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The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.
Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspe…
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The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.
Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspended between dog and wolf. We’re still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent. An undertide of confusion persists: Evening car accidents increase, circadian rhythms reset, the moon’s out before dinner. That space in between is strange and destabilizing until we get used to it.
Each year I assume there’s a wolf hiding in the earlier sunsets, that there’s a certain sorrow implicit when daylight decreases. The dog days are literally and metaphorically over. In the northeast U.S., spring and summer are seasons you can pet. Fall and winter have fangs.
Not everyone feels this. I always consult my friend Leigh at this time of year to try to catch some of her glee. “License to hunker!” she nearly bellowed at me when I reminded her we change the clocks tomorrow. “Sorry, it’s 4:30, I can’t do anything more today. Time to have a drink and watch your shows!” I love her delirium, and I want to borrow some of it to wear like a shawl until spring.
The ancient Greeks experienced time in two ways. Chronos was the clock time that governs our lives, bedtime and estimated departure time, the hour gained or lost. Kairos referred to a more figurative measure of time — the right time, the moment of opportunity, the sacred window for action. In order to recognize kairos, we have to be aware, awake, present. Madeleine L’Engle wrote: “The child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”
When I think about the mystical possibilities of kairos, it seems mundane, boring, uncreative to be blue about a lost chronological hour. In any season, there is kairos. These moments of possibility, of serendipity, arrive in all seasons, but we have to be awake to seize them. The stillness of the colder, darker months — that license to hunker — is a time to slow down and observe. What windows of luck and chance and coincidence emerge when we’re a little quieter, a little more observant? I’ll be observing the sun setting an hour earlier tomorrow, wondering about kairos, those moments of opportunity in the offing that the clock and the calendar can’t touch.
THE LATEST NEWS
Government Shutdown
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A grocery store in Manhattan.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
A judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps during the shutdown. The program had been set to run out of funds today.
Insufficient staffing at air traffic control facilities set off a second day of widespread delays at airports, including those serving New York City.
Trump has urged Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster so they can end the shutdown, though some worry that doing so could backfire.
More on Politics
Ohio became the latest state to redraw its congressional map. The changes could help Republicans pick up two more seats in next year’s midterm elections.
Vice President JD Vance said that he hopes his wife, Usha Vance, who was raised in a Hindu family, will eventually convert to Catholicism. He faced quick backlash on social media.
There’s a growing divide among Republicans over trade: Some in the party oppose Trump’s plan to import beef from Argentina, and senators voted three times this week to end the president’s power to enforce sweeping tariffs.
Other Big Stories
Jamaica raised its death toll from Hurricane Melissa to 19 people, and officials expect that number climb as the worst-hit areas are searched.
OpenAI has used complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise. These charts show how.
A.I. is making death threats more realistic, enabling online harassers to generate images showing their victims in imagined violent situations.
THE WEEK IN CULTURE
Fine Arts
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Maurizio Cattelan’s “America.”Credit...Sotheby’s, via Associated Press
An 18-karat gold toilet can be yours for $10 million — or whatever the flushable sculpture happens to be worth a few hours before the auction begins next month.
Thieves stole more than 1,000 objects from a museum in Oakland, Calif., the city’s police department said.
Vacation couldn’t stop Claude Monet, the father of French impressionism, from spending 10-hour workdays at the easel. A lush blockbuster show in Brooklyn helps explain why.
Most museum workers have considered quitting in the past five years, a new survey finds. The industry is vexed by low pay, burnout and “new culture wars.”
Film
“Hedda” stars Tessa Thompson as a stifled newlywed who stirs up mayhem. Our critic calls it “a film for adults that, like its protagonist, doesn’t skimp on brainpower.”
“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain,” an animated film about a young girl in Japan discovering the world, is sweetly humanist with philosophical heft.
Theater
New York City Center usually favors heavy-hitting drama for its annual gala. This time around, though, it’s serving up a feast of cartoonish gore and questionable sex with “Bat Boy: The Musical.”
