighborhood as a good soccer player. He had been mountaineering and rock climbing for most of his life.

It might seem a strange hobby in Kolkata, hundreds of miles from the Himalayan foothills, but West Bengal is a surprising hive of mountaineering. There are hundreds of mountaineering clubs, in just about every small town and every neighborhood of the cities. Kolkata has dozens of them. The state government heavily promotes the activity through the West Bengal Mountaineering and Adventure Sports Foundation, where a 60-foot climbing wall rises outside its offices.

The foundation gives grants to those who apply with realistic ambitions of scaling the biggest peaks. In the case of Ghosh, Paul, Nath and Hazra, it granted each 500,000 rupees, or about $7,500, toward their quest to climb Everest.

Ghosh was the most experienced of the mountaineers — not a well-known climber in West Bengal, but a respected one. He was an instructor at summer camps held at a climbing center on Susunia Hill, a 1,450-foot hiccup on the plain a couple of hours’ drive northwest of Kolkata. He had successfully climbed a number of 7,000-meter peaks in the Himalayas. In the bedroom he shared with Chandana was a poster of Everest. It hung there for 20 years.

“We try to go through our routines,” Chandana Ghosh said in February. “The peace is not there. We try to eat and we try to sleep. But all the time we are thinking about the beloved man of this family, lying up there all alone.”

Goutam Ghosh was the youngest of three brothers, all in their 50s. They lived with their parents, wives and children in a dim, two-story apartment in the concrete jumble of Barrackpore, a district of northern Kolkata. Their father had recently died. The door from the street led to an outside hallway, open to a sky obscured by rambling apartments, one on top of another, squeezed tight. The bathroom was to the left, a hole behind a half wall and a pitcher of water next to a hose.

Debasish Ghosh, 53, unlike his younger brother, was not a mountaineer. A small man with a bushy mustache and a bit of a paunch, he ran a fast-food stall, serving chow mein and mutton rolls, not far from the family’s home near the Barrackpore train station. He made a vow: If the body could be found, he would bring Goutam home.

Goutam Ghosh’s widow, Chandana, helps her brother-in-law Debasish prepare for his trip to Nepal in hope of returning with Ghosh’s body. Josh Haner/The New York Times

A flier for the Goutam Ghosh memorial rock climbing course at Susunia Hill in West Bengal, India. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Debasish Ghosh at the outset of his 40-hour trip by train, bus and taxi to Kathmandu to meet his brother’s body. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Debasish Ghosh hoped that the West Bengal government would coordinate and finance a retrieval attempt a year later. For months, he requested meetings with officials, slowly climbing the government’s chain of command, until he and Chandana met with Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal.

She expressed concern for the cost, Debasish Ghosh said, and asked who would venture up Everest to bring back the bodies. She wondered about the state’s responsibility if members of a recovery team were hurt or killed.

Without a commitment from the state government, the Ghosh family sent a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. His office forwarded it to the state government, with a note that said “for action as appropriate.” Secretly, the state government approved money for the operation, but it did not share its plans with the Ghosh and Nath families.

“They were saying that only if the body is located will they take up the decision,” Debasish Ghosh said. “But who will inform us that the body is there? It has to be the Sherpas, because otherwise nobody is obligated to find the body.”

So the family hired an experienced guide who was known among West Bengali climbers and who had been to the Everest summit five times. He told Debasish Ghosh that he would recover his brother’s body for 26.3 Indian lakh rupees, or roughly $40,000, more than the cost of Goutam Ghosh’s original expedition.

The family agreed to pay 2.5 lakh (about $4,000) upfront, to organize and buy oxygen for those who would make the initial search, following closely behind the rope-fixing teams. The rest would be paid at intervals along the way — when photographs were produced, for example, and when the body reached Kathmandu.

The Ghosh family did not have the money, but agreed to sell a small lot in Kolkata that Goutam owned, where he hoped to someday build a house. They sold jewelry, including a gold necklace that Chandana wore for her wedding. Family members and mountaineering club members scrounged the small bits of savings that they had. By early May, as the rope-fixing team was doing its work, it was still not enough.

“We have arranged about 20 lakh so far,” Debasish Ghosh said in Kolkata.

A day later, too anxious to wait helplessly any longer, he packed a small yellow daypack with a few changes of clothes, plastic containers of homemade chicken and roti, and a folder of paperwork, protected in plastic sleeves. The sleeves held copies of Goutam Ghosh’s identification card, his police service card, his permit for climbing Everest — all things that would help identify a body and cut through the logistics of bringing it home.

He knelt at his mother’s bed and touched his mother’s feet, a sign of respect. He prayed with her as she cried. He stepped into the hot sun and through a huddle of well-wishers. Accompanied by one of Goutam Ghosh’s friends, he waved and disappeared around a corner, swallowed by a street filled with cars, rickshaws, scooters, bicycles, walkers and cows, and walked to the train station.

“I cannot keep my mind cool staying at home,” Debasish said. “I want to be closer.”

After two trains, two buses and 40 hours, the two men were in Kathmandu. They found a $5-a-night room to share, and waited.

Sabita Nath and her husband, Paresh, spent many late nights at sewing machines to make backpacks and jackets that supported Paresh’s quest. Josh Haner/The New York Times

‘Let Him Be’

The rope-fixing team reached Camp 4 on April 23, but weather stopped the Sherpas from going higher. The team descended to refresh at lower altitude in anticipation of its next push, carrying rumors that a body was seen amid the tatters and rubble at Camp 4 — the body of Paresh Nath, presumably.

His wife, Sabita Nath, had little communication with the government for nearly a year. No one reached out to the family to discuss what might happen if the body was found. No one, in fact, had asked her if she even wanted her husband’s body back.

Sabita Nath did not share her tiny home with a large, extended family. With her husband gone, it was just her and their 9-year-old son, Adrishikar, living behind a storefront where her husband sold his handmade backpacks and jackets.

“After a while, I began to think there is no reason to bring him here,” she said at her home one day, sitting near the sewing machines where they used to work side by side. “He loved the mountains like God. If he is there, let him be. His soul must be happy somewhere.”

She and Paresh were not deeply religious. Some of Nath’s relatives performed rituals after it was clear that he had died in 2016, but Sabita did not attend. She allowed herself the traditional 10 days of mourning, then removed all the signs of being a wedded woman — the circular red bindi from her forehead, the vermilion sindoor along the part of her hair and the red and white bangles on her wrist. She was a widow.

Money was an issue. Paresh Nath once had a life insurance policy, his wife said, but the premiums were not paid and it was worthless. Sabita got busy at her sewing machine, making simple nylon shopping bags she sold to a nearby grocery market for about 1,500 rupees (about $23) per month. Climbers and friends provided donations of about 2,500 rupees per month ($39) to keep her financially afloat.

A picture of Paresh Nath in the small shop at his home where he sold backpacks and mountaineering supplies. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Adrishikar Nath, now 10, did not ask if his father was dead for much of the year after he did not come home. Josh Haner/The New York Times

For most of a year, Adrishikar did not ask if his father was dead, and his mother did not have the heart to tell him.

“I tell him that papa has built a room on Everest that he is living in,” Sabita Nath said in February. “I can’t tell him the real fact, that he is gone.”

Like many Indians, the Naths ate without utensils, and Adrishikar carefully washed his father’s one hand after meals. Paresh Nath drove the boy to school on a scooter even though he had no license because of his disability. Theirs was a special bond, Sabita Nath said, and her focus was on the boy’s well-being, not her husband’s body.

“Even if the government brings the body, what’s the use to me?” she said. “It is just a mortal body. To me, the more urgent thing is a job, so I can raise our son. To bring a body from Everest is a huge cost. And I cannot spend that money.”

If the government wanted to help financially, she said, the money would be better spent on her son’s education than on her husband’s dead body. She reiterated her stance in May, just before photographs of Nath’s body appeared on social media. He was identified by his boots and the snowsuit he had sewn himself.

Nath’s family and friends were stunned by the photographs. Sabita experienced chest pains and went to the doctor.

“I felt sick,” she said afterward at her home in Durgapur. “Until that day, I was trying to console myself by thinking that maybe he was still alive and only lost.”

Climbers working their way across the Summit Ridge. The true summit is hidden a few meters beyond this view. Paul Pottinger

The Red Tape

The route to the summit of Everest changes slightly each year, depending on variable conditions, like the snowpack or snow slides. In 2017, it opened on May 15, later than usual. The new route was strung near previous ones, and the worn, faded ropes of past seasons could be seen threaded among the rocks and through the snow.

The rope-fixing team returned down the mountain and reported seeing a body most of the way up the Triangular Face, below the Balcony — just where Goutam Ghosh’s body was last seen, about 360 days before.

“I think that was the body of the Indian climber,” Chime Chundub Gurung, one member of the team, said at the airport in Kathmandu a few days later. “The body was upside down with legs up. It was very close to the new rope. I didn’t touch it, and I didn’t see the face. I only saw boots, and he was wearing mountaineering clothes.”

The hundreds of climbers below, eager for the route to open and seeing a forecast for good weather, began to stream toward the summit. Within days, dozens reached the summit and came back again. Few of them saw Paresh Nath’s body, stashed away on a far side of Camp 4. But every one of them climbed within feet of Ghosh’s body.

