Oct. 15, 2024, 7:19 p.m. ET

Right off the bat, Charlamagne tha God asked Kamala Harris in his radio town hall Tuesday afternoon about her tendency to stick to her scripts. “I would say, you’re welcome,” she laughed. “That would be called disciplined.”

And if Charlamagne thought that opening exchange might loosen her up a little bit, might take her off the familiar path and lead her instead toward a real emotional connection with his huge audience of millennial and mostly Black listeners, he didn’t know quite whom he was interviewing. For an hour in front of Charlamagne’s microphone in Detroit, Harris was as disciplined as ever, unspooling a solid case for why she would be a vastly better president for Black America than Donald Trump, while sidestepping a few tough questions and frustrating questioners who just wanted her to get a little angry.

It’s who she is. She may be doing more interviews in the final days of the campaign, but she is clearly determined not to get pushed off her message, either by friendly interviewers like Charlamagne or more adversarial journalists. Those qualities may make her an equally firm and determined president, should she win, but she will never win any awards for being a free-flowing and spontaneous campaigner.

When one questioner asked her stance on reparations, she said it should be studied, then quickly pivoted to her economic agenda. When Charlamagne asked whether it was true that she had locked up thousands of Black men as the district attorney in San Francisco, she said that was false and began to describe herself as “the most progressive in California,” before seemingly realizing that could be used in a Republican attack ad and quickly making it clear that she was talking about not criminalizing marijuana use.

Harris is very aware that her support among Black men is soft, which is why she unveiled a plan on Monday to boost their economic fortunes. But today’s politics requires her to carefully navigate the space between directly appealing to a specific demographic group she needs and not alienating equally needed white suburban voters who don’t really want to hear anything about reparations or financial breaks that won’t benefit them.

And so she made the interview a kind of State-of-the-Union speech of important but not terribly exciting ideas that she talks about all the time. Using community banks to make forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs, because they lack access to venture capital. Increasing child tax credits, having Medicare cover the cost of home health care and helping with down payments for first-time home buyers.

These are the details of how social programs work, but they don’t make for great radio. Charlamagne tried to get her to say Trump should be imprisoned for starting the Jan. 6 riot, but she carefully said that was up to the Justice Department and she wouldn’t weaponize it the way Trump would.

The closest she came to an unscripted moment was when Charlamagne asked if it’s possible to use the word fascism to describe Trump’s vision, and she laughed and said, “Yeah, we can say that.” But she wouldn’t go any further, and a minute later she was back on comfortable ground, describing how she grew up in the Black church.

Oct. 15, 2024, 5:25 p.m. ET

With Israel clamping down on food shipments to Gaza, the Biden administration is finally warning Israel to ease up or risk a suspension of some military aid.

In a letter released on Tuesday, the administration gave Israel 30 days to allow more humanitarian assistance to enter Gaza or else face consequences. That’s a welcome indication that President Biden is belatedly enforcing U.S. law, which bars military assistance to countries that block American humanitarian aid.

As a State Department official, Matthew Miller, put it, “It’s just a plain reading of U.S. law.” The problem is that until now, Biden didn’t seem able to read the law plainly.

In April the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugee bureau decided that Israel was blocking aid. Yet Biden somehow concluded that Israel was not in violation of the law, and weapons largely continued to flow to Israel, magnifying the devastation in Gaza.

More recently, Israel has dialed back the flow of food into Gaza even more sharply. The State Department says that the level of aid entering Gaza in September was lower than at any other point since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel. There has been debate about whether Israel is pursuing one retired general’s proposed starvation strategy, particularly in northern Gaza.

I admire much of Biden’s foreign policy, but I have been very critical of his failure to use weapon shipments as leverage to force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to listen to Washington’s calls for restraint and a cease-fire. Without leverage, Biden has been reduced to pleading with Netanyahu and having his pleas humiliatingly rebuffed. Biden’s weakness has made America complicit in the resulting humanitarian tragedy.

So it’s a welcome indication that Biden may finally be willing to use leverage, instead of hugs, to influence Netanyahu. But the 30-day period, which means nothing is likely to happen until after the U.S. election, makes one wonder if this isn’t more performative than substantive, meant to help Vice President Kamala Harris win Arab American votes in Michigan.

I hope Biden is finally serious; more than 3,100 children in Gaza under the age of 5 have been killed, according to Save the Children, and UNICEF has called Gaza the world’s most dangerous place to be a child. But after a year in which he has allowed Netanyahu to walk all over him, skepticism seems reasonable.

Oct. 15, 2024, 4:06 p.m. ET

I like a dance party as much as the next gal, but Donald Trump’s weird rally-turned-D.J.-session on Monday night has me more than a little concerned.

I am far from the only one. The former president, who is increasingly steering clear of public events that aren’t guaranteed safe spaces (he canceled yet another TV interview on Tuesday), had arranged for a nice, friendly town hall: Field a few softball questions from fans. Wave, smile, throw out some random asides. Do that weird old-guy hip shake. (I swear I’ve seen my dad do the exact same moves.)

But after three or four questions, things went off the rails. Two attendees dropped from the heat. No one seemed to know what to do. And suddenly Trump announced that the rest of the event would be devoted to enjoying his campaign’s playlist. He stood onstage swaying and smirking, occasionally moving his arms, for just shy of 40 minutes.

