“India e Giappone sono xenofobi come Cina e Russia”/ La gaffe di Biden che rischia di creare un incidente

Dozens of used electric-vehicle batteries were stacked like cordwood on pallets in a warehouse-style building about 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada, when I visited the site last week.The batteries were bound for an assembly line that would begin the chemical process of recycling up to 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they contain. Eventually, after treatment in two more buildings on the site, the metals will become a high-value, fine black powder called cathode active material that is shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to Toyota and Panasonic for the manufacture of new EV batteries.This cutting-edge recycling process has been developed by a company named Redwood Materials. Founded by J. B. Straubel, a former chief technology officer at Tesla, Redwood has invested about $2 billion in this 300-acre facility located in an industrial park in rural Storey County, not far from where Tesla has built a massive “Gigafactory” manufacturing complex.With about 900 employees now on-site, and a workforce of 1,500 expected when the plant is operating at capacity, Redwood’s Nevada facility embodies the economic opportunities spinning off from the environmental imperative to reduce carbon emissions and combat the risk of global climate change.[Read: Biden’s blue-collar bet]The facility is also a testament to the incongruous political dynamics forming around the emerging electric-vehicle industry and the broader transition toward a clean-energy economy.Electric vehicles are being adopted at the fastest rate inside blue-leaning major metropolitan areas. In polls, self-identified Democrats now express much more openness to purchasing an EV than Republicans.Yet counties that Donald Trump won in 2020, such as Nevada’s tiny Storey County, are receiving the most private investment, and the jobs associated with it, in new EV-production facilities, according to a Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to The Atlantic.The paradox is that even as those red-leaning places are receiving the greatest direct economic benefits from the EV transition, they have mostly elected Republican House members who voted last year to repeal the new federal tax incentives that have encouraged these investments. These places are also likely to provide most of their votes this fall to Trump, who has pledged to repeal “on day one” all of President Joe Biden’s efforts to accelerate the EV transition.All of this raises doubts about whether it’s sustainable for the emerging EV industry to rely preponderantly on Democratic-leaning places for both its sales and political backing, while providing the greatest economic lift to Republican-leaning places electing political figures hostile to government support for the industry. Put another way: Is red makers for blue takers a viable model for the green economy?“Every industrial order requires policy support, and so you can certainly imagine all sorts of problems if you have a complete disconnect of the production side from the consumption side,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told me.The risk of losing federal support has come as the electric-vehicle industry faces a noticeable slowdown in its previously rapid sales growth. That means the industry could experience even greater disruption if Trump wins and succeeds in repealing the incentives for EV adoption that Biden signed into the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.If the incentives are rescinded, U.S. companies across the emerging EV industry will find it much more difficult to survive the rising competitive challenge from China, Albert Gore III, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me.“The role of public policy in achieving the objective of eventually out-competing China in manufacturing batteries, battery components, and EVs themselves is really significant,” said Gore, the son of the former vice president and environmental advocate Al Gore. “Those two bills have taken existing momentum [in the industry] and accelerated it and magnified it.”At this early stage in the industry’s development, the mismatch between the geography of EV production and consumption—between the makers and takers—could hardly be greater.In its tabulation, Brookings Metro identifies more than $123 billion in U.S. investments in EV plants since Biden took office. Almost exactly 70 percent of that spending has flowed into counties Trump won in 2020, Brookings found.The environmental group Climate Power tracks all private-sector investment in clean energy, including facilities that manufacture components for generating solar and wind electric power, and plants that provide semiconductors for clean-energy products and improvements to the electric grid. In its latest report, the group found that since passage of the IRA, Republican-held House districts had received three-fourths of the total $352 billion in clean-energy investment under that broader definition; the GOP districts had also received 53 percent of all the jobs associated with those investments.In contrast, the places where EVs comprise the largest share of new vehicle registrations are entirely large blue-leaning metropolitan areas, according to a recent New York Times analysis using data from S&P Global Mobility. All six of the metro areas where EVs exceed 20 percent of new registrations are on the West Coast, including five in California and Seattle; other places where EVs have made the most inroads, the Times found, include Portland, Oregon; Denver; Las Vegas; Phoenix; and Washington, D.C. Deep-blue California alone accounts for more than one-third of all U.S. EV registrations.Polling shows that uncertainty about EV costs, reliability, and charging infrastructure is evident among a broad range of Americans. But the partisan gap over EVs remains striking.In Gallup polling this spring, about one-fourth of Democrats said they either own or are seriously considering purchasing an EV; nearly another half of Democrats said they were somewhat open to buying one. But Republican voters have become deeply resistant to EVs; in both the 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys, about seven in 10 say they would never buy one. Other polling this year has found that while Democrats, by a ratio of about 10 to one, believe that EVs are better for the environment and more energy efficient than gas-powered cars, a plurality of Republicans say that traditional internal-combustion-engine vehicles are better on both counts. Republicans are also far more likely than Democrats to say that gas-powered cars are safer, more reliable, and more affordable to operate. And of course, many more Republicans than Democrats to begin with reject the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are dangerously transforming the environment.Brian Deese, who helped devise Biden’s clean-energy strategy as his first director of the National Economic Council, told me that economics, not politics, explained the geography of EV production. In choosing where to locate their plants, Deese said, companies are not focusing on a community’s political inclinations but rather are looking for places with lots of space, as well as nearby manufacturing and construction