The first photographs arrived on Tuesday, May 16. Debasish Ghosh received one on his phone at 6:17 that evening while sitting at his hotel. Numbly, he stared at it, tugging the edges with his fingertips to zoom in for a better look. He sent the message to his son and to Chandana at home in Kolkata. He also sent it to Sunita Hazra, the only survivor among the four Indians in the expedition the year before.

The photo showed a body in a faded yellow snowsuit bent like a horseshoe and half-buried in snow. It looked like something archaeologists were midway through excavating. There was no face visible, but the boots and the gear matched what Ghosh was wearing a year before. The pattern of the yellow-and-black snowsuit matched what Sunita had in her closet at home, the one she bought alongside Ghosh at a little shop in Kathmandu.

Goutam Ghosh’s body was discovered nearly a year after he was left dead on the mountain. Phurba Sherpa

Everyone agreed: It was Ghosh’s body.

Three men from the West Bengal government rushed to Kathmandu, taking the 90-minute commercial flight that Debasish Ghosh could not afford. They quickly struck a deal with Mingma Sherpa, the owner of Seven Summit Treks, a major Himalayan expedition company based in Kathmandu. The sides agreed on a price that the government would pay for the two bodies to be recovered: $90,000, roughly the amount the government quietly set aside weeks earlier. The government announced it would pay for the retrievals.

Sabita Nath and Chandana Ghosh received calls from a government official asking them to sign a “no objection” certificate to allow for the attempted recoveries. They agreed.

Nepal’s Department of Tourism, which oversees the country’s mountaineering trade, placed only one major provision on the operation: It did not want the bodies coming down at the same time that hundreds of climbers were going up.

“We just want to ensure that other mountaineers who planned to go up this season will not be hampered,” Director General Dinesh Bhattarai said. “I have talked to them, and they will try to bring them down at nighttime, and when there are less climbers moving up.”

The issue, he admitted, was one of optics as much as congestion.

“The climbers, they know pretty well that it is dangerous, and they are ready to encounter these kinds of incidents,” Bhattarai said. “They are mentally prepared for that. It’s more about not hampering the existing climber. But at the same time, we are also concerned about what they see.”

It was also a matter of practicality. Digging out and dragging a body off the mountain typically requires at least six Sherpas. This effort needed about a dozen people. And most of the Sherpa guides were either still on the mountain with clients, or just returning, too exhausted to turn right back around and go up.

The days of waiting piled up.

Sherpas used axes to pry Goutam Ghosh’s body from the mountain. Dawa Finjhok Sherpa/Seven Summit Treks, for The New York Times

The Retrievals Begin

It was late May, the tail end of the Everest climbing season, when five hired Sherpas quietly left Camp 2 at 1 a.m. Into the dark they carried ropes and oxygen canisters, but no food, only a little bit of water and a plastic half-liter bottle of Coke. The Coke froze quickly in the bitter temperatures, even inside their packs. When they wanted a sip, they used a small stove to melt ice and put the bottle in the warm water to turn it back to liquid.

They turned their oxygen on low at what they called the “crampon point,” an hour above Camp 2, where the trail becomes predominantly ice and climbers attach crampons, with fang-like spikes, to the soles of their boots.

Sherpas typically use oxygen only in the death zone, at Camp 4 and above, but they wanted to move quickly. Oxygen was fuel, feeding the lungs and the blood, and it allowed them to keep a brisker pace than usual. Each man had two bottles, enough to last about 24 hours, they figured.

The leader was Dawa Finjhok Sherpa, a 29-year-old guide who had been to the summit of Everest five times. He received a call a couple of weeks before from Mingma Sherpa, the owner of Seven Summits. The company needed an experienced guide to lead an expedition to retrieve a pair of bodies, he was told.

(The New York Times hired Dawa Finjhok Sherpa, through Seven Summits, to shoot video of the retrieval effort.)

Guides often did two, even three, major expeditions in the Himalayas each spring. By late May, many were either already home or exhausted. Mingma Sherpa dangled a $3,000 payout for a few days of work and scrounged up about a dozen men. He promised beer if they were successful.

Like most Sherpas, Dawa Finjhok Sherpa did not love working as a guide, carrying heavy loads and the hopes and demands of foreigners — and sometimes the foreigners themselves — up and down the world’s highest peaks. But it paid better than anything else.

Many of the guides came from remote villages, and there was little work there. Some, like Dawa Finjhok Sherpa, were from Kathmandu. They knew that more conventional jobs, in construction or retail or finance or anything else, wouldn’t give them the same money for the same amount of work. But it did not mean they liked it.

“I’ve almost quit this job,” Dawa Finjhok Sherpa said over a beer in Kathmandu one evening, “because there are so many ways to die.”

About 11 a.m., the retrieval Sherpas reached Camp 4, a ghost town of abandoned tents and gear so late in the season. They heated their Cokes and sipped from the plastic bottles, but did not dawdle. Once rested, the five men stood in the midday light, put on their packs, secured their oxygen masks and kept moving, up the Triangular Face toward the Balcony of Everest, looking for a frozen man who had waited a long time for someone to take him home.

A few hours behind them, following the same route, six more Sherpas left Camp 2 and headed to Camp 4. Their mission was to recover Paresh Nath.

The danger increased with every foot of altitude toward the summit, where the air grew thinner and the chances of rescue, should anything go wrong, grew slimmer. The same threats faced by climbers from around the world were faced by Sherpas from Nepal. But Mingma Sherpa, an experienced climber himself, said no mission to recover bodies was off limits, if the price was right.

“Above the South Summit, from the South Summit to the summit, we might have to think about it,” Mingma Sherpa said. “But below the Balcony, the only question is weather. I cannot fight the weather. The technical part, we can handle. The weather can kill us.”

If it all went right, then, the bodies of the Indian climbers would return from Everest. They would be among the highest-altitude recoveries ever made.

At 1:39 local time on a Wednesday afternoon, the recovery team searching for Goutam Ghosh got to his body, a pale-yellow crescent on a steep black-and-white backdrop, icebound between jagged rocks the color of coal.

The head was downhill, the face turned slightly to the outside. The arms were splayed overhead, the back was arched and the feet were curled to the right. His once-bright clothes were bleached by the elements. So was the rope that was still attached to the rigging around his waist. It was red when all the Everest summiters of the year before climbed it, but was now faded to a dusky pink.

There were no signs of his depleted oxygen bottles, probably scavenged and sold in Kathmandu for a hundred dollars. There were no signs of his mittens, likely pulled off by Ghosh in his final desperate, hypoxic moments. The snowsuit was unzipped to the waist, a sign that hypothermia had tricked Ghosh into thinking he was overheating.

A skull cap that Ghosh wore the day of the summit attempt was still on, but the yellow down-filled hood attached to his snowsuit was loose and filled with snow. It was still knotted where Ghosh had cinched it at the chin. His hands were bare, black and leathery, like his face. His white teeth, like the silver crampons still attached to his boots, gleamed in the sunshine.

The men were able to pry Ghosh’s hood loose and pull it over his face. They tied the hood with rope so they would not have to see the face.

“At first when we saw him, we were a little bit afraid,” Dawa Finjhok Sherpa said. “If we don’t see the skin, it’s easier.”

The Sherpas connected Ghosh to a new rope, anchored in a rock about 30 feet uphill, and used ice axes to dig and pry the body from the snow. When the body moved, it moved as one piece, without torque, all the limbs, muscles and joints frozen solid. Pulling on a wrist turned the body all the way to the toes. Once the body was freed from the mountain’s grip, the men hammered blocks of ice from it. Dawa Finjhok Sherpa estimated the load weighed more than 300 pounds, double Ghosh’s weight when he was alive. Two men could not lift the body. Three struggled to maneuver it.

They tied ropes through Ghosh’s carabiner. They lowered him by rigging a pulley-type system through the same anchors used for climbers attempting the summit. They used Ghosh’s jumar, a ratcheting device used in climbing, to help belay the load, sliding it downhill one stretch of rope at a time.

They had the mountain to themselves above Camp 4, which they could see far below in the saddle between Everest and Lhotse.

“It was easier because there was a lot of snow this year, so the rocks were covered in snow and we could slide him,” Dawa Finjhok Sherpa said. “But the snowy, flat areas were hard. He was heavy.”

Not far from where they found Ghosh’s body that morning was another body that Dawa Finjhok Sherpa estimated had been there for five or six years. And somewhere nearby, they knew, was the body of a doctor from Alabama who had died a few days before. There was no plan to bring it down.

It took an hour to drag Ghosh’s body to Camp 4, where Dawa Finjhok Sherpa opened Ghosh’s backpack. Inside he found a video camera and a pair of gloves. There were banners and printouts of the India and West Bengal flags, and for the Kolkata police department and Ghosh’s climbing club.

Dawa Finjhok Sherpa put the gloves on Ghosh’s hands and put the video camera in his own backpack. He left Ghosh’s backpack at Camp 4, with the wind-torn remains of the 2017 climbing season.

The recovery team had a rolled-up plastic toboggan that it intended to use as a stretcher, but Ghosh’s body was too stiff and contorted to fit on it properly. So the men found an abandoned blue plastic tarp, wrapped it around Ghosh’s lower body and lashed it tight with mismatched pieces of rope. They found a thin, gray foam sleeping pad and did the same thing for his upper body.

The men tried to keep the body on its back, but it slid better facedown. Soon the snowsuit was ripped open at the elbows, spilling down feathers.

By nightfall, the team was pulling, lifting and sliding Ghosh down the mountain, past where Subhas Paul had died the year before. It came across the group assigned to retrieve Paresh Nath, which was on its way up. There were few other climbers. The mountain was practically empty so late in the season, and those who remained traveled different parts of the slopes at different times. Like drivers familiar with a city’s traffic patterns, the recovery Sherpas knew the rhythms of the route.

They rested in the middle of the night at Camp 3, which is carved into the precipitous ice of the Lhotse Face. A Seven Summits cook had hiked up from Camp 2 to meet them, and fed them noodles and juice. The Sherpas trudged downhill from there.

“I started to make a system to belay the body below Camp 3,” Dawa Finjhok Sherpa said. “My partner was holding the rope, but he fell asleep. He let the rope slip just as I was hooking up our system. Three of us held on as tight as we could and we screamed. We all got rope burns. If we wouldn’t have held on, the body would have slipped down the mountain.”

At dawn, Ghosh’s body arrived at the crampon point. The Sherpas assigned to get his body had been working nearly 28 hours, but Ghosh’s journey was held up, awaiting Nath and the helicopter that would carry them off the mountain.

Clouds shrouded Everest. Ghosh’s recovery team sought shelter down at Camp 2, leaving Ghosh alone on the mountain again. The body was soon covered in snow.

The retrieval Sherpas with Goutam Ghosh’s body, just below Camp 4. Dawa Finjhok Sherpa/Seven Summit Treks, for The New York Times

Leaving Everest

The body of Paresh Nath, still in the red-and-black snowsuit that he sewed for himself, reached the crampon point at about 2 p.m. on Thursday, May 25. He was wrapped in a malleable, plastic stretcher, with a tangle of ropes laced through grommets at its edges.

Nath’s right hand, his one hand, was bare and appeared to grip a rope across his chest. His other arm was tucked along his side. It was the position he died in a year before. His body was hard as stone.

Their toughest work done, the sun shining again, the Sherpas assigned to Nath’s recovery shed their outer layers. They huddled on the snow and were presented with noodles and juice.

The Ghosh team came up the short distance from Camp 2, and having strapped the contorted Ghosh into a plastic stretcher of his own, his arms sticking over the edges, coaxed both men downhill in their makeshift sleds. It was not an easy journey, the trail pocked by crags and crevasses. In an hour, they got to the helicopter landing spot, nothing but a relatively flat space covered in snow and ice near the tents at Camp 2. At more than 21,000 feet, it is the highest spot on the mountain that most helicopters can reasonably reach.

When the Sherpas called to Base Camp, they were told the helicopter would not come that day. It would come tomorrow, the 26th. The next day, reports were the same. The helicopter would come the 27th.

The excuse was weather; it was raining in Kathmandu, and clouds were thick between there and Everest. What the Sherpas did not know, and what the families of Ghosh and Nath did not know, was that they were also waiting for the body of another Indian climber, one who had died just days before.

A third team of Sherpas hired by Seven Summits had rappelled into a crevasse near the Balcony and pulled him out. The team followed the teams of Ghosh and Nath back down the mountain, and arrived at Camp 2 late on May 26, well after dark.

The biggest expense for most recovery operations is helicopters. Seven Summits wanted to minimize the cost by ferrying three bodies down at once, rather than performing multiple missions over several days.

Finally, on May 28, the bodies were in place and the sky was clear and blue. A helicopter curled around the valley and touched down, just for a moment, in a cloud of blowing snow. Its skids briefly tickled the slope, and the helicopter spun sideways. Its tail nearly wiped away the man trying to direct it.

The pilot brought it around for another try, flying about 10 feet above the ground as he approached. The helicopter landed and slid 20 or 30 feet before it stopped. The pilot kept the rotors on to hold the copter on the icy shelf. Three men pulled Ghosh’s body to the vessel, and a fourth helped them lift it into the small space behind the pilot, who breathed oxygen from a tank through a tube to his nose.

The helicopter, already at its altitude limit, unable to take more than one body at a time, lifted off the snow only slightly and followed the throat of the snow-filled valley downhill, into some low clouds and over the steep, chunky landscape of the Khumbu Icefall.

A year before, the climb between Base Camp and Camp 2 took Ghosh and his colleagues about 20 hours, divided by a night’s sleep at Camp 1. The ride down took two minutes.

The icefall gave way to a barren strip of gray moraine dotted with yellow and orange tents, the remnants of the season’s Base Camp. The helicopter landed in front of about two dozen people, some pointing cameras and others shielding their faces from the dust.

Two men pulled Ghosh’s body out of the copter, letting it drop to the rocks, and another four carried it by the ropes. Soon the helicopter was gone again, to get Paresh Nath.

Over a couple of hours that morning, the bodies, along with guides and supplies coming off the mountain for the season, were ferried to a green plain at about 14,000 feet. At noon, the bodies of Ghosh, Nath and the other Indian climber were piled on top in the small cargo space behind the pilot’s seat. Several guides climbed on top of the bodies, happy to have a ride downhill.

They flew down a cloud-covered river bed, thick with spring runoff. Seven minutes later, the helicopter landed at Lukla in a cold, light rain. Men muscled the bodies to the ground.

Among the men waiting who converged on the cargo was one of the three West Bengal government officials and several police officers from Lukla. Soon, more officers arrived, in uniform. Part of their job was to identify and investigate dead bodies coming out of the mountains above.

“The police tried to take the bodies inside, but we didn’t have the manpower to move them,” Dawa Finjhok Sherpa said. “They asked us to remove the clothes and the wraps, but they were all frozen. So they said, O.K., just unwrap their faces. They took pictures of their faces.”

The formal investigation took a couple of hours. Down in Kathmandu, Debasish Ghosh stood among about three dozen people waiting at a hospital helipad in the late-afternoon light. The helicopter soon appeared as a silent dot over the city’s skyline. It grew larger and louder until it touched down in a swirl of wind and dust.

After a three-day wait near Camp 2, a helicopter arrived to carry the bodies off the mountain. Dawa Finjhok Sherpa/Seven Summit Treks, for The New York Times

Goutam Ghosh’s body arriving in Kathmandu. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Debasish Ghosh outside the hospital where a post-mortem was performed on his brother’s body. Josh Haner/The New York Times

“I cannot stop thinking about the money spent to retrieve his body,” Debasish Ghosh said. “If we had spent the money earlier, if we had helped Goutam when he was alive, so that he could find a better agency, or buy more oxygen or make better preparations, could he have survived? Would he be home now, alive? Did we contribute to his death because we didn’t help him until now?”

No one paid Debasish much attention. Not the government officials from West Bengal, quick to reach the helicopter the moment it landed. Not Loben Sherpa, who organized the fateful expedition the year before, or Mingma Sherpa, the owner of Seven Summits, who was paid to recover the bodies. Not the few journalists who had gathered, nor the neighborhood children who rushed to see what the excitement was about.

Debasish stood back, without expression, his hands folded behind him. His brother’s body was the first out, laid stiffly on the concrete. People surged forward to get closer. Debasish crossed his arms.

Within a couple of minutes, the helicopter was emptied of its cargo and gone again. People and their cameras followed its skyward arc, but Debasish stared intently at his brother’s corpse. No one spoke to him. No one asked if he wanted to get closer to the body. No one comforted him. No one offered to have him meet Dawa Finjhok Sherpa, who led the recovery effort and accompanied the body every step from its yearlong home near the Balcony of Everest to the helipad in Kathmandu.

The bodies were lifted into the back of a waiting, unmarked sport utility vehicle and driven around the vast compound of Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, to the service entrance at the Department of Forensic Medicine. Government officials arrived quickly by car. Nobody offered Debasish a ride. He walked the 10 minutes, alone.

On the ground floor was a warm, dimly lit hallway where a dead body lay uncovered on a table. The lights and air-conditioning in the building had been on sporadically because of power failures, a persistent problem. A service entrance from the dock was on one end. A table was at the other, where a police representative kept guard.

Two silver, dented doors opened into what was called the Forensic Demonstration Room. There were three stainless steel tables, each framed with edges to keep things from spilling off the edges. The tables had drains that fed into tubes under the table, and the tile floors had drains, too. Above each table was an electrical outlet to plug in power tools.

The three bodies were unloaded from the car and carried into the service entrance. Ghosh’s and Nath’s were placed on the floor of the hallway, to one side. Their names were written in marker on the tattered coverings that had wrapped them all the way from near the summit of Everest.

Debasish Ghosh was escorted inside. He told someone that his brother’s name was misspelled.

The bodies were not unwrapped, and Debasish did not see his brother’s face. He touched the body only through the layers of clothes and wrappings, and tried to give it a squeeze. It needed to thaw for a couple of days before it could be examined.

Goutam Ghosh’s body thawed for a couple of days in a hallway outside the autopsy room. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Cause of Death

At 11 in the morning on May 31, a team of forensic doctors huddled over the body of Goutam Ghosh.