It was, gently put, troubling — an extended senior moment from a man who would be, if elected, America’s oldest president at the end of his term. Even Kristi Noem looked unsettled, and she killed her puppy when it acted up.

Voters deserve to know if Trump is slipping cognitively. In addition to backing out of appearances and running a lower-energy campaign than in previous cycles, Trump’s stream-of-consciousness weave is fast degenerating into something at times incomprehensible. (Except for the racist bits. Those still come across.)

I am not a cognitive specialist. I am not here to diagnose the former president. But I can certainly speak to the concerns of regular Americans — how it looks to those of us who have gone through time and heartbreak with loved ones experiencing cognitive troubles, whether temporary or progressive. Among the various possibilities weighing on some of our minds:

At 78, like so many others his age, Trump may have entered a period of permanent cognitive decline. Without a proper medical work-up, it’s impossible to say. But the specter of an irreversible slide is what is seriously freaking out some voters — and should be freaking out Trump’s own team. This is what many Americans were pretty sure was happening with President Biden, even if it manifested differently. It is no more comforting to consider the possibility with Trump, and it shouldn’t be downplayed simply because Trump’s possible senior moments are less spacey and more ragey.

Trump may be suffering a temporary decline because of the stress and grueling schedule of a presidential campaign, possibly combined with two assassination attempts and his ongoing legal dramas. He is auditioning for arguably the most stressful job in the world — one that, as we so often noted with Biden, takes a visible toll even on presidents decades younger.

There has also been a bit of speculation that this is part of some clever scheme to help him avoid tough questions or awkward encounters — or at least keep people focused on something other than his bone-deep dishonesty and scary antidemocratic tendencies. But there have been too many times he has lost the thread of his thoughts altogether for this to be four-dimensional chess.

Unfortunately, we have too much experience watching politicians fall prey to the vagaries of aging. We may never understand what exactly is going on with Trump, because his people are so intent on shielding him — in much the same way that Republicans accused Biden’s people of shielding him. But we know the red flags. Time and chance happen to everyone, regardless of his or her political leanings. To pretend otherwise is to court disaster.

A correction was made on

Oct. 15, 2024

:

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of South Dakota’s governor. She is Kristi Noem, not Kristie.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Oct. 11, 2024, 4:00 p.m. ET

It was not two weeks ago that Hurricane Helene made landfall 160 miles from Tampa, Fla., and moved northward from there, killing more than 200 people and producing damages now estimated at $175 billion. That is almost half as much money as the green energy investments the Congressional Budget Office projected would be paid out over a decade by the Inflation Reduction Act, often called the largest and most consequential climate legislation ever passed anywhere in the world. So half of that decade-long estimate, in damages, accrued from one single storm.

As Kate Aronoff writes in The New Republic, the recent technocratic turn toward treating climate change as merely a matter of energy transition has left climate-conscious Democrats without great language to describe — or policy tools to defend against — the devastating impacts that will intensify in the decades ahead.

The damages from Hurricane Milton appear, at the moment, considerably smaller than those generated by Helene, thanks to the slight southward drift of the storm course. Tampa endured merely a thousand-year rain event, with more rainfall in a single hour than the city had ever recorded in any single month before. More than 100 tornadoes swept across the peninsula, too.

Even so, Milton was a kind of success story, in its way, and a testament to Florida’s experience with hurricane hazards. But the longer and more troubling legacy of these particular back-to-back hurricanes might be how quickly the storms themselves have been weaponized, not merely to make familiar partisan points but also as part of much larger and darker information wars.

This phenomenon has already generated valuable commentary and concern. But the most striking illustration of it, for me, was a bulletin issued by Chuck Edwards, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, as he tried to clarify a long list of delusional stories for his constituents:

“Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government,” “Local officials are NOT abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze over Chimney Rock,” “FEMA is NOT stopping trucks or vehicles with donations,” “FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid,” and “FEMA cannot seize your property or land.”

For decades, climate advocates believed that warming itself would ultimately defeat denial — that once a disaster of inarguable intensity arrived, the world would belatedly wake up. In recent years, as I’ve watched unprecedented-seeming event after unprecedented-seeming event, I’ve wondered whether our stronger adaptive reflex wasn’t toward simple normalization, allowing us to navigate ever harsher and more unpredictable climate realities while telling ourselves, on balance, that everything is fine.

But the paranoid flotsam crowding the floodwaters in the wake of Helene suggests a third possibility, that an increasing number of increasingly intense disasters will push at least some of us, and possibly many of us, deeper into cocoons of paranoid delusion. Far from the “return of the real,” climate change now looks as much like a portal offering at least some of us an Infowars-style exit from an ever harsher reality.

Oct. 11, 2024, 1:10 p.m. ET

It was heartening to wake up to the news on Friday that Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

These men and women serve as living symbols of the horror and unimaginable loss that occurred in August 1945 when the United States ushered in the nuclear age with attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The survivors alive today were just children when they witnessed their homes and neighborhoods transformed into heaps of rubble, corpses and raging fires. Though the damage occurred within a split second, the physical and psychological injuries remain nearly eