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If the career of Roger Fidler has any meaning, it is this: Sometimes, you can see the future coming but get trampled by it anyway.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would liberate news from printing presses, giving people portable devices that kept them informed all day long. Some stories would be enhanced by video, others by sound and animation. Readers could share articles, driving engagement across diverse communities.

All that has come to pass, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and just about everyone seems interested in, if not obsessed by, national and world happenings. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler was championing do not receive much benefit. After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating.

Every day brings bad news. Sometimes it is about recently formed digital enterprises, sometimes venerable publications whose history stretches back more than a century.

Cutbacks were just announced at Law360, The Intercept and the youth-oriented video site NowThis, which laid off half its staff. The tech news site Engadget, which comprehensively tracks tech layoffs, laid off its top editors and other staff members. Condé Nast and Time are shedding employees. The continued existence of Vice Media, once valued at $5.7 billion, and Sports Illustrated, in another era the most influential sports publication, is uncertain. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post eliminated hundreds of journalists between them. One out of four newspapers that existed in 2005 no longer does.

The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest.

The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather report and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself. Local and regional coverage had a hard time establishing itself as a paying proposition.

Now there are signs that the whole concept of “news” is fading. Asked where they get their local news, nearly as many respondents to a Gallup poll said social media as mentioned newspapers and magazines. A recent attempt to give people free subscriptions to their local papers in Pennsylvania as part of an academic study drew almost no takers.

“Soon after the printing press emerged in the 15th century, the scriptoriums for copying manuscripts in monasteries rapidly began shutting down,” said Mr. Fidler, now 81 and living in retirement in Santa Fe, N.M. “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”

The decline of the news media has been paralleled by the fracturing of American society, which is now as angry and divided as it’s been since the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than a half-century ago. As the media fell, the noise level rose.

Perhaps it could have been different. Contrary to the myth that all the newspaper magnates of the 1980s and 1990s thought the good times would last forever, quite a few saw trouble lurking in the far distance.

Mr. Fidler spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that had important metro dailies in cities like Miami and San Jose, Calif. One early project was Viewtron, an effort to put terminals into people’s homes that would deliver news, shopping and chat. It delivered too little and cost too much. In 1986, Viewtron was shut down.

What Mr. Fidler took away from Viewtron’s failure was that newspaper readers needed something that looked like a newspaper and that didn’t pinch them in the wallet. He helped develop technology for lightweight tablets that would use flat-panel displays that were low cost but clear and bright with a relatively long battery life.

Such displays did not exist in the early 1990s but were promised by the end of the decade. The newspaper would be transmitted through high-speed digital telephone networks or direct broadcast satellite transmissions. “I think this will be the salvation for the traditional serious newspapers,” Thomas Winship, a longtime editor of The Boston Globe, told The New York Times in a 1992 profile of Mr. Fidler.

While at least some publishers were convinced, the tablets never came to save newspapers. One problem was there was no consensus on a software standard. Tablets did not really become viable until Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. But the real problem for the news business was the emergence of a devastating and unforeseen competitor: the internet.

“I was too narrowly focused,” Mr. Fidler conceded.

The internet would first create an alternative to printed newspapers and magazines, then become a competitor, and finally annihilate many of them. “I didn’t consider all the possible cross impacts of emerging technologies that would lead to Craigslist, alternative news sites, social media and other products that would greatly diminish newspaper circulation and advertising revenue,” Mr. Fidler said.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for collaborating and for sharing information. Being amorphous and infinitely flexible, it allowed for slow adapters and fast adapters at the same time, which circumvented the sort of hand-holding for readers that Mr. Fidler believed necessary. Newspapers lost their classified ads to the internet almost immediately. The display ads lingered, but Google and Facebook, and later Amazon, took over that market.

The web, by essentially allowing every voice to be heard at the same volume, encouraged publishers to join the party. Newspapers and magazines simply gave away what they had charged for in physical form. They were pushed by Silicon Valley, which needed quality content to keep people online and using its technology.

“Publishers got this mistaken belief that content is like a commodity and should be available everywhere for free,” Mr. Fidler said. It took years to institute paywalls, by which point many publications were fatally weakened.

The good old days weren’t that good

For all the gloom that the media is wallowing in about the media, the situation is contradictory.

Reliable local reporting in many places is sparse or nonexistent. But there is also a much wider variety of foreign, national and cultural news available online than previous generations could get in print. For all the celebration of the old days, if you were in a city with a mediocre newspaper — and there were many — access to quality journalism was difficult.

“Basically, the world has been opened up to us. There’s so much good journalism out there,” said David Mindich, a journalism professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. “If you had said to me 20 years ago, ‘I see a generation listening to long-form audio shows,’ I would have said: ‘Attention spans are getting shorter. I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But it did.”

Most long-form audio shows, even at their best, are not news in the way, say, a zoning commission report is news. The erosion of the idea of news can be seen even more vividly in the magazine field. Where the goal was to inform, now it is to entertain.

“Time magazine just selected Taylor Swift as the person of the year,” said Samir Husni, a longtime magazine analyst. “It never selected Elvis or the Beatles. She was the first entertainer. We’re becoming more about marketing in journalism than truth in journalism because we’re depending on the customer to pay the price rather than advertising.”

This is how digital has changed journalism, he said: “The thing now is to make everybody happy. But that was never the role of journalism, making people happy.”

Marc Benioff, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought the struggling Time in 2018 with his wife, Lynne, viewed the selection of Ms. Swift differently: “Best selling issue of all time!” (In recent years, at least.) A few weeks after the Swift issue appeared, Time’s union said 15 percent of the magazine’s unionized editorial staff got the ax.

That was more of a strategic move than a sign of distress, Mr. Benioff said.

“If you’re going to make these media businesses work, you have to shift the product mix, which also means you have to shift the employee mix,” he texted. The paywall, put in place in 2011, was dropped last year. As a brand, Time needs the widest exposure possible.

Two years ago, Mr. Benioff told Axios that Time’s revenue would be up 30 percent in 2022 to $200 million. That might have been aspirational. “Revenue in 2024 should hit $200 million, a new high,” he says now. “We’re even going to make money.”

Other publications are trying to take the profit motive out of journalism.

Nonprofit news ventures tend to be small, low profile and unevenly distributed across regions. But there are many signs of growth. The number of outfits serving communities of color — never very well served by traditional publications — has doubled in the past five years, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Readers generally respond, too.

“People talk about nonprofit reporting in their communities like it’s a normal part of the news ecosystem, not like it’s some outside force,” said Magda Konieczna, author of “Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails.” In some places, the effect is striking. “Philadelphia is now a news jungle rather than a news desert.”

Ms. Konieczna teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. A few weeks ago, a Canadian news giant, Bell Media, announced that it was cutting hundreds of jobs and ending many of its television newscasts. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the decision was “eroding our very democracy.”

“My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news, or why they would want to, in large part because it doesn’t really exist,” Ms. Konieczna said. “This is the dystopian future.”

The New Yorker, as it happened, employed A.J. Liebling, the greatest press critic of the postwar years. He called himself an optimist despite seeing a downhill march ever since he became a reporter in 1925.

“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money,” he wrote. The more it did the latter, he argued, the less it bothered with the former.

There was no golden age, but Roger Fidler is still inconsolable. He long ago outlasted Knight Ridder, which was sold to McClatchy, another chain, in 2006. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020. He spends a couple of hours each day reading the news in the printed edition of a community newspaper and the digital editions of national and regional newspapers. It is a lot, and yet not enough.

“Social media and its comments overwhelmed us,” he said. “We’re flooded with information because everybody’s a journalist. Everyone thinks they have the truth. Everyone certainly has an opinion. It’s discouraging to see how it’s gone.”

President Biden and his allies had reasons for both hope and concern after a Michigan primary election that revealed the party’s painful divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and confronted him with his largest measure of Democratic opposition to date.

He avoided his anxious supporters’ darkest predictions by winning the Tuesday primary, 81 percent to 13 percent, over an “uncommitted” movement that sprang up to protest his backing of Israel. Yet more than 100,000 voters registered their disapproval of him, signaling serious discontent among Arab Americans, young voters and progressives as he tries to stitch back together his winning 2020 coalition.

Democratic unease with Mr. Biden’s handling of the Mideast war will not go away as the presidential primary calendar moves on to more than a dozen Super Tuesday states next week, but his allies are optimistic that Michigan will serve as the high-water mark for resistance to the president within his party.

Though many states have the option for Democrats to cast protest votes against Mr. Biden, they are not nearly as likely as Michigan was to become a national litmus test for his popularity or his handling of the war in Gaza.

No other place will have the combination of a large and politically active Arab American community, a battleground-state spotlight with heightened stakes for November, and a weekslong runway in which Michigan hosted the country’s only Democratic primary action.

But if Mr. Biden’s immediate electoral worries have receded after Michigan, the political pressure over his position on Israel threatens to linger through the summer and fall barring a major shift in policy or progress to end the bloodshed in Gaza.

Opposition to American political, military and financial support for Israel has dogged Mr. Biden and other prominent Democrats at public events around the country, with frustration spreading beyond Arab American and Muslim communities to college campuses and other progressive areas.

An apparent desire to avoid confrontations with antiwar demonstrators has led Mr. Biden’s campaign to encase him and Vice President Kamala Harris in political Bubble Wrap, taking unusual steps to maintain a focus on more politically friendly topics. When Ms. Harris visited Michigan last week, she spoke about abortion rights before just nine invited people in Grand Rapids. Her previous stops to promote the issue came before crowds of cheering supporters — events meant to show enthusiasm for her and the Democratic ticket.

In Minnesota, where an “uncommitted” push began on Monday before the state’s March 5 primary, Gov. Tim Walz, a top Biden surrogate, said a group of demonstrators had been protesting Mr. Biden’s position on Israel outside his home every day. Others have protested at recent events Mr. Walz has attended to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday and an appearance at a community college.

“It is concerning, as it should be,” Mr. Walz, who is also the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview on Wednesday. “This is what the political process is supposed to do. It forces us to be making sure we’re hearing folks. They are in pain. They are frustrated. They want to see something done.”

The Michigan activists who organized the three-week “uncommitted” effort on a $200,000 budget — a relative pittance in a populous state — judged their share of the vote to be a success. On Wednesday, they warned again that Mr. Biden risked losing to former President Donald J. Trump if he did not stop the war or break from Israel’s government.

“We’re asking you, President Biden, to stop killing our families before you come and ask for our support,” said Abbas Alawieh, one of the movement’s organizers.

James Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington and a Democratic National Committee member since 1993, said Mr. Biden and the White House had no choice but to engage with those angered by the war in Gaza and to keep shifting the administration’s approach to the conflict.

“I can’t help them if they don’t want to be helped,” he said. “I’m not giving up because I don’t want to see Donald Trump back in the White House, but they have to help us help them.”

Still, the results on Tuesday suggested that Mr. Biden had managed to limit the political damage over his Israel policy.

In the six college towns that are home to Michigan’s largest public universities, “uncommitted” received 18 percent support — a share higher than the statewide percentage and enough to raise concerns about the general election, but well short of the anti-Biden margins in Dearborn and other areas with large Arab American populations.

The “uncommitted” organizers, and the progressives who followed their lead, did not push a broader case about Mr. Biden’s political standing or his age, which have for months been a central focus of Democratic worries about his prospects in the general election.

In Colorado, which also holds its primary on March 5, former Representative David Skaggs wrote an essay in The Denver Post last week announcing that he would vote “uncommitted.” Expressing deep reservations about Mr. Biden’s political strength, he warned that negative perceptions about the president’s age would “haunt the Biden campaign” and potentially doom it to defeat.

The Biden campaign has sought to carefully navigate his public appearances, wary of exposure to protesters and scrutiny by mainstream and right-wing news outlets alike.

In recent weeks, the president has popped up more frequently on social media, where has discussed how he met Jill Biden, the first lady, and retold the heartbreaking story about caring for his young sons after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. The Biden campaign also joined TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that has become the primary news source for tens of millions of young Americans.

“Campaign events are only one source of communication, and while the president and vice president are the best and most prominent messengers, they’re not the only messengers,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan of Virginia, a member of the Biden campaign’s advisory board. “The nature of campaigns has changed in a social media world.”

The Biden campaign has long maintained that the voters it needs to win in November are not avid consumers of traditional news outlets that cover the president’s movements and public events.

“The president’s strong primary performances in diverse states show that strategy is working,” said Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman.

Still, the political consequences of the Gaza war go well beyond the simple tabulation of “uncommitted” votes in Michigan, warned Doug Schoen, a veteran Democratic pollster who has served as a consultant for five Israeli prime ministers.

The fracturing of the president’s coalition, Mr. Schoen said, is part of a broader sense of ineffectiveness, bolstered by Republican intransigence in Congress, the failure of border security legislation and Mr. Trump’s somewhat specious argument that the world was at peace during his administration and is in chaos now.

“This is less about parsing votes in certain key states than the fact that he looks weaker,” Mr. Schoen said of Mr. Biden, “making it that much more imperative for him to prove that he can govern.”

While Michigan Democrats spent the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s primary issuing dire warnings — mostly in private — that Mr. Biden had a political problem that could endure into the general election, his allies in the 15 Super Tuesday states appear less worried.

“We’re not always going to all agree on every single issue,” said Representative Robert Garcia of California, which holds its primary next week. “When the coalition is so diverse, I might have a different perspective than the president on some issues, maybe on the border and immigration. But I’m still going to vote for him.”

Alyce McFadden contributed reporting from New York.

Americans ages 65 and older should receive an additional dose of the latest Covid vaccine this spring, scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.

The spring shot would be a second dose of the most recent iteration of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Novavax vaccines introduced in the fall. The recommendation now goes to the C.D.C. director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, who is likely to accept it.

At a meeting of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, federal researchers presented preliminary data showing that the latest vaccines have an effectiveness of about 40 to 50 percent against symptomatic infection or hospitalization, although estimates against currently circulating variants were based on small numbers.

In October and November, adults who received a fall dose accounted for 4 percent of Covid-related hospitalizations. Those who got a booster in the fall of 2022, but not the updated vaccine this fall, accounted for 25 percent.

Still, a second dose this spring would not be cost-effective for adults 18 to 64 years old, who are at lower risk of severe illness and hospitalization than older adults, according to modeling presented at the meeting.

Older adults and those with weakened immune systems because of illnesses or medications would benefit the most from a spring dose, the advisers concluded.

“I was impressed with data supporting the need for an additional dose of vaccine for those 65 years and older,” Dr. Camille Kotton, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the scientific advisory panel, said in an interview.

“Given the risk of severe, even life-threatening, disease, I would encourage those who are moderately to severely immunocompromised to take the opportunity for another dose,” she added.

Adults ages 65 and older accounted for two-thirds of all hospitalizations related to Covid between October 2023 and January 2024, and those ages 75 and older accounted for nearly half. Adults in this age group were also the most likely to have opted for the fall shot.

More than 43 percent of Americans aged 75 and older got the fall shot, compared with fewer than 10 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 years. Vaccination rates were lowest among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and among those who lived in rural areas. Fewer than 13 percent of pregnant women opted for the vaccine.

Nearly half of those who did not plan to get the vaccine said they were concerned about unknown serious side effects, according to data from the National Immunization Survey in January.

Other reasons for the low uptake may be the lack of vaccine availability in the first few weeks following the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and confusion over insurance coverage for the shots.

The agency’s advisers met in September to discuss whether to recommend the shots, and for whom, but that allowed little time for vaccine manufacturing and distribution before the fall peak of infections, said Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, an infectious disease physician and C.D.C. researcher.

Dr. Panagiotakopoulos presented a revised plan for a decision on next fall’s Covid shot, with the C.D.C. advisers meeting in June to make recommendations regarding who should get the vaccine. A meeting of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration, which must precede the C.D.C. guidance, is already scheduled for May 16.

At the meeting on Wednesday, C.D.C. advisers wrestled with whether to suggest that older adults “may” opt to get a spring Covid vaccine in consultation with their health care providers, or to recommend more emphatically that they “should” do so.

Some panelists said the softer recommendation would be more palatable to Americans, and less likely to contribute to vaccine fatigue. Others argued that stronger language would make it clearer to those at high risk from the virus that a vaccine would afford them protection through the spring.

The advisers ultimately voted to recommend that Americans ages 65 and older “should” receive a spring shot.

“I hope that clarity of the need for a second dose may encourage vaccination and protection in both those who have not yet had a first vaccine and those who would benefit by a second vaccine,” Dr. Kotton said.

WilmerHale, a prominent U.S. law firm, is close to wrapping up a detailed review of OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, and his ouster from the artificial intelligence start-up late last year, two people with knowledge of the proceedings said.

The investigation, when complete, could give insight into what went on behind the scenes with Mr. Altman and OpenAI’s former board of directors, which fired him on Nov. 17 before reinstating him five days later. OpenAI, which is valued at more than $80 billion, has led a frenzy over A.I. and could help determine the direction of the transformative technology.

Mr. Altman, 38, has told people in recent weeks that the investigation was nearing a close, the two people with knowledge of the matter said. The results could be delivered to OpenAI’s board as soon as early next month, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements.

OpenAI declined to comment. WilmerHale did not respond to a request for comment.

Investigators spent the past three months interviewing OpenAI employees and executives after its former board said it no longer had confidence in Mr. Altman’s ability to run the company, the people said. The board said Mr. Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications,” though it did not provide specifics.

Privately, the board worried that Mr. Altman was not sharing all his plans to raise money from investors in the Middle East for an A.I. chip project, people with knowledge of the matter have said.

After he was ousted, Mr. Altman waged a bare-knuckle fight against some OpenAI directors to get himself reinstated as chief executive. He won but made concessions. He agreed that OpenAI would hire an outside law firm to investigate his ouster, and he did not regain his own board seat at the company. But he succeeded in revamping the board, removing two members and adding two others.

OpenAI nearly imploded during the leadership crisis, endangering a potential windfall for its investors, such as Microsoft, and its employees. In the months since Mr. Altman’s reinstatement, insiders have scrambled to contain the fallout, advising employees to keep potential dissent quiet for fear of jeopardizing the company’s fortunes.

OpenAI is considered a leader in generative A.I., technology that can generate text, sounds and images from short prompts. It is also among the many companies aspiring to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

Meta, Google, Microsoft and others are also racing to develop such technology. Leaders at these companies believe that A.G.I. will revolutionize the computing industry, as well as the global economy and workforces.

President Biden underwent the third physical exam of his presidency on Wednesday amid concerns over his age as he campaigns for a second term.

Mr. Biden, 81, traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for his annual physical, according to the White House. The visit was not announced ahead of time but was on his schedule, according to two people familiar with the plans but who were not advised to speak about them publicly.

Mr. Biden spent about two and a half hours inside Walter Reed. The White House is expected to release a summary of Mr. Biden’s physical later on Wednesday.

Events over the past few weeks have cast a spotlight on Mr. Biden’s age. He was described in a special counsel report over his handling of classified documents as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Polling shows that a majority of Americans have concerns about his age and ability to run for a second term. And Mr. Biden has made unforced errors at events, including recalling interactions with foreign leaders who would have been dead at the time those interactions took place.

As the presidential election heats up, the president has tried in recent days to assuage concerns over his age by reframing the focus on his likely Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, who is four years younger and who makes a number of untrue, exaggerated or outright false claims at each of his public appearances.

“You got to take a look at the other guy,” Mr. Biden said during an appearance this week on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name,” he added, referring to a video in which Mr. Trump, 77, appeared to forget the name of his wife, Melania.

White House officials have been asked for weeks about whether and when Mr. Biden would make the trip to Walter Reed. Last February, Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s longtime physician, gave Mr. Biden a clean bill of health, calling him a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old.”

But Mr. Biden’s advisers have declined to say definitively whether the president — the oldest in the nation’s history — will take any tests to assess his memory and cognitive abilities. (In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has bragged about taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test that can help detect dementia and cognitive decline, but he has distorted the facts about the contents of the test. And the Montreal test, experts say, is neither definitive nor diagnostic.)

Mr. Biden has also become noticeably slower in his movements in recent months, walking stiffly as he makes his way to the podium at appearances and taking the short stairs directly into the belly of Air Force One, rather than the taller stairs to the plane’s upper door.

Last year, Dr. O’Connor said the stiffness in Mr. Biden’s gait was the result of “significant spinal arthritis, mild post-fracture foot arthritis and a mild sensory peripheral neuropathy of the feet,” for which the president undergoes physical therapy to maintain flexibility.

His gait is somewhat halting, a characteristic that multiple people close to the White House say is partly because of his refusal to wear an orthopedic boot after suffering a hairline fracture in his foot before taking office.

When you read — a book, a traffic sign, a billboard, this article — how much do you really notice the letters? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably not at all.

But even if you don’t really notice them, you might sense it if something has subtly changed. That’s a feeling some people have had in recent weeks when they turn on their Microsoft Word programs.

After 17 years of Calibri as Word’s default typeface, many users suddenly found themselves typing in a new typeface called Aptos. The change is also affecting the look of PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel.

Letters are letters, but for designers and typography fans, they matter a lot.

Why the change?

“We wanted to bring something new and fresh that really was designed natively for the sort of modern era of computing,” said Jon Friedman, the company’s corporate vice president for design and research, who led the effort.

(Technically Aptos and Calibri are typefaces, while a “font” refers to a particular face or size, like italics or boldface. But in practice, “font” is often used as a synonym for “typeface,” including by Microsoft employees interviewed for this article.)

The big divide in the world of typeface is between serif, or letters with small lines or tails attached to their edges, and sans serif, letters without those lines that have a smoother look.

Like Calibri, Aptos is a sans serif typeface but with something a little extra, Microsoft says.

Centuries ago, in the early days of printing presses, almost all typefaces had serifs. “Sans serif was meant for billboards,” Mr. Friedman said. “They were big, blocky letters, and they called them ‘grotesque.’ They were bold and easily legible from far.” At the time, a sans serif was rarely used for more than one or two words or a single sentence.

Aptos would be classified as a “neo-grotesque” font.

“Neo-grotesque was when the artistry started,” Mr. Friedman said, referring to an era in the mid-20th century. “Designers started to choose sans serif fonts. That was the birth of Helvetica and Arial that were used more broadly and were sans serif fonts.”

It helped that most people thought sans serifs looked better on a computer, which was rapidly becoming the writing instrument of choice worldwide.

As for Aptos, “we wanted it to be a little more quirky and whimsical” even though it was a sans serif, Mr. Friedman said. “Sans serif fonts are pretty rectilinear, clear, easy for reading, but sometimes they miss some of the whimsy that serif fonts might have.”

The designer, Steve Matteson, “brought a little more — he called it ‘imperfections’: little bits of change that are slightly different from a typical sans serif font,” Mr. Friedman added.

“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” Mr. Matteson said in a Microsoft statement about the change. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g.”

In most sans serif fonts, “the capital ‘I’ is a line, and the lowercase ‘l’ is a line,” Mr. Friedman said. “The weight is slightly different, but most people can’t see it. In Aptos, the lowercase ‘l’ has a tiny curve at the bottom. Illinois. Illustration. It’s very clear what you’re reading, even in a sans serif.”

“It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it,” he added.

In another subtlety, above the lowercase i’s and j’s are circular dots as opposed to squares as in Calibri. You may notice this when you type “je ne sais quoi” in Aptos.

So how exactly do you design a font? The answer is one that creative types everywhere might appreciate: “You’ve got to start somewhere,” Mr. Friedman said.

“One font designer might start by roughly sketching out the entirety of the alphabet,” he said. “Others might start with a particular letter that they think is challenging.”

“You think a font is such a tiny thing,” he added. “It’s just letters. But it requires deep thinking; it’s not a trivial concept.”

The end result, Aptos, is Microsoft’s trademarked intellectual property.

“Even though some people can see the difference and passionately care about it, and others may seem like they don’t care about it, the moment we change it, people notice something changed,” Mr. Friedman said.

Some of those people came forward on social media with a litany of complaints. (Others said they liked the new font.)

Change to a familiar product often brings protest. When The New York Times added color to its print front page in 1997, some people complained that the staid paper had become unnecessarily flashy, though such gripes faded quickly as readers grew used to the change.

As for those who never learn to appreciate the neo-grotesque, there is a solution. Remember what “default” means.

If you’re using a Windows device, navigate to Home and open the Font Dialog Box Launcher. On a Mac, go to Format and click Font. Change the font to one you like better. Set it to Default. Aptos will no longer darken your door.

The New York Times is keeping its color, though.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump won Michigan’s primary elections on Tuesday as the president and his predecessor hurtle toward a rematch in November.

But the results showed some of the fragility of the political coalitions they have constructed in a critical state for the fall. Losing any slice of support is perilous for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by about 150,000 votes, and Mr. Trump carried it in 2016 by about 11,000 votes.

The results of the primaries on Tuesday carried extra weight because Michigan was the first state that is a top general-election battleground to hold its primary in 2024.

Here are four takeaways from the results:

‘Uncommitted’ succeeded in grabbing Biden’s attention.

When the movement to persuade Democrats to vote “uncommitted” began three weeks ago, its public goal was clear: Pile enough pressure on Mr. Biden that he would call for an unconditional cease-fire in Gaza.

Since then, top White House officials told Arab American leaders in Dearborn, Mich., that they had regrets over how the administration had responded to the crisis. Mr. Biden called Israel’s military action “over the top.” And on the eve of the primary, he said he hoped a cease-fire agreement would be in place within a week. (The view from Israel and Gaza suggested Mr. Biden was being a bit optimistic.)

And yet the strength of the “uncommitted” effort surprised the president’s campaign, which until this week didn’t anticipate the strength of anti-Biden sentiment among Michigan Democrats.

In the early hours of Wednesday, roughly 13 percent of primary voters had chosen “uncommitted” — a share that paled next to Mr. Biden’s 81 percent, but represented more than 75,000 people in Michigan who made the effort to lodge their disapproval of the president.

The movement is now likely to spread to other states, many of which have an option for voters to choose “uncommitted” or “no preference” in their primaries. Listen to Michigan, the group that kicked off the state’s protest vote, is holding an organizing call for supporters in Minnesota, which votes next week, and Washington State, which holds its primary on March 12.

“This is the only option we have to enact democracy in this moment,” said Asma Mohammed, a progressive activist who is among the leaders of a new group called Uncommitted Minnesota. “We are against a Trump presidency, and we also want Biden to be better. If that means pushing him to his limit, that is what it will take.”

The challenge for the Biden campaign will be slowing any perceived momentum after Michigan by those protesting his Gaza policy. As long as the war grinds on and the United States keeps sending aid to Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to assuage voters who are angry about the mounting Palestinian death toll.

Both front-runners have clear vulnerabilities.

Mr. Trump has long been the heavy favorite to become the Republican nominee. Mr. Biden left little doubt that he would run again for Democrats.

Yet tens of thousands of Michiganders in both parties voted against their standard-bearers on Tuesday, a stark rejection that suggests they could have problems stitching together a winning coalition in November. The saving grace for each man, as Karl Rove, the former top strategist for George W. Bush, vividly put it recently, is that “only one can lose.”

Part of the reason Michigan’s results appear more damaging to Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump is the matter of expectations.

Ms. Haley has been campaigning against Mr. Trump for months, and her share of the Republican electorate has gone down from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Michigan.

But Mr. Biden cruised through his first two primaries in South Carolina and Nevada before a loosely organized group of Arab American political operatives, with $200,000 and three weeks to spare, won enough support that their effort is likely to clinch delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

“If the White House is listening, if our congressional leaders are listening, if our state leaders are listening, we need a change of course or we risk the complete unraveling of American democracy come November,” said Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn.

Biden needs to keep an eye on college towns.

It was not surprising to see “uncommitted” beat Mr. Biden in Dearborn and Hamtramck, two of the Michigan cities with the highest concentrations of Arab Americans. With nearly all ballots counted, Dearborn gave 56 percent of its Democratic primary vote to “uncommitted.” In Hamtramck, “uncommitted” drew 61 percent of the city’s Democratic vote.

Perhaps more worrisome for Mr. Biden was his performance in Ann Arbor, a college town 30 miles to the west.

There, where most students and faculty members at the University of Michigan live, “uncommitted” earned 19 percent of the vote. In East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, “uncommitted” got 15 percent of the vote.

While no other battleground states have Arab American communities the size of Michigan’s, they all have college towns where young, progressive voters are angry about American support for Israel.

It is in those places — Madison, Wis.; Athens, Ga.; Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz.; and State College, Pa., among others — where Mr. Biden faces a general-election threat if he does not attract overwhelming support and turnout among students in November.

Nikki Haley’s still in it, but she’s not going to win it.

Donald J. Trump won — again. Nikki Haley lost — again.

At one point in the nominating calendar, the Michigan primary had the potential to be a brief but notable way station between the four first states and Super Tuesday.

But the lopsided results offered more of the same, with Mr. Trump dominating everywhere in Michigan and Ms. Haley on track for her weakest showing since the race narrowed to two candidates. She marches on, with planned rallies and fund-raisers in seven states and Washington, D.C., before Super Tuesday on March 5.

The month of February was about momentum, and Mr. Trump has all of it. March is about delegates, and he has most of those, too.

But the race for delegates is about to quicken sharply. California alone on March 5 has more delegates at stake than all of the contests in January and February combined.

Ms. Haley’s campaign called her share of the vote — she was below 30 percent early Wednesday — “a flashing warning sign for Trump in November.” But it was a warning sign for her candidacy now.

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Dearborn, Mich., and Alyce McFadden from New York.

Vice President Kamala Harris went to the U.S.-Mexico border soon after she and President Biden took office, even though she had characterized such visits as empty politics just weeks before. President Barack Obama also toured the border during his time in the White House, though he came to see the trips as little more than photo ops.

Donald J. Trump used the border when he was president to galvanize support for his anti-immigration policies, even signing his name on his “big, beautiful wall” with a Sharpie pen.

As the immigration debate grows increasingly polarized, a trip along the 2,000-mile frontier has become a compulsory bit of political theater for leaders who want to show they care about immigration. The imagery at the border — the wall, the Border Patrol officers, the crowded detention facilities — serves as a potent backdrop for drawing attention to the crisis or, increasingly, for seizing on the issue to attack political opponents.

On Thursday, both of those factors will be at play when President Biden and Mr. Trump make dueling trips to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mr. Trump will travel to Eagle Pass, Texas, where he will speak about crimes committed by migrants and blame Mr. Biden for surging crossings at the border. Mr. Biden, more than 300 miles away in Brownsville, plans to speak with border agents and call out House Republicans who took their cue from Mr. Trump and thwarted a bipartisan border bill that would have cracked down on unlawful migration.

“It’s a relatively new phenomenon, where you go and make a big deal of the border at the border,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian. “As long as this remains an issue, we’re going to have presidents who either go to make a political point or if they don’t go, are pressured to do so.”

Immigration has become one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political liabilities as millions of migrants overwhelm the underfunded and underresourced system, something that Republicans like Mr. Trump are keen to highlight. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday found that Americans are most likely to name immigration as the most important problem in the country.

“This is a Hail Mary by Biden,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the main union for Border Patrol agents. Mr. Judd, who has long supported Mr. Trump, will join the former president in Eagle Pass on Thursday. Still, he said, he was in favor of the border bill in Congress that Mr. Biden supported and Mr. Trump opposed.

Immigration is at the center of Mr. Trump’s candidacy for president and many Republicans, especially in the House, would be reluctant to give an election-year win to Mr. Biden on an issue that has given them a powerful line of criticism toward the White House.

The politics of the border were not always so divisive. In 1971, Pat Nixon, then the first lady, captured headlines when she greeted Mexican children and complained about fencing while visiting a park along the border in San Diego.

Decades later, President George W. Bush traveled to a Border Patrol post in New Mexico to rally support for his attempt to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy. While the Senate at that point supported a bill that included a path to eventual citizenship for many illegal immigrants, the House emphasized the need for border security.

Mr. Obama confronted starker divisions. In 2011, he made a speech in El Paso within sight of the border to push for legalization laws, in a nod to Latino voters who would be crucial in the 2012 election. But in 2014, as a record number of unaccompanied minors crossed the border, Mr. Obama faced relentless calls to visit the border, which he dismissed.

“I’m not interested in photo ops,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Trump was. He visited the border several times during his presidency and might have gone more if not for the pandemic.

Almost as soon as Mr. Biden came into office, he and Ms. Harris faced demands by Republicans who said they should visit the border and see the crisis for themselves. Both of them have made the trip to El Paso; Ms. Harris in June 2021 and Mr. Biden in January 2023.

Both of them have also faced criticism. Republicans took Ms. Harris to task for going to El Paso instead of the lower Rio Grande Valley, considered the epicenter of the surge in migration. Progressive Democrats said Mr. Biden should have spoken directly to migrants.

Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the Obama administration, said presidents and other top officials can show that they prioritize the border by visiting. But he also acknowledged that such visits may be more for political gain.

“It’s so politically sensitive right now,” Mr. Kerlikowske said. “To have them come and view the work and the difficulties that Customs and Border Protection in particular faces on the border tells you that this will be, if not No. 1, then certainly one or two in the topics of this presidential election cycle.”

Just below rows of energy and kombucha drinks at Westside Market, a deli in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, sit a few glass bottles of Vybes. The drink, which comes in flavors like strawberry lavender and blood orange lime, is made with cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD.

But a lack of federal rules and a mishmash of state regulations have made it impossible for Vybes to be distributed by a national retailer, like Target or Walmart. That has hindered the potential growth for the drink, said Jonathan Eppers, who left the technology industry to create Vybes in 2018.

“For the first two years, we were riding a rocket ship,” Mr. Eppers said. “But the patchwork of laws and regulations around the space has made it tough to grow our business.”

A little more than six years ago, CBD, the nonintoxicating component that is derived from cannabis or hemp, was poised to be the next big “it” ingredient, part of a wave of beverages and foods that were promoted as having healthful benefits or providing relaxation. Start-ups flooded the market with products, many promising to soothe stressed-out and anxious consumers.

At its apex around 2018, CBD was everywhere, appearing in water, chocolate bars, tinctures, gummies and skin serums. Consumers could buy athleisure apparel infused with CBD oil and feed their nervous pups CBD chews and snacks. Big corporations even jumped in. Molson Coors teamed up with a Canadian cannabis firm to create a line of CBD-infused drinks. Constellation Brands, the maker of Modelo beer, made a $4 billion investment in a publicly traded cannabis company. Ben & Jerry’s began looking into creating CBD-infused ice cream.

In the last couple of years, however, the industry has stalled out. Molson Coors ended its joint venture, and Constellation has written down more than a $1 billion of its cannabis investments. Large companies have shelved plans for CBD products, and hundreds of start-ups have either shut down, shifted to other ingredients or simply tempered their growth projections.

Hopes for resuscitation of the market through efforts by the industry to put federal regulation of CBD into a new farm bill were dashed when Congress passed an extension of the 2018 version of the bill in the fall.

Also contributing to the precipitous fall of the industry is the simple fact that many people are befuddled by what CBD is, whether it is legal and if it will get them high.

The compound comes from the cannabis plant. Cannabis plants that contain high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, are marijuana and can get users high. Cannabis plants with lower levels of THC are known as hemp.

Five years ago, Congress legalized hemp-based CBD, though CBD made with higher levels of THC remained illegal at the federal level. But the Food and Drug Administration has declined to create rules allowing CBD to be used in dietary supplements or conventional foods. The agency said that a new regulatory pathway for CBD must be created and that there was not enough evidence to determine how much of it could be consumed and for how long. (The F.D.A. has approved one drug that contains CBD and is used to treat some epileptic seizures.)

Like marijuana, which remains illegal at the federal level, CBD has been legalized by many states, creating a morass of varying rules and problems for manufacturers.

“I saw the writing on the wall in late 2019 and 2020. It was going to take a lot longer for federal regulations to be established around CBD,” said Ben Witte, who founded Recess in 2018 as a line of sparkling water containing CBD. Today, those drinks make up less than 10 percent of his revenue. He focuses instead on mocktails and Recess Mood, a line of non-CBD relaxation drinks.

Even before hemp-based CBD was legalized, stores and online retailers were flooded with products containing it. But none of them had been approved by the F.D.A., and some touted outrageous and unsubstantiated claims that the infused products could do everything from treating Alzheimer’s disease to curing cancer.

The F.D.A. began issuing warning letters to manufacturers and retailers for selling unapproved CBD products or making unsupported claims around the products. In 2020, the F.D.A. found in a sampling of products that 18 percent contained significantly less CBD than indicated on the packaging while 37 percent had significantly more.

“I think the bigger question here is why do you need to have it in food at all?” said Dr. Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest. “What is the purpose? What is it that this ingredient is actually doing for you?”

He added, “These companies have managed to create a belief that society needs these products when there’s no evidence that says CBD treats anything more than the rare epileptic syndrome it has been approved for.”

As questions about the compound rose, state regulators began pulling CBD products off store shelves and confiscating products. Companies also ran into obstacles selling or advertising online.

“My account on Meta is forever banned from making any advertising after I posted once under our company’s page about our CBD products and it was flagged,” said Clarice Coppolino, head of branding and product development for Vital Leaf, which makes CBD chocolate, skin care and tinctures.

The Covid-19 pandemic also took a toll on the industry. While sales in the early weeks and months of the pandemic soared as nervous consumers sought relief through CBD-infused products, the interest among large companies and investors fell off.

“Covid clearly shifted consumer packaged goods companies away from the CBD space and what was possible there to focusing on simply meeting food demand,” said Carmen Brace, a consultant who worked with companies that sell consumer packaged goods.

Amid heavy industry lobbying, some states began legalizing hemp in various products. In 2021, for instance, California passed legislation that allowed hemp-derived CBD in any food, beverage and dietary supplement sold in the state. Other states legalized CBD with restrictions on the types of products it could be used in, the amounts and where the hemp had to be grown.

Mr. Eppers started Vybes after trying CBD oil to relieve the stress and anxiety he felt while working in the tech industry. The product drew a following in its first two years, but around 2020 California regulators began to pull the drinks off shelves. So Mr. Eppers banded with other CBD manufacturers to push laws allowing the product in the state.

But the confusing hodgepodge of rules has hindered Vybes’ growth. “We make a drink that a lot of consumers want, but the big chains won’t touch it,” Mr. Eppers said.

For now, Vybes, made with 25 milligrams of hemp CBD, has found a home in smaller regional and independent grocers around the country, Mr. Eppers said.

“When I got into this category in 2018, the sky was the limit,” he said. “Nobody starts a business to hit a low ceiling.”