I’m a delusional tennis player. Not the kind who brags about his excellence on court. (I’m a middle-aged weekend warrior; let’s be real.) But the kind who watches match highlights on YouTube all year, treating the shots and tactics there like a how-to manual. Carlos Alcaraz blasted an inside-out forehand and then finished his opponent with a perfect stop-volley. I can do that! No, sir, you cannot.
Watching the U.S. Open up close, the reason is clear. When you see how fast the ball moves, when you hear the pop of the racket, when you witness players screeching to a halt using their sneakers like hockey skates, you understand that the pros play a totally different game from the one that 26 million American hobbyists play. It’s a show of acrobatics, power, endurance and mental toughness.
Millions of us don’t get to see it in person. So I asked Matthew Futterman — who covers tennis for our sister publication, The Athletic, and basically lives at Flushing Meadows for two weeks — about the big show, which ends today in a clash between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.
There’s great spirit at the Australian Open, surprise upsets at the French Open and vaunted tradition at Wimbledon. So why does the U.S. Open feel so much more alive than the other majors?
It’s the only Grand Slam where the fans actually look like the population of the city, especially during the first week, when the tickets are more affordable and so many matches are on smaller courts outside the stadium. You really saw it this year during the mixed doubles the week before the tournament, when tickets for Louis Armstrong Stadium were free and fans got to watch some of the best players in the world compete for a big prize. And remember, it’s held in a city-owned park. Those outdoor courts are public courts that we can play on during the year. It’s not a private club. That’s huge.
What does it feel like on site that I’m not seeing on TV?
Because New York is so diverse, every player, no matter where they are from, can feel like they are playing at home. For Alex Eala of the Philippines, Filipino fans made it feel like she was playing in Manila. Brazilian fans turned João Fonseca’s matches into a mini Rio. And when you’re on Ashe in a big match in the second week with 24,000 people, it feels like you’ve been invited to the biggest, coolest party there is, intimate and massive all at once. Oh, there’s Lin-Manuel Miranda! Oh, there’s Alicia Keys!
American players are doing better than they have in a generation. Both the men and the women are winning tournaments and crowding the top 20. What’s going on?
American tennis associations have done a great job of making sure the best kids got access to top coaching during the past 15 years. Tennis is an expensive sport. Few families can afford the costs of elite development. Frances Tiafoe, Tommy Paul, Amanda Anisimova, Coco Gauff — all needed help and got it in various forms. Title IX also means the government must provide the same amount of opportunities for women’s sports as men’s sports, which has built a culture of women’s sports over the last 50 years.
There were some compelling story lines this year. Naomi Osaka reached her first semifinal since having a kid; Novak Djokovic got there at the age of 38 and did a dance from “K-pop Demon Hunters.” A Latvian player told the African American woman who beat her that she had “no education.”
And then there’s Anisimova, who bounced back from a 6-0, 6-0 battering in the Wimbledon final two months ago to exorcise the ghost of Iga Swiatek in the quarters. Then she staged a late-night comeback over Naomi Osaka in the semis to make a second consecutive Grand Slam final. Even though Anisimova lost yesterday, she showed that in tennis and life, only one thing matters — what you do next.
I never thought we’d get a rivalry like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s. But we may have one! The world’s top-ranked men, Sinner and Alcaraz, meet today in their third major final this year. (This was a great story about their relationship.)
They’re both forces of nature with incredible athleticism and power. Sinner can also function as a human backboard. Alcaraz is an acrobat. His ceiling for achievement is probably higher, but his floor is lower. Sinner’s ability to get in and out of corners — showing the agility of the champion junior skier he once was — is ridiculous. So is this behind-the-back half volley from Alcaraz:
What do players do in New York when they’re not on court?
Iga Swiatek craves nature and goes for walks in Central Park. Karolina Muchova is a coffee nerd who hunts for great cafes. Alex de Minaur likes to eat in the meatpacking district. Coco Gauff enjoys shopping. Players mostly stay at luxury hotels in Midtown or downtown, though Stefanos Tsitsipas owns an apartment in Tribeca. Novak Djokovic stays at a friend’s estate in Alpine, N.J. For many of them, the city is a little hectic. It’s not what they are used to.
Is the Honey Deuce, the melon-garnished drink of the tournament, as delicious as people say on TikTok?
Wrong guy to ask. I had a bad night with vodka when I was a teenager and can’t drink it. But they sold 556,782 Honey Deuce cocktails last year, so they must be doing something right.
More coverage:
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Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, beat Anisimova to win her second straight U.S. Open.
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Meet the woman who decides which famous people get free tickets for the tournament.
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Can you ace our tennis quiz?
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Osaka arrived at each match with a glittering Labubu. We spoke with the artist who bedazzled them.
THE LATEST NEWS
Trump Administration
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On national security, spending and oversight, President Trump continues to trample Congress’s power. Republicans in charge have mostly shrugged, Julian Barnes and Catie Edmondson write.
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Trump is openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize. In a mixed message this week, he signed an executive order to establish a “Department of War.”
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The administration has started an ICE operation in Massachusetts that will probably last several weeks.
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Trump is also threatening an immigration crackdown in Chicago.
International
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Japan’s prime minister says he’ll step down, adding political uncertainty to an already turbulent time.
