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Newsletters have a history even longer than newspapers, and email is several decades older than the web. Despite this lengthy pedigree, email newsletters are having a very buzzy moment — and here at The New York Times, we’re striving to bring even more depth, ambition and scale to our lineup.

This summer marks 20 years since The Times published its first newsletters. We started off in 2001 covering technology, books and finance, among other topics. Some of those newsletters are still thriving, in various incarnations, as part of a portfolio that reaches some 15 million people every week — a number that has surged over the last two years. Flagships such as The Morning and DealBook serve as a destination for readers and a crucial gateway and guide to our journalism, while offering original reporting and analysis.

As the editorial...

To be a good empirical economist, you must be prepared to make use of economic data without forgetting that the data is at best an imperfect guide to reality. I used to describe national income accounting — G.D.P. and all that — as a peculiarly boring form of science fiction. That’s not to say that the statisticians just make things up; they try really hard, and their work is immensely valuable. It’s just that any close look at how the numbers are constructed reveals that data coverage is always incomplete and the gaps are filled in with estimates and imputations.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself drawn to another analogy: Economic measures, especially the measures we use to make sense of a rapidly changing situation, are like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. That is, they’re imperfect images of an underlying reality that exists, but that we can’t directly see. And sometimes it’s important, in interpreting the shadows, to think about the Platonic ideal...

The lesson from Wednesday’s consumer price report was, to a large extent, in the eyes of the beholder.

Team Transitory — a term I’m stealing from the economic analyst George Pearkes — was encouraged by the fact that July’s inflation was substantially lower than June’s. That is, those arguing that recent price increases reflect temporary disruptions as we recover from the pandemic rather than an underlying inflation problem — a group that includes White House economists, many progressives and yours truly — found the report reassuring.

Other reasonable economists were not as sanguine, pointing out that inflation is still running hot and warning that we may soon see substantial increases in rent, which is a big part of the Consumer Price Index. And I’ll concede the possibility that above-normal inflation may prove persistent enough that the Federal Reserve will want to tighten monetary policy sooner than it now expects. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I’m not...

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more