The bodies had been placed on their own examination tables the day before. A pipe ran warm water over them to help them thaw. For the first time, Debasish Ghosh was taken to look at his brother’s face. He was struck not by overwhelming emotion, but by how black his brother’s face was. He was in the room for less than a minute.

Bodies found at such high elevations, where the temperatures remain below freezing, are well preserved. The outside of the body appears intact, if shrunken and mummified. There is little decomposition internally. Threats found in other remote locations, such as heat, soggy conditions or animal scavengers, are not an issue at such high elevations.

The university’s forensics department, led by Dr. Pramod Kumar Shrestha, performs six to eight post-mortems on a typical day. Maybe 15 examinations a year are for people who died high in the Himalayas, some of them climbers, some of them villagers.

“After one year, it may be difficult to determine the cause of death,” Shrestha said. “But we eliminate the possibilities one by one, until we are left with plausible explanations.”

Many climbers who succumb to the elements are said to have died of high-altitude illness, a vague diagnosis. It was presumed to be what happened to Ghosh and Nath.

“The head-regulating mechanics stop functioning when you’re in extreme cold temperatures,” Shrestha said. “With a lack of oxygen, the brain stops functioning. It is not able to coordinate various functions of the body. It’s the brain that coordinates the regulation of your body.”

Sometimes there are several possible explanations.

The coffin holding Goutam Ghosh’s body arriving at the airport in Kathmandu en route to Kolkata. Rajneesh Bhandari for The New York Times

A tribute to Ghosh in his house as his body was brought in. The boots were carried home from Nepal by his brother. The photograph was the last taken of Ghosh, at the South Summit — not quite the true summit. Josh Haner/The New York Times

“They may have some injuries from falling or something,” Shrestha said. “They may have broken bones, internal injuries, a skull fracture, bruises. It depends on the conditions of their death. A lack of oxygen, an exposure to cold, starves the brain. The lungs get a froth in the respiratory passages. But it could be accompanied by a disease. Maybe they died there, but they had heart disease. We check all the internal organs for signs of pre-existing conditions.”

With Ghosh, the doctors began with external observations, something often done by a police investigator looking for clues to a violent death. “The face appears partially mummified. Both the feet are soddened,” the doctors wrote in the final report for Ghosh. The eyes were “shrunken and collapsed,” they reported. They found lacerations on his right hand, perhaps stemming from rough handling during the recovery. There were no broken bones.

A saw was used to cut into the head to retrieve the brain and to split the rib cage to inspect internal organs. The saw cut from behind one ear to the other, over the top of the head. The skin was pulled back, front to back, the skull opened and the brain removed. It was weighed and examined. No abnormalities were found. The brain was replaced, the skull fitted together and the skin sewn.

“We try to keep the body as presentable as possible,” Shrestha said.

There was an abnormal amount of fluid in the lungs. The chambers of the heart contained only “post-mortem clot.” The kidneys “appear congested,” the report said. But the heart and Ghosh’s other organs, most of them removed and weighed, were determined to be normal for a 50-year-old man.

The abdomen and the chest were sewn back together, leaving a crude, thick laceration. The exam lasted about 45 minutes. In the final report, the doctors listed the cause of death as “undetermined.”

A similar examination for Nath, noting his missing left hand and some abrasions, ended with the same conclusion.

The bodies of Ghosh and Nath were carted to a nearby room, in the Department of Anatomy, for embalming. A mix of formaldehyde, glycerin and rectified spirits was injected into their cavities and soft tissue. The bodies were shrouded in plastic wrapping and placed inside wood coffins, along with white cotton cloths.

On one coffin was a photocopy of Ghosh’s passport. On the other was a copy of Nath’s. They were attached to the lids of the coffins with clear packing tape.

Before the coffins were sealed, though, Debasish Ghosh, wearing a surgical mask, entered and took another look at his brother. He asked for his brother’s boots as a memento. And he asked for the boots of Nath, to give to his family.

Chandana Ghosh embraced the body of her husband, Goutam. His mother, Sahbha Rani Ghosh, is at top center. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Last Respects

Preparations were complete at the Ghosh house when the sun came up in Kolkata on June 2, the temperature on its way past 100 degrees. The family’s sitting room, really an unused storefront with yellow walls, was cleared of furniture and the roll-up door raised. Ghosh’s faded climbing boots sat in a corner near his photograph.

“I must see him again,” his wife, Chandana, said in the room the day before. “Most times, the bodies are left on Everest. No one can see the body again. No one can touch the body again. At least I will see him once more. I will touch him one more time.”

The hearse crept into the crowd, and was immediately surrounded by mourners. Some hung on to the vehicle and cried. Many aimed their cameras inside, where Ghosh’s body was out of the coffin, draped in white cloths, his feet and face exposed for all to see. A yellow cap, like the one he wore when he died, was on his head. It covered the scar from the autopsy on his skull.

The women of the family rushed inside the house, and the body was carried through the throng and placed on the floor. A human chain formed to keep people back amid pushing and shouting. The room, about 10 feet by 20 feet, was stuffed with 50 people. It was swelteringly hot. Women knelt at Ghosh’s side and cried.

Chandana broke down near her husband’s left hip and flung herself on top of his corpse. She sat up again, inconsolable, her face and hair wet with tears and sweat. Her nephew lifted a cup of water to her lips and wiped her face with a wet cloth.

Ghosh’s mother, her face anguished, wailed and fell atop her dead son.

After 20 minutes, the body was carried across the street, onto a platform in the shade. A line formed to pay respects, starting down the block and curling around Ghosh’s body, soon piled with flowers.

After an hour in the midday heat, the body was lifted back into the hearse. A group with a banner led the procession onto Old Calcutta Road, followed by mourners in two single-file lines. The hearse followed, and then family members and close friends, some dropping puffed rice and splashing water to the ground, followed by police and military officers. Debasish’s teenage son had downloaded the music of his uncle’s favorite singer into his phone, and Kishore Kumar’s voice warbled from the hearse’s speakers en route to the crematory.

At the same time, more than 100 miles to the northwest, a similar ritual unfolded for Paresh Nath in Durgapur. His body arrived in a hearse to the courtyard of his home, where a huge crowd awaited. The lid of the coffin was pried off, and the plastic wrap that encased his body was torn open at the head. A flag of the Durgapur Mountaineers Association was draped on top of him. The body was soon smothered in garlands and petals.

Sabita Nath sobbed, and held tight to her son, Adrishikar, now 10, who came face-to-face with the corpse of his father after a year of denying his death. The body was taken to the mountaineering club, where another crowd gathered, and then to the Birbhanpur Cremation Ground along the Damodar River.

Adrishikar, as his son, was responsible for the cremation rituals. He was shown all the ritualistic steps and performed them — the touching of rice and water and fire to the lips, the chanting, the circling. The young boy who had washed his father’s hand after meals when his father was alive was there when his father’s body was slid into the incinerator, and there to take the ashes to the river, and to break the urn, and to dunk himself in the water. And when it was over, he returned home and held his mother again.

Chandana Ghosh as the hearse carrying her husband’s body leaves their house for the last time. Josh Haner/The New York Times

The procession to the crematory. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Chandana Ghosh did not attend the cremation. She removed the red and white wedding bangles and colorful sari that signaled marriage and changed into a predominantly white sari. Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thirteen men carried Ghosh’s body up some steps inside the dim, dusty crematory in Kolkata. In the room upstairs, fluorescent bulbs overhead did not provide enough light, and a ceiling fan did not provide enough breeze. One side of the room had an iron gate that opened to an incinerator.

The group lifted Ghosh’s body onto a bamboo stretcher. The white linen sheet that covered him was pulled back to reveal a red-and-black track suit. The jacket was opened, exposing a thick, zipperlike scar from the autopsy.

Several sticks of incense were lit. In a bowl, rice, banana and ghee were mashed together. A nephew fed it to his uncle’s lips. He poured sacred Ganges water into his hand and sprinkled it on Ghosh’s blackened face, then over the rest of his body. The group chanted prayers and mantras. Debasish Ghosh stood in the corner, expressionless.

The body was carried and placed headfirst on rails that disappeared under the metal door of a 10-foot-tall oven. Several times, a man called, “Balo Hari.” The group answered, “Hari Bol,” a plea to Lord Krishna to take Ghosh from earth to heaven. The door opened slightly to reveal an orange glow. Someone pulled a lever, and the body slid into the opening. The door closed behind it.

Back at the Ghosh house, Ghosh’s widow, Chandana, had changed clothes. Gone was the colorful sari, replaced by a white one with small, subtle flowers. She had no sindoor tilak, the vermilion smear along the hairline that signaled marriage, and no red bindi dot on her forehead.

The red and white bangles on her wrist were gone, too. While her husband’s body was cremated, she broke them. A year after her husband died on Everest, she was finally a widow.

The calendar on the bedroom wall still showed May 2016.

Goutam Ghosh. Josh Haner/The New York Times

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s - The New York Times

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:12:55 +0000

26-inch hood

2002 Toyota Corolla

36 inches

2014 Ford Escape

47 inches

2022 Chevrolet Silverado

In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads were traditional cars like sedans. Their hoods were low to the ground.

By the 2010s, larger vehicles like compact S.U.V.s had eclipsed cars.

Today, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks dominate the roads. Many are bigger than ever.

And far deadlier, a New York Times investigation found.

They are killing thousands of pedestrians who otherwise might have survived.

