n the winter of outrage that followed, gun owners poured into Richmond, crowded county board meetings and formed paramilitary groups in one county after another.

But not everyone saw this fight as just about gun policy. It was also about power.

“Virginia is not the Virginia it used to be,” lamented John Sharp, a supervisor in Bedford County, which passed a militia resolution in May. “We’re outvoted.”

“Biden’s coming for us; there will be a war,” said Paul Cangialosi, who works with the Virginia Militia Alliance, created after last year’s election to organize armed groups across the state. “We don’t fix this at the ballot box, I hate to say it. We’re too divided.”

The founders saw militias, Mr. Abbott explained, as preventing “governments who had the majority from being able to impose their will on people who didn’t want their will.”

“If we do this tonight, what we’re doing is we’re just provoking or enhancing the possibility that we’re going to have civil unrest,” he said, talking of the fatal shootings at the August protests in Kenosha, Wis.

“That’s really not going to mean very much,” Mr. Powell said, noting that inflation has trended lower for decades. “Inflation dynamics will evolve, but it’s hard to make the case why they would evolve very suddenly, in this current situation.”

A lot of people are going to get hurt, and the pain will not be distributed randomly.

The legacy of the racism that infected so many of the New Deal’s achievements is particularly bitter for Black workers, who continue to live disproportionately in the states that provide the least aid to those who lose their jobs. During the last recession, only 23.8 percent of unemployed Black workers received benefits, compared to 33.2 percent of white workers, according to a 2012 analysis by the Urban Institute. Those who qualify for benefits also get less money. On average, the 11 former Confederate states replace just 40 percent of lost wages, compared to an average of 46 percent in the rest of the United States.

Although Americans generally agree that government should not act with racist intent, the unemployment safety net was designed with racist intent. And it continues to work in the way that it was designed, allowing Mississippi to badly serve Americans who live there.

For opponents of the federal supplements, any evidence the payments are allowing people to stay out of the job market or are driving up wages is seen as damning.

President Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants knew that a stronger safety net would drive up wages. They understood that helping those who weren’t working would help those who were working, too.

The average amount that workers got, relative to prior wages, has also been in steady decline.

Over the past 30 years, Mexico’s G.D.P. has grown at an average annual rate of only 2.2 percent, and there are enormous internal inequalities. The 10 richest people have the same wealth as the poorest half of the country, according to a 2018 Oxfam report.

In 2018, when Mr. López Obrador ran for the presidency for a third time, the indignation and rage of those left behind had reached a boiling point. The signs of discontent were visible: historically low approval of government performance and communities that were willing to take justice into their own hands. Mr. López Obrador offered a political pathway to dissipate this tension and won the election with more than 50 percent of the vote.

Since then he has radically increased the minimum wage; established about $33 billion in annual direct transfers and handouts to disadvantaged groups; and begun ambitious projects, like the Mayan train and the Dos Bocas refinery, in regions traditionally overlooked by central governments.

Many describe Mr. López Obrador’s style of governance and his social and economic projects as populist in nature.

But in short, Mr. López Obrador is a less radical politician than he’s accused of being and is more prudent with his management of government than he’s given credit for.

Baby birds aren’t the only youngsters brought to Walden’s Puddle by concerned people like me. The problem is that it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a baby animal that needs help and a baby animal whose worried parents are nearby, just waiting for the worried human to go away.

Fallen nestlings need help, for example, while fledglings are best left alone. Fledglings are babies too — still learning to fly, still being fed by their parents — but they don’t belong in a nest. “Fledgling songbirds often spend several days on the ground,” said Ms. Campbell. “To us they look tiny and helpless, but if they are fully feathered, then they are fine to be on the ground.”

And if a wild animal has moved into your own home — if a groundhog has burrowed under your foundation, say, or a raccoon has built a nursery in your attic — don’t hire an exterminator to trap and kill it, or even to relocate it: Animals evicted from their territories rarely survive, and this time of year they leave orphans behind.

The best option is just to wait a few weeks till the babies are ready to leave the nest, and then repair the hole where they entered. If giving them a little time isn’t feasible, humane forms of harassment can inspire the mother to move her family to a more hospitable location.

But others will adapt, and we will find ourselves living in ever closer proximity to one another. The least we can do is learn to recognize when a wild creature needs our help. And if we can make it less convenient for them to move into our homes while creating a healthier environment for them outdoors, we can all thrive. Together.

The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.

Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”

But the F.D.A. advisory committee, along with an independent think tank and several prominent experts — including some Alzheimer’s doctors who worked on the aducanumab clinical trials — said the evidence raised significant doubts about whether the drug is effective.

