The Daily The New York Times

A showdown between House Republicans and their leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is heading toward a government shutdown.

Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for The Times, explains the causes and consequences of the looming crisis.

Guest: Carl Hulse, is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times.

Although one major strike, against Hollywood studios, was finally resolved this past week, another, against U.S. vehicle makers, is expanding. The plight of the autoworkers has now become a major point of contention in the presidential race.

Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why the strike could be an essential test along the road to the White House.

Guest: Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.

After 148 days on strike, writers of movies and television are returning to work on Wednesday

with an agreement in hand that amounts to a major win for organized labor in Hollywood.

John Koblin, a media reporter for The Times, explains why the studios acquiesced to writers’ demands and what the deal means for the future of American entertainment.

Guest: John Koblin, a media reporter for The New York Times.

In one of the most serious political corruption cases in recent history, federal prosecutors have accused a senior U.S. senator of trading the power of his position for cash, gifts and gold.

Tracey Tully, who covers New Jersey for The Times, tells the story behind the charges against the senator, Robert Menendez, and his wife, Nadine, and describes the role played by Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman at the center of the allegations.

Guest: Tracey Tully covers New Jersey for The New York Times.

California is poised to become the first state to outlaw discrimination based on a person’s caste. The system of social stratification, which dates back thousands of years, has been outlawed in India and Nepal for decades.

Amy Qin, a correspondent who covers Asian American communities for The Times, explains why so many believe a prejudice that originated on the other side of the globe now requires legal protection in the U.S.  — and why so many are equally convinced that it would be a bad idea.

Guest: Amy Qin, a national correspondent covering Asian American communities for The New York Times.

“The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” Shane McCrae, the 47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice one rainy afternoon in May, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.”

There was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in McCrae’s childhood — between a day in June 1979 when his white grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father’s and placed a call — is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape, from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened, where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he was Black, it’s a story that’s been hard for McCrae to piece together.

McCrae’s new book, the memoir “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun,” is his attempt to construct, at a remove of four decades, an understanding of what happened and what it has come to mean. The memoir takes the reader through McCrae’s childhood, from his earliest memories after being taken from his father to when, at 16, he found him again.