Illustrations by Todd M. Detwiler

For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75 percent.

The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.

After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and S.U.V.s is an important factor.

Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.

There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.

We simulated what happens when vehicles hit pedestrians at 20 miles per hour, working with reconstruction experts at Virtual Crash.

This represents a standard sedan, which generally has a hood under two and a half feet. An average American man is 5-foot-9.

The car hits him in the lower body, beneath his center of gravity. He is flung onto the hood.

That looks dramatic, but it’s usually safer for pedestrians than other outcomes, partly because hoods are designed to absorb impact.

A modern pickup’s hood is much taller, almost four feet on average.

That means the truck strikes the pedestrian around his chest.

He is knocked to the pavement, which is less forgiving than a car’s hood, and the pickup runs him over.

He is more likely to be killed in this scenario.

Simulated and rendered in Virtual Crash 6.

“We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash tests for us. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”

More vehicles than ever have hoods that exceed the average American’s center of gravity, which is generally around the belly button.

The hood of an average passenger vehicle today is about three feet high. Anyone shorter than 5-foot-6 — about half of American adults — would frequently be rammed to the pavement. So would most children.

Not only are the high hoods on larger vehicles more lethal, but their bulkier frames can also block drivers’ views of pedestrians.

Here is a 2021 Chevrolet Silverado.

Its hood is about 47 inches.

A tall hood, such as this one, creates a large blind zone for the driver.

But large hoods are just one of the contributors to big blind zones.

These are A-pillars, which protect passengers in a rollover. They, too, have grown as vehicles have gotten larger.

The A-pillar on the driver’s side creates an especially large blind zone that limits visibility during left turns.

Large sideview mirrors also add to the blind zones.

Our analysis found that blind zones in popular pickup trucks have grown significantly since the late 1990s.

To analyze how these blind zones have changed, we used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sightlines in four of the most common pickups today — the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma — with their counterparts from the 1990s or early 2000s.

The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled.

The Sierra’s and the Tacoma’s grew by about 60 percent.

The smallest increase was the F-150’s. Its blind zones grew by about 25 percent.

Our overall findings match what we found in court records and heard from dozens of experts who reconstruct crashes for police and lawyers.

One morning last year, Charlene McAlister, 76, set out for work at a child care center in Colorado Springs. “See you tonight,” she called to her daughter as she left their home.

As Ms. McAlister was crossing the street, a Ram 1500 TRX — a pickup marketed for its off-road capabilities and fierce-looking design — was turning left.

Ms. McAlister was not quite five feet tall. The pickup’s hood was at least four feet high. It hit her, throwing her to the pavement.

The driver later said he hadn’t seen Ms. McAlister, according to court records. They show that the truck’s large hood and side mirrors may have impeded his view.

When Ms. McAlister’s daughter, Serena, arrived at the scene, she saw her mother’s hedgehog-themed backpack and red purse in the road, spattered with blood. Emergency workers had draped a white sheet over her body.

The size of vehicles is far from the only reason that more pedestrians are dying, according to independent experts and industry officials.

“While vehicle safety is critical, blaming larger vehicles for pedestrian deaths overlooks systemic issues” including the design of roads, said Mike Levine, a spokesman for Ford.

Automakers say that new technology designed to detect and avoid pedestrians — including systems that automatically apply the brakes — would dramatically improve safety. For example, Bill Grotz, a spokesman for General Motors, pointed to a recent study that found that G.M. vehicles with so-called front pedestrian braking reduced the frequency of injuries by 35 percent.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pinning its hopes on automated collision-avoidance systems. Such technologies “are actively reducing the occurrence of these crashes and fundamentally shifting the risk landscape,” said Sean Rushton, an agency spokesman. “We view these technologies as the cornerstone of future mitigation strategies.”

But many experts say that technology is not a perfect substitute for drivers being able to view their surroundings directly. And tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which studies ways to make driving less dangerous, have shown that many large vehicles’ automatic braking systems do not consistently prevent collisions.

The owner’s manuals for some of the most popular vehicles caution that safety technology can fail in a variety of common situations: in bad weather; at high speeds; if there are shadows on the road or its surface is uneven; or if a pedestrian is running, pushing a stroller, not standing upright or the size of a small child.

‘King of the Road’

Today’s S.U.V.s and pickups promise more: more seats, more space, more safety, more power, more domination, more prestige.

And, for automakers, more money.

They are the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry’s profits, said Mark Wakefield, an industry expert at the consulting firm AlixPartners. For nearly a decade, Ford and G.M. have said in their annual reports that their earnings depend on larger S.U.V.s and pickups.

The cost of making bigger vehicles is usually not much higher than it is for cars, because they are often built in automakers’ most efficient factories and the extra raw materials are relatively cheap.

Yet customers are willing to pay much more for them. The average sticker price for a full-size pickup is $70,000, double that of a sedan, according to Cox Automotive. (Some people pay more to soup up their trucks with “lift kits” that raise their suspensions.)

It is no coincidence that automakers have dramatically scaled back their production of sedans and other passenger cars in the United States. Ford, for example, went from selling more than a million in 2017 to fewer than 100,000 five years later.

What used to be utilitarian vehicles for construction workers are now marketed to the American masses, with messages tailored to specific audiences.

One common pitch centers on machismo. Automakers trumpet how some of their trucks have an “aggressive appearance” or a “piercing glare.”

Other approaches emphasize the perceived safety of being the biggest vehicle around. “You’re the king of the road,” said Frank Hanley, a director at the automotive research firm JD Power.

At Ford, Nicole Gayney’s job was to identify specific social and psychological groups to target.

One was men who hoped to be seen as the neighborhood’s hero, keeping everyone safe, said Dr. Gayney, who left Ford in 2022. Another group was women who viewed a roomy S.U.V. as a way to be the community’s caregiver, taking the soccer team out for ice cream.

“We’re kind of in this American mind-set that bigger is better,” she said.

An Unintended Consequence

In 2009, after a spate of fatal incidents in which drivers were crushed in rollovers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required roofs to be strong enough to support three times the weight of a vehicle. Many automakers responded by installing thicker A-pillars.

James Forbes, who was a longtime engineering manager at Ford, said that after the company began installing the fatter A-pillars, he and his colleagues noticed that they were reducing drivers’ visibility.

The drivers were safer, but pedestrians were in greater peril. “We were very much biasing safety toward the owner of the vehicle,” Mr. Forbes said.

Those potential dangers began attracting attention, with articles in the Detroit Free Press and Consumer Reports.

By 2022, the lack of visibility in large vehicles had become a concern for researchers at the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center, whose mission is to identify and address problems in the transportation system.

That November, the researchers met with leaders at the department and N.H.T.S.A. They delivered a stark message: Large vehicles, with their big blind zones, were increasingly deadly. They were killing hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists every year and injuring thousands more, the researchers estimated, according to attendees and meeting materials we reviewed.

The researchers hoped that their warning would spur regulators to consider how to address the problem.

But a senior N.H.T.S.A. official disputed the data and argued that new pedestrian-sensing technologies were already improving safety.

“There was just zero acknowledgement of the problem,” said Angie Byrne, a former Volpe Center employee who was involved with the research and attended the meeting.

The meeting ended with no plan for action.

The Closed Casket

The U.S. government has paid scant attention to how the size of vehicles affects the safety of pedestrians.

Federal regulators don’t collect much data about the heights of vehicles’ hoods. But we found one service that does: Expert AutoStats.

Our analysis shows a radical change in the makeup of American vehicles over the past two decades.

Not only have many drivers abandoned traditional cars in favor of S.U.V.s and pickups. But millions have flocked to vehicles with hoods that are more than 50 inches tall — like the Ford F-250 and Chevrolet Silverado 2500 — whose ranks have increased more than five-fold since 2002.

To understand how a vehicle’s size affects a crash’s lethality, we built a statistical model. Our goal was to estimate how many fewer pedestrians, if any, would have died in a world in which vehicles had remained roughly the same size since 2002.

We started with a federal database that contains a nationally representative sample of crashes reported to the police from 2016 to 2024. We narrowed that down to those involving a single vehicle and a single pedestrian. And we added the data on hood heights, which wasn’t included in the federal database.

Our model then analyzed the degree to which different factors — such as hood height, weather conditions, time of day and whether alcohol was involved — affected whether pedestrians died.

Crashes are complex events, and the data we fed into our model doesn’t capture everything about each incident. And, of course, there is no way to definitively say what would have happened in an alternate reality where vehicles had not continued to grow larger.

But based on the best available data, the model reached a sobering estimate: The shift toward vehicles with higher hoods caused about 3,000 deaths from 2016 to 2024.

The estimate is conservative in many ways.

For example, it doesn’t include collisions that occur in places like parking lots, driveways or private roads, which are not part of the federal database. Hundreds of pedestrians a year are estimated to die in such crashes, a number that has been increasing.

Only in the past several years have researchers started exploring whether and how larger vehicles threaten pedestrians.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, for example, found last year that vehicles with larger blind zones were substantially more likely to hit pedestrians when turning left.

We asked engineers at Forensic Rock for a real-world demonstration of left-turn crashes to show the danger to pedestrians.

A 2021 Silverado is behind a red sedan at a mock intersection. A pedestrian (represented by a dummy) waits to the left.