Daniel Radcliffe is returning to Broadway to star in a solo play called “Every Brilliant Thing.”
Samuel Beckett, who has been dead for 35 years, is having something of a revival right now. That includes “Endgame,” a bleak tragicomedy staged by the Druid theater company.
More Culture
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Credit...The New York Times
Twenty-five years after Tim Meadows left “Saturday Night Live,” he’s still regularly popping up on TV screens and delighting new audiences.
Several video game revivals this year — in franchises like Double Dragon and Ninja Gaiden — are a throwback to an era when games were much, much harder.
LISTEN TO THIS
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Lily AllenCredit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times
The British singer Lily Allen has released a bombshell divorce album, one that manages to both comprehensively eviscerate an unnamed partner (believed to be her ex-husband, the actor David Harbour) and also actually be good. Our critic called it “irresistible.”
I started listening to the album, “West End Girl,” in a bath the other night, and I didn’t stop until the water got cold. The details were salacious, shocking, unbelievable — it was a royal tour of the wreckage of a marriage, each track a new plot point in a story of sex, lies and discovered texts, some of which she reads aloud.
Allen seems to be suggesting that writing so explicitly, and with such salacious detail, about her own life is “a way of reclaiming her power in her broken relationship,” our critic writes. On the song “Let You W/In,” she sings, “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth on the table.” That she did.
Related: Allen and Harbour listed their nearly $8 million Brooklyn brownstone recently. That has added to the lore.
RECIPE OF THE WEEK
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Credit...Mark Weinberg for The New York Times
Monster Cookies
If you’ve got extra Halloween candy on hand, use it to Nigella Lawson’s sweet and chewy monster cookies. You can fold whatever needs using up into the oat-speckled cookie dough. Chocolate varieties like peppermint patties and peanut butter cups work especially well, getting just a little melty in the oven’s heat. Or use M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces, which add a delightful sugar crunch.
REAL ESTATE
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Teresa and Marty StreleckyCredit...Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times
**The Hunt: **A senior couple, craving a downtown area with shops and restaurants, set their sights on Portland and Seattle with a $725,000 budget. Which home did they choose? Play our game.
Do it yourself: Painting furniture is trickier than you might think. Here’s a guide.
LIVING
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A sushi rice cup from Silver Rice.Credit...Heather Willensky for The New York Times
ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER
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Credit...Marki Williams/The New York Times
Sometimes store-bought is fine
Life doesn’t always afford time for slow cooking. For busy parents juggling school drop-offs, college students with a mountain of homework or even experienced home cooks in a rush, a jar of marinara can be a lifeline. And store-bought sauces have come a long way. Nowadays, grocery shelves are replete with a staggering number of promising options, some of which taste convincingly homemade. We taste-tested 41 jars of marinara sauce and found several standouts for your busiest moments — including a thick and tangy sauce for dunking mozzarella sticks and a rustic take that tasted delicious on its own. —* Maki Yazawa*
GAME OF THE WEEK
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The Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto.Credit...Cole Burston/Getty Images
Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Toronto Blue Jays, World Series Game 7: Last weekend, this newsletter previewed the World Series as a battle between the Dodgers’ pitching staff, so good at strikeouts, and the Blue Jays’ bats, so good at making contact.
Toronto has certainly been hitting the ball. In the games they’ve won, the Jays have scored 11, 6 and 6 runs. And they scored 5 in a loss, the 18-inning classic that was Game 3. Los Angeles’s pitching hasn’t been quite so impressive, but it’s had its moments. The Dodgers’ sometimes-shaky bullpen blanked Toronto for 11 straight innings in Game 3, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been a star, throwing a complete game in Game 2 and six sharp innings in last night’s 3-1 win.
Game 7 is tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on Fox
NOW TIME TO PLAY
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Melissa Kirsch covers wellness and lifestyle and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.
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