The F.D.A. authorized the drug under a program called accelerated approval, which has been applied to therapies for some cancers and other serious diseases for which there are few, if any, treatments.

The risks with aducanumab involve brain swelling or bleeding experienced by about 40 percent of Phase 3 trial participants receiving the high dose. Most were either asymptomatic or had headaches, dizziness or nausea. But such effects prompted 6 percent of high-dose recipients to discontinue. No Phase 3 participants died from the effects, but one safety trial participant did.

About two million Americans may fit the description of the patients the drug was tested on: people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or the stage just before that, Alzheimer’s-related mild cognitive impairment. About six million people in the United States and roughly 30 million globally have Alzheimer’s, a number expected to double by 2050. Currently, five medications approved in the United States can delay cognitive decline for several months in various Alzheimer’s stages.

The crux of the controversy over aducanumab involved two Phase 3 trials with results that contradicted each other: One suggested the drug slightly slowed cognitive decline while the other trial showed no benefit. The trials were stopped early by a data monitoring committee that found aducanumab didn’t appear to be showing any benefit. Consequently, over a third of the 3,285 participants in those trials were never able to complete them.

Aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, targets a protein, amyloid, that clumps into plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and is considered a biomarker of the disease. One thing both critics and supporters of approval agree on is that the drug substantially reduces levels of amyloid, and the F.D.A. said that the drug’s effect on a biomarker qualified it for the accelerated approval program.

He estimates 25 to 40 percent of the clinic’s roughly 3,000 patients might be eligible, but it doesn’t have enough neurologists.

The requirement is one of the last sex-based distinctions in federal law, one that challengers say cannot be justified now that women are allowed to serve in every role in the military, including ground combat. Unlike men, though, they are not required to register with the Selective Service System, the government agency that maintains a database of Americans who would be eligible for the draft were it reinstated.

The unequal treatment “imposes selective burdens on men, reinforces the notion that women are not full and equal citizens, and perpetuates stereotypes about men’s and women’s capabilities,” lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a petition on behalf of two men who were required to register and the National Coalition for Men.

The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.

Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)

These decreases are the result of many Chinese women’s decision to postpone marriage and childbearing. There are many reasons for these changes in behavior, notably urbanization, greater access to higher education for women and rising expectations about standards of living.

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”Lifting controls over births would be, for the Chinese Communist Party, a tacit admission that its past policies have failed. And yet anything short of removing all such regulations will only ensure more failure.

The arc of Mr. Byrd’s half-century career in the chamber is instructive. In the deliberations around the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he conducted one of the most disgraceful filibusters in Senate history, joining a two-month effort by Southern senators to derail the landmark legislation. But about 13 years later, Senate Democrats showed their confidence in his changed attitude by making him majority leader.

Mr. Byrd recognized this obstruction as a mortal threat to a functioning Senate. Working with Vice President Walter Mondale, who was presiding in the Senate, Mr. Byrd moved forcefully to crush the next post-cloture filibuster in 1978 (this time brought by two liberal Democrats).

It is fundamental to the distinctive nature of the Senate that the minority party must have its rights protected. But the best way to do that is through regular order — a legislative process that involves public hearings, committee work in which bipartisan understanding of issues develops and principled compromise occurs, and a vigorous amendment process and serious debate on the Senate floor, leading to a final vote, with the majority prevailing.

Moreover, there is no convincing rationale for establishing two classes of legislative action. It should be unacceptable that the $2.1 trillion tax cut in 2017 or the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act could be done by majority vote (through reconciliation) but that 60 votes are required before helping the Dreamers, requiring background checks for guns, combating climate change or protecting the right to vote.

Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).

For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I

If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?

The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.

But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself.

What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.

Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.

More to the point, though, the question of how the U.S. would respond reflects a myopia about the origins of Hamas shelling.

Israeli officials did not wake up one bright morning to find thousands of rockets raining down,” notes Sari Bashi, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “Israeli security forces, led by a prime minister desperate to stay in power to avoid jail on corruption charges, created a provocation by using violence and the threat of violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem. They stormed a sensitive religious site, used excessive force against demonstrators and threatened to forcibly transfer Palestinian families from their homes as part of an official policy to ‘Judaize’ occupied East Jerusalem, which is a war crime.”

So the question of how the United States would respond if Canada started shelling Seattle seems misplaced. After all, Israel deliberately nurtured Hamas in the first place (to create a rival to existing Palestinian groups), and the United Nations and most experts consider Israel to be occupying Gaza (because Israel controls it, even though it withdrew in 2005).

Similarly, the Irish Republican Army, with support from some in Ireland and the United States, bombed Britain’s Parliament, Harrods department store and the Conservative Party Conference, along with innumerable other targets. Yet Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not bomb Dublin or Boston, nor did she bulldoze the offices of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political wing.

In 2018, ETA announced it was disbanding, adding “we are truly sorry” for violence that claimed 800 lives. In Northern Ireland, where the conflict initially seemed even more intractable than the disputes in the Middle East do today, a negotiated peace was reached with the Good Friday accords of 1998.

Ms. Cain continued, “When athletes are not protected, they should be able to make choices that protect themselves. It’s like saying you don’t want to be with a company that doesn’t treat you well.”

“I am not a natural public speaker and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media,” she wrote. “I get really nervous and find it stressful to always try to engage.”

The power balance has changed — redistributing leverage among public figures, the journalists and publications that cover them, and the companies that they do business with. Social media has provided athletes and other celebrities a direct line to their public, cutting out the middlemen. When Ms. Osaka released a statement explaining her decision and the steps that led to it, she did so on her own platforms.

Indeed, Ms. Osaka’s statement, which appeared to be written on the notepad app of her phone, was arguably among the most influential uses of media of her career.

We’ve seen this with other young celebrities, such as the British actor, writer and director Michaela Coel, who told Vulture that she declined a $1 million Netflix deal when the streamer wouldn’t let her retain a percentage of the copyright to her show “I May Destroy You.” She fired her agents in the U.S. for pushing the deal, choosing instead the bold path of going agentless in Hollywood.

Like many successful athletes, Ms. Osaka gets most of her earnings from endorsements, not prize money or salaries. Her high profile started with her accomplishments on the tennis court, and her talent sustains that profile, but she has grown into a respected and influential brand herself. She has often taken risks with that influence, whether it’s wearing masks in support of Black Lives Matter at the U.S. Open last year or pushing back against critics on social media who criticized her for ruining her “innocent” image by posting photos of herself in a bathing suit.

“You are often compared to the Williams sisters. Maybe it’s because you’re Black. But I guess it’s because you’re talented and maybe American, too,” a journalist reportedly declared, bizarrely, before asking, “We could have a final between you and Serena. Is it something you hope for? I mean, 22 years separate you girls.”

This latest episode is evidence that when athletes such as Ms. Osaka and LeBron James are told to refrain from commenting on racism or politics and instead to shut up and play, it has always included an unsaid caveat: “unless we stand to profit off your voice.”

This April, prodded or perhaps even shamed by prominent Black business leaders, 170 executives of major companies signed a statement protesting a vote-suppression measure enacted in Georgia and ones pending in other states.

And this brings us to a subject that corporate America would evidently prefer not to talk about: abortion. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I’ve been listening hard, and so far all I’ve heard is the sound of silence.

. The article pointed out that in the four days between April 26 and April 29, 28 new abortion restrictions were signed into law in seven states. As of mid-May, bills proposing 549 separate abortion restrictions had been introduced in 47 states, including 165 that would ban abortion.

Much of this activity might have been shrugged off as just so much political theater had the Supreme Court not agreed last month to hear Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that under current doctrine is unconstitutional. While the country may not learn until a year from now how receptive the court is to revising or abandoning its abortion precedents, its acceptance of the Mississippi case for argument in the fall serves as a welcome mat to states trying to outdo one another in anti-abortion zealotry.

But nothing can compete with the law that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed last month. Not only does it ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant — but it effectively deputizes the entire world’s population to enforce the ban, authorizing “any person” to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion outside that time frame

All would be subject to a $10,000 fine plus the plaintiff’s court costs for each successful lawsuit. At the same time, the law strips the state itself of enforcement power. The purpose of that novel provision is to prevent abortion providers from going to court, because there is no entity they can sue.

Abortion may be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, but don’t misunderstand the silence. Abortion is not rare. It is, in fact, a common female experience, although I’ll grant that it is not as common as voting. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and some 40 percent of those end in abortion. This is life as women live it, even in Texas.

Your silence is acquiescence; it’s a decision. You’re making a decision. Your silence is a decision. And when you recognize that, some of these issues are so salient and so critical that you have to take a position.

“The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden.

And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

Congress now has a month to pass the bill. In July, it will go to committee, where Senators Reed and Inhofe’s influence leaves the legislation’s solutions vulnerable to being watered down or minimized.