The blind zone from the Silverado’s A-pillar completely blocks the pedestrian from view.

The pedestrian begins crossing and remains in the blind zone as the Silverado moves forward.

As the truck turns, the blind zone mostly hides the pedestrian.

Video from the driver’s perspective shows there is a moment when the pedestrian’s lower body is visible.

We ran the same test with a 1998 Silverado.

Just as with the new truck, the A-pillar on the old Silverado initially blocks the pedestrian from view.

But because the A-pillar is smaller, the pedestrian is more visible.

When the videos are viewed together, the difference is subtle but clear.

One evening in October 2016, Margaret Lacey, a 57-year-old nurse, was taking her dog for a walk in Jefferson County, Colo.

She was in a crosswalk as Ernest Martinez, a 50-year-old construction manager, was turning left in his Ford Excursion. He later said he hadn’t seen Ms. Lacey until his S.U.V. was nearly upon her. His view had been blocked by the A-pillar, a crash reconstructionist found.

He slammed the brakes, but he still hit her.

The hood of his 2002 Excursion — large for its time but common by today’s standards — was nearly four feet tall. It came up to Ms. Lacey’s chest. The impact sent her flying. Her head smashed into the pavement.

Mr. Martinez leapt out of his vehicle and knelt by her side. “I prayed with her,” he said in an interview. “I just held her hand and watched her go.” Her dog also died.

When Ms. Lacey’s sister, Betty, learned of her death, she flew to the United States from Ireland. She wanted an open casket, following her family tradition. But her sister’s head was grievously misshapen. “The only part that looked like Margaret was her hands,” Betty said.

The coffin was closed. Her funeral was held at a Catholic chapel in Denver, and Mr. Martinez was among the mourners. “May God bless you all, and I pray that you all will find peace,” he wrote in the condolence book.

“I’m sorry.”

Methodology

We used four main datasets to conduct our analysis: crash data from N.H.T.S.A.’s Crash Report Sampling System (C.R.S.S.) from 2016 to 2024, the most recent year available; N.H.T.S.A.’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (F.A.R.S.); vehicle measurements from Expert AutoStats; and registration information from S&P Global from 2002 to 2024. The datasets characterized vehicle models differently, so we standardized the descriptions. Part of that involved using an A.I. model. We reviewed thousands of matches and found no errors among them.

To estimate the effect of hood height on a vehicle’s lethality, we narrowed the C.R.S.S. data to single-pedestrian, single-vehicle crashes. We excluded motorcycles and commercial trucks, as well as collisions in which the vehicle was moving backward. That left us with about 6,000 incidents.

Then we ran what’s known as a logistic regression. We took the following crash conditions into account: speed limit, bad weather, lighting, alcohol involvement, crash year, and vehicle year and whether the crash occurred in an urban area. We also accounted for the sex and age of the pedestrian and the driver. We included only crashes in which all these variables were available and accounted for C.R.S.S.’s sampling method.

We found hood height to be a statistically significant (p-value = 0.003) predictor of pedestrian death in a crash. The estimated magnitude of this effect is a 2.8 percent increase in the odds of a pedestrian fatality for every one-inch increase in hood height.

We also considered alternative models that included reported crash speed, hood angle and hood length. In all variants, hood height remained a statistically significant predictor of deadliness. Hood height had a lower effect in our model than in most variants, indicating that our estimates may be conservative.

We used our model to estimate the number of pedestrian deaths that would have occurred under two counterfactual scenarios.

In the first scenario, we decreased the hood height of each vehicle in our dataset by three inches, equal to the increase of the average hood height since 2002. We computed how much this change would reduce the predicted probability of a pedestrian death for each crash. We multiplied the yearly average reduction, which was about 7 percent for all years, by the total number of pedestrian fatalities in the F.A.R.S. dataset, which provides a national census of fatal crashes. As with the C.R.S.S. dataset, we also filtered to single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crashes with non-commercial vehicles in the F.A.R.S. dataset. This resulted in a range of 306 to 377 lives saved, or 3,077 in total from 2016 to 2024.

In the second scenario, we took a random sample of hood heights from 2002 and applied them to more recent crashes in our database. Across 10,000 simulations, this reduced the probability of pedestrian death by about 5 percent to 7 percent, depending on the year. That amounted to 222 to 361 lives saved each year, or a total of 2,624.

To measure the differences in visibility among pickup trucks, we used an Artec Leo structured light scanner to create three-dimensional models of the trucks.

We scanned four of the most popular pickup models: Silverado, F-150, Sierra and Tacoma. We scanned one of each model from the 1990s or early 2000s and one from the modern-day fleet. Before scanning, we adjusted the driver’s seat to the middlemost position.

Next, we used a technique called aperture projection to calculate how much space was visible through each window. We used these figures to determine the size and shape of the blind zones in front and to the sides of the driver, up to 50 feet.

We ran these calculations twice for each vehicle: from the perspective of a 5-foot-11 driver and from that of a 5-foot-6 driver. The differences were the same or smaller for the taller driver, so we used those results to be conservative.

We estimated the percentage of Americans under 5-foot-6 based on an analysis by Matthew Parkinson of Pennsylvania State University. The 3D Silverado that appears in the article was created with the help of Kevin Shain from Laser Design.

We consulted with a number of industry experts to develop and check our methodology, including Justin Tyndall from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and Steve Summerskill at Loughborough University in England.

John Sterling, legendary Yankees broadcaster, dies at age 87 - The Athletic

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:03:42 +0000

John Sterling, whose tenure as the New York Yankees’ radio voice spanned more than three decades and five World Series wins, and whose bombastic delivery and idiosyncratic catchphrases earned him a nomination to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, died Monday at the age of 87.

Sterling’s death was announced by WFAN, which did not say where he died nor specify a cause. Sterling suffered heart failure about a week ago, YES Network play-by-play announcer Michael Kay said on his ESPN radio show.

Sterling became the Yankees’ play-by-play announcer in 1989 and spent 36 years in the position, calling 5,060 consecutive games (plus 211 more in the postseason) until he missed his first game in July 2019. He called 5,651 Yankees games, including eight World Series appearances. By the time he retired in 2024, he was known as “The Voice of the Yankees.”

His run covered one of the Yankees’ greatest eras. He called every game of Derek Jeter’s 20-year career and every pitch thrown by Mariano Rivera. He emceed the uniform number retirement ceremonies for Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Joe Torre, among others. He was there when Aaron Judge crushed his American League single-season record 62nd home run in 2022.

“He’s synonymous with those five championships (1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2009),” said Kay, Sterling’s longtime broadcast partner. “If you’re coming into people’s homes, at the beach, the pool or their car, and you’re constantly telling them good news — it made him part of the Yankee firmament. He became a part of forever, because those championships are never going to go away.”

Sterling was married to Jennifer Sterling for 12 years. They had four children: Abigail and triplets Veronica, Bradford and Derek.

The job was a childhood dream for Sterling, born John Sloss, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as a Yankees fan listening to games on the radio and trying to learn from broadcasters of all types.

“I am a very blessed human being,” Sterling said in a statement announcing his retirement. “I have been able to do what I wanted, broadcasting for 64 years. As a little boy growing up in New York as a Yankees fan, I was able to broadcast the Yankees for 36 years.”

Sterling, a member of the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame, featured a distinctive baritone and drew adoration and criticism alike for his eccentricities and his unabashed Yankees fandom that resonated in his broadcasts. He marked victories with a thunderous “The Yankees win,” perhaps his most popular line. He personalized home run calls for players, starting with “Bern, Baby, Bern!” for Williams. He eventually had calls for every player, including “An A-bomb from A-Rod” for Alex Rodriguez and “Robbie Canó, don’t you know?” for Robinson Canó.

“John Sterling breathed life and excitement into Yankees games for 36 years while wearing his passion for baseball and the Yankees on his sleeve,” the club said in a statement. “He informed and entertained generations of fans with a theatrical and unapologetic style that was uniquely his own.

“John treasured his role as the voice of the New York Yankees, and his enthusiasm for the art of broadcasting perfectly complemented our city and our fans. The symmetry between John and his audience was both undeniable and magical, and his signature calls will resonate for as long as we put on pinstripes — especially after every Yankees win.”

Though Sterling was almost exclusively on the radio, nearly every day he would dress as if he were going on TV, wearing a tailored suit, tie and dress shoes.

“It’s like he gets in that chair and it shoots life through him,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He’s at home when he’s in his office. It’s a remarkable career, to be able to do it like that and as long as he did it. He’s left quite a mark on this organization and the game of baseball.”

He was a 12-time Emmy Award winner and was thrice honored as a finalist for the Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, which recognizes excellence in baseball broadcasting.

Sterling’s peculiar speech patterns included sing-song inflections and the tendency to exaggerate the word “the.” Before a pitcher delivered the ball, Sterling would say, “Thuuhhh pitch.” After the final out of a victory, it was, “Thuuhhh Yankees win!”

“He was so witty, smart,” Judge said. “As a kid, you always heard it. You watch old Yankees games. You hear the old broadcasts.”

Humble beginnings

Sterling said he grew up playing sports and wasn’t an exceptional student. Much of his free time revolved around listening to the radio, sometimes mimicking different announcers. He knew early on he had an unusually deep voice and, “I learned I could use it to adapt to different radio styles,” he told The New York Times in 2011.

Sterling studied at Moravian College and Boston University, but when his mother died at 47, he returned to New York City and took classes at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. In 1961, he got his first radio job at a small station in Wellsville, N.Y., approximately 60 miles south of Buffalo, and around that time, he changed his name to Sterling. After a stop to work mornings in Providence, R.I., he went to Baltimore, beginning to blend sports talk into his general show, and getting chances to broadcast games for the Baltimore Colts and Bullets.

In 1971, he returned to New York City as a full-timer at WMCA.

“He would hang up on people and berate them: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’” said Jim Rosenhaus, a Cleveland Guardians radio broadcaster. “It was awesome. We’d go to school the next day (and say), ‘Did you hear what John Sterling said last night?’ There was barely any sports talk back then, but he’d get on and just shred people.”

He also began working New Jersey Nets and New York Islanders games and started honing his distinct style, giving on-air nicknames to players (Bernard King was “B.B. King”) and creating catchphrases (“Goal! Islander goal! Islander goal!”).

“If you didn’t know first names on the team,” Rosenhaus said, “you had no idea what he was talking about. Going back to the ABA days, their teams were phenomenal, led by Dr. J. His play-by-play was, ‘Doc’ has it at the top of the key, down low to ‘The Whopper,’ outside to ‘Super John,’ the ‘BT Express’ has it now.’ … If you didn’t know who these guys were, then you were lost.”

When Sterling moved to Atlanta in 1981, he joined TBS and WSB Radio and began broadcasting for the Atlanta Braves and the Hawks. He became known for punctuating Dominique Wilkins’ dunks with flair: “Dominique is Magnifique!”

The Yankees years

In 1989, Sterling took over as the Yankees’ play-by-play broadcaster for WABC. His stint began auspiciously with an encounter with the late owner George Steinbrenner in a hotel elevator in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Steinbrenner lifted a finger and pointed it at Sterling’s chest.

“It was just the two of us,” Sterling said, “and George said to me, the way he talks, ‘I just want you to know that I always wanted you to do Yankees games.’”

That started Sterling’s streak, which astounded his peers.

“I never once turned on the radio and said, ‘Boy, John sounds tired.’ He always brought his ‘A’ game,” Blue Jays and ESPN broadcaster Dan Shulman told Yankees magazine in 2024.

“Showing up to perform virtually every single day since 1989, he was a pillar for Yankees fans who relied on the comfort and familiarity of his voice to be the soundtrack of their spring, summer and fall,” the Yankees said in a statement upon his retirement. “Given the tremendous care he had for the team and his performance on the air, it’s not a stretch to believe that our fans live and die with every pitch because John Sterling did the same.”

Over that time, Sterling spent 10 seasons in the booth working alongside Kay. Suzyn Waldman took over as his color analyst in 2005 and remains in the position. The best-friends dynamic between Sterling and Waldman became an instant obsession for Yankees fans, who, in addition to hearing details about the games, would get their inside jokes and references to Broadway musicals or old-time movies.

Occasionally, Sterling would draw the ire of listeners and critics for starting home run calls too soon, only for them to become long fly-ball outs or include wrong details due to deteriorating hearing and eyesight.

He was also known for refusing to adapt to the times. He didn’t have a smartphone or use the internet. On the road, he would seek out that city’s newspaper in the morning and travel with books, typically suspense or crime novels. He had several TVs mounted on the walls of his apartment in Edgewater, N.J., and would sometimes watch several games at a time.

“He’s one of a kind,” Waldman said. “There will never be another person like that, to have that kind of love for a team and that kind of love for his fan base.”

Sterling’s streak ended on July 4, 2019, when he fell ill and missed three games.

“Think about that,” Mets broadcaster Howie Rose said at the time. “Some Yankees fans have never heard anyone but John’s voice for the entirety of their life.”

Even players were astounded by Sterling’s commitment. In 2000, Sterling’s wife gave birth to their triplets before Game 2 of the American League Championship Series. Early in the day, Sterling was at the hospital in New Jersey to witness their birth. Later that night, he called the Yankees’ victory over the Seattle Mariners and boarded the team’s charter to Washington. On the jet, third baseman Scott Brosius saw Sterling. He was baffled.

“John,” Brosius said, “didn’t you just have triplets? Why are you on the flight?”

Sterling shrugged.

“Nothing more I can do,” he said.

Sterling’s health began to falter later in his career. In 2020, he missed games while recovering from a blood infection. Soon after, his workload lightened, but traveling took a toll on him. In 2023, a foul ball zipped over the netting behind the plate and struck Sterling in the broadcast booth, caroming off his table and leaving a cut over his eyebrow. Sterling continued to call the game.

In 2024, Sterling retired — twice. In early April, Sterling felt run-down after the Yankees opened the season with trips to the Houston Astros and the Arizona Diamondbacks. He abruptly ended his career on April 15 of that year, and the team held an on-field, pregame ceremony in his honor about a week later.

“I hate packing, unpacking, traveling, getting to places, et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “But the games themselves, they’re as easy for me to do as anything I do.”

Sterling then returned to the Yankees booth for the final week of the regular season and the playoffs until the Yankees lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. He then hosted a weekly radio show on WABC throughout much of 2025.

“How lucky can you be, for people to celebrate what you do for a living?” he said.

White House Criticizes Smithsonian Museum for ‘Extreme Political Activism’ - The New York Times

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:42:09 +0000

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White House Criticizes Smithsonian Museum for ‘Extreme Political Activism’

A scathing report released on the Fourth of July says the National Museum of American History downplays the role of the founders while emphasizing social justice.

Listen · 9:52 min

A report by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council said, “To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, it is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy and shame.”Credit...Annabelle Gordon/Reuters

By Graham Bowley Robin Pogrebin and Jennifer Schuessler

Published July 5, 2026Updated July 6, 2026, 8:45 a.m. ET

In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.

The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.

While the report concludes that the broader Smithsonian Institution — which oversees 21 museums and the National Zoo — “has not met its obligations to the American people,” it places particular blame on the National Museum of American History.

Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”

The report takes issue with specific exhibits, such as an 1840 statue of George Washington that includes a depiction of Hercules. The work’s accompanying text describes “the perceived courage of the American people.” That language, the report says, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”

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The Knicks did the unthinkable during their title run: They became America’s team - The Athletic

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:50:01 +0000

What Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby and Co. did this month will always have a spot in history. In many ways, they achieved the unexpected and seemingly impossible.

Yes, they snapped the New York Knicks’ 53-year NBA title drought in a magnificent way but — like Brunson standing next to Victor Wembanyama — that was overshadowed by their real feat: For the past few weeks, they’ve turned the New York Knicks into America’s team.

Their run has been a perfect storm, a face turn the world never saw coming. It was Brunson, the mighty but undersized captain, who powered the Knicks to victory. A classic underdog story. It was Karl-Anthony Towns, finally a hero after years of struggles, who let the world in on his pain but also his triumph as he dedicated his success to his late mom. It was an audience that turned on Victor Wembanyama in his first visit to a stage that was supposed to serve as his valedictory moment.

It was the Knicks fans themselves who carried main-character energy the whole month as they took over arena after arena on the road. Sure, it was also Ben Stiller, Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet, Mariska Hargitay and Larry David, but it was mostly the fans in the 300s and 400s and the ones pouring into the streets who had waited so long for this very moment after decades of pain and suffering.

Knicks fans sing 'We are the champions' after winning title

It seems outrageous, but it also rings true. The Knicks have captured hearts and imaginations this spring, not just in New York City, where they have a higher approval rating than a slice of Prince Street Pizza, but across the country.

Look at the numbers. This was the most-watched NBA Finals since 1998, when Michael Jordan was still roaming the hardwood. People flocked to their TVs, bars and watch parties in droves to catch the Knicks topple Goliath.

Those ratings might be expected when the finals centered on a team from the country’s largest media market and an emerging 7-4 star, but the Knicks gave the league a storyline it could sell. These Knicks, unlike any team that came before them, were likeable — lovable even.

The Knicks had never been in that position before. They were unlovable losers for decades, mired in dysfunction and disarray. With an owner who many saw as the worst in the sport. They had never been good enough to become the villains across the country, like the Lakers and Celtics had, which was a punishment of its own.

But there was nothing that could touch them this spring. James Dolan, the team’s owner, started a quixotic fight with New York City and its mayor and police commissioner, but that settled into white noise. He invited President Donald Trump to a finals game at MSG and then listened as fans vigorously booed him, as fans disassociated the owner from the team, just as they had for decades.

This season, the vibes remained immaculate. The Knicks gave fans a little of everything to grab onto.

Brunson was, of course, a Hollywood-ready Cinderella story. At 6 feet 2, he’s undersized and relies on craftiness more than awe-inspiring athleticism. It made him the perfect foil for Wembanyama. And as the series progressed, it was Brunson who got stronger and more composed as Wembanyama piled up flagrant fouls. When Brunson skated by Wembanyama late in Game 5, scoring over the Spurs giant during yet another comeback win, it felt like kismet.

Brunson offered up a story of perseverance and strength as the former second-round pick who became one of the best players in the league. He did it while playing for his dad, Rick, who raised him and helped build him into a star.

He did it alongside his longtime friends and teammates, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges. The ‘Nova Knicks are the college text chain group that grew into NBA champions together.

In victory, the Knicks were inspiring. Game 4 will live as one of the greatest in NBA history. They erased a 29-point deficit in one half and sent Madison Square Garden into such a fit it left the famous arena shaking.

It was a catharsis for a fanbase that had waited so long to see a title. They piled into watch parties outside Madison Square Garden and on light poles in midtown. Some had waited more than half a century to see another championship. Some had never seen one in their lifetime. Some thought they never would. Instead, they got a team that epitomized the best of the sport on the court and gave them something to grab onto. They flung themselves into the streets with every win, and when the Knicks finally won it all, they partied across the city.

Like the Red Sox and Cubs before them, it took the right team and terms to break the funk that eclipsed the franchise for generations. These Knicks will be remembered as champions and as the rare big-market team that became easy to root for.

Where Americans Can Vote by Mail in the 2020 Elections - The New York Times

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:28:27 +0000

Ballots mailed

directly to all voters

Absentee voting

allowed for all

Excuse required

for absentee voting

21%

57%

22%

44 million voters

in nine states + D.C.

118 million voters

in 34 states

46 million voters

in seven states

Vt.

N.H.

Maine

Each square

is 100,000

registered voters.

N.D.

Mass.

Wash.

N.Y.

Minn.

Wis.

Mich.

S.D.

Idaho

Mont.

Ore.

Conn.

R.I.

Pa.

Iowa

N.J.

Ill.

Ind.

Ohio

Wyo.

Md.

Utah

W.Va.

Del.

Colo.

D.C.

Neb.

Calif.

Ky.

Va.

Mo.

Nev.

Kan.

N.M.

Tenn.

N.C.

Ark.

Okla.

Ariz.

S.C.

La.

Miss.

Ala.

Ga.

Texas

Alaska

Hawaii

Fla.

Ballots mailed

directly to all voters

Absentee voting

allowed for all

Excuse required

for absentee voting

21%

57%

22%

44 million voters

in nine states + D.C.

118 million voters

in 34 states

46 million voters

in seven states

Maine

Vt.

N.H.

Each square is 100,000

registered voters.

N.D.

Mass.

Wash.

N.Y.

Minn.

Wis.

Mich.

S.D.

Idaho

Mont.

Ore.

Conn.

R.I.

Pa.

Iowa

N.J.

Ill.

Ind.

Ohio

Wyo.

Md.

Utah

W.Va.

Del.

Colo.

D.C.

Neb.

Calif.

Ky.

Va.

Mo.

Nev.

Kan.

N.M.

Tenn.

N.C.

Ark.

Okla.

Ariz.

S.C.

La.

Ala.

Ga.

Miss.

Texas

Alaska

Hawaii

Fla.

Ballots mailed

directly to all voters

Absentee voting

allowed for all

Excuse required

for absentee voting

21%

57%

22%

44 million voters

in nine states + D.C.

118 million voters

in 34 states

46 million voters

in seven states

Vt.

N.H.

Maine

N.D.

Mass.

Wash.

N.Y.

Minn.

Wis.

Mich.

S.D.

Idaho

Ore.

Conn.

R.I.

Mont.

Pa.

Iowa

N.J.

Ill.

Ind.

Ohio

Wyo.

Md.

Utah

W.Va.

Del.

Colo.

D.C.

Neb.

Calif.

Ky.

Va.

Mo.

Nev.

Kan.

N.M.

Each square

is 100,000

registered voters.

Tenn.

N.C.

Ark.

Okla.

Ariz.

S.C.

La.

Ala.

Ga.

Miss.

Texas

Alaska

Hawaii

Fla.

Ballots mailed

directly to all voters

Absentee voting

allowed for all

Excuse required

for absentee voting

21%

57%

22%

44 million voters

in nine states + D.C.

118 million voters

in 34 states

46 million voters

in seven states

Each square

is 100,000

registered voters.

Ballots mailed

directly to

all voters

Absentee

voting allowed

for all

Excuse required

for absentee

voting

21%

57%

22%

44 million

voters in nine

states + D.C.

118 million

voters in

34 states

46 million

voters in

seven states

Each square

is 100,000

registered

voters.

Why Race Alone When Your Dog Can Join, Too? - The New York Times

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:16:10 +0000

On a sunny morning in the rolling green hills of Anniston, Ala., more than 900 runners lined up with their dogs for the OneWorld Canine Obstacle Run, a race and camping festival.

When the whistle blew, each pair charged up and over mounds of sand before plunging into the first pool. Soaked pups emerged from the water, shaking off, before continuing on the roughly four-mile course, which included more than 40 obstacles.

The first few obstacles included ladders, a swaying bridge called “The Wiggler” and a shallow creek that fed into a drainage pipe, sending the dogs and their handlers straight into a muddy pool.

Then they all disappeared into the woods, where the course climbed over derelict cars, giant spools and pyramids of tires before spitting them out at the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, the race’s toughest ascent.

Emily Wang for The New York Times

While some runner-dog pairs chased course records, the event attracted competitors of all levels. There were divisions for youth, military veterans, search-and-rescue personnel and participants over 60. If a team couldn’t complete an obstacle, they could step aside and take a two-minute penalty.

Amber Batteiger, who has worked in animal welfare and crisis response and lives in Satellite Beach, Fla., said that it’s not always the most athletic pairs who succeed. “The safest teams are often the ones willing to slow down, skip an obstacle or end their day early if that’s what their dog needs,” she said.

The breeds you might expect to see at an event like this were well represented: German shepherds, Siberian huskies, Australian shepherds, bloodhounds. A search-and-rescue cadaver dog named Dr. Phil was there, too.

But the course also attracted less obvious athletes: corgis, mini Aussies, papillons, Boston terriers.

Emily Wang for The New York Times

“The dog makes the run,” Tim Malo said. “They jump over everything. I’m just dragging my old body behind them.”

Mr. Malo was recruited to race by his friend, Kathy Watson, from Sale Creek, Tenn. To prepare, Ms. Watson and her border collies, Rolex and Jack, spent three weeks dock-diving, a sport where dogs launch off a platform to chase toys in the water.

But when her husband declined to run with her — “because he’s sane,” she said — she asked Mr. Malo to team up with Jack.

Devon Helberg of Waco, Texas, dyed her poodle, Dolly Beth, orange in honor of this year’s neon theme.

The day of the race was hot — nearly 90 degrees — so many participants took the course slowly, stopping at every water station to give their dogs a break.

Paul Hammond, the event’s director, said he keeps scheming up ways to make the race more challenging.

“This year, there’s more natural, God-made obstacles,” he said during a safety briefing before the event. “Well, I won’t call them obstacles. Hills. There’s some more hills for you guys, but I’ll let you discover them.”

Before and after the race, many participants camped together. At night, a band played and the campground filled with runners swapping stories while their dogs rested in the shade.

The winning team completed the course in 41 minutes, and the last finishers took three and a half hours.

After the race, many participants are already thinking about the next one. Morgan Weller, a professional dog trainer, has run the race five times with her search-and-rescue dogs.

“I was just addicted to it,” she said. “You get to find out how strong your dog is, how strong you are, and after the first year, I never looked at my dog the same way again.”

The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:29:25 +0000

Crypto Brought Trump a Huge Windfall, Even as Many Investors Lost Big

President Trump and his family reaped vast financial rewards from a memecoin that generated losses for hundreds of thousands of investors.

7 min read

Does Trump Worry About Conflicts of Interest? ‘I Found Out That Nobody Cared.’

4 min read

The Key Ways Trump’s Financial Interests Intersect With Government Policy

4 min read

Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

Analysis

Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House

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5 min read

The Incumbent Democrats at Risk of Losing to Progressive Challengers in 2026

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Pool photo by Hyoung Chang

Colorado Governor Fires Officials Who Opposed Freeing Election Denier

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3 min read

U.S. Defeats Bosnia and Herzegovina for First Men’s Knockout Win Since 2002

Despite Folarin Balogun’s red card, the Americans held on for a 2-0 victory and advanced to face Belgium in the round of 16.

From The Athletic

Harry Kane Just Played a Game That Will Be Talked About for Decades

From The Athletic

United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Carlos Barria/Reuters
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Carlos Barria/Reuters
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Phil Noble/Reuters
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Eakin Howard/Associated Press
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Jamie Squire/Getty Images
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Martin Meissner/Associated Press
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Pedro Nunes/Reuters
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
United States vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

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Russia Strikes Ukraine as Explosions Rock Capital

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2 min read

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

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President Trump seems to have turned swaths of the city into either a construction zone or an armed camp as he seeks to prove that he alone can improve it.

5 min read

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Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

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Ten writers on the films that get at the hopes, dreams, heartbreak and hilarity of the U.S.A. as it turns 250.

8 min read

Pablo Torre Finds Out | Podcasts | The Athletic

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:29:23 +0000

“Please Enjoy It Or You Are Fired”: Inside PTFO, with Dan Le Batard

PTFO keeps winning awards. But what do we do for an encore? How do you make something special without losing our standards — or our minds? Do you guys even enjoy this? Pablo visits Miami to see his friend/boss, Dan Le Batard, and Dan’s producer, Chris Cote. more

June 30, 2026

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