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Russia hit Kyiv’s heavily protected government district in an overnight strike.
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Israel’s war in Gaza has displaced most of the enclave’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents. Many of them fear they’ll never return to their old homes.
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France’s financial woes are pushing its government to the brink. Here’s how it got to this point.
Other Big Stories
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Wildfire fighters are being sent to work in poisonous smoke. When these firefighters get sick, they don’t all receive the same help.
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Powerball’s $1.787 billion jackpot had two winning tickets, one sold in Missouri and one in Texas.
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“Father Mother Sister Brother,” directed by Jim Jarmusch, won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
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Her brother disappeared 52 years ago. This year, his remains were identified. “I just knew they had found him, in my heart. I just knew it,” she said.
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Should states have their own vaccine recommendations?
Yes. State guidelines will increase confidence among people who are skeptical of the federal authorities. “If the federal government’s vaccine-related apparatus can no longer be trusted, giving more authority to the state makes sense,” The Boston Globe’s editorial board writes.
No. A patchwork system will make it harder to know whom to trust and will leave us all more vulnerable to outbreaks. “Viruses don’t recognize state lines,” Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis writes.
FROM OPINION
The convenience of disposable plastics doesn’t just come at an environmental cost. It has changed how we eat, shop and raise children, Saabira Chaudhuri writes.
If Major League Baseball wants to enter partnerships with the gambling industry, it should let players bet, too, J.R. Moehringer writes.
Here are columns by Ross Douthat on Trump’s imperial presidency and Maureen Dowd on the battle of the sexes.
MORNING READS
Pill blues: Women are being bombarded with social media clips about birth control. Many are questioning what they’ve long been told.
Screen time: This researcher sounded the alarm about kids and phones years ago. Now, she shares her own rules. (Chief among them: No smartphone until you get your driver’s license. And no social media until you turn 16.)
Masked enforcement: ICE agents are covering their faces. Is that un-American?
Your pick: The most-clicked story in the newsletter yesterday was about a family searching for a home to restore in Chester County, Pa.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
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“Buckeye” by Patrick Ryan: There’s something refreshingly timeless about Ryan’s second novel for adults, which unfolds in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, in the aftermath of World War II. The book follows two couples — Cal and Becky Jenkins and Margaret and Felix Salt — as their marriages take root, bear fruit and intertwine with each other in complex ways. “What Ryan has to say about infidelity is far more nuanced and humane than anything the meme-judgment generation might offer,” our reviewer wrote. The same is true of Ryan’s window on a tight-knit community, and the way a place grows and changes alongside the people who live there. With shades of Wallace Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety” and Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” “Buckeye” is the rare novel that manages to be sweeping and intimate at the same time.
More on books
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“Mrs. Dalloway” is turning 100. Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece is more relevant than ever.
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Looking for novels to read this fall? Go here.
THE INTERVIEW
This week’s subject for The Interview is Brené Brown, an author, podcaster and academic who became famous for her research on empathy, vulnerability and courage. In recent years, Brown has turned her focus to corporate settings. She works with C.E.O.s to promote what she calls “courageous leadership” and has written a book about the same thing, titled “Strong Ground.” It’s about her perspective on leadership, but also this moment of intense technological and cultural upheaval in workplaces.
Like a lot of people in every industry, I personally am feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change.
Same.
In your new book, you quote Amy Webb, a C.E.O. and professor at N.Y.U. who studies the future, and she described this moment as a “supercycle” of unprecedented change. This massive disruption, all this new technology that companies have available to them, how they’re supposed to use it and then how to train people on it: What does that look like inside a workplace at this moment, when it just feels like everything is up in the air?
It looks like a complete [expletive] show. What it looks like is scarcity. We’re not doing enough, we don’t know enough, we don’t have enough people trained, we’re not investing enough. This is what everyone’s doing and we’re behind. So it looks like fear and scarcity driving huge investments in A.I. that are not even aligned with business strategy.
In this moment of profound change, what is a good leader?
A good leader to me right now is a leader who understands urgency but is working from productive urgency. Not, like my grandma would say, “chicken with your head cut off” urgency — we’re seeing a lot of that — but productive, strategic urgency. Action over impact is so dangerous, and right now we’re seeing a ton of action over impact as companies try to integrate this technology. They’re not understanding how to bring people along, how to use it in smart ways, where it will work, where it will not work. Linda Hall — a Harvard Business School professor and researcher who studies digital transformation — will tell you the hardest thing about digital transformation is never the technology; it’s always the people. Then you add to that geopolitical instability around the world. Leaders wake up and, depending on the tariff fever dream of the night before by this administration, everything has changed.
Read more of the interview here, or watch a longer version of the interview on our YouTube channel.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …
Make the best boxed macaroni and cheese.
Listen to these albums coming this fall.
Watch one of our critics’ favorite shows on Netflix right now.
MEAL PLAN
Summer’s gone and life is getting more chaotic. So Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has recipes to help you manage. They include crispy chicken with lime butter, lemon pasta with almonds and arugula and beef fried rice.
NOW TIME TO PLAY
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were codevelop and codeveloped.
Can you put eight historical events — including the first battery, “The Wizard of Oz” and Rodin’s “The Thinker” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.
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