A couple months ago, a friend of mine lost her phone. The next day, another friend lost his wallet. These things weren’t just misplaced; they didn’t surface the next day. They hadn’t slid out of a pocket and down between the couch cushions only to be found while tidying the house. The phone and wallet disappeared and didn’t come back. They seemed well and truly lost.

We misplace things all the time. “Keys, phone, wallet,” I repeat as a mantra before I leave the house, the office, the bar, patting my pockets to make sure we’re intact. We’ve all experienced that “Oh no, where’s my …” feeling. We’re sure we lost some essential item and are hit with a feeling of doom so intense, it’s almost breathtaking. Then, just as quickly, that exquisite wash of relief when you find that your phone is, in fact, in the pocket of your coat — false alarm, crisis averted. You are, for a moment, a changed person, a person who glimpsed the horror of having to call the D.M.V., and you got a last-minute reprieve. You’ll keep better track of your stuff from now on. You never want to feel that way again.

Misplacing stuff and then finding it is everyday nonsense. Losing things is rarer. The fact that two good friends lost important things back-to-back seemed weird, like a particular type of bad luck had zeroed in on my social circle. Someone wise once advised me that when things seem strange or confusing or too symbolically weighty, we might ask ourselves, “How would I interpret this if it were a dream?” It puts some distance between us and what’s happening. What if I had a dream in which people in my life kept losing their things? How would I interpret that?

“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “One Art.” The poem begins by discussing the loss of inconsequential things like keys, then moves on to bigger losses: “three loved houses,” “two rivers, a continent,” “even losing you.” Small losses prepare you for big ones.

In the dream in which my friends keep losing seemingly insignificant things, I see symbols. The wallet and the phone are boring essentials, the untreasured, unremarked-upon tools of living that we take for granted until we lose them. Then their import comes into bright focus: What was even in my wallet? License, credit cards, so many receipts. Was there a gift card that I’ll never get back? Things were so easy before and I didn’t even know it. Now there’s all this confusion, all this hassle. Why are we so careless? Why do we take everything for granted?

In my interpretation, I am tempted to see a lesson in holding on to things more tightly, in keeping better track, in cherishing harder. But when I asked my friend who lost her phone about the experience, she described two hours of panic. The next morning, though, the feeling had vanished. “I decided that if anyone wanted to get in touch with me, they could wait. That I could get everywhere I needed to, that I actually had everything I needed,” she said.

Oh! Of course! Impermanence! I always forget. The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already broken. The phone and wallet are already lost. We have everything we need. The things we’re afraid of losing are already gone.

Knowing this doesn’t keep the terror from setting in every time I think I’ve left my phone in a cab. But in the quiet moments when I’m calmer, I’m trying to meditate on the things I’m holding too tightly, to loosen my grip a little, to carry a little more lightly the teacup, the wallet or phone, the people and places and ideas I’m clutching, as if clutching will keep them from vanishing.

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📺 “Suits LA” (Tomorrow): In 2023, “Suits” — a show that had been off the air for four years — was the most watched show on Netflix. It’s easy to see why. The show was sleek and light, sexy and fun. What’s more, it introduced the world to Meghan Markle. Now, we go again in “Suits LA,” a spinoff series. Like the original, it follows the lives of improbably good-looking lawyers. Unlike the original, it’s set in the world of Hollywood entertainment law. I’m sure it’ll be just as fun, but whether it produces a star who helps convulse a centuries-old British institution remains to be seen.

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Salmon Niçoise With Orzo

Perfect for chilly evenings when you long for summer, Ali Slagle’s one-pan salmon niçoise with orzo carries the bright, sunny flavors of Provence in an easy dinner. This colorful mix of salmon, green beans and tomatoes is made in the same pan as the olive-speckled orzo, but added in stages so each element winds up perfectly cooked. And if it doesn’t feel like niçoise without tuna, feel free to substitute a can of it for the salmon. Either way, it’s sure to evoke warmer days to come.

T MAGAZINE

Click the cover above to read this weekend’s issue of T, The Times’s style magazine.

REAL ESTATE

The Hunt: After years of subletting and living out of suitcases, a young actor decided to find a “soft place to land” in New York. Which home did she choose? Play our game.

Dallas Mavericks vs. Los Angeles Lakers, N.B.A.: When Dallas traded Luka Doncic, the 25-year-old face of the franchise, to the Lakers this month, Mavs fans spiraled. They protested outside the stadium; they protested inside the stadium; they canceled their season tickets. This is the two teams’ first matchup since the trade, and it could be an emotional game for Doncic, who had been with Dallas his entire career and who, by all accounts, did not want to leave. Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern on TNT

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Some sports rivalries are generational. Others are about an underdog fight or national pride.

Canada’s hockey victory over the United States on Thursday was a bit of both. Against a backdrop of taunts by President Trump about annexing Canada and the looming economic threat of 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, a lot was symbolically riding on the game.

[Read: Trump Says Auto Tariffs Coming Apr. 2]

“Canada needed a win, and the players beared that on their shoulders,” Jon Cooper, Canada’s coach, said after the game. “This one was different. This wasn’t a win for themselves. This was a win for 40-plus million people. The guys knew it and they delivered.”

The game capped off a round-robin tournament called the 4 Nations Face-Off between Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States. It was the first international tournament since the 2016 World Cup of Hockey to feature some of the National Hockey League’s best players representing their countries.

The championship on Thursday took on geopolitical consequences unfamiliar to Canadian sports fans. After Canada lost the first-round match, there was a sense of urgency weighed by heavy stakes and a responsibility to prove something very important to the world.

Instead of the usual electric anticipation before sports matchups between Canada and the United States, this championship’s buildup held a bitterness. Social media was abuzz with insults in both directions. My group chat plotted how many Canadian flags would sufficiently offend at a sports bar. Bygone were the playful pregame bets between world leaders.

Despite being an infrequent sports watcher, the tone felt unusually familiar. The intensity reminded me of the hostile soccer rivalry between Albania, my family’s home country, and Serbia. The two nations have a fraught political relationship and have been involved in wars against each other.

On the flip side, Canada and the United States, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has remarked in recent weeks, fought alongside each other as close allies that share a friendship unparalleled on the global stage. That was, of course, before Mr. Trump’s threats of annexation.

“You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” Mr. Trudeau wrote in a post on X after the nail-biting victory.

Thursday began with more needling from Mr. Trump that Canada should “someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State” led by “Governor Trudeau.”

[Read: Canada as the 51st State? In Electoral Terms, Trump’s Idea Favors Democrats.]

Typically, Canada’s matches against the United States are about sport supremacy and pride, equally so in the women’s hockey league and in soccer and basketball, said Dave Bidini, a Canadian musician and author of 13 books about hockey. That’s changing.

“This geopolitical climate adds an entirely new depth, I think, to these kinds of games and probably will for the next four years,” Mr. Bidini told me. The last time he recalled feeling heightened political tension during an international hockey event was during a match in 1972 between Canada and the Soviet Union. Canada scored the winning goal with 34 seconds to spare. As a child, Mr. Bidini feared the Soviet Union would consume his country if the team lost.

“Looking back, I think how utterly absurd that was,” Mr. Bidini told me before the game on Thursday. “But that was the climate of the times, and tonight is the closest it has come to mirroring that.”

“I hope Canada wins because I think it’ll quiet the noise a little bit,” he added, referring to Mr. Trump’s threats.

As for other noise, sports-watching venues across Canada were raucous. At a packed sports bar in Toronto’s east end, fans around me booed the United States. They erupted in jubilation after Canada’s first two goals by Nathan MacKinnon and Sam Bennett, and into enthusiastic cheers after three impressive saves by the goaltender Jordan Binnington. The viewers more than once broke into the melody of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Pizza Pizza, a Canadian fast-food franchise, put out ads during the game for a 25 percent “reverse tariff” discount on pizza.

Connor McDavid, who played alongside the fellow national treasure Sidney Crosby, scored the winning goal in overtime.

Then came the finale: the national anthem.

Matthew Roberts, a spectator who was sitting not far from me, belted out the first words of “O Canada.” Others quickly joined.

“I sang ‘O Canada’ as loud as I could to get the crowd going,” Mr. Roberts said.

As exhilarated fans filed out of the bar, Mr. Roberts told me he normally isn’t the most patriotic or invested sports fan, but the atmosphere that night called for it.

Trans Canada

• Pierre Poilievre, the front-runner to become Canada’s next leader, has become a darling of the American right, writes Nori Onishi, The Times’s correspondent in Montreal.

