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| It's Monday. The Queens district attorney primary was nearly two weeks ago, and votes are still being counted. |
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| Weather: A possibility of showers during the morning commute, then partly sunny skies. Expect a high around 80. |
| Alternate-side parking: In effect until Aug. 11. |
 Jeenah Moon for The New York Times |
| A fire near Trenton last week caused delays at Pennsylvania Station in Midtown Manhattan that were "so crazy the National Guard was needed to contain the crowds," a CBS New York reporter said. |
| Two days later, a garbage truck crashed nose-first on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, forcing a multiple-hour shutdown of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. |
| And New Jersey Transit canceled more than 60 trains last week, mostly because equipment or personnel were not available, my colleague Patrick McGeehan reported. |
| It is starting to feel like a repeat of 2017's "Summer of Hell." |
| A bird's-eye view |
| More than 900,000 people commute on New Jersey Transit trains and buses each weekday. |
| The commuters heading to New York usually enter the city at Port Authority or Penn Station. Because they are near each other, a problem at one location can overwhelm the other with thousands of displaced travelers. |
| On a day in mid-June, problems with overhead wires stopped New Jersey Transit and Amtrak service in and out of Penn Station. Delays started about 10 a.m. and lasted into the evening. "Some passengers waited two hours before their trains began moving again," ABC 7 reported. |
| After the fire in Trenton on July 1, the National Guard was called to the station to prevent "people from entering the tracks and, later, kick people out due to overcrowding on the few trains that did arrive," according to CBS New York. |
| Then two days later, the garbage truck crash forced the Port Authority shutdown. |
| How much money would it take to alleviate problems on New Jersey Transit? |
| Nick Sifuentes, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group, said it would cost about $700 million to bring New Jersey Transit into a state of good repairs. |
| Decisions made years ago caused the current problems, he added. "Decades of underfunding have left N.J. Transit scrambling to even make money to pay the people that work there, much less do any new big projects," he said. |
| And there are not enough people working there. |
| Last year, transit officials said they had to cancel hundreds of trains because they simply did not have the personnel needed for them to run. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said the shortage of train engineers was "a crisis in itself, one that has left countless thousands of commuters stranded by canceled trains." |
| What's next? |
| No one is building additional tunnels or train lines between New York and New Jersey. |
| New Jersey Transit said nearly a dozen new engineers were driving trains, and more were being trained. |
| From The Times |
 Richard Heathcote/Getty Images |
| The United States women's soccer team, which claimed its fourth World Cup title yesterday, will get a ticker-tape parade in New York City. |
| Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier, is accused of luring girls to his Manhattan mansion and abusing them. |
| El Chapo earned $12,666,181,704, prosecutors say. They want him to pay it back. |
| For the first time in six years, every Democrat in the New York State Senate is working with the Democratic conference. |
| [Want more news from New York and around the region? Check out our full coverage.] |
| The Mini Crossword: Here is today's puzzle. |
| What we're reading |
| The Prospect Park Y.M.C.A., where Mayor de Blasio exercises, was closed because of contaminated water. [NY1] |
| A woman who celebrated her 114th birthday in Harlem over the weekend is believed to be the oldest person in America. [New York Post] |
| To win a cannoli-eating contest on Staten Island, how many do you have to eat? [SIlive.com] |
| A high school in Queens honored an alumnus, Luis Alvarez, who died days after testifying in Congress about the health care needs of Sept. 11 emergency responders. [Queens Chronicle] |
| Coming up today |
| Dissent Magazine releases its summer issue, "What Is the Nation Good For?" Writers discuss their essays at Verso Books in Brooklyn. 6:30 p.m. [Free] |
| The author Pamela Nadell discusses the figures in her book "America's Jewish Women," including the labor organizer Bessie Hillman and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. 7 p.m. [Free] |
| Pete Davidson, Bill Burr and Judd Apatow perform a benefit show at the St. George Theater on Staten Island for Friends of Firefighters, an organization that provides free counseling services for members of the New York Fire Department. 9 p.m. [$45] |
| — Vivian Ewing |
| Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times's culture pages. |
| And finally: A New York story about Marianne Williamson (with a cameo by Jay-Z) |
 Supporters of Marianne Williamson at a debate watch party.
Holly Pickett for The New York Times |
| In 1965, a research psychologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center thought Jesus was talking to her. |
| "This is a course in miracles," the voice said to the research psychologist, Helen Schucman. "Please take notes" |
| Ms. Schucman, who trained at New York University and was living in Manhattan, obliged. The result was a book called "A Course in Miracles." |
| In the years since, countless people have found comfort and empowerment in the book. Among them was Marianne Williamson, one of the two dozen people running for president. |
| [Read about the New York text at the heart of Marianne Williamson's philosophy.] |
| At a Democratic presidential debate last month, Ms. Williamson looked into the camera and, in her closing remarks, said President Trump "harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out." Then she promised: "I'm going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win." |
| Sam Kestenbaum, writing in The Times, said Ms. Williamson's closing remarks were "drawing directly" from "A Course in Miracles." He described it as "a curious New York scripture that arose during the heady metaphysical counterculture of the 1960s." |
| The book begins: "Nothing unreal exists. Nothing real can be threatened. Herein lies the peace of God." |
| I have never read the book, but those words sounded familiar. Then I realized I had heard them before … in a rap song. |
| In the song "Drug Dealers Anonymous," the Brooklyn-born rapper Jay-Z says, "I'm a course of miracles with this [expletive] / Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists / Therein lies the piece of God." |
| My mom's family is Jewish, my dad's family is Muslim and I went to an all-boys Catholic high school. But, because of my obsession with politics and rap music, I've also been exposed to copious amounts of New York mysticism. |
| It's Monday — please take notes. |
| Metropolitan Diary: Classical act |
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| Dear Diary: |
| I grew up in a small town in Kentucky in the 1950s. My parents knew nothing about classical music, but they thought they should offer it to their children. They acquired a long-playing record for that purpose, to no avail. At college, in Virginia, I was required to take a music appreciation class. Again, it got a big yawn from me. |
| In 1965, having moved to New York City in an act of blind optimism, I was riding in a yellow cab when I heard something on the radio that electrified me. I had to know what it was. I asked the driver. |
| "That's Bach," he said. |
| I have to hear a lot more of that, I thought. And I did. |
| Years later, I met a man through the Classical Music Lovers' Exchange. We had both listed "Don Carlo" as our favorite opera. I lived near Lincoln Center, and when he went to the opera with his brother, his brother would leave before the last act, handing me his ticket on the way out. |
| The man, whom I later married, had second-acted Broadway plays as a Stuyvesant High School student. Now I was last-acting the Metropolitan Opera. |
| — Sara Wotman |