capacity. All of those factors, he notes, tend to be most available in communities outside major metro areas that are now preponderantly represented by Republicans. Labor officials would add one other factor: In many cases, companies are locating their new EV facilities in Republican-leaning states with right-to-work laws that impede union organizing.Deese also thinks it’s too soon to assume that Democratic voters will remain the prime market for EVs. Although polls today show such political polarization around EVs, “it’s pretty hard to think of a technology where there was a cheaper, better technology to solve a consumer need and consumers prioritized a cultural or political patina over lower costs and higher quality,” said Deese, who is now a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.The challenge for the EV industry is that the current mismatch between its makers and takers could doom the public policies promoting its growth before it can prove its value to consumers across the political spectrum.The industry’s key firms, as Gore told me, began investing in EV facilities long before Biden signed the IRA and infrastructure bills, or finalized the Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring auto manufacturers to sell a growing number of zero-emission vehicles over the next decade. But companies, he added, are undoubtedly counting on both those carrots and sticks when calculating how much consumer demand will grow to support the EV-production facilities they are building.Redwood itself typifies that dynamic. Alexis Georgeson, Redwood’s vice president of government relations and communications, pointed out that the company was formed in 2017, while Trump was president; even then, she told me, Straubel recognized that as the number of EVs on the road increased, recycling their batteries could provide an economic opportunity while also reducing U.S. reliance on foreign sources of lithium and other critical minerals the batteries require. “Our mission, our business proposition, has not changed as a result of what we have seen happening with this administration,” Georgeson said.But Georgeson is quick to add that the policies approved under Biden have “been tremendously helpful to us.” Redwood has been approved for a $2 billion federal loan to fund further expansion of its Nevada site (although it has not received any of the money yet). It also will benefit from the IRA provisions that provide tax credits for producers and consumers in order to encourage domestic manufacture of EV batteries. Within a few years, Redwood expects to be producing enough of the recycled minerals, as well as superthin foil from recycled copper, to manufacture at least 1 million EV batteries a year.Devon Reese, a Reno city-council member, told me that the EV industry’s rapid expansion in the area has come with “growing pains” mostly relating to ensuring reliable transportation to the isolated Storey County. But overall, he said, there’s no question that the industry’s growth “absolutely has been a net positive” for the community. There are “probably nearly 11,000 jobs that have been created in this region by the energy projects,” Reese told me. “That represents a lot of families, and homes that are owned, and apartments that are rented, and stores that are shopped in.”Despite this enormous flow of investment into the Reno region from Redwood and Tesla’s “Gigafactory,” Mark Amodei, the area’s Republican U.S. representative, joined every other House Republican last year in voting to repeal all of the IRA’s incentives for EV production and clean energy. Every House and Senate Republican also voted against the initial passage of the IRA in 2022.After his repeal vote, Amodei told me he questioned how many of the construction and production jobs would really go to Nevada residents. “The benefits I don’t think outweighed the negative stuff in terms of debt, inflation, and—oh, by the way—how much really came to Nevada,” Amodei said. He also said that the pace at which Biden is seeking to encourage a transition away from internal-combustion engines toward EVs “borders on suicidal” and “just makes no sense unless it’s all about a political agenda and not much about solving problems” (Amodei’s office did not respond to a question about whether his views have changed since then).Environmentalists had hoped that the spread of clean-energy investments into Republican-held seats would politically safeguard the IRA the same way the diffusion of military projects across virtually every state and district ensures broad bipartisan congressional support for defense-spending bills. Groups, including Climate Power, are running ads in swing states this year touting the new jobs that EV manufacturers are creating, for instance in building fully electric school buses. “This is really about jobs in the United States,” Alex Glass, Climate Power’s managing director of communications, told me. “What Donald Trump has been saying is he would rather have these jobs—the jobs of the future—happen in China.”But the willingness of all House Republicans to vote to repeal Biden’s EV incentives, even while their districts are receiving most of the investment flowing from them, challenged the traditional assumption that politicians fear voting against policies that are providing direct economic benefits to their voters.[Read: Biden’s ‘big build’]Now the hope among clean-energy advocates is that some Republicans whose districts are benefiting from these incentives voted to rescind them last year only because they knew that repeal could never become law with a Democratic Senate and president. If Trump wins, and Republicans seize unified control of Congress next year, a vote to repeal the IRA incentives would transform from a symbolic gesture into an actual threat to jobs in these districts. Even under a scenario of unified Republican control in Washington next year, “our perspective is that it would be quite challenging” for the GOP to assemble enough votes for repeal, Georgeson said.As evidence, she pointed to the disconnect between Republican opposition to the IRA in Washington and the cooperation the company has received from GOP governors and other state officials in Nevada and South Carolina, where it is beginning work on an even larger recycling plant that will involve $3.5 billion in investment. “Both states have been incredibly supportive of us,” she told me, providing assistance not only in infrastructure but in forging partnerships with local colleges to train workers for the new jobs.Gore told me that the electric-vehicle industry will mobilize to defend the federal tax and spending programs promoting its growth if Republicans try again to repeal them next year. The industry, he said, must do a better job of demonstrating how it is benefiting the Republican-leaning communities where it is primarily investing. But, he added, it can now marshal powerful evidence for that case in the form of new manufacturing plants and jobs. “No politician sees a vote against a popular growing factory in his or her district as a winning issue,” Gore told me.As Trump and congressional Republicans escalate their threats against Biden’s environmental agenda, the best defense for the emerging clean-energy industry may be the growing number of red communities benefiting from the green of new paychecks.

