From an Inside the Times column by Allie Jones headlined “Infiltrating a Bachelorette Party”:

First, I heard the screams.

“Loo-ser, loo-ser!” I was pulling up to a $5 million rental property just outside Scottsdale, Ariz., and the shrieks echoed throughout the neighborhood. The voices belonged to members of a bachelorette party who were engaged in a particularly cutthroat drinking game by the property’s pool. I had come to the right place.

From a Times Insider column by Sarah Bahr headlined “Stepping Back to Look Ahead”:

In 2018, despite having recently published a series of articles on how climate change was challenging the world’s cities that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times’s architecture critic, felt unsatisfied.

He wanted more. He wanted to find a way to explore the variety of intersecting challenges — such as immigration and housing affordability — that the world’s urban hubs face, as well as how addressing those issues could enable social and economic progress.