York Times Research Articles

Making New Connections: LLMs as Puzzle Generators for the New York Times' Connections Word Game

The Connections puzzle is a word association game published daily by The New York Times (NYT). In this game, players are asked to find groups of four words that are connected by a common theme. While solving a given Connections puzzle requires both semantic knowledge and abstract reasoning, generating novel puzzles additionally requires a form of metacognition: generators must be able to accurately model the downstream reasoning of potential solvers. In this paper, we investigate the ability of the GPT family of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate challenging and creative word games for human players. We start with an analysis of the word game Connections and the unique challenges it poses as a Procedural Content Generation (PCG) domain. We then propose a method for generating Connections puzzles using LLMs by adapting a Tree of Thoughts (ToT) prompting approach. We evaluate this method by conducting a user study, asking human players to compare AI- against human-generated Connections puzzles. Our findings show that LLMs are capable puzzle creators, and can generate diverse sets of enjoyable, challenging, and creative Connections puzzles as judged by human users.

Online public response to emergency department diagnostic error report: A qualitative study.

The 2022 study on diagnostic error in the emergency department (ED) published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reported that one in every 18 ED patients is misdiagnosed. The report was methodologically critiqued by emergency physicians and researchers. However, little is known about public perception of error in the ED. We sought to characterize public response to AHRQ's publication. A search was conducted for online news articles published December 2022 reporting the AHRQ study and containing "public comment" sections. Verbatim comments and relevant characteristics were collected. Three coders completed content analysis and resolved any differences. Descriptive statistics and themes are reported. Fifteen online articles were reviewed; three had public comment sections (New York Times, DailyMail, and Boston Globe). There were 553 unique user comments; 293 were original comments (53%) and 260 were replies to comments (47%). The 260 replies were in response to 113 original comments, with the remaining original comments having 0 replies (n = 180). Of the 202 commenters who identified a personal role in a health care encounter, 70 (35%) identified as patients and 68 (34%) identified as physicians. Comments centered on seven major themes: (1) negative personal experiences, (2) reframing study conclusions, (3) sense of decline in training standards, (4) internal stressors impeding ED diagnostic accuracy, (5) external stressors impeding ED diagnostic accuracy, (6) suggested solutions, and (7) role of the ED in diagnosis. The news coverage of AHRQ's report provided individuals a platform to share their perspectives. Many comments reflected a nuanced understanding of the role of emergency care and the stressors of the ED environment. Despite questions about the report's accuracy, there were many individuals who shared personal negative experiences suggesting that the public may feel directly impacted by error in the ED.

The Otherness in Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand

In her recent historical fiction, Take My Hand (2022), New York Times bestselling author Dolen Perkins-Valdez explores the specific manifestations of post-slavery racism, particularly institutional racism. This is vividly portrayed through the experiences of Civil Townsend, a determined new nurse, who witnesses the systematic denial of reproductive rights and autonomy among impoverished African American females. Due to the novel being published within the last two years, there is a significant lack of extensive scholarly analysis on its critical themes. This research employs the postcolonial concept of Otherness to examine the oppression of black women in the narratives. It investigates how stereotyping and dehumanizing as facets of Otherness within a postcolonial framework, contribute to their oppression. It also gives an analysis of the causes and consequences of the practice of Othering. The study offers insights into the power dynamics between the dominant and marginalized racial groups, underscoring the persistent battle against racial stereotypes and institutional racism. The conclusions of this research underscore the notion that the ideology of Otherness is central to the oppression experienced by the African American female characters in the novel. It advocates that achieving equality involves recognizing and respecting differences ideologically.

Digital Transformation and Innovation of the News Media

Under the background of globalization and the rapid development of information technology, the digital transformation and innovation of news media have become an important trend of the industry. Traditional media adapt to the new audience needs and market environment through digital transformation, and gradually transform to diversified content production, personalized recommendation, multi-platform distribution and paid subscription mode. Many media organizations, such as the New York Times and the BBC, have explored the possibilities of content innovation and dissemination through artificial intelligence, big data and virtual reality. However, digital transformation also faces challenges such as information authenticity, privacy security and technology dependence. In the future, with the further development of new technologies, news media will continue to explore AI-driven news production, immersive reporting and blockchain applications to build a more innovative, efficient and credible news ecosystem.

An Alien in the Newsroom: AI Anxiety in European and American Newspapers

The media portrayal of artificial intelligence (AI) directly impacts how audiences conceptualize this technology and, therefore, its use, development, and regulation. This study aims to measure a key aspect of this problem: the feeling of AI anxiety conveyed by news outlets that represent this technology as a sort of “alien” that is autonomous, opaque, and independent of humans. To do so, we build an AI anxiety index based on principal component analysis (PCA) and apply it to a corpus of headlines (n = 1682) about AI published before and after the launch of ChatGPT in ten newspapers: The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, San Francisco Chronicle, Manchester Evening News, La Voz de Galicia, Ouest France, and Münchner Merkur. The results show that ChatGPT not only boosted the number of AI headlines × 5.16) but also reduced positive sentiments (−26.46%) and increased negatives (58.84%). The AI anxiety index also grew (10.59%), albeit driven by regional media (61.41%), while it fell in national media (−6.82%). Finally, the discussion of the variables that compose the index reveals the opportunities and challenges faced by national and regional media in avoiding the feeling of AI anxiety.

The Use of Trigger Words in the Modern Political Post-Soviet Discourse of the Russian-Speaking and English-Speaking Press (Using the Example of Publications Kommersant, Izvestia, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times and The Washington Post)

The Use of Trigger Words in the Modern Political Post-Soviet Discourse of the Russian-Speaking and English-Speaking Press (Using the Example of Publications Kommersant, Izvestia, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times and The Washington Post)

The Point of No Return: A Review Essay

Abstract Thomas Byrne Edsall is one of America's finest political journalists and a foremost amplifier of the work of political scientists and other scholars. Academic research bolsters his argument in virtually every chapter of The Point of No Return. The book is a collection of his New York Times columns, bookended by a new introduction and conclusion, spanning the period from Donald Trump's rise in the 2016 election to his attempt to overturn the presidential election four years later. A remarkable feature of Edsall's columns is how quickly he diagnosed emerging developments that would come to define our politics, including the Republican Establishment's rapid descent, Trump's unwavering and cult-like following, the pernicious effects of disinformation, the Democratic Party's inept response to social and cultural change, and the likelihood that Trump would not surrender power peacefully if he lost the 2020 election. A running theme throughout the book is the danger that Trump poses to the nation's democracy. The Point of No Return is the latest book in the four-decade career of a journalist who regularly has enlarged our understanding of American politics.

Judgmental the Identity of New York Times between Al Jazeera on Indonesia General Election: Appraisal Framework

This study aims to identify the terminology Al Jazeera and the New York Times used in their news reports on the 2024 Indonesian General Election, which had many candidates. In particular, this article identifies the data gathered from the appraisal system's components of attitude judgment (Martin & White, 2005), described in interpersonal (Martin & Rose, 2007). The number of negative judgments is much higher than the number of positive judgments. Out of the 21 total data, 76.2% are identified as negative judgments with 16 data, while the remaining 23.8% are positive judgments with 5 data. Once the analysis is carried out thoroughly, it is found that 80.9% of the data is categorized under social esteem, and the other 19.1% falls under social sanction. There are indications that the disparity between the positive and negative judgments is because of the controversy that preceded and followed the 2024 Indonesian General Election, in which Gibran, the President’s son, nominated Prabowo as a candidate and won the general election. This study's language assessment (appraisal) tries to identify two forms of judgment in four online international newspaper segments.

