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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.

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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.”

Australia is a country of abundant sunshine, but the skin of most Australians is better adapted to gloomy England than the beaches of Brisbane. The country’s predominantly white population has by far the world’s highest rate of skin cancer, and for years the public-health establishment has warned residents about the dangers of ultraviolet light. A 1980s ad campaign advised Australians to “Slip, Slop, Slap”—if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.It’s long been known that sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin, and that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, osteoporosis, and many other diseases. It was natural to assume that vitamin D was responsible for these outcomes. “Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer,” The New York Times wrote in 2010. “Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D.” By 2020, more than one in six adults were on that wonder treatment in the form of daily supplements, which promise to deliver the sun’s benefits without its dangers.But sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure. In a large clinical trial that began in 2011, some 26,000 older adults were randomly assigned to receive either daily vitamin D pills or placebos, and were then followed for an average of five years. The study’s results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine two years ago. An accompanying editorial, with the headline “A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation,” noted that no benefits whatsoever had been found for any of the health conditions that the study tracked. “Vitamin D supplementation did not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease, prevent falls, improve cognitive function, reduce atrial fibrillation, change body composition, reduce migraine frequency, improve stroke outcomes, decrease age-related macular degeneration, or reduce knee pain,” the journal said. “People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.”[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]Australia’s new guidance is in part a recognition of this reality. It’s also the result of our improved understanding of the disparate mechanisms through which sunlight affects health. Some of them are intuitive: Bright morning light, filtered through the eyes, helps regulate our circadian rhythms, improving energy, mood, and sleep. But the systemic effects of UV light operate through entirely different pathways that have been less well understood by the public, and even many health professionals. In recent years, that science has received more attention, strengthening conviction in sunlight’s possibly irreplaceable benefits. In 2019, an international collection of researchers issued a call to arms with the headline “Insufficient Sun Exposure Has Become a Real Public Health Problem.”Health authorities in some countries have begun to follow Australia’s lead, or at least to explore doing so. In the United Kingdom, for example, the National Health Service is reviewing the evidence on sun exposure, with a report due this summer. Dermatology conferences in Europe have begun to schedule sessions on the benefits of sun exposure after not engaging with the topic for years.In the United States, however, there is no sign of any such reconsideration. Both the CDC and the American Academy of Dermatology still counsel strict avoidance, recommending that everyone but infants wear sunscreen every day, regardless of the weather. When I asked the AAD about Australia’s new guidelines, a spokesperson offered only that, “because ultraviolet rays from the sun can cause skin cancer, the Academy does not recommend getting vitamin D from sun exposure.”Such a stance surely reflects understandable concerns about mixed messaging. But it also seems more and more outdated, and suggests a broader problem within American public-health institutions.More than a century ago, scientists began to notice a mysterious pattern across the globe, which they came to call the “latitude effect.” Once you adjust for confounding variables—such as income, exercise, and smoking rates—people living at high latitudes suffer from higher rates of many diseases than people living at low or middle latitudes. The pattern plays out in many conditions, but it’s most pronounced in autoimmune disorders, especially multiple sclerosis. Throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., populations at higher latitudes are much more likely to develop MS than those closer to the equator. Over the years, scientists have offered many theories to explain this phenomenon: differences in diet, something in the water. But MS research pointed to a perhaps more obvious answer: sunlight. The higher the latitude, the lower the angle of the sun and the more its rays are filtered by the atmosphere. A number of studies have found links between sun exposure and the disease. Kids who spend less than 30 minutes a day outside on weekends and holidays are much more likely to develop MS than kids who are outside for more than one hour on these same days. Relapse rates for the disease are higher in early spring, after months of sun scarcity. People who were born in the spring (whose mothers received little sun exposure during their third trimester of pregnancy) are more likely to develop MS than people born in the fall.Here, too, scientists first assumed that vitamin D was the key. But vitamin D supplementation proved useless for MS. Could something else about sun exposure protect against the condition?A hint came from another disease, psoriasis, a disorder in which the immune system mistakes the patient’s own skin cells for pathogens and attacks them, producing inflammation and red, scaly skin. Since ancient times, it had been observed that sunlight seems to alleviate the condition, and doctors have long recommended “phototherapy” as a treatment. But only in the late 20th century, with the recognition that psoriasis was an autoimmune disease, did they start to understand why it worked.It turns out that UV light essentially induces the immune system to stop attacking the skin, reducing inflammation. This is unfortunate when it comes to skin cancer—UV rays not only damage DNA, spurring the formation of cancerous cells; they also retard the immune system’s attack on those cells. But in the case of psoriasis, the tamping-down of a hyperactive response is exactly what’s needed. Moreover, to the initial surprise of researchers, this effect isn’t limited to the site of exposure. From the skin, the immune system’s regulatory cells migrate throughout the body, soothing inflammation elsewhere as well.[Read: AI-driven dermatology could leave dark-skinned patients behind]This effect is now believed to be the reason sun exposure helps prevent or ameliorate many autoimmune diseases, including MS, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. It also explains why other conditions that involve a hyperinflammatory response, such as asthma and allergies, seem to be alleviated by sun exposure. It may even explain why some other diseases now believed to be connected to chronic inflammation, including cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s, are often less prevalent in regions with more sun exposure.The consortium of Australian public-health groups had those potential benefits in mind when it drafted its new guidelines. “There’s no doubt at all that UV hitting the skin has immune effects,” Rachel Neale, a cancer researcher and the lead author of the guidelines, told me. “There’s absolutely no doubt.” But as to what to do with that knowledge, Neale isn’t certain. “This is likely to be both harmful and beneficial. We need to know more about that balance.”What does one do with that uncertainty? The original “Slip, Slop, Slap” campaign was easy to implement because of its simplicity: Stay out of the sun; that’s all you need to know. It was, in a sense, the equivalent of the “Just Say No” campaign against drugs, launched in the U.S. around the same time. But the simplicity also sometimes runs afoul of common sense. Dermatologists who tell their patients to wear sunscreen even indoors on cloudy winter days seem out of touch.Australia’s new advice is, by comparison, more scientific, yet also more complicated. It divides its recommendations into three groups, according to people’s skin color and susceptibility to skin cancer. Those with pale skin, or olive skin plus other risk factors, are advised to practice extreme caution: Keep slip-slop-slapping. Those with “olive or pale-brown skin” can take a balanced approach to sun exposure, using sunscreen whenever the UV index is at least a 3 (which is most days of the year in Australia). Those with dark skin need sunscreen only for extended outings in the bright sun.[Read: The problem sunscreen poses for dark skin]In designing the new guidelines, Neale and her colleagues tried to be faithful to the science while also realizing that whatever line is set on sun exposure, many people will cross it, intentionally or not. Even though skin cancer is rarely fatal when promptly diagnosed, it weighs heavily on the nation’s health-care system and on people’s well-being. “We spend $2 billion a year treating skin cancer in Australia,” Neale said. “It’s bonkers how much we spend, apart from the fact that people end up with bits of themselves chopped out. So at a whole-population level, the messaging will continue to be very much about sun protection.”That said, we now know that many individuals at low risk of skin cancer could benefit from more sun exposure—and that doctors are not yet prepared to prescribe it. A survey Neale conducted in 2020 showed that the majority of patients in Australia with vitamin D deficiencies were prescribed supplements by their doctors, despite the lack of efficacy, while only a minority were prescribed sun exposure. “We definitely need to be doing some education for doctors,” she told me. In support of the new position statement, Neale’s team has been working on a website where doctors can enter information about their patients’ location, skin color, and risk factors and receive a document with targeted advice. In most cases, people can meet their needs with just a few minutes of exposure a day.That sort of customized approach is sorely needed in the United States, Adewole Adamson, a dermatologist who directs the Melanoma and Pigmented Lesion Clinic at the University of Texas, told me. “A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t productive when it comes to sun-exposure recommendations,” he said. “It can cause harm to some populations.” For years, Adamson has called for more rational guidelines for people of color, who have the lowest risk of skin cancer and also higher rates of many of the diseases that sunlight seems to ameliorate. Adamson finds it disheartening that mostly white Australia now has “a better official position” than organizations in the U.S., “where nonwhite Americans will outnumber white Americans in the next 20 years.”To some degree, one can sympathize with the desire to keep things simple. People have limited bandwidth, and some may misunderstand or tune out overly complicated health messages. Others will inevitably turn a little information into a dangerous thing. A fringe segment of the alt-health crowd is already suggesting that skin-cancer dangers have been exaggerated as a way to get us all to buy more sunblock. But knowing that some people will draw strange conclusions from the facts is not a good-enough reason to withhold those facts, as we saw during the pandemic, when experts looking to provide simple guidance sometimes implied that the science was more settled than it was. This is not the 1950s. When public authorities spin or simplify science in an attempt to elicit a desired behavior, they are going to get called on it. Conspiracy-minded conclusions, among other bad ones, are likely to gain more credence, not less. And the public is going to have less faith in national institutions and the positions they espouse the next time.Besides, in this case, the news being withheld is incredibly good. It’s not every day that science discovers a free and readily accessible intervention that might improve the health of so many people. That’s the real story here, and it’s most compelling when conveyed honestly: Science feels its way forward, one hesitant step at a time, and backtracks almost as often. Eventually, that awkward but beautiful two-step leads us to better ground.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Sunscreen Absolutism.”

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Apple/YouTubeApple on Thursday apologized for an advertisement for its new iPad Pro after the commercial was met with a firestorm of criticism on social media.The video promoting the device, which was shared by Apple CEO Tim Cook on X earlier in the week, showed several creative tools—musical instruments, a typewriter, cans of paint—being crushed in a huge hydraulic press. The press then reopens, revealing the iPad, symbolizing how all of the creative potential of the different tools has been crammed into the newer, thinner device.Not everyone saw it that way, it seems.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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