Global leaders, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, have committed to improving future responses to similar situations, but establishing a pandemic treaty has proven difficult.

Beijing's maritime force lacks the support systems to match America, despite it's new third aircraft carrier, expert tells Newsweek.

With this gift, she is always with him—even when they're apart.

Israeli Defense Forces continue strikes on the Gaza city of Rafah and prepare for a planned ground invasion after ceasefire talks with Hamas leaders in Cairo, Egypt fell apart.

Citizens and politicians of Switzerland debate what form the country's historic neutrality should take as it pertains to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A16-year-old boy has been arrested for defacing a WW1 monument in Central Park by spray painting “Gaza" in red across the base of the structure.

Speaker Mike Johnson has spoken out against any move to "defund" Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Police in riot gear began dismantling an anti-Israel encampment at the University of Pennsylvania and arresting protesters early Friday after more than two weeks of the demonstration on campus.

The former president's legal team has been accused of making frequent errors during his hush money trial in recent days.

"There is no shame to be able to acknowledge that today is a bad day," Harry told school children in Nigeria with Meghan Markle.

Several days after Ric Flair's viral confrontation at a Gainesville, Florida, restaurant, the WWE legend said he was "wrong for getting mad" and expressed regret.

Somehow, the Knicks are simultaneously in the midst of their most special season in a quarter-century while being held together by Silly Putty.

Target has announced that it will only sell their Pride Month collection in select stores after suffering a backlash and boycott last year during the 2023 Pride season.

Greece's contestant Marina Satti was filmed yawning during remarks made by her Israeli competitor, sparking criticism online.

GOP figures discuss what the former president must do to win over those still backing Nikki Haley in the primaries.

President Biden sparked backlash on social media when he proclaimed in a post that under his administration, no American citizens are being left behind.

“I can almost not wrap my head around it still, and I'm living in it," Tyler Wenrich said. "It's definitely a nightmare.”

Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog has voiced strong discontent over the U.S. decision to publicly announce that it will withhold certain weapons from Israel.

Treat mom this May with a delightful dessert. These five fruits and vegetables are seasonal in spring, making them ideal ingredients for a flavorful treat.

Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Max Muncy had a rough defensive start to the season, but has found his bearings in the field over the last month.

Built on the site of a 19th-century gallows complex, this courthouse may be as close as Trump gets to prison.

Actress Phylicia Rashad is stepping down after leading the school’s College of Fine Arts.

President Biden welcomed the back-to-back reigning WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces to the White House on Thursday, but he flubbed when referencing one of the team's members.

A fisherman who had been going up and down the nearby river claimed he heard crying and the fatal shot before discovering Miller's belongings lying along the riverbank.

The Disney star dated Bieber on-and-off for almost 10 years, before the singer wed model Hailey Baldwin in 2018.

For the first time since 2005, NOAA says an "unusual event" has led to a severe G4 geomagnetic storm watch for Friday.

Five ejections of solar plasma from the sun may slam into the Earth in the next day or so, sparking powerful geomagnetic storms.

Kyiv said in February that thousands of Starlink satellite communications terminals were used by Russian troops in Ukraine.

The Smith Entertainment Group is asking fans in Salt Lake City to help name their new NHL franchise for next season. Here are the top five names on the 20-name list.

A Missouri state representative said children today would rather play video games and join gangs than work.

Don't miss Van Cleef & Arpels' "Blooms on Fifth Avenue, The Costume Institute's "Sleeping Beauties," the Natural History Museum's hip-hop jewelry show, a cool new bar on Wall Street, the Jayson Home pop-up at Bergdorf Goodman and more New York events on this week's Alexa calendar.

Stormy Daniels leaves Manhattan Criminal Court on May 9, 2024, in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images What we learned from Daniels’s testimony. A New York case against former President Donald Trump, once considered the least important of the four criminal suits he faces, could now be the only one to have a direct impact ahead of the election. This case, which centers on whether Trump falsified business records in order to hide hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels, is currently on trial. (Two cases involving Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, as well as a third involving his mishandling of classified documents, are stalled and may not be heard in court until after November.) And boy what a trial it is — cutting memes, potential betrayals, and more. Despite the significance of the New York trial, it hasn’t necessarily broken through to most US voters: As of late April, just 45 percent of people have been following its developments, according to a PBS/NPR/Marist poll. Because Trump has faced so many legal cases, including another civil suit related to business fraud, many people have grappled with fatigue as these cases have blurred together. Enter: Daniels’s testimony this week. Given her prominent platform, the ongoing interest in her relationship with Trump, and her willingness to speak out about the intimidation she’s faced in the past, Daniels’s appearance seemed to raise the case’s profile. It’s not likely, however, that it will shift much of Trump’s core support just yet. What Daniels said Daniels’s testimony, which spanned multiple days this week, featured intimate details about her 2006 encounter with Trump and marked the first time the two had come face to face in years. By divulging this information, Daniels helped prosecutors establish that she and Trump had had a sexual relationship, something he has denied. Providing evidence of that relationship enables prosecutors to make the case that he had reason to pay money to cover it up. The defense team, meanwhile, sought to undermine Daniels’s credibility by asking about her animus toward Trump and her financial incentives for coming forward about the relationship with him. While Daniels’s testimony may not be as key as that of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer who allegedly helped facilitate the hush money payments and who is expected to take the stand to testify against him, it does provide “the critical motive for Trump to be frantic about her revelations weeks before the election and try to buy her silence,” Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman told Vox. Below are some excerpts of what Daniels said on the witness stand. She described in detail her sexual encounter with Trump. Daniels recounted the 2006 relationship, noting that her “own insecurities, in that moment, kept [her] from saying no,” and that she felt there was a “power imbalance.” She also included specifics, stating that Trump was initially wearing silk or satin pajamas, that he did not wear a condom, and that he asked about her career. After the encounter, she says he told her, “Let’s get together again, honey bunch.” Following this testimony on Tuesday, the defense called for a mistrial, arguing that Daniels’s statements would prejudice the jury against Trump. The judge denied this request. She denied that her decision to speak out about Trump was motivated by money. Daniels was questioned multiple times by the defense about whether she was motivated to come forward because of financial gain. Daniels said that she had profited from the story but emphasized that she was looking for accountability. “I have been making money by telling my story,” she said, while also adding, “It has also cost me a lot of money.” Daniels also said that it had been a net “negative” for her life to come forward about the encounter. She pushed back on claims that she fabricated her story. Daniels repeatedly rebutted assertions from the defense suggesting that she had made up the encounter. “If that story was untrue,” she said, “I would’ve written it to be a lot better.” She made clear she dislikes Trump. The defense pressed Daniels on her stance toward the former President in an attempt to undermine her reliability. “Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense attorney Susan Necheles asked. “Yes,” Daniels responded. She confirmed she received the hush money payment but did not confirm Trump’s involvement. Daniels testified that she received $130,000 in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement. She also stated that her attorney had negotiated the payment with Cohen and that she did not have knowledge of Trump’s involvement with it. Will it break through? Notably, there’s been less enthusiasm about this election so far relative to past ones. In April, an NBC News poll found that the proportion of voters who have high interest in the presidential contest has hit a 20-year low. As one Democrat put it in a New York Times story about the general burnout members of the “resistance” have experienced this year, “It’s crisis fatigue, for sure.” Daniels’s testimony has certainly generated more attention this week, though experts note that it alone might not be enough to hurt Trump’s base. “​​Stormy Daniels has always been clickbait. Thus, more people are likely to tune in to hear about her testimony than the testimony of the Trump Org’s controller,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University. This is also one of the cases against Trump that’s on shakier legal ground, some experts say, and Trump’s core backers in particular already view this trial as a political attack. That’s unlikely to change, says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “If I were designing a legal case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, I would design exactly the case that’s being brought in New York,” Ayres told Vox. Ultimately, it could well come down to a conviction to determine whether there’s an impact on the 2024 election at all. An April AP poll found that 47 percent of independents, some of whom could be swing voters, would not consider Trump to be fit to be president if he is convicted. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Quips about sex and pornography, questions on motivation, and turd-based tweets all came up during Stormy Daniels' second day on the witness stand.