The Many Semantic Lives of Geopolitics: Evidence from the New York Times Archive 1900-2023

ABSTRACT Henry Kissinger’s death foregrounds a puzzle in the history of geopolitics. How did a word made infamous by Nazi Germany become so ubiquitous and popular in the English-speaking world? Was Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, responsible for its rehabilitation into respectability in English? Historians, geographers and political scientists have traced how Western geopolitical thought developed in the twentieth century through transatlantic imperial rivalry and knowledge field formations. But there is no quantitative discourse analysis of the many ways in which the word is used in the English language. Responding to this absence, this paper uses both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis to study how the word was employed in the New York Times from 1900 to 2023. Analysis of this corpus, and select examples from it, reveals the limits of three common presumptions about geopolitics: that it entered English as a synonym for Nazi foreign policy philosophy, that its use carried a stigma, and that Henry Kissinger led a revival of the word from the 1970s. Rather, the corpus record reveals a term with many semantic lives, a stigma that did not endure, and a synonym for great power competition and resource rivalry whose popularity is due to many factors besides Kissinger’s influence. Cluster of meaning around rivals and resources, books and culture, and US power define the term’s use in American geopolitical culture.

Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa

This piece interrogates anti-Black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in Africa. I focus on New York Times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. In critically attending to mediated imaginaries of Nairobi, Kenya as “unhygienic,” I demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-Scientific.” The situated knowledge informing such practices is disregarded or, worse, presented as a threat to be targeted and eliminated. Such biomedical transgressions are indexed in the NYT by racialized references to waste, dirt, and excrement, turning the (structurally white) reader-viewer into what I call a shit voyeur. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of Man, I argue that Man-the-shit voyeur disregards his own culpability in rising antimicrobial resistance, locating health risks instead in the contaminating nature of Others. This racialized grammar is further subtended by the logic of the spherical—the illusion that the world-as-sphere is a totality that Man can perceive with a unidirectional gaze. Global health reporting that is racialized via the logics of the spherical and shit voyeurism not only fails to accurately represent medical concerns in Africa but also perpetuates biomedical hegemony and/as global white supremacy.

Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in the American New York Times During the Period between (1961-1968)

The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper has a great influence on its readers internationally. The first issue was published on September 18, 1851 as the New York Daily Times. Throughout its life, it has been one of the most trusted newspaper organizations, winning dozens of international awards and consistently being one of the best-selling newspapers in the world. One of the topics that the newspaper focused on and devoted a lot of space to during the years (1961-1968) was the Kurdish issue in Iraq. On this basis, we conducted this scientific research entitled (Reflection of the Kurdish Issue in the American New York Times newspaper in the period between 1961-1968). It consists of an introduction and three axes. Each topic includes several discussions. In the first section, entitled (The Beginning of Defining the Kurds), we briefly highlighted some of these articles that dealt with the definition of Kurdish nationalism after the founding and publication of the newspaper. In the second section, we focused on the events of the Kurdish revolution and nationalist demands. The third and final topic was entitled (The role of the newspaper in demonstrating the international political position towards the Kurdish issue). In this topic, we highlight the international position and the newspaper’s position towards the Kurdish issue. Finally, we came to the conclusion that The New York Times provided a valuable service to the Kurdish cause in Iraq. Within the framework of his professional work.

Understanding COVID-19 Media Framing: Comparative Insights from Germany, the US, and the UK During Omicron

ABSTRACT This study examines the media framing of COVID-19 reporting in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom during the period of the highly contagious Omicron variant from December 2021 to March 2022. By identifying issue-specific media frames using hierarchical cluster analysis, the study gains insights into the distinctive characteristics of journalistic roles within each country and sheds light on the similarities and differences in media framing. Findings reveal that the German Süddeutsche Zeitung prioritizes the economic and Omicron impact on society and reports rather emotionally through evaluations and blame on social issues but frames otherwise quite neutral, reflecting its role in opinion formation and information dissemination. Conversely, the American New York Times takes an objective and informative approach, except similar to the Süddeutsche Zeitung when dealing with social impacts of the pandemic, addressing Omicron, economic impacts, and vaccination challenges while emphasizing shared burdens of the pandemic. The British Guardian gives equal weight to economic and social consequences and the Omicron impact and also raises the issues concerning the healthcare sector. Blame and negative evaluations cross all frames and newspapers, although (emotionally charged) evaluations and accusations are most prevalent in the Guardian, often directed at unvaccinated people and politics.

