Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, is reportedly being held in a New York City detention-center unit known for housing rappers and tech moguls. We have the latest on his life inside. And, then, the Labor Secretary’s fall from grace. Plus:

• Adam Gopnik on Donald Trump’s autocratic arch
• The Minnesotans who wanted to be in Prince’s “Purple Rain”
• Will the Ticketmaster verdict make concerts cheaper?

Diego Lasarte
A member of the editorial staff

Four months ago, Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, was abducted in the middle of the night during a U.S. raid on a military complex in Caracas and brought to New York on charges including narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) After being booked at a local D.E.A. office, Maduro was transported to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park. Since then, little has been revealed about Maduro’s living conditions behind bars. But, in a recent interview, the rapper and former gang member Tekashi 6ix9ine claimed to have been roommates with him. “Maduro slept, like, right across from me,” 6ix9ine told Adin Ross, a manosphere streamer.

During the interview, 6ix9ine described Maduro’s condition after being released from solitary confinement—“he smelled like shit when he first came out the box”—and said that Maduro told him details of the top-secret raid in Caracas. The rapper also posted a video, right after his release, showing off a homemade SpongeBob SquarePants figurine, made out of cardboard by a fellow-inmate, that he claimed Maduro had signed for him.

6ix9ine and Maduro were likely in 4 North, a unit in the M.D.C. Brooklyn where high-profile inmates are often held—previous residents include the rapper Sean (Diddy) Combs, the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, and the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. The unit has tight quarters, with the beds clustered together dormitory-style. Meals are wheeled in, and there is a small room where detainees can work on their legal cases, according to someone who spoke often with an inmate held there. There are no pillows. The V.I.P. clientele are sequestered from the rest of the prison. “They will never encounter inmates from any other part of the facility, and officials will not put any dangerous inmates in there,” Sam Mangel, a federal prison consultant who has advised inmates in the Brooklyn M.D.C., told me.

Maduro’s case is still in preliminary stages. Mangel estimated that Maduro could be at the jail as long as another eighteen months, as his trial proceeds. Meanwhile, back in Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former Vice-President, is serving as acting President and has proved willing to work with the U.S. And, a few weeks ago, Trump publicly weighed succeeding Maduro as President himself. “I’m polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela,” Trump said. “I will quickly learn Spanish—it won’t take too long, I’m good at language—and I will go to Venezuela, and I am going to run for President.” Maduro, for his part, has reportedly had trouble sleeping in New York. According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, he’s been heard yelling in the night, “Tell my country that I have been kidnapped!”

As though the ballroom weren’t enough, the President has now proposed the construction of a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. Standing at two hundred and fifty feet high, presumably for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial. Asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me.” Adam Gopnik reports »

The Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, resigned yesterday, becoming the third Cabinet official to leave the Administration in Trump’s second term.

What’s the story behind her departure?

“When Lori Chavez-DeRemer became Labor Secretary, she was supposed to embody the MAGA brand of economic populism at its most aspirational. She was the Latina daughter of a former Teamster, personally recommended to Trump by the president of the Teamsters union. She was a Republican from liberal Oregon, where she had been a suburban mayor and a single-term member of Congress. She supported the PRO Act, federal legislation that would make it easier to unionize.

“Yesterday, Chavez-DeRemer stepped down ‘to take a position in the private sector,’ according to the White House. (Similar phrasing was used to describe the former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent departure from the Department of Justice.) In reality, Chavez-DeRemer was facing a litany of allegations of professional misconduct. The Labor Department’s inspector general had been investigating her, her advisers, and her family for months. Her chief of staff, Jihun Han—who, I reported last year, threatened employees with criminal prosecution for talking to the press—was pushed out in March; so was a security guard with whom the Secretary was allegedly having an affair. Chavez-DeRemer has been accused of drinking on the job and billing taxpayers for extravagant pleasure trips. The Times reported that she commanded a staffer to bring ‘sauvi B’ to her hotel room. She also instructed female employees to ‘pay attention’ to her father and husband. The latter was banned from the department’s headquarters after at least three women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching. (He has denied wrongdoing, and a police investigation, per the Washington Post, was closed in February.)

“All these allegations, Chavez-DeRemer wrote on X, are false—‘peddled by high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media.’ What she doesn’t deny is the agenda she pushed in her brief time as Secretary: the repeal of minimum-wage guarantees for home-care workers, the rollback of mine-safety rules, the defunding of training programs for women in construction, the elimination of grants to end child and slave labor. Last summer, Chavez-DeRemer hung a giant banner of Trump’s face over the side of department headquarters. An employee sent me a photo taken from inside a conference room. The window was occluded by a big, scowling eye.”

— E. Tammy Kim, a contributing writer who has been reporting extensively on the federal government during Trump 2.0

• On the tenth anniversary of Prince’s death, check out these images from 1983, when the photographer Tom Arndt captured a casting call for “Purple Rain,” in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn.

• After years of skyrocketing fees and byzantine sales practices, a jury ruled against Ticketmaster in an antitrust case. Will concerts get any cheaper?

• From spray-on condoms to radioactive wrinkle cream, a new exhibition in Paris puts terrible inventions in the spotlight.

• Can Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs help cure addiction?

• The most-clicked piece in yesterday’s newsletter was the story of how professional wrestling prepared Linda McMahon for Trump’s Cabinet.

• A movie: The coming-of-age drama “Amrum,” now in theatres, follows a young German islander witnessing the end of the Nazi regime from a perilous remove.