• A Delta flight from Minneapolis crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday, with the plane going belly-up on the tarmac. All 76 passengers and four crew members survived. The airline offered passengers $30,000 each. And amid the recent string of crashes, here’s what passengers should know about airline safety.

• Banff is featured in the latest edition of 36 Hours, a series by the Travel section that offers a weekend itinerary complete with dining recommendations, hotels and activities. (In case you missed it, I recently visited Quebec City for the series.)

• The Canadian model Winnie Harlow announced her engagement.

• John Giorgi, a software engineer and research scientist based in Toronto, believes artificial intelligence tools are helping coders, not leading to their extinction.

Vjosa Isai is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times in Toronto.

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The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, with its anti-immigrant and nationalist platform, has long been the pariah of German politics. Its members have been fined for Nazi slogans and labeled extremist by the government.

Ahead of Sunday’s national parliamentary election, a new band of influencers has found a voice among voters by bringing a more youthful edge to the party known for its provocations and controversies. They welcome the scorn of protesters, journalists and the mainstream political parties. Some of them still trade jokes about Hitler and Jews, along with the occasional Sig Heil salute.

Their party’s energy and ethos has won approving nods from Elon Musk, an adviser to President Trump, and from Vice President JD Vance. And they have helped elevate the party to second in the polls, even as the political establishment has kept the AfD out of government as part of a longstanding commitment to sideline parties deemed extreme.

They are the changing face of the AfD.

When Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, 28, first went to an AfD event in 2017, she was surrounded by retirees. “They could have been my grandparents,” she said. Things have changed. Young people who might have been punks or hippies in a different time are now finding the AfD, she said — and posting about it.

Ms. Kaiser is a parliamentary candidate and a personal assistant in the office of Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD. She canvassed for the party on a frigid Saturday morning in Sittensen, a small town outside Hamburg. She picked the spot because she had been uninvited from a panel discussion there because of lingering controversy over a social media post that violated a law against hate speech.

In 2021, Ms. Kaiser on Facebook criticized Germany’s acceptance of immigrants from Afghanistan. In the post, she asked Hamburg’s mayor whether he was creating a “welcome culture for gang rapes?” The government fined her 6,000 euros ($6,275) and convicted her of inciting racial hatred. Her online following grew.

Other young activists have embraced confrontation to win votes and gain followers.

On a recent Saturday, Michelle Gollan, 23, stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with a stern look on her face. She held a microphone adorned with the name of her YouTube channel, “eingollan,” which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.

Her poster read “remigration,” considered AfD code for deportations. The dot on the “i” has been replaced by a pink AfD arrow.

She was trying to attract protesters to talk to her, to feed a new video and, she said, introduce her viewers to new ideas. She succeeded with a woman with an anti-AfD sticker on her jacket and a rainbow flag draped around her shoulders, who briefly debated her.

The tense discussion left a huge grin on Ms. Gollan’s face: “For me, being provocative also means triggering people.”

Whenever the AfD rallies in the streets, as it did in Munich this month after a mother and child were killed by an immigrant in a car attack, protesters show up. And when protesters march against the party, as hundreds of thousands have done already in Berlin during this campaign, young AfD activists show up in turn.

At such demonstrations, Christopher Tamm, 24, likes to wear a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of the AfD’s youth wing, which is classified as extremist by German intelligence. “I openly say that I am right-wing, that I stand for right-wing politics,” Mr. Tamm said.

The next morning, near Hamburg, an AfD supporter waved good morning to fellow volunteers who were canvassing for the elections. He left his hand up in a Hitler salute, which is illegal in Germany. “Keep your arm up like this a bit longer,” he said.

Being provocative and promoting fear and hate work well on social media, but that tone shouldn’t be adopted by a mainstream party, said Emilia Fester, 26, a member of Parliament from the Greens party. Ms. Fester isn’t shy about speaking out against the AfD. Whenever it spreads lies or disinformation on social media, she said, “That is something one must clearly call out and limit.”

The young AfD activists are an extension of a party that has found support in many corners of Germany since its founding in 2013. It is a party no longer defined by a single demographic, but infused more broadly into a society where many still see the AfD as far-right extremists. In doing so, they have created their own counterculture.

