The Morning: Ready for the Super Bowl?

Good morning. Today we’ve got a guide to the Super Bowl. We’re also covering Donald Trump, German politics and art in New York.

The Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, during Super Bowl LVII. Doug Mills/The New York Times

A super sequel

The Kansas City Chiefs meet the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX tonight, and it’s likely that more than 100 million people will tune in. For many, it will be the only football game they watch this year.

If you’re among that group, good news: This is an ideal matchup for casual fans. For one, it’s a rematch. Philadelphia and Kansas City played each other in the Super Bowl just two years ago, and plenty of familiar characters will return. Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce are back. Kelce’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift, will probably be there, too.

And there’s history at stake. Kansas City is trying to win its third straight Super Bowl, which no team — not even Tom Brady’s New England Patriots dynasty — has ever done.

In the rest of today’s newsletter, we’ve got a guide to the Super Bowl, with contributions from my colleagues around The Times.

The teams

One thing to know about Philadelphia: The Eagles have pioneered a play called the “tush push,” in which players line up behind the quarterback Jalen Hurts and shove him forward to gain a yard or two. When the Eagles ran the play this season, it worked more than 80 percent of the time, according to The Ringer. But that’s no guarantee it will work during the Super Bowl. As The Ringer notes, Kansas City shut down several tush pushes by the Buffalo Bills during the A.F.C. championship game.

One thing to know about Kansas City: The team was 15-2 this season, but it won 11 of those victories, plus another in the playoffs, by a single score (meaning eight points or fewer). It won 17 straight one-score games, an N.F.L. record. The Athletic’s Mike Sando calculated that the odds of such a streak are about one-tenth of 1 percent. Is that a sign that Kansas City is lucky — or just great in clutch moments?

The halftime show

Kendrick Lamar Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated Press

Kendrick Lamar’s smash “Not Like Us” is a lot of things: a Drake-slaying diss track, a No. 1 single, a Grammys darling. Tonight, it might also be part of a Super Bowl halftime show. But while casual viewers will hear an easily digestible crowd-pleaser, it’s also a strange hit for Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most revered M.C.s of all time.

In recent years, Lamar had shied from the spotlight. He released an album about therapy and trauma. Now, on “Not Like Us,” he spends almost five minutes calling Drake — the most popular rapper of the last decade — a pedophile (Drake says this is false, and he’s suing the record label), along with a “jabroni” and a “colonizer.” Will the diss, which has been featured in promos for the performance, be the centerpiece of the show? Or will Lamar minimize its role — or even elide it entirely?

—Joe Coscarelli, music reporter

Read more: “Not Like Us” reinvented Kendrick Lamar. Is the Super Bowl ready for it?

The commercials

If 2022 was the cryptocurrency Super Bowl, this year’s broadcast will be remembered for its artificial intelligence ads. Viewers will be hit with pitches for A.I.-enabled personal assistants, reservation services and sunglasses. This year’s commercials are also low on controversy and creativity, with advertisers looking for safety in strenuous silliness and familiar celebrity faces.

—Mike Hale, television critic

Read more: Mike is ranking all of this year’s ads from best to worst. (The list will grow through the day as more ads are revealed.)

The host city

The return of the Super Bowl to New Orleans has taken months of extensive work. Around the French Quarter and the Superdome, there are new streetlights and sidewalks. Some buildings have been covered in colorful murals. Tourism drives the city’s economy, and the Super Bowl — which will draw as many as 150,000 people — offers an unrivaled platform to pitch itself on TV as a destination.

The rush of improvements has provoked a complicated reaction among residents. One lamented that the area now looks like a Disney theme park. Others have found it somewhat heartening after the deadly New Year’s Day terrorist attack. And the changes have stoked frustration over the city’s persistent potholes and decaying infrastructure. “Finish fixing the streets,” a resident said. “Finish beautifying, finish putting flowers out. Keep the stuff well lit. Keep the police presence. We deserve all of that.”