There have been at least 105 reported tornadoes reported across the country since Monday.

Set within London Jewelers’ dazzling Manhasset flagship, Two by London — the 2,200-square-foot luxurious engagement jewelry boutique — has a brand-new look.

The American Longboard Association has opted to allow to a transgender female in the women's division of a surf competition in California.

A U.S. committee has launched an inquiry into the Georgia Institute of Technology's collaboration with a Chinese institution accused of ties to the People's Liberation Army.

The Baby Phat designer clarified that her 21-year-old child did not have "an anything" with the restaurateur, claiming she was "set up."

Shaquille O'Neal is a big fan of Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic, but on Wednesday, he let the six-time NBA All-Star know that he did not believe Jokic deserved his third MVP award.

"It just opens up a book of people really talking about their experience and like why these things feel important to them personally, which is really special."

The executive branch has steadily accrued power, leading to failure born of inflated expectations.

Common Sense Media reviews of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Star Wars: Tales of the Empire,” “Unfrosted” and “Prom Dates.”

Now people often stop him and say: “You’re the guy who takes his mom out to lunch,” said Chris Allen, who thinks “that’s a wonderful way to be introduced.”

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”[Yair Rosenberg: The day after Netanyahu ]The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.He said he felt a wave of disbelief, as if he were getting away with something. “I had to pinch myself,” he told me. He had been marching in the streets against Netanyahu. Now he was giving press conferences behind a lectern that said PRIME MINISTER on it. Would anyone notice the reversal? “I was wondering at what point people were going to clock that the person now speaking on TV for the Israeli government had until recently been protesting against it.”“There was complete pandemonium,” he said, with foreign-media requests coming fast and just a tiny crew to field them. “We were operating on pure adrenaline.” In practice, that meant saying yes to all reasonable requests, and offering regular “White House–style” press conferences from the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters. Levy’s time at the podium and on news shows made him famous, or notorious, depending on one’s view of the Gaza war. Israeli comedians lightly lampooned him in sketches. His eyebrows became world-famous when he raised them, theatrically, at a Sky News presenter who had asked a question so bizarre and pretzeled in its logic that it must be seen to be believed. (She suggested that Israel had traded 150 Palestinian prisoners for only 50 Israeli hostages because Israel undervalues Palestinian life.)As the war proceeded, and Gaza suffered more death and destruction, Levy’s resolute refusal to accept blame for civilian misery earned him the hatred and distrust of many. He maintained that opinion polls revealed that Hamas “represents the Palestinians.” His own language tended to be civilized and diplomatic. But when Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter used language (Nakba) guaranteed to make Palestinians think they were about to be ethnically cleansed, rather than repudiate those words, Levy seemed to relish the challenge of rising in their defense. And he treated other concerns about ethnic cleansing, which did not come from nowhere, as simply “outrageous and false accusations.” (“As a government official,” Levy told me later, “there is a limit to the amount you can repudiate statements by members of the government, even when they’re supremely unhelpful.”)Levy’s performance was “indicative of what is wrong with a lot of Israel’s PR efforts,” Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a British translator and analyst who knew Levy when they were Oxford undergraduates, told me. He expressed doubt that Israel’s ideal representative would be a recreational contrarian with an accent straight from the Oxford Union. Levy, Al-Tamimi said, “treated his spokesman position as though it were a debating competition.”In late November, after a brief pause for a successful prisoner exchange, the Israel-Hamas war resumed, and the government started facing intense domestic criticism for failing to engineer another swap. Around that time, the team handling Israel’s shambolic public-diplomacy operation started to get hints of an effort to purge those with suspect politics. “Something changed,” Shirona Partem, another erstwhile protester who had joined the government’s press team after October 7, told me. In addition to Levy, whose job was to speak on the record to foreign outlets, the government had hired a small crew of press liaisons to take media requests and coordinate interviews. “We were building something professional, not political,” she said. Partem emphasized that they spoke only to foreign media, so nothing they did could have been construed as undermining the government against its domestic opposition.By December, though, her unit was told to stand down. Partem and others had developed relationships with reporters, and also with various Israeli experts and government offices from which those reporters were seeking information. Many of them kept replying to media requests—showing up for work, in effect, after having been fired. But officially, their positions were left empty. The prime minister’s office is known to be jealous of power and credit, and it had begun ensuring that no professional operation would succeed the apolitical team it had shut down.Levy was exempt from the December purge, and for the next months was even unleashed to speak to Israeli media. He had recently gone viral for the eyebrow incident, and the government liked having someone with a little brio in front of the cameras, in contrast to the ministers who were still either shy or gaffe-prone. But he says he soon began to sense a chill in his relationship with the prime minister’s office. On January 17, he was told to share the podium more—a request that went against his instincts, as he had been trying to build a personal relationship with viewers and media, and also because he is a diva. He suspects that his protester past had become an issue, even though he maintains that it did not affect his work. “I don’t think that anyone who watched any of the interviews or press conferences I gave could say I injected personal opinion,” Levy said. Soon, someone in the prime minister’s office was briefing the media against him. He stressed that he has no direct knowledge of who was responsible, though multiple sources told me Sara Netanyahu had become irate over perceived political disloyalty.The British foreign minister’s alleged complaint about Levy came in March, according to the BBC and Israeli media. That began the terminal phase of Levy’s spokesmanship. In a tweet, Cameron had urged the passage of more aid into Gaza. Levy countered that the channels for aid were unimpeded, saying, “There are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment”—a claim at odds with the extreme scarcity of all of those items in Gaza. Cameron’s office allegedly sent an arch inquiry to the prime minister’s office, to see if Levy was freelancing. Levy was soon suspended, though he denies that Cameron ever intervened to have him sacked. Levy said the supposed complaint was in fact just a single WhatsApp, sent from a Foreign Office employee to the prime minister’s office. (Cameron’s own spokesperson said, “We wouldn’t comment on the domestic appointments of another government.”) But he soon found his position untenable, and by April, he had resigned completely and was back in front of a camera at home, representing Israel pro bono.Levy is in some ways understanding about the return of politics. “Cracks emerged,” he told me. He rattled off a number of bitter divides among Israelis: whether to prioritize the destruction of Hamas or the return of hostages; whether Netanyahu should resign now or later; whether the military should invade Rafah. These are all hard questions, he admitted, and it is to be expected that they would be divisive. “But my job was to keep politics aside,” he says. “And it’s sad to see that politics can infect what should be a national mission.”Partem, his colleague, is now back in private life too. She told me she worries about how poorly Israel has waged its PR war—especially compared with Iran and Russia, both anti-Israel maestros. “We’re on the right side of history, but it feels like we weren’t able to convey that message,” she said. Her time as a mouthpiece for the government gave her hope, she added, “because she found that Israelis of all political persuasions were willing to work together—even if the government itself was too focused on its survival to join the effort. “Anybody who is in power for too long gets a bit delusional,” she told me. “We know there are people up for the task. But this current government is really a unique set of people who shouldn’t be there.”