Wutbürger, a German rock bank whose name translates to “enraged citizen,” started out making patriotic anti-establishment music. It has since embraced a far-right identity and fan base, forging close ties with some AfD politicians. It has also been classified as a “right-wing extremist group” by a state government in Germany.

The band’s song “Walhalla,” including the lyric “we send our enemies back to the Orient,” has gone viral.

“We achieved our own counterculture. Our own music, our own rap culture, our own rock culture,” said Andy Habermann, the band’s leader. “We don’t hear the mainstream anymore, we don’t see them on TV, we don’t listen to the mainstream anymore on the radio. We know they are filtered, sadly. We have no more trust.”

As the reality sets in that the United States is drastically diminishing its foreign assistance to developing countries, an urgent conversation is starting among governments, philanthropists, and global health and development organizations.

It is centered on one crucial question: Who will fill this gap?

Last year, the United States contributed about $12 billion to global health, money that has funded treatment of H.I.V. and prevention of new infections; children’s vaccines against polio, measles and pneumonia; clean water for refugees; and tests and medications for malaria.

The next largest funder is the Gates Foundation, which disburses a fraction of that amount: its global health division had a budget of $1.86 billion in 2023.

“The gap that has been filled by the U.S. cannot be easily matched by anybody,” said Dr. Ntobeko Ntusi, the chief executive of the South African Medical Research Council.

U.S. assistance has been channeled through the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., which the new Trump administration has largely dismantled, and other government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, which is also facing substantial cuts in health research grants.

Many people are suggesting that other countries, particularly China, could move into some of the areas vacated by the United States, Dr. Ntusi said. Others are making urgent appeals to big philanthropies including the Gates Foundation and Open Philanthropy.

This conversation is most consequential in Africa. About 85 percent of U.S. spending on global health went to programs in or for African countries.

For countries such as Somalia, where U.S. aid made up 25 percent of the government’s whole budget, or Tanzania, where the U.S. funded a majority of public health care, the loss is catastrophic. And for the major global health agencies, the situation is similarly critical.

President Trump has already pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, which is now trying make an initial budget cut of $500 million for 2026-27 to cope with the withdrawal of American funds.

“Most of our neighbors on the continent, they’ve been completely reliant on the U.S. to procure most of the lifesaving medications for endemic infections,” Dr. Ntusi said. “And I don’t see most of the governments overnight being able to have the resources to cope. And so I think there’s going to be devastating consequences on lives lost from Africans who will die of preventable infections”

The U.S. is the largest donor to Gavi, an organization that supplies essential vaccines to the world’s poorest countries, and to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The U.S. contribution is required by Congress. Asked about the commitment to these and other multilateral agencies including the Pandemic Fund, a State Department spokesperson said that the programs were being reviewed to see if they aligned with the national interest, and that funding would continue only for those that met this condition.

Who Steps In?

There is no indication that additional funding will come from the other G7 countries, the European Union or other high-income nations. Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have all reduced their foreign aid. Some new donor countries have come forward to support the W.H.O., including Saudi Arabia and South Korea, but their spending is dwarfed by the amount the U.S. once gave.

Of nongovernmental players, the World Bank is best placed to provide long-term support for health spending. The bank has said little so far. It could offer countries hit hard by the U.S. cutoff innovative financing such as debt-for-health-care swaps to give nations struggling under heavy debt burdens some fiscal freedom to make up lost health care funding. However, the U.S. is the largest shareholder of the bank, and the Trump administration would have influence over any such investment.

Much of the public discussion about filling the vacuum left by the U.S. has focused on China, which has built a significant presence by financing infrastructure projects in African countries, particularly those with extensive mineral reserves or strategic ports.

“There is good reason for them to do so,” said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore. China regards foreign aid as a soft-power tool in its superpower rivalry with the United States, much as the United States did when setting up U.S.A.I.D. during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. China seeks to use aid to garner more support from developing countries in the United Nations.

While Chinese aid has largely come in loans to build infrastructure, it includes support for more varied projects. China’s answer to Western development aid, a program unveiled in 2021 called the Global Development Initiative, includes $2 billion for upgrading livestock production in Ethiopia, fighting malaria in Gambia and planting trees in Mongolia, among other projects.