Where injustices (fail to) meet: newspaper coverage of speciesism, animal rights, and racism

This study examines the ways widely circulated U.S. newspapers have articulated the idea of “speciesism” and its associated idea “animal rights” in relation to “racism” to understand how powerful news media helps to shape the public understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression that cuts across the human and the more-than-human world. The archives (1987 to 2023) of three U.S. newspapers – The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post – were analyzed, using qualitative content analysis. The ideas of articulation, symbolic annihilation, erasure, and discursive closure served as the analytical guides for the analysis. The analysis shows that there is gross underrepresentation of speciesism and even far less representation of the relationship between speciesism and racism and between animal rights and anti-racism. When represented, the articulations showed problematic patterns of erasure of those concepts and relationships. The paper ends with the implications of the findings.

The Battle of Blair Mountain and the News Media: Professional Ideology and the Coverage of Bloodshed in West Virginia

In 1921, “labor trouble” was the euphemistic phrase used by newspapers to describe the often-bloody conflicts that took place between working miners and their bosses in West Virginia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was one such conflict, a well-known clash between striking miners and mine operators that was made famous because airplanes were used, however unsuccessfully, to drop bombs on the miners during the hostilities. This study examines the coverage of this event by the New York Times and Washington Post to understand the ideological assumptions of professional journalists at the time toward this brutal conflict. Using a historically informed analysis of newspaper content, this study shows how the professional norms of journalism culminated in a highly ideologically informed coverage of labor struggle, revealing upper and middle-class anxiety toward class conflict in early twentieth century America.

Learn how to become a supercommunicator

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion it has taken place.” That's why I think that all college and university administrators, including college athletics adminiistrators, could benefit from the advice that Charles Duhigg presented in his book Supercommunicators. Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize‐winning investigative journalist who previously worked as a senior editor at The New York Times.

Creating And Accelerating The Shift From Fossil Fuel Jobs To Green Energy Jobs

The green energy job market in the United States is growing consistently, whereas fossil fuel employment is declining. Green energy jobs have overtaken fossil fuel jobs in electric power generation (EPG), and they are beginning to command a presence in the fuels sector. Demand for green energy workers is very high, and green energy employers are having trouble finding qualified workers to fill their open positions. Real wages in green energy are increasing, the jobs are stable, and workers have more choice as to which parts of the US they want to live in. Meanwhile, workers are being pushed out of fossil fuel jobs, and this has caused fossil fuel dependent communities to languish. However, workers pushed out of fossil fuel industries are not shifting to green energy jobs, despite their attractive qualities. This is caused by numerous, major barriers. However, solutions are starting to form amongst major institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the New York Times, showcasing that there is a real problem and potential for opportunity in this area. A possible solution is to take this job transition online, consolidating the workers, employers, and necessary re-training in one place

Perceiving Distances and Construing Targets Based on Communication

Construal level theory states that the psychological distance to events and objects affects their construal level. But how do humans get to the psychological distance in the first place? We argue that language plays a key role. Communicating a distance typically requires a particular measurement unit, and the distance and its resolution affect the perceived psychological distance. There is an important difference between an invitation to a wedding on August 3rd and next summer. To substantiate our claims, we replicate the BIF task (n = 358) and the open-ended activity descriptions (n = 357) from Liberman and Trope (1998), and the concreteness in New York Times articles (n = 15,075) from Bhatia and Walasek (2016). We show the added value in understanding the effect of communicating distances, spotlighting its relevance for academic work that studies construal based on language or uses construal to explain further social situations.

