Lightening Up

Daylight is adding up, about three minutes more each day as March progresses, give or take. Tomorrow, we bank a full hour at once: Change your clocks, change your smoke detector batteries, start planning menus around tender lettuces. Spring hasn’t arrived yet, but her plane’s definitely left the ground.

I call this time of year The Great Thaw, or sometimes The Great Unclenching. Despite winter’s cozy associations with holiday gathering, with mugs of cocoa enjoyed before the blazing hearth, it’s always felt to me like a time of contraction, of hoarding. We button and zip ourselves up into ourselves and move quickly past one another. We sleep more and default to indoors. The days are always ending again.

When the light returns, something unclenches in me, and I like to imagine that it does in all of us, although I know better than to impute my own longing for the warmer months to the bewildering characters who prefer the cold. “Daylight Saving Time Begins.” That entry on the calendar always reads like a triumphant return, a welcome back. We tried this “standard time” thing all winter, tried being measured and responsible with how we spent our time, and now, exhale, finally, that’s over. Now, we will loosen up. Now we will stop being so withholding and rigid with our time, with our presence, with our imaginations. Now a perfectly good Saturday plan is just to meet up outside and see what develops. The season of scarcity is coming to a close and now we will spend ourselves with abandon.

Whether or not you feel a sort of inner unleashing happening this time of year, opening up is a seductive prospect, isn’t it? If there’s a tension between the seasons — fall and winter’s contraction vs. spring and summer’s expansion — then there’s a similar tension in us. Being timid vs. living out loud. Rushing in from the cold vs. lingering. Playing it safe vs. risking it. Keeping ourselves small and contained vs. letting loose our full splendor. Sometimes we need inducements to be our most expansive selves, an invitation to open up.

Let tomorrow’s onset of longer, brighter days serve as that invitation. Why not? We change the clocks by an hour, making this deliberate shift from dark to light in our external worlds. How can we do this internally as well? How will we meet this unofficial beginning of the lighter, looser half of the year? How will we thaw out, unclench, let go?

THE LATEST NEWS

The Trump Administration

• Members of President Trump’s cabinet clashed with Elon Musk in a contentious meeting on Thursday. Afterward, Trump pulled back some of Musk’s power over agency cuts.

• The Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing its failure to protect Jewish students from harassment.

• Federal agencies are purging hundreds of so-called “woke” words from government documents. See the list of terms.

• Trump’s immigration plans call for private prisons to detain many more migrants. That means big profits for the companies that run the facilities.

Trump’s Foreign Policy

• Trump said he asked the Iranian government to reopen nuclear talks. In 2018 he withdrew the U.S. from a nuclear deal with Iran.

• Trump says he is considering imposing sanctions and tariffs on Russia until it reaches a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

• Panama will release more than 100 migrants, deported by the U.S., that it had been holding in a jungle camp.

International

• At least 140 people have died in clashes between Syria’s new authorities and forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad. It’s the bloodiest fighting since the Assad regime fell.

• A German court convicted five men with plotting to kidnap the country’s health minister on live TV in order to create chaos and destabilize the government.

• Dominique Pelicot, the French man convicted of drugging and raping his wife, now faces a similar charge from his daughter.

Business

• Hiring in the U.S. is holding steady: The country added 151,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose just slightly.

• The Justice Department is investigating whether major U.S. egg producers violated antitrust laws, causing the cost of eggs to spike.

• Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul sentenced to 25 years in prison, is lobbying for a presidential pardon.

Other Big Stories

• Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, died of a virus linked to rodents, a medical examiner said. Hackman, who had Alzheimer’s, appears to have died a week later.

• A firing squad in South Carolina executed a man convicted of murder. It was the first such execution in the U.S. in 15 years, and the first ever in South Carolina.

• Athena, a privately developed spacecraft meant to shuttle NASA instruments to the moon, toppled while landing and died shortly after.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Film and TV

• The final season of “The Righteous Gemstones,” a satire of American televangelism that’s both supremely crude and deeply humanizing, begins tomorrow.

• Hulu’s “Deli Boys” centers on South Asians, drugs, violence and the minimart. Its two lead actors found dream roles playing no one’s hero.

• While in-person moviegoing languishes in much of the world, French audiences are returning to the cinema.

• George Lowe, whose baritone lent an air of silly seriousness to the cartoon talk-show host Space Ghost, died at 67.

Oscars

• “Anora” was the big winner at the Oscars. Sean Baker, the movie’s director, used a speech to urge audiences to keep seeing films in theaters.

• “Wicked” duets and stand-up bits: The hosts of “Popcast” discussed the ways the Academy Awards incorporated music into its ceremony.

• On Oscars night, a number of celebrities opted for nearly nude fashion.

• These eight celebrities ruled the red carpet this awards season.

Music

• Hear the music that our classical music and opera critics can’t stop thinking about — including Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story.”

• Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, died at 82. His crush on a bank teller early in his marriage inspired Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene.”

• Jay-Z sued the woman who withdrew her rape lawsuit against him last month, claiming that she and her lawyers knew the allegations were false.

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