On March 21, a little less than a month before India’s national elections, the main opposition party, Congress, held a press conference to announce that its campaign was paralyzed. The government had earlier frozen the party’s bank accounts in connection with an alleged tax violation from the 1990s. Now the party was struggling to support its parliamentary candidates, and its ground organization had sputtered to a halt.Later that evening, fewer than 10 miles away, cops and paramilitaries surrounded the official bungalow of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi province and a member of another opposition party, seeking his arrest on corruption charges. His supporters began a spontaneous protest, and amid the frenzy, Kejriwal became the first sitting chief minister to be arrested in India’s history. The events of March 21 are part of a pattern that has cast doubt on the legitimacy of India’s election. According to this year’s report by Freedom House, a bipartisan think tank that evaluates democracies across the world, Modi’s government “has selectively pursued anti-corruption investigations against opposition politicians while overlooking allegations against political allies.” Many of those politicians have then been cleared of the charges if they joined Modi’s party: Of 25 opposition leaders probed for corruption, 23 saw their charges dropped when they switched parties. These and other worrying developments are striking in a country that has long prided itself as the biggest and most unlikely modern democratic success story.[Ashoka Mody: Is India an autocracy?]India conducted its first election during the winter of 1951–2, a mammoth exercise that took five months to complete. For a nation that was overwhelmingly illiterate, poor, and racked by social divisions, the decision to adopt the universal adult franchise at one stroke was extraordinarily ambitious. Just preparing the country’s first electoral roll, enlisting 173 million voters, was a staggering undertaking—one actually completed before the constitution was even enacted in 1950. “Indians became voters before they were citizens,” the scholar Ornit Shani has written.Indian elections have taken place, largely uninterrupted, ever since. Not only is this record rare among postcolonial nations; it is somewhat of a paradox within the context of India itself. Low indices for human development and shoddy public services testify to the country’s inefficiency on many counts, and yet, India has tended to organize the world’s largest elections with relative ease. The country’s election commission is largely responsible for this success. The constitutional body has overseen 17 national elections and hundreds of provincial elections in states as large as European nations; today it caters to nearly 1 billion voters and marshals nearly 15 million workers to conduct a national election. The commission is led by a three-person panel whose chief, like a high-ranking judge, can be removed only if Parliament impeaches them. At least since the 1990s, chief election commissioners have been independent and powerful figures who inspire fear in politicians and their parties. Many voters believe that opposition politicians, such as Arvind Kejriwal, pictured on placard at left, have become targets of selective law enforcement. (Idrees Mohammed / AFP / Getty) Narendra Modi has managed to undermine all that during his decade as prime minister. In December, his government passed a law amending the selection process for choosing election commissioners such that the executive branch would have the most say over the process. That he chose to interfere is little wonder. Independent election commissioners had posed an obstacle to Modi almost from the beginning of his political career.When Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002, a spasm of religious violence killed more than 1,000 people there, mostly Muslims. Modi dissolved the provincial assembly and called for elections six months ahead of schedule, likely hoping to capitalize on the climate of religious polarization that gripped the province. But J. M. Lyngdoh, then the chief election commissioner, visited Gujarat and concluded that local insecurity called for deferring elections until the winter. Modi responded by impugning Lyngdoh’s motivations and mocking his Christian identity.By 2019, Modi had mostly taken care of this problem: He was ensconced as prime minister, and had rendered the election commission all but toothless, having filled the body with handpicked former bureaucrats closely allied with the Hindu right.For decades, a stringent code of conduct governed elections in India, and transgressions could result in public censure, bans from campaigning, and, in extreme cases, the disqualification of candidates. And yet, in 2019, the commission heard five complaints against Modi for violating the election code—by seeking votes in the name of the military, for example, and appealing to the electorate on religious grounds. It somehow contrived to clear Modi in all five cases.Five years later, Modi is leading an even more incendiary and divisive campaign, and the commission appears to be comatose. On April 6, Modi described the Congress party’s manifesto as reflecting the mentality of the Muslim League, the separatist organization that led to the creation of Pakistan and is widely reviled in India, even though the manifesto made no reference to religion. Then, in an election rally on April 21, Modi told voters that the Congress party intended to seize their private wealth and distribute it among India’s 200 million Muslims, whom he characterized as infiltrators producing more than their share of children.Modi’s speech almost certainly violated not only the election code but also Indian laws against hate speech and inciting religious discord. Perhaps even Modi realized he had gone too far: The transcripts of the speech uploaded to the prime minister’s website did not include the most offensive passages. Even so, his remarks caused an uproar in India. Political parties and more than 20,000 private citizens complained to the election commission, seeking its intervention. If the electoral body did not act, Sagarika Ghose, an opposition legislator wrote on X, “then let’s please wind up the Election Commission and forget about the Model Code of Conduct.”The commission responded timidly, with a notice not to Modi but to the president of his Bharatiya Janata Party. In the past, the commission directly censured political leaders for their violations; today its reluctance to confront the prime minister surprises no one. Commissioners know that standing up to Modi can exact a heavy price. In 2019, Ashok Lavasa, one of the three election commissioners, recorded a formal dissent from the decision to exonerate the prime minister on the five complaints. Lavasa’s phone was placed on a surveillance list, while his family endured months of harassment, including tax raids and investigations into his son’s business. In 2020, Lavasa resigned. He had been due to take over as chief election commissioner the following year.I reached out to several former election commissioners for comment for this story. Two spoke with me off the record, kept deferring the date for a formal interview, and eventually stopped taking calls or responding to texts. One, Om Prakash Rawat, who was chief election commissioner in 2018, dismissed concerns about the commission’s independence as media fictions and suggested that Western democracies had perpetuated them in order to undermine India. Rawat told me that he did not think Modi and his party had violated the election code in 2019 or in the present election. Modi’s speech branding the Congress manifesto as reflecting the mentality of the Muslim League was merely politics as usual, he said.As the election season has worn on and the commission has kept quiet, Modi has doubled down on his rhetoric, describing the Muslim electorate as “jihadi votes,” and the BJP has put out animated videos portraying Muslims as crafty and predatory animals. Arvind Kejriwal, the Delhi chief minister, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate, a federal agency that investigates financial crimes. Since Modi came to power in 2014, the number of investigations the directorate has conducted against political leaders has more than quadrupled, to 121. Of the leaders under investigation, 115 of them—95 percent—belonged to opposition parties.Kejriwal is the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, an upstart populist outfit that has quickly risen to take charge of two northern provinces. A rousing orator, Kejriwal was known for his sarcastic and often humorous speeches critical of Modi. In the short term, arresting him served the BJP by eliminating a charismatic opposition politician from the campaign trail. In the long term, it dealt a blow to a rival who could one day become a national challenger.Kejriwal was technically the first chief minister to be arrested in India’s history, but effectively, he was the second. In January, Hemant Soren, the chief minister of the eastern state of Jharkhand, had resigned a few hours before he was arrested by the directorate. Like Kejriwal, Soren had a commanding presence in a region where the BJP was markedly weak.Few institutions have survived the democratic subversion of the Modi years. Soren and Kejriwal approached the courts, but an enfeebled judiciary is still vacillating on whether to grant them bail. Much of the mainstream news media purvey Hindu-nationalist propaganda, depicting Modi as the personification of the nation and his opponents as corrupt actors intent on destabilizing India. A recent analysis of six prominent networks from February through April, the months leading up to the election, found that 52 percent of their prime-time coverage attacked opposition parties; another 27 percent praised Modi and his government.Under Modi, India has slipped 43 places down the World Press Freedom Index; it now ranks a dismal 159 out of 180 nations. Since 2021, Freedom House has categorized India as only “partly free” in its annual reports. That same year, the V-Dem Institute, an independent research organization based in Sweden, also reclassified India, observing that “the world’s largest democracy has turned into an electoral autocracy.”These days in India, talk often swirls back to the Emergency, India’s previous era of authoritarian rule, in the 1970s under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The 1977 elections that ended the Emergency produced a staggering upset, with Gandhi losing her own parliamentary seat. But the Princeton professor Gyan Prakash, who wrote a book about the Emergency, told me that the analogy to the present moment was misleading. Gandhi freed opposition leaders from prison as elections approached; Modi has been doing the opposite.“The 1977 elections were held fair and square,” Prakash told me. “One fears that is not going to be the case with 2024.”In India’s stratified and deeply hierarchical society, elections have long been a great equalizer. During the campaign season, social boundaries between castes and classes seem momentarily to dissolve as passionate political debates break out in tea stalls and on crowded buses and subways. Candidates and parties produce festive road shows on city streets.But Modi and his Hindu-nationalist juggernaut have quelled these energies. The current election feels sluggish. Most cities and towns have been bathed in the saffron hue of the BJP, and posters of Modi’s visage can be seen everywhere. Participation is correspondingly low; when voting began for more than 100 parliamentary seats on April 19, turnout was down more than three percentage points from five years ago.Trust in the election commission is declining among voters; even fewer have confidence in the electronic machines used for voting. Making matters worse, this year’s turnout figures from the first round of voting were publicized a full 10 days later than normal, and they were expressed as percentages instead of whole numbers. Indian citizens rely on turnout data to assess the fairness of the vote. Now voters are openly voicing fears of sabotage; despite repeated appeals, the commission has not yet released the full figures.The weakening of public faith in Indian elections is not surprising or accidental. The Hindu-nationalist movement has always been disdainful of Indian constitutionalism and democracy, seeing its participation in these processes as tactical accommodations on the path to its eventual goal of a centralized, authoritarian government. Commenting on India’s first election back in 1952, Organiser, the preeminent journal of the Hindu right, suggested that the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, “would live to confess the failure of universal adult franchise in India.” Prakash told me that the government’s more recent ploys to throttle the opposition were part of the “BJP’s single-minded and ruthless drive for a one-party state.”On April 22, a BJP candidate was elected unopposed from the Surat constituency in Gujarat, two weeks before elections were scheduled in the city of 1.8 million voters. The Congress candidate for the parliamentary seat had been rejected on a technicality; when the party put forward an alternative candidate, he was rejected too. Under mysterious circumstances, the remaining eight non-BJP candidates simultaneously withdrew from the race, paving the way for the BJP to win without a vote.[Vaibhav Vats: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]On the evening of the Surat victory, Jitendra Chauhan, an independent candidate from Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, alleged in a video posted online that associates of the city’s sitting MP were threatening him, and that he feared he might even be killed if he didn’t withdraw his nomination. (The Gandhinagar MP is Amit Shah, India’s home minister and widely considered the second-most-powerful person in the country. The BJP denies Chauhan’s claims.) Over the following days, 16 candidates, including Chauhan, withdrew; many said they had faced pressure from powerful BJP politicians and even the police. Around the same time, in Indore, a Congress candidate went to the polling office to withdraw his nomination; when he emerged, he had joined the BJP.Such strong-arm maneuvers offer one among several possible means of securing a one-party future. In January, during a mayoral election in the northern city of Chandigarh, a polling officer belonging to the BJP was caught on camera spoiling opposition ballots. That case resulted in a rare intervention: The election was overturned by India’s supreme court.Through his decade in power, Modi has plowed the level playing field from which he rose. In 2014, when Modi led his insurgent campaign against the Congress, the media were free to robustly criticize the government, democratic institutions such as the election commission and the courts asserted themselves, and dissent did not carry the threat of prison. Now the very bodies the public once relied on to safeguard the electoral process have seemingly abdicated their constitutional mandate and are helping make Modi’s third bid for prime minister into something resembling a coronation.

Back when the word weird (or, in the spelling of the day, wyrd ) was first commonly used in English, it was not an adjective but a noun, and it functioned as a synonym for fate. A person wasn’t weird; instead a person had a weird, which was theirs alone, determined by forces beyond control and understanding. Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth helped transform the word, linking its supernatural connotations with an aesthetic quality. Those three crones know the future—they seem to know everything, standing astride the temporal and the miraculous as they do. In them, the old and the new weirds meet: They are creatures in touch with the workings of fate, but they are also inexplicable, creepy, queer, spooky, deviant from the norm.I have been thinking about this word and its overtones since reading All Fours, the second novel by the idiosyncratic interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, probably best known for her work as a filmmaker. As I made my way through the book, I kept remarking to myself, and writing in the margins, “This is so weird.” That’s not a bad thing, in my personal lexicon, though in this instance I was registering a persistent feeling of bafflement. July’s middle-aged protagonist—a “semi-famous” artist known for her early multi-genre success (who, like July, has worked across film, writing, and performance)—consistently acted on instincts I didn’t understand and made choices I couldn’t imagine anyone making. As a narrator, she was not just unreliable but unpredictable, unsettling, shimmeringly strange.[Read: Miranda July on ‘Kajillionaire’ and nice people in Hollywood]This unnamed narrator—who, being a wry Los Angeles creative type, enjoys half-mockingly noting that she is a minor celebrity—is perplexing even to herself. Stalled out in her art practice and dissatisfied in her marriage (stable, loving, stale) to a music producer, she decides to drive to New York, leaving him and their young child behind for three weeks. She conceives the trip ostensibly to prove a point. At a party, her husband offhandedly suggests that people fall into two personality types: Drivers and Parkers. Drivers can immerse themselves in the ongoingness of life; they enjoy time with their children and pets; they’re good on road trips because they’re present and steady. Parkers “need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause,” or they lapse into boredom and disappointment. The artist feels that she is being pegged as a Parker, and undertakes this road trip, she tells herself, to “finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be.” That this is overly literal and somewhat illogical—leaving your family for three weeks doesn’t suggest a willingness to be present in daily ongoingness and child-rearing—doesn’t occur to her.But even the artist is aware that this classic plot—a combination of the American road trip and the midlife crisis, both clichéd subgenres of the quest narrative—is the kind of trope that she typically wouldn’t bother with. Naturally, the road trip, and by extension the novel, goes sideways immediately. July herself has never been given to making chill, grounded art.The narrator hasn’t gotten an hour away from her house before she makes eye contact with a young man at a gas station in Monrovia. A few minutes later, they run into each other at a nearby restaurant, and as they talk, he mentions that he works at Hertz and that he and his interior-decorator wife are trying to save $20,000 as a “nest egg.” For no discernible reason, the narrator proceeds to drive first to one of his Hertz locations and then to a dingy motel, where she rents a room. Soon after, she commissions the wife (without mentioning her encounter with the husband) to redecorate the motel room to look like a room at Le Bristol hotel, in Paris, for a fee of $20,000.Is she stalking the Hertz guy, nearly 15 years her junior? Is this an art project? Whether July is presenting this as an earnest hero’s journey or as a self-skewering satire of the free spirit who does erratic things upon hitting her mid-40s and calls it art isn’t clear. That may sound like a huge flaw in the novel, and it does sometimes feel like a glitch, yet the ambiguity about what July and her narrator are up to makes the novel as intriguing as it is frustrating. July thwarts the reader’s instinct to decipher whether this is a narrative about miraculous fate or one about an odd character’s mundane sexual and hormonal odyssey. Instead, she writes as though there’s no difference.I’m not the first to be cheerfully confounded by July’s oeuvre, which amounts to a multipronged investigation of alienation from what the world sees as “normal.” Critics have often dismissively described her enterprise as “twee,” likely because she is fashionable and somewhat affectless, and her work features West Coast oddballs who blend quirkiness and borderline erotic perversity. Stylistically, she rides the line between deadpan humor and earnest absurdity. To take a representative example, in the first of her three feature-length films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), a young video artist (played by July) fixates on a man whose wife has left him, and who recently set one of his hands on fire in an ill-conceived stunt to impress their children; secondary plotlines involve a middle-aged man leaving sexually explicit messages for two teen girls, and a woman planning to meet an internet stranger in the park after being titillated by his suggestion that they “poop back and forth” forever.All of her projects, which revolve around a sort of randomness and mystery, probe shame and estrangement, but with a tonal lightness. “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the narrator of All Fours remarks before she embarks on her zany motel-redecoration project. “Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.” This aimlessness, her attunement to randomness, is entwined with her creativity. Yet as she keeps riffing, the narrator drifts toward a formulation of her experiment that’s more specific and ennobled, borrowing from feminist politics. What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby? But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance. The appearance of the word monster comes as no surprise here. The female artist who does battle with what Virginia Woolf called “the Angel in the House” and leaves home to accomplish something inscrutable to her family and society at large still seems obligated to reckon with whether this act is horrific. As the critic Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book, Art Monsters, the impulse to demonize women who refuse domesticity in favor of creative exploration goes back hundreds of years (at least). So does the female artist’s own willingness to wonder whether her impulses are reprehensible.July’s artist is consciously pushing back against this legacy here—she will not be kept from her greatness!—while July herself seems also to be lightly ridiculing the way her character’s politically enlightened logic is leading her into a foolish, perhaps unjustifiable set of actions. Her ghost self travels onward—she keeps track of where she should be, dutifully reporting home about the sights she isn’t seeing—while she remains installed in a Louis XIV–style motel room, where she is not busy making great art. Instead, she is masturbating furiously, overwhelmed with desire for a married stranger. This behavior is not monstrous, but it is wayward—weyward being an early spelling of weird.Except that in a sense, it isn’t weyward at all: The narrator’s behavior (her erraticism, even her eroticism) is right on schedule. She has entered perimenopause, when estrogen levels begin to zigzag. This Rumspringa of hers is less about artistic evolution than the bewilderments of hormonal flux and (in her case) the problem of fitting wild, outsize desire into a life of monogamy, heterosexuality, and parenthood. Her yearnings converge: She wants to become more embodied, more honest and self-accepting, and creatively free—a state that she doesn’t entirely believe is possible. Her sexual awakening, experienced just as she’s learning that she’s likely nearing the end of her high-libido years, is baffling, transcendent, and abject. “This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing.”[From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis]Continuing her old life now seems unbearable; leaving it behind is unthinkable. Whether as a woman, a wife, or an artist, July’s narrator has never, as yet, been an integrated person, believing instead in selectively presenting others with different selves, “each real, each with different needs.” For her, “the only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand.” And yet she still dreams of intimacy, of having a self that can be wholly expressed and held by another. “One fine day I would tell him all about me,” she fantasizes, thinking of her husband, “and this trip would be one of my stories. We would be holding each other in bed, saying everything, laughing and crying and being amazed at all the things we didn’t know about each other, the Great Reveal.”The perimenopausal plotline—easily dismissed as niche and sentimental, unlike its cousin, the plotline of male midlife crisis—may in fact be the perfect form for July, who turns it into something appropriately whimsical and stark. She writes this hormonal crucible so well in part because she seems already positioned to capture precisely how heightened, bizarre, off-putting, confusing, absurd it is; these elements are the hallmarks of her style. In this context, the tone that might have been dismissed as irony or caprice in earlier work takes on a kind of embodied, material plausibility: “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form,” the narrator reports with true desperation after returning home. What she has found in Monrovia may be weird, but it is also her weird—transgressiveness in search of honest intimacy, performative selfhood in search of authentic freedom. If this truest, weirdest self cannot be contained in the family structure or the social world that she occupies, perhaps breaking that structure counts as creative liberation.Perimenopause, as the narrator experiences it, is a profound betrayal in that it begins transporting her into crone-hood without her consent, before she is ready. At the same time, the crone, the weird sister, is afforded proximity to the transporting, the repugnant, the queer, the prophetic. This is good for art, or it can be. In one climactic scene of the book—a sort of symbolic consummation with her future self—the artist has sex with an older woman with a connection to the Hertz attendant. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water. Well, knock me over with a feather, I thought.” After the encounter, in an epiphanic haze, she feels certain that promiscuity is the secret to life. This mania, as July renders it, is both completely earnest and totally laughable—a trademark tension in July’s work since her 20s.Later, her narrator mulls:I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.Here, finally, she arrives at something that looks like a viable future, though after her return home from Monrovia, the book loses the fevered outlandishness that July achieves at its apex. The back half of the novel depends largely on an experiment with polyamory, presented as edgy, but an angsty middle-aged artist curing her ennui with an escapist lesbian affair is hardly radical. This delivers its share of tragicomic setbacks—and a banal, if true, realization that “the point was to keep going without a comprehensible end in sight.”In Art Monsters, Elkin quotes an essay in which Woolf characterizes the two primary obstacles in her writing life: “The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.” July frantically disassembles Woolf’s Angel in All Fours, without quite solving Woolf’s second challenge. (Has anyone?) Yet her entry into the canon of attempts to capture that truth, in all its flagrant specificity, is one only she could have produced: fascinating, jarringly funny, sometimes repellent, and strangely powerful.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Miranda July’s Weird Road Trip.”