Pinned
Anna Marks
Opinion Staff Editor
In ‘House of the Dragon,’ a Sapphic Subtext Reigns Supreme
HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” has returned for a second season, bringing back the greatest tragic love story now on television: the star-crossed love of the central characters, Alicent Hightower (played by Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra Targaryen (played by Emma D’Arcy).
The romantic energy crackling between the two queens is clear enough to have drawn notice. As teenage best friends, they loved each other in that heady mix of romance, friendship and mimicry characteristic of girlhood. As adults, stripped apart by forced marriages and primogeniture, their romance withers into endless competition and bitter cruelty. They plunge their families into a brutal civil war, replete with parricide and dragon fire.
All the show’s conflicts could be solved if our heroines could explore more productive possibilities. Like any good tragic romance, the unfulfilled longing that stretches between the two characters acts as the tension that holds the story together. Without it, the story would feel far less Shakespearean.
The story’s queer subtext is purposeful. Emily Carey, who played young Alicent Hightower in the first season of “House of the Dragon,” has said that the two characters are “in love a little bit” and that their interactions “toe the line between platonic and romantic.” Her counterpart, Milly Alco*ck, who played a young Rhaenyra Targaryen, noted the way societal circ*mstances keep them separate: “These women aren’t given the privilege to know what choices they have, because of the world that they live in.”
The women of the universe of “Game of Thrones” are no strangers to sexual violence and are most often accessories to patriarchal ends. Oftentimes, the fantasy show’s violations are poorly explained away as attempts to craft a realistic mirror of historical violence. But in the case of Rhaenyra and Alicent, a “realistic” setting functions as the perfect garden in which to cultivate an allegory about the consequences of compulsory heterosexuality.
If the queens lived in a society in which they could fully explore the feelings that hang between them, would there really be any need for a world-crushing, family-savaging civil war? Wouldn’t their world be a better place if they could just fall in love?
Queer people have long trained ourselves to hunt for marginal subtext — longing looks, brushes of hands, impotent anger — when overt queer narratives are absent. The subtext in “House of the Dragon” is not marginal. Without it, the show would be yet another unremarkable installment in a franchise that has outstayed its welcome.
June 21, 2024, 3:14 p.m. ET
Michelle Cottle
Opinion Writer
Biden Is Finally Reminding Voters of Trump’s Toxic Chaos
For the first couple of weeks after Donald Trump’s felony conviction, Team Biden did not want to touch that mess — partly out of fear of fueling Trump’s long-running claims of political persecution.
That reluctance seems to have dissipated, for now at least. In recent days, the president has been going hard at Trump’s criminal status — there’s even a new ad! — spurred by internal polling showing that the issue could damage the MAGA king with voters. The research, an anonymous pollster told Politico, shows that the conviction fits with the broader message that Trump is an entitled, above-it-all, self-centered jerk who thinks accountability is for losers. (Yes, I am paraphrasing.)
This feels like the sensible play for the president. Sure, with Trump, calling out bad behavior always leads to screeching about witch hunts, which risks rallying ever more Republicans around him. On the other hand, the guy is a convicted criminal. Wouldn’t not hitting him for it suggest a certain timidness, as if the Biden campaign had in some way given up or was running scared? Not a good look for a president being slammed as too weak.
Also — and I want to put this in the gentlest way possible — there aren’t exactly a glut of promising strategies available to Team Biden to fight the thick fog of voter frustration and dissatisfaction swirling around its guy. This president has many fine qualities and has been impressively productive. But he isn’t an exciting or inspirational figure. Back in 2020, voters were craving slow and steady. Now, with Americans in a sour mood — and with that whole Biden-seems-older-than-dirt thing prompting ever more anxiety — his options for driving voters to the polls feel limited and heavily skewed toward the negative.
This is not shaping up to be a hopey-changey sort of election.
Biden’s advisers think the best way to combat a host of voter concerns is to remind people of the toxic chaos Trump brings. His conviction seems like a solid addition to the mix. Even many voters who could not care less about the particulars of the case may find themselves once again pondering the return of Trump’s relentless drama with dread and exhaustion.
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June 21, 2024, 12:27 p.m. ET
Jesse Wegman
Editorial Board Member
The Supreme Court Dials Down the Chaos on Guns
Violent people who pose a clear and immediate threat to the physical safety of others should not be allowed to possess firearms. That seems like a statement any reasonable person living in a self-governing society can readily agree with. And yet on Friday morning, it took the United States Supreme Court 103 pages of opinions, concurrences and dissent to work it all out.
The good news is that eight members of the court landed on the right conclusion, agreeing that the Second Amendment permits laws like the one that stripped weapons from Zackey Rahimi, a domestic abuser and general public menace who shoots guns the way regular people shake hands.
The bad news is that the justices had to go to such lengths to do it — debating the meaning of old English surety and affray laws rather than simply acknowledging that no right is absolute and that the government has always kept weapons away from people who have proved themselves to be dangerous to others.
The spectacle of judges role-playing as amateur historians is embarrassing to watch, and yet the court chose to put itself in this position with its gobsmacking 2022 decision in , which required that any gun law be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In the vision of Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote Bruen’s majority opinion for himself and the other five right-wing justices, that meant any modern law had to have essentially an exact analogue from the 18th century in order to survive. In his dissent on Friday, Thomas argued that the founding generation had no federal laws like the one that took Rahimi’s guns away; ergo, it was unconstitutional.
It appears to be dawning on Thomas’s fellow conservatives just how twisted that approach is. Bruen was “not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
In concurrence, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that it makes no sense to rely on history from a time before women and people of color were treated as equal citizens (or citizens at all). “History has a role to play” in any constitutional analysis, she wrote, but it must be “calibrated to reveal something useful and transferable to the present day.” Thomas’s analysis is “so exacting as to be useless,” she wrote.
There is no lack of competition for the worst, most indefensible decisions of the Roberts court, but the Bruen ruling is near the top. That’s not only because of the absurdity of its logic, but also the chaos of its practical application, which has confounded judges throughout the federal judiciary for two years.
“Lower courts are struggling,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her concurrence. “They say there is little method to Bruen’s madness.”
They are right, and the court was right to ratchet the madness back on Friday, if only a little. A country that can’t properly deal with an epidemic of gun violence is not a country that can survive for long.
June 21, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
When Pariahs Like Putin and Kim Meet, Watch Out
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The visit of Vladimir Putin to North Korea this week was choreographed as an old-timey Communist summit, with armies of flag-waving children, portraits waving from every lamp pole and building, lavish gifts and high-blown expressions of an old and eternal friendship.
“Comrade Kim Jong-un warmly embraced him,” went the official North Korean account of the airport greeting. “The top leaders shared their innermost thoughts during an intimate conversation while driving to where they were staying.”
Heady stuff, but as phony now as it was back in the day. In fact, despite professions of friendship for North Korea in the Soviet era, no Soviet leader ever visited Pyongyang. The only Kremlin leader ever to do so, in fact, was Putin himself back in 2000.
That was a far different visit, at which Putin was trying to position himself as an indispensable interlocutor between a dangerous pariah and the world. At the conclusion, the Russian leader said he had become confident that North Korea would use rocket technology only for the peaceful exploration of the cosmos. (Fast-forward to June 2018: Then-President Donald Trump, returning from his visit with Kim, tweeted: “Just landed — a long trip but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”)
This Putin-Kim visit was pariah to pariah, as was their last get-together in eastern Russia in September. Putin is arguably now the greater pariah, looking for munitions and weapons to sustain his murderous war on Ukraine, and for a comrade in his hatred for the West. Kim, who was probably seeking technical support for his missile or nuclear programs, at least has not yet waged war against anyone but his own people. In any case, the text of the pact signed by Putin and Kim was not made public, and the line for public consumption was of mutual assistance in the event of foreign aggression.
When pariahs meet and talk about mutual military assistance, there is reason to worry. Russia itself used to be openly concerned about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and even joined in United Nations efforts to stop it. But Putin has now focused his country’s foreign policy solely on garnering what support he can for the brutal land grab that he has elevated into a war of survival against the West.
From Pyongyang, Putin flew in his old Soviet plane to Hanoi, another ally from Communist days, where he was again greeted with official hugs and children waving flags. But here his anti-Western rhetoric was almost absent. His goal was simpler: to show that he can still be received in some places with honors, as President Biden and China’s Xi Jinping were on their visits to Vietnam last year.
Vietnam historically has been heavily dependent on Russia for its armaments, but it has been steadily building bridges with the United States and the West. Putin’s message here was: Hey, I’m still around.
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June 20, 2024, 4:19 p.m. ET
Adam Sternbergh
Opinion Culture Editor
Donald Sutherland, Generational Chameleon
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Donald Sutherland, who died on Thursday at 88, had the kind of film career — spanning six decades — that means one generation of admirers will remember him as the star of films like “M*A*S*H” and “Ordinary People,” while a much younger generation will know him best as President Snow in the “Hunger Games” franchise. Everyone should agree that he was a brilliant actor. But depending on what era of his career you’re most familiar with, you might argue over whether he’s best lionized as a character actor or a leading man.
In fact, he was both, in a way that seems not possible now, because he came into his career in an era when character actors were leading men.
Sutherland always had the aura of a character actor, because of his chameleonlike ability to shift between roles and his resilient capacity to elevate any material. Yet he was undeniably a leading man for much of his career, the headline star in many of his films, such as “Klute” and “Ordinary People.” The films of that era demanded character actors as their leads: actors with the deft ability to portray many facets of humanity. Now, many studios want to anchor a film on the particular brand of charisma that’s already made an actor beloved.
It’s a diverting parlor game to look around at a younger cohort and guess who’s best suited to inherit Sutherland’s mantle: To watch Jesse Plemons (age 36) steal scenes as both a righteous lawman in “Killers of the Flower Moon” and a dead-eyed sociopath in “Civil War” is to see another great character actor blossoming before our eyes. Austin Butler (32), who’s already been nominated for an Oscar — which means he has one more nomination than Sutherland ever received — arrives like the anti-Sutherland: a leading-man type determined to prove his acting bona fides by taking on idiosyncratic roles.
Yet the real question might be less “Who will be the next Donald Sutherland?” than whether Hollywood today could nurture an actor to the heights Sutherland was able to achieve. It’s hard to imagine an actor like Sutherland arriving now and headlining a decade’s worth of films. We can be thankful not only for his talent but also for the fortuitous timing of his rise, which put those talents on full display.
June 20, 2024, 11:49 a.m. ET
David French
Opinion Columnist
Thou Shalt Not Post the Ten Commandments in the Classroom
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There is a certain irony in the bravado about the Ten Commandments from Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana. On Saturday he told attendees at a Republican fund-raiser, “I can’t wait to be sued.” Clearly, he knows that the Supreme Court previously ruled against mandatory displays of the Ten Commandments in the classroom. In a 1980 case, Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments, purchased through private donations, in every public school classroom in the state.
A Louisiana law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in the state defies this precedent, so, yes, the state will be sued.
But Landry’s comments didn’t stop with bravado. He also said something else. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he told the guests, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” To teach respect for the rule of law, he’s defying the Supreme Court? That’s an interesting message to send to students.
It’s consistent with an emerging Republican approach to constitutional law. Just as many Republicans view their constituency as composed of the “real” Americans, they tend to believe their interpretation of the Constitution represents the “real” Constitution. So we’re seeing a flurry of culture-war-motivated state laws, many of them aimed at the First Amendment, that confront precedent.
The Dobbs decision gave some Republicans hope for radical change, but reversing Roe has not signaled open season on the court’s rulings. Republicans’ challenges to the Voting Rights Act failed, the independent state legislature theory foundered, and efforts to expand the standing doctrine to limit access to the abortion pill faltered. Even so, it’s premature to declare that the Supreme Court is frustrating the MAGA right.
Altering constitutional law is not the only motivation here; a version of Christian mysticism is also in play. There is a real belief that the Ten Commandments have a form of spiritual power over the hearts and minds of students and that posting the displays can change their lives.
I’m an evangelical Christian who believes in God and the divine inspiration of Scripture, but I do not believe that documents radiate powers of personal virtue. I happened to grow up in Kentucky and went to classes before the Ten Commandments were ordered removed, and I can testify that the displays had no impact on our lives. My classmates and I were not better people because of the faded posters on the walls.
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June 20, 2024, 6:20 a.m. ET
Peter Coy
Opinion Writer
The Pope’s Spurious Prayer
Pope Francis told entertainers at the Vatican last week that he has been saying the Prayer for Good Humor for the past 40 years. He highly recommended it, which he attributed to St. Thomas More, a martyr of the Roman Catholic Church.
The prayer is very nice, but it seems to have been written not by More but by a young Englishman — a Protestant, as far as I can tell — in the early 20th century.
This is not a big deal. No one is harmed if the pope misattributes a prayer. It is odd, though. Surely some of the scholars surrounding the pope must know about this. Did they not tell him? If not, what does that say about the culture of the Vatican?
I emailed Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See press office, but he did not reply. I followed up with multiple emails over several days, along with a couple of voice mail messages. Niente.
The Prayer for Good Humor begins with a mild joke:
Give me a good digestion, Lord,
And also something to digest.
It ends like this:
Give me a sense of humor, Lord.
Give me the power to see a joke,
To get some happiness from life
And pass it on to other folk.
This light, pleasing language doesn’t feel as though it came from the pen of More, who was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England. A real More prayer sounds more like this: “O glorious blessed Trinity, whose justice has damned to perpetual pain many proud rebellious angels.”
Abbé Germain Marc’hadour, a French Catholic priest who was a leading authority on More and founded a journal about him, Moreana, included the Prayer for Good Humor in a 1972 piece titled “Most Famous of More’s Spurious Prayers.”
Marc’hadour investigated a legend that the prayer appeared on a tablet at Chester Cathedral, an Anglican church, in England. The dean of the cathedral wrote back to him that there was no such tablet. He enclosed a card with the prayer and this: “The above lines were written by Thomas Henry Basil Webb, only son of Lt. Col. Sir Henry Webb, Bt., born on Aug. 12, 1898, educated at Winchester College — he was killed on the Somme, Dec. 1, 1917, aged 19.” According to another source I found, Webb might have written the prayer when he was just 12 years old.
I’m hoping Francis keeps saying the prayer, even if word gets to him that it’s no More. We all should have the power to see a joke.
June 19, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
The Profound Unseriousness of J.D. Vance
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Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio likes to present himself as a serious, thoughtful conservative, one who came to understand by 2021 that Donald Trump was “deeper than I’d given him credit for” and in 2016 recognized that Trump had some “reasonable” things to say and that he “substantively was offering something very different” from conventional Republicans. OK, that’s not an easy case to make, but Vance is entitled to try to make it.
But the thing is, if you want to persuade the world that Trump is secretly deep and reasonable, then you have to demonstrate in your public actions some of those same qualities yourself. And Vance is falling far short on that score.
Take, for example, the issue of guns. One of the very few things Trump got right as president was to ban bump stocks, the attachments to semiautomatic weapons that turn them into rapid-fire machine guns. “We’re knocking out bump stocks,” Trump said in 2018, a year after the Las Vegas gunman used the device to kill 60 people and injure more than 400. But last week, in one of its most dangerous decisions, the Supreme Court said that ban was illegal. When Senate Democrats said they wanted to fix that problem with a bill banning bump stocks, Vance declared the bill addressed a “fake problem” and would “end up just inhibiting the rights of law-abiding Americans.” Presumably, he thinks there’s some kind of right to own a machine gun that even Trump isn’t aware of.
“The question is: How many people would have been shot alternatively?” Vance asked, a question so callous that it should make him an outlier even on Trump’s short list of extremist running mates.
Then there’s the issue of Trump’s criminal conviction. Last week, Vance said he would lead a group of Republican senators pledging to block or slow down all of President Biden’s nominees for judgeships or U.S. attorney, in retaliation for Trump’s felony conviction. (Biden had nothing to do with that New York State prosecution, but the details don’t matter when you’re doing a big pander to the MAGA crowd.) The blockade will last until Election Day, Vance said, and will also extend to any other nominees who “have suggested the Trump prosecutions were reasonable.”
These kinds of blockades are among the most juvenile and petulant tantrums an elected official can throw, putting Vance right there on the lowest level of the Senate alongside Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, the author of another useless blockade and naturally an eager signer of this one. That’s Vance’s real reputation in Washington, and Trump might want to think twice before choosing someone even more preposterous than he is.
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June 18, 2024, 4:15 p.m. ET
Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
The Election of Magical Thinking
There’s a simple way to reconcile voters’ concerns about President Biden’s age with his desire to continue his work in a second term: He demotes himself to vice president. Runs as a running mate. Someone younger tops the Democratic ticket. For the next four years, he taps his experience without exhausting his energy.
Likely? Ha. There’s as good a chance I’ll win a gold in gymnastics at the Paris Olympics.
But that hasn’t stopped the Biden-as-veep chatter not only on byways of the internet but also in an actual poll by SurveyUSA, which asked Americans whether they’d support that scenario. A majority said yes, suggesting that they didn’t recognize its ludicrousness. A politician doesn’t trade Air Force One for Air Force Two any more than someone with a flatbed seat in first class asks for the last row of coach. And Biden already played second fiddle under President Barack Obama. He’s not itching for an encore.
So let’s junk that bunk — and with it, other fantasies that treat a profoundly serious presidential contest in deeply unserious ways.
This is an election of magical thinking beyond the usual. That’s no accident. It reflects how frustrated many Americans are with the reality of two major-party candidates who don’t appeal to them. How desperate Donald Trump’s opponents are for some grand assurance of — or secret incantation for — his defeat. How susceptible not only to elaborate conspiracy theories but also to milder fictions Trump’s supporters can be.
No, you keen-eyed MAGA sleuths, Biden’s aides didn’t schedule an early debate so that they could replace him after he flails. Nor did they engineer Hunter Biden’s conviction just to look virtuous.
Democrats, it is not the case that if journalists just stop talking about Biden’s age, many Americans miraculously won’t notice it. Nor are there tea leaves auguring a revolt against Trump at the Republican convention. A respected public intellectual privately promoted that idea to me.
And Michelle Obama will not — abracadabra! — be riding to the rescue. She has never signaled any interest in elected office and has been clear about her distaste for the muck of politics.
Indulging such illusions is dangerous. Those of us who believe that Trump’s return to the White House would be ruinous must prosaically and persistently make the case for Biden’s superiority, flaws and all. We must plan, plod, slog. No sorcery will save us.
June 18, 2024, 2:23 p.m. ET
Farah Stockman
Editorial Board Member
Biden Courts Some Liberal Love on Immigration
Two weeks after President Biden abruptly cracked down on asylum seekers at the southern border — angering some progressives — he announced a new program on Tuesday to protect from deportation the undocumented spouses and stepchildren of American citizens.
In a certain way, it is a no-brainer. The undocumented spouses of American citizens are already eligible for citizenship, but were required to leave the country to apply for a green card, a process that can take years. That’s especially true for people who slipped across the border — rather than overstayed a visa — since they could be barred from re-entry for up to 10 years. Now they will be able to apply from the United States and work legally while they wait.
For about half a million American families, this is a game changer. It is being compared to DACA, which created a special legal status for people who were brought into the United States by their parents. But it is not quite the clear case that DACA was. Kids who were brought into the country illegally by their parents committed no crime and shouldn’t have to face the same consequences as adults who came by their own volition.
You don’t have to be a raging ideologue to believe that there should be consequences for breaking the law. Plenty of Democrats feel that people who sneak across the border or overstay a visa should be required to make amends, even if that just means paying a civil fine. That’s one reason Biden’s permissive policies on immigration are endangering his bid for re-election.
But the move to protect undocumented spouses is politically savvy. It’s a family-oriented policy that makes a priority of the needs of American citizens, unlike those of his policies that allowed nearly two million asylum seekers into the country in recent years.
Despite the fever dream of conspiracy theorists, they can’t cast a ballot to thank him.
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June 18, 2024, 11:12 a.m. ET
Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
The Paranoid Style in Tariff Policy
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A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time.
But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea.
What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea?
First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent. But high tariffs would reduce imports, so tariff rates would have to go even higher to realize the same amount of revenue, which would reduce imports even more, and so on. How high would tariffs have to go in the end? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using highly Trump-favorable assumptions and came up with a tariff rate of 133 percent; in reality, there’s probably no tariff rate high enough to replace the income tax.
And to the extent that we did replace income taxes with tariffs, we’d in effect sharply raise taxes on working-class Americans while giving the rich a big tax cut — because the income tax is fairly progressive, falling most heavily on affluent taxpayers, while tariffs are de facto a kind of sales tax that falls most heavily on the working class.
So this is a really bad idea that would be highly unpopular if voters knew about it.
But here’s the kicker: How did the Republican National Committee respond when asked about it? By having its representative declare, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Now, economists have been saying that tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers for the past two centuries or so; I guess they’ve been working for China all along. Yes, there are exceptions and qualifications, but if you imagine that Trump is thinking about optimal tariff theory, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.
Anyway, look at how the R.N.C. responded to a substantive policy question: by insisting not just that Dear Leader’s nonsense is true, but that anyone who disagrees is part of a sinister conspiracy.
Don’t brush this off. It’s one more piece of evidence that MAGA has become a dangerous cult.
June 18, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
Better to Close the Israeli War Cabinet Than Let the Extremists In
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By all accounts, the real reason Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dissolved his “war cabinet” — the small decision-making body he established soon after the Hamas attacks that led Israel to go to war in Gaza — was to prevent the far-right hawks in his government from getting close to strategic military decisions.
Keeping Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as far away from military operations as possible is good. They are dangerous nationalists and would do what they could to make the war even more horrific. How things came to this is a sad reflection of the way political maneuvering has played into this extraordinarily cruel war.
The war cabinet was effectively finished before Netanyahu announced its formal dissolution on Monday. The two centrist opposition leaders he brought in to broaden support for the war effort, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot — both former military chiefs of staff with solid security credentials — had quit a week earlier, angry that crucial decisions were being blocked by “political considerations.” That brought the extremists knocking at the door, compelling Netanyahu to close down the war cabinet rather than let them in, and to rely on a clutch of close advisers in handling the war.
The problem is that Netanyahu’s idea of handling the war is to juggle pressures for a cease-fire from Israeli centrists and the Biden administration against threats from the far-right zealots to quit his government if he calls a cease-fire. Without the right his government would fall, probably pushing Netanyahu out of office — a development that would satisfy a majority of Israelis but leave Netanyahu exposed to the corruption charges that have been dogging him for years.
The specific issue that drove Gantz and Eisenkot to quit the war cabinet was procrastination on the cease-fire proposal that President Biden announced on May 31. Biden had presented the three-stage plan, which included release of all remaining Israeli hostages, as an Israeli proposal, which required only agreement from Hamas to go into effect. But Netanyahu never publicly acknowledged ownership or agreement, and Hamas came back with conditions that Israel rejected. The Biden administration then upped the ante by taking the plan to the U.N. Security Council, where it passed with only Russia abstaining.
The administration remains outwardly sanguine about the cease-fire. But aside from the political hurdles on the Israeli side, predicting or obtaining a response from Hamas has been onerous. Negotiations for the movement are handled by Hamas political operatives in Doha, Qatar, but the final word is with the Hamas chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the author of the murderous raid on Israel on Oct. 7. Communications with Sinwar are painfully slow, as he takes huge precautions not to give away his whereabouts in Gaza. He also knows that the remaining Israeli hostages are his only bargaining chip, and he is in no rush to cash them in.
That is the maddening reality of this war: Leaders on both sides keep it going even when the best interests of their people so clearly demand its immediate end.
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June 17, 2024, 5:57 p.m. ET
Patrick Healy
Deputy Opinion Editor
The Tony Award I Wish I Could Give
I first saw the director Maria Friedman’s production of “Merrily We Roll Along” in London in 2013 and felt I was witnessing some kind of miracle. Here was a revival of an unusual kind of Broadway legend — a musical regarded as brilliant and ambitious but, ultimately, perhaps fatally flawed because of an unsympathetic central character and a plot whose reverse chronology kept you from being swept up and away by the heart of the show (the friendship of the three core characters).
What Friedman pulled off was extraordinary. Nothing a director does is more important than choosing the right cast, and Friedman’s work with the actor Mark Umbers turned the selfish, shallow Franklin Shepard Jr. into a man who craved connection but ended in heartbreak — an achievement that owed much to her casting of Damian Humbley and Jenna Russell as Frank’s friends Charley and Mary and the intimacy and chemistry among the three performers.
Friedman, who is an acclaimed actress in her own right, stayed with “Merrily” for years, mounting a version in Boston and then, to enormous acclaim, an Off Broadway production in 2023 that moved to Broadway last fall, 42 years after the initial Broadway production closed after only 16 regular performances. Her “Merrily” won the Tony Award for best musical revival on Sunday night, as well as Tonys for two of its sensational stars, Jonathan Groff as Frank and Daniel Radcliffe as Charley.
Groff, Radcliffe and their co-star Lindsay Mendez created a bond of such affection and understanding that their trio of performances will stay in my memory for a long time.
In a surprise, Friedman didn’t win the Tony for best director of a musical on Sunday; that honor went to Danya Taymor, who did excellent work on “The Outsiders.”
Yet later in the Tony ceremony, when “Merrily” won for best musical revival, one of the show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman — who is the director’s sister and a legend in her own right — heaped praise on her sibling and tried to hand her Tony to her. Maria Friedman gently pushed the Tony away and then gave a loving tribute to the show and its creators, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.
“Well, Steve and George, ‘Merrily’s’ popular,” she said.
It was a class-act performance. If I could come up with a new Tony category and give the award, it would be to an artist who kept working and working on a puzzle of a show and its casting until she created a version for the ages, and that award would go to Maria Friedman for “Merrily.”
June 17, 2024, 11:07 a.m. ET
Pamela Paul
Opinion Columnist
A Warning on Social Media Is the Very Least We Can Do
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You’re in the middle of a public health emergency involving a dangerously addictive substance — let’s say an epidemic of fentanyl or vaping among teens. Which of the following is the best response?
1. Issue a warning. Tell everyone, “Hey, watch out — this stuff isn’t good for you.”
2. Regulate the dangerous substance so that it causes the least amount of harm.
3. Ban the substance and penalize anyone who distributes it.
In the midst of a well-documented mental health crisis among children and teenagers, with social media use a clear contributing factor, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recommends choice one. As he wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay on Monday, “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
It’s an excellent first step, but it’s a mere Band-Aid on a suppurating wound. Telling teenagers something is bad for them may work for some kids, but for others it’s practically an open invitation to abuse. To add muscle to a mere label, we need to prohibit its sale to people under 18 and enforce the law on sellers. We need to strongly regulate social media, as Europe has begun to do, and ban it for kids under 16. Murthy urges Congress to take similar steps.
Free-speech absolutists (or those who play the role when a law restricts something that earns them lots of money) will say that requiring age verification systems is an unconstitutional limit on free speech. Nonsense. We don’t allow children to freely attend PG-13 or R-rated movies. We don’t allow hard liquor to be advertised during children’s programming.
Other objections to regulation are that it’s difficult to carry out (so are many things) and that there’s only a correlative link between social media and adverse mental health rather than one of causation.
Complacency is easy. The hard truth is that many people are too addicted to social media themselves to fight for laws that would unstick their kids. Big Tech, with Congress in its pocket, is only too happy for everyone to keep their heads in the sand and reap the benefits. But a combination of Options 2 and 3 are the only ones that will bring real results.
A correction was made on
June 17, 2024
:
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the surgeon general. He is Dr. Vivek Murthy, not Murphy.
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June 17, 2024, 5:05 a.m. ET
Patrick Healy
Deputy Opinion Editor
Why the Election Is Slipping Away From President Biden Right Now
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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
The spring campaign season ends this week, and the political landscape is tough for President Biden: He isn’t winning over enough voters in the battleground states. In the springtime of re-election years, many voters decide whether they’re open or closed to another term for the guy in office. Call it the incumbent threshold decision. In previous cycles, many voters gave up on Donald Trump, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter by this time during re-election — those incumbents never held sustained leads in the polls after that.
When this spring began, on March 19, Trump had a polling average lead of 2 percentage points over Biden nationally, according to Real Clear Politics. As spring ends, Trump leads by about 1 percent. I think a successful spring for Biden would have had him ahead. Even more worrisome for Biden: Trump began the spring with leads in the six key swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. After months of Democratic campaigning in those states, Biden hasn’t taken the lead in any of them. Trump’s lead has held pretty steady in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. Biden has made up enough ground in Michigan and Wisconsin to be razor-close to Trump. There hasn’t been polling recently in Pennsylvania; the late-May polling average had Trump ahead by 2.3 points.
Some important context: The race is clearly tight, Biden has solid fund-raising, and he would win if he prevails in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But I think the spring is ending as a missed opportunity for Biden to gain more ground on Trump, especially with Trump’s felony conviction. Based on Times polling and Times Opinion focus groups, many undecided and independent voters see Biden as ineffective on the economy, immigration and foreign wars, and too old for a second term.
That’s why, this week, Biden plans to spend a lot of time in debate prep. The reason he agreed to this unusually early debate against Trump, on June 27, is because he needs it: Look at his springtime performance and the swing state polls, and the election is slipping away from Biden right now. He needs to start persuading more people to want him for another four years — and that he’s up to the job. He has a lot to lose in this debate, but I think he was smart to take the gamble.
As for Trump, he’ll be campaigning in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania this week. Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the whole ballgame this fall: If Trump holds his lead in the Sun Belt states, all he needs is Pennsylvania to win. Trump isn’t doing much debate prep, according to my colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, but the expectations for him are lower than for Biden. Many voters expect Trump to be the same unhinged guy he was in the 2020 debates, ranting and talking over Biden. Trump can afford to spend time in must-win Pennsylvania while Biden tries to ensure his summer is better than his spring.