—Rick Rojas, Atlanta bureau chief

Read more: After New Orleans’s Super Bowl makeover, some residents say: What about us?

More Super Bowl coverage

From The Athletic

Trump Administration

More on Politics

Vivek Ramaswamy Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

International

In central Gaza.  Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Other Big Stories

Should Musk have this much power?

No. While Americans focus on Musk’s cost-cutting mission, they don’t realize he is also collecting vast amounts of private data. “An ‘unelected, unaccountable billionaire’ threatens civil servants’ privacy and national security,” The Washington Post’s Colbert King writes.

Yes. Musk’s reforms — including buying out workers and dismantling agencies — are extreme because he is reforming an extremist government. He is up against “a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan writes.

“The Palestinians are here to stay”: While governments debate the future of Gaza, five Palestinian scholars discuss what self-determination means for them.

Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the American empire and Maureen Dowd on Trump’s “Mean Girls.”

James Denmark’s “Untitled.”  via James Denmark and Lloyd Toone; Photo by Stan Narten

Galleries: See new art in New York City this month.

Routine: How the costume designer for “Wicked” spends his Sundays.

Space: The odds of an asteroid striking Earth in 2032 keep going up and down. Here’s why.

Vows: They got married in Antarctica.

Lives Lived: Sam Nujoma directed a guerrilla army in a 24-year war for Namibia’s independence from South African rule, and became his country’s founding president. He died at 95.

“This is a Love Story,” by Jessica Soffer: The title doesn’t lie — this is a love story. But, just in time for Valentine’s Day, Soffer’s unapologetically romantic novel includes many tales that tug at the heartstrings. First and foremost is the long marriage of Abe and Jane, a writer and an artist whose complicated, colorful life together is winding down as she lays dying. While he runs through a litany of their memories together — a veritable “14,000 Things to be Happy About” plus enough stinkers to keep it real — we catch glimpses of other great loves: their son’s connection with his grandmother, Jane’s mind meld with an old friend, Abe’s affinity for the march of words on a page and New Yorkers’ devotion to Central Park. Soffer’s saga goes down like bittersweet chocolate, with a hint of sugar to soften the sharp edge of loss.

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

This week’s subject for The Interview is the legendary actor Denzel Washington. He’s starring in the title role of “Othello” in a new Broadway production that begins previews on Feb. 24.

I’m always curious about actors, and artists generally, when they realize that their art is also a business. Does that affect how you approached the work itself?

When I learned about my least favorite uncle, my Uncle Sam, that was the eye opener. I’m like, He takes what? That’s the reality of it, and a dollar is not a dollar. By the time agents, lawyer, business manager, Uncle Sam, everybody else gets finished with you, a dollar’s about 38 cents. So you’ve got to cobble those 38 cents together to make a real dollar.

But does that affect the work? If you know that something is a money job, do you go about that job any differently?

You’re asking me, Did I ever take a job for money?

No, I’m asking —

Because I was about to answer it.

OK.

I’ve taken every job for money. There’s no job I’ve taken where I went: You guys just keep the money. I’m just so glad to be an actor. I don’t even want the money.

This is a base question, but did you find that you cared about not getting an Oscar nomination for “Gladiator II”?

I was sitting there smiling, going: Look at you. On the day you didn’t get a nomination for an Oscar, you’re working on “Othello” on Broadway. Are you kidding me? Awww. Oh, I’m so upset. Listen, I’ve been around too long. I’m getting wiser, working on talking less and learning to understand more — and that’s exciting.

Read more of the interview here.

Photograph by Naila Ruechel for The New York Times

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In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making a spicy creamy Bolognese (which features a brilliant secret ingredient: red curry paste), a blackened salmon, and lemony chicken with potatoes and oregano.

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was anarchical.

Can you put eight historical events — including the first flowers, the first domesticated dogs, and the carving of the Grand Canyon — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.

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Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch