Cabbage is a shape-shifter among vegetables. Unlike kale, with its recognizable ruffle, or collards, which are always their leafy green selves, cabbage can transform in a cook’s hands. Slice it into crunchy slaw. Ferment it into bracing sauerkraut or kimchi. Broil it until charred and sweet. Simmer it into silky submission. Cabbage will be whatever you want it to be.

And this time of year, I want it to be the foundation of a warming, weeknight-friendly one-pot pasta.

A note about one-pot pasta: It’s not necessarily easier than making pasta the usual way. Yes, you’ll have one fewer pot to wash, but plenty of classic recipes require only a pot and a skillet anyway. The real reason to love a one-pot pasta is its depth of flavor. When pasta cooks surrounded by aromatics and vegetables in broth instead of water, it absorbs every nuance, gaining character that you simply can’t replicate by tossing cooked pasta with a sauce. One-pot pastas are a way to bank flavor, to accumulate the richness of ingredients until, like Scrooge McDuck, you’re basically swimming in a wealth of deliciousness.

The key is choosing the right ingredients, ones that will release liquid and flavor as they simmer. Juicy vegetables are ideal to infuse the sauce. Add enough of them and your one-pot pasta becomes a one-pot meal.

In this recipe, I sauté the cabbage first along with some leeks, coaxing out sweetness through gentle caramelization. This soft tangle becomes the base of the dish. Vegetable or chicken broth instead of water deepens everything further, while salty, nutty Gruyère and tangy sour cream round out the sauce. A sprinkle of smoked paprika adds heat and complexity, and fresh dill (or whatever herbs you have), a pop of color and freshness.

You can use any short pasta here — rigatoni, penne, shells — just keep a close eye on it as it cooks. You want the pasta to be just tender, absorbing the flavorful liquid without turning mushy. If the pot threatens to dry out before everything is done, add a splash more broth or water. If there’s too much liquid at the end, let it simmer uncovered for a minute or two to evaporate.

The result is a comforting weeknight dish you’ll want to make again and again, especially as the weather stays cold. Cabbage will be there for you; cabbage, being cabbage, will always oblige.

One-Pot Cheesy Orecchiette with Cabbage and Paprika

A sweet, soft mix of cabbage and leeks forms the base of this homey one-pot dish. Using vegetable broth instead of water as the liquid in the pot deepens the flavor, which is rounded out with salty, nutty Gruyère cheese and sour cream, and finished with smoked paprika and dill (or another fresh herb). You can use any short pasta here, just keep an eye on it so it doesn’t overcook; it should be just tender without being mushy.

By Melissa Clark

Yield: 4 servings

Total time: 45 minutes

INGREDIENTS

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, more for serving
1 large leek, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced (or use 4 scallions)
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves, finely grated or minced
Pinch of red chile flakes, more for serving
1/2 small green cabbage (about 1 pound), sliced (5 cups)
1 teaspoon cider vinegar, more to taste
1 pound small pasta, such as orecchiette, shells or fusilli
4 cups vegetable broth
1 cup shredded Gruyère (about 3 1/2 ounces)
1/2 cup sour cream, crème fraîche or mascarpone
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika, more to taste
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill or parsley, more for serving

DIRECTIONS

1. In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium. Add leek and a pinch each of salt and pepper, and cook until tender and very lightly golden at the edges, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic and chile flakes, and cook until fragrant, 1 minute longer. Add the cabbage and season with more salt and pepper. Cook until soft and collapsed, about 15 minutes. Stir in the vinegar, then taste and add more salt, pepper and vinegar until it’s nicely seasoned.

2. Add pasta, broth and 1/2 teaspoon salt to the pan. Let the liquid come to a boil, then cover the pan and cook, stirring and tossing the pasta once or twice, until it is cooked through but still al dente, 12 to 15 minutes. If the skillet dries out before the pasta is cooked through, add a little water. And if there’s a bit of water left in the pan at the end, fear not, the pasta will absorb it in the next step. Just make sure to take the pan off the heat before the pasta gets too soft.

3. Remove pan from heat and stir in Gruyère, crème fraîche and smoked paprika, and toss well. Stir in the dill. Season to taste with more salt (if you used salt-free broth, you might need to add more than you’d think) and cider vinegar if needed. Serve topped with more paprika, olive oil and dill if you like.

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WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump vitiated scientific facts Thursday, helping fossil fuel fat cats by eliminating the government’s ability to regulate treacherous gases, a reporter asked what he says to people worried about the very real hazards of a hotter planet.

“I tell them don’t worry about it,” he shot back.

The administration has even coined a word to denigrate those who push back on Trump’s rash policies: “panican,” as in one who panics.

In a world steeped in violence and menace, we are constantly being told by the people in charge not to worry.

Don’t worry about a sweltering Earth. Don’t worry about all those powerful creeps getting away with abusing young women exploited by Jeffrey Epstein. Instead, just behold the beauty of the rising Dow, as the abrasive, evasive Pam Bondi suggested at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Don’t worry about the Trump family’s unethical get-rich-quick schemes. Don’t worry about an economy increasingly catering to the well connected. Don’t worry about the president threatening to unilaterally set the rules for state elections — Congress be damned.

The pueri aeterni of Silicon Valley have greased the palm of our King Joffrey in the White House. And now we are told not to worry about safeguards for artificial intelligence, the most spine-tingling technology ever created.

I interviewed Elon Musk in 2017, when he still cared about AI safety as much as he once cared about going to the wildest party on Epstein’s island and now cares about constantly sharing deranged posts about race on X. He told me that the fate of humanity depends on not allowing the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech and government elites.

“It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” Musk said then. “It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”

Let’s just say that our man in the White House is no Marcus Aurelius.

When I reported in Silicon Valley back then, the debate was whether AI would jump to the dark side once it got smarter than we are.

But since then, even the tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by the billions to be made on AI, including on erotica. These geniuses who were supposed to escort us into a better, safer future turned out to be the biggest sellouts of all time.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has welcomed erotica, or “adult mode,” as it’s called, saying he wants to “treat adult users like adults.”

Once Musk put up an AI-generated picture of himself in a bikini to demonstrate his AI model’s new feature, people used it to manipulate pictures of women online, stripping off their clothes.

The tech bros are thrilled with their ability to buy influence in Trump world. (Yes, Jeff Bezos, I’m talking about “Melania.”)

As Wired reported, the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, was one of Trump’s biggest individual donors in 2025, to the tune of $25 million. Another $25 million is on the way to a PAC that fights politicians who favor regulating AI. OpenAI’s original mission was to protect humanity, but where’s the money in that?

The tech universe shuddered this past week at alarms from several Paul Reveres.

An urgent post on X titled “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, the CEO of two small tech companies, went viral. He warned that AI is leaping ahead faster than we think.

“The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies … Open AI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind,” he wrote, adding: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job … I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself.” Now, he wrote, OpenAI’s newest model is showing judgment, and it knows how to make the right call on its own.

A week ago Monday, an Anthropic AI safety researcher, Mrinank Sharma, quit his job, posting an apocalyptic warning on X that the “world is in peril” from AI, bioweapons and cascading crises.

Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has been the most responsible tech executive in acknowledging the awesome, hair-curling power of AI, saying it will “test who we are as a species” and reveal whether humanity has the maturity to handle this “almost unimaginable power.” (The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the company’s AI tool, Claude, had helped the U.S. military capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.)

Sharma is not sure if humanity has the maturity to handle AI. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote.

He said he will disappear to England and pursue a poetry degree, signing off with a William Stafford poem containing a line that augured AI dominance: “Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.”

Zoë Hitzig, a researcher at OpenAI, also quit last Monday. In a guest essay for The New York Times, she said she had lost faith that OpenAI still wanted to back her work on the two outcomes she fears most: “a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it.”

Another OpenAI executive, Ryan Beiermeister, lost her job in the safety division after complaining about ChatGPT’s rollout of AI erotica, the Journal disclosed.

Beiermeister, the Journal said, did not think the company had enough guardrails in place to stop child-exploitation content and wall off adult content from teens.

OpenAI contended that Beiermeister’s departure was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. She adamantly denied that to the Journal.

Despite the smarmy reassurances of the tech lords, some AI insiders are alarmed by what they’re seeing.

The people in charge tell us not to worry. But we should worry. It’s getting scary out there. There’s nothing artificial about that.

Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.

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For decades, politicians have sold tariffs as a tonic for the working class. In reality, one particular group seems to benefit more than any other from trade wars: Washington influence peddlers.

The United States collected some $288.5 billion in tariff revenue last year, up from $98.3 billion in 2024, thanks to a barrage of new levies imposed by the Trump administration. These tariffs, designed by elite lawyers in D.C. and implemented with highly technical and specialized language, presented a unique opportunity for lobbyists to charge large corporations exorbitant rates to seek relief and other carveouts. And they did very well for themselves.

The 20 largest lobbying firms reported $824 million in revenue last year, up from $595 million during the final year of the Biden administration.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, lobbying contracts that mentioned tariffs were worth $10.6 million, up from $1.8 million a year earlier, according to the Advancing American Freedom Foundation.

No wonder the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs are small businesses, not large ones. Big companies can afford to hire attorneys to understand the complex rules and lobbyists to try to minimize the pain. Small businesses get stuck with enormous tax bills.

While lobbyists cashed in, Americans felt the pain. Poorer people tend to spend more of their income on goods that are subject to tariffs than higher earners. Tariffs redistribute corporate profits from less politically connected industries to more politically connected industries, not from the rich to the poor.

Sometimes the tariffs are sold as a national security imperative, but that hasn’t been the case over the past year. Taxing imports from Canada is not a way to reduce drug overdoses. Imposing tariffs on countries that already eliminated their trade barriers doesn’t help to eliminate trade barriers.

Defenders of import taxes sometimes argue that lobbying is unfortunate but worthwhile given all the jobs that are saved or protected. Yet the government bailed out farmers because they were harmed by tariffs. And the number of total manufacturing jobs has fallen by 72,000 since last April. Car sales are down, and there are 19,000 fewer car manufacturing jobs in the country.

All this is why 6 in 10 Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs, according to the latest polling, and approval for them has consistently lagged other parts of his agenda, even among Republican voters. The people’s elected representatives in Congress wouldn’t pass new tariffs, which is why the president is imposing them by executive order and claiming a nonexistent emergency.

Draining the swamp is hard, but tariffs are an unforced error that make an already difficult task impossible.

— The Washington Post

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Today is Wednesday, Feb. 18, the 49th day of 2026. There are 316 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Feb. 18, 2001, veteran FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested, accused of spying for Russia. (Hanssen later pleaded guilty to espionage and attempted espionage and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole; he died in prison in 2023.)

Also on this date:

In 1885, Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was published in the U.S.

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In 1930, the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.

In 1970, the “Chicago Seven” defendants were found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; five were convicted of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 (those convictions were later reversed).

In 1983, 13 people were shot to death at a gambling club in Seattle’s Chinatown in what became known as the Wah Mee Massacre. (Two men were convicted of the killings and were sentenced to life in prison; a third was found guilty of robbery and assault and served 28 years in prison before being deported to Hong Kong in 2014.)

In 1994, in the final race of his Olympic career at the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, U.S. speedskater Dan Jansen broke the world record in the 1,000 meters, winning the gold medal.

In 2001, auto racing star Dale Earnhardt Sr. died in a crash in the final lap of the Daytona 500; he was 49.

In 2003, an arson attack involving two South Korean subway trains in the city of Daegu claimed nearly 200 lives.

In 2013, some $42 million (40 million euros) worth of diamonds and other gems were stolen at Brussels’ international airport by eight gunmen who cut through a perimeter fence, drove onto the tarmac and took the gemstones as they were being transferred from an armored car to a plane bound for Switzerland.

In 2021, the NASA rover Perseverance successfully landed on Mars, where it continues to explore the planet’s surface.

Today’s Birthdays:

Artist-singer Yoko Ono is 93.
Restaurateur-TV host Prue Leith (TV: “The Great British Baking Show”) is 86.
Singer Irma Thomas is 85.
Musician Dennis DeYoung is 79.
Actor Cybill Shepherd is 76.
Actor John Travolta is 72.
TV personality Vanna White is 69.
Actor Matt Dillon is 62.
Rapper-music executive Dr. Dre is 61.
Actor Molly Ringwald is 58.
Actor Ike Barinholtz is 49.
Football Hall of Famer Dwight Freeney is 46.
Musician Regina Spektor is 46.
Actor Kylie Rogers is 22.