Pediatric CSF diversion procedures for treatment of hydrocephalus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because there is not a link between COVID-19 and pediatric hydrocephalus, the COVID-19 pandemic should not have altered the incidence of pediatric hydrocephalus or the rate of CSF diversion procedures or shunt failure. Therefore, hydrocephalus-related surgical volume should have remained constant. The goal of this study was to evaluate the rates of hydrocephalus surgeries in the COVID-19 era compared with the baseline pre-COVID-19 era. Ten institutions collected information about all hydrocephalus-related surgeries performed between March 2018 and February 2022. The period after March 1, 2020, was considered the COVID-19 era; the period prior to this date was considered the baseline pre-COVID era. Four COVID surge periods were defined using the New York Times COVID-19 database. Total case volumes were compared between the COVID era and baseline, both overall and for each surge period. Sex, race, ethnicity, insurance status, Area Deprivation Index (ADI), and rural-urban commuter area were collected for each surgery. Proportions of patients were then compared overall and for each surge based on these variables. Of 8056 procedures, 54% were in male patients (n = 4375), 65% in White patients (n = 5247), 18% in Hispanic patients (n = 1423), and 54% in patients with public insurance (n = 4371). There was no change in the number of surgeries per site per month in the COVID era compared with baseline (16.7 vs 17.9, p = 0.113). However, there was a significant decrease in the first surge period (April 2020; 11.5 vs 17.7, p = 0.034). Male sex (p < 0.0039) and Black race (p < 0.001) were found to be associated with a significantly higher proportion of hydrocephalus procedures during the COVID-19 era. Some surge periods showed different proportions of privately insured patient and ADI levels. However, these relationships were inconsistent between surges. Overall average monthly case numbers were not significantly different between the pre-COVID and COVID eras. There was a significant decrease in hydrocephalus surgery during the first COVID surge. More hydrocephalus surgeries were performed in children of male sex and Black race proportionally during the COVID period overall, but not during individual surges.

Метафорическая концептуализация экономических отношений в публицистическом дискурсе финансово-экономической нестабильности (на материалах англоязычных публикаций, отражающих кризис потолка госдолга в США в 2023 г.)

The article examines the metaphorical conceptualization of a crisis economic situation in mass media discourse. The article looks at the metaphorical representation of economic relationships in the period of financial uncertainty caused by the inflation and the debt ceiling crisis in the USA in 2023. The aim of the research is to determine and describe the most relevant metaphorical models depicting the economic phenomena in the given historical period. The scientific novelty lies in describing the ways of metaphorical conceptualization of economic relationships in mass media discourse brought to life by new empirical data of the debt ceiling crisis. The research findings include describing the most relevant metaphorical models that depict the economic phenomena in the articles of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist; determining the nominative field of the target concept ECONOMY; extending the corpus of metaphors from crisis discourse and identifying the primary functions of the metaphors used in the texts under the study.

Critical Discourse Analysis of empowerment in “Amid the Rubble of Mosul, Francis Offers a Salve for Iraq’s Wounds”

Positive Discourse Analysis is a complementary approach for Critical discourse analysis, yet the former intends to have a positive orientation to make the world a better place to live in. The present study attempts to find out one of the syntactic strategies positively used by The New York Times in a report entitled “Amid the Rubble of Mosul, Francis Offers a Salve for Iraq’s Wounds” through which the ideology of empowerment is used to encourage individuals and enhance confidence in their active participation in social, economic, and political processes. To accomplish the analysis of one of the syntactic strategies of the selected report, the present study intends to analyze a report on the first-ever papal visit to Iraq by Pope Francis through the lens of transitivity to examine how the media report from the New York Times utilizes this strategy to focus on the positive effect of the visit. The present study aims at finding (1)the types of empowerment and (2) investigating the most frequently used process in transitivity to reflect empowerment. It is hypothesized that empowerment has six types and (2) there are six processes of transitivity, with material process being the most widely used in the chosen report. The methodology of the present study includes (1) a theoretical survey of CDA and PDA, and (2) analyzing the chosen data qualitatively and quantitatively. An eclectic model is used based on Fairclough model of CDA (1989) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) for transitivity. The findings show how the selected tool ,especially the material process, is functionalized to express empowerment in Media to affect the life of the ordinary people.