Mr. Chong said China’s ability to fill the opening left by U.S.A.I.D. could be constrained by its own financial limitations. China’s economy has stagnated because of a property crisis and rising government debt, and the country has already scaled back on big infrastructure loans.

To date, China has shown little interest in supporting global health programs, or in providing grants on a scale anywhere near U.S.A.I.D. levels. AidData, a university research lab at William & Mary in Virginia, estimates that Beijing provides about $6.8 billion a year in grants and low-cost loans.

Philanthropies

Philanthropies that were already working in global health have been deluged with panicked calls from organizations with frozen funds.

“I have talked to some foundations who have all said we’re being inundated with people saying, ‘Help us, help us, help us,’ and I think they’re trying to patch little holes,” said Sheila Davis, the chief executive of the nonprofit Partners in Health, which works with local governments to bring health care to communities in developing countries. But if a patchwork bailout can cover just 20 percent of what the U.S. was paying for, what should a new donor save? she asked. “Do you choose to save one program fully and then let others go? Or what is the best strategy?”

Chief among the foundations fielding pleas for help is the Gates Foundation, which has been warning its grant recipients that it cannot make up the gap. In addition to funding global health programs, the foundation also supports health research and is a major contributor to Gavi.

“There is no foundation — or group of foundations — that can provide the funding, work force capacity, expertise, or leadership that the United States has historically provided to combat and control deadly diseases and address hunger and poverty around the world,” the foundation’s North America director, Rob Nabors, said by email.

Multiple recipients of Gates Foundation funding, who declined to speak on the record because they were describing confidential conversations, said they had been told by foundation staff members that it would continue to fund research and programs in the areas it already worked, but wouldn’t expand significantly, and that while some grants might be restructured to try to compensate for part of the lost U.S. funding, the foundation’s work would continue to be “catalytic” rather than support large-scale programming like U.S.A.I.D. did.

John-Arne Røttingen, the chief executive of the Wellcome Trust, which is among the largest donors to global health research, said in an email that the foundation was “exploring what options might exist” in the new landscape. But, he said, its help would be “a drop in the ocean compared to what governments across the world need to provide.”

A couple of small organizations, such as Founders Pledge, have started “bridge funds,” ranging from about $20 million to $200 million, to try to help plug immediate gaps.

But the philanthropic sector has largely been silent about the momentous change in the landscape. Major players that have already put hundreds of millions of dollars into health care in Africa, such as the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, did not respond to questions about their plans. The Delta Foundation (co-founded by the Zimbabwean telecom billionaire Strive Masiyiwa) declined to discuss the issue.

Two executives at smaller private foundations said there was a reluctance to say anything publicly because of fear of retribution from the Trump administration, including a potential loss of charitable status.

African Governments

African governments are under tremendous pressure from frustrated citizens to assume responsibility for the health spending that was coming from the U.S. The issue led the agenda at a meeting of the continent’s health ministers at an African Union summit last week.

In the 24 years since the Union adopted what’s called the Abuja Declaration, committing its 42 members to spending 15 percent of their budgets on health, only a couple of states have ever hit that target, and for a year or two at most. Average health spending by African countries is less than half that amount.

In Nigeria, the president convened an emergency cabinet committee to make a plan for the budget shortfall, and Parliament allotted an extra $200 million to the national budget last week. But that extraordinary measure illustrates the scale of what’s been lost: it’s less than half of the $512 million that the U.S. gave Nigeria for health care in 2023.

Nigeria’s health minister, Dr. Muhammad Pate, said that nearly 28,000 health care workers in the country had been paid in whole or part by U.S.A.I.D., which also covered three-quarters of the bill for drugs and test kits for the 1.3 million Nigerians who live with H.I.V.

Nigeria will quickly need to find new ways of operating, he said, including boosting manufacturing of some of those items domestically. “It may not be as fancy, but at least it will serve,” Dr. Pate said.

He also predicted that the end of U.S. aid would accelerate what he called a “realignment” in Africa. “The world has shifted in the last 20 years,” he said. “So we have other actors: We have China, India, Brazil, Mexico and others.”

Deisy Ventura, a professor of global health ethics at the University of São Paulo, said the change could open opportunities for other countries to exert newfound influence.

“The retreat of the United States may open space for new leaders now,” she said. “It’s important for us in the global south to imagine an international coordination of emergency preparedness and response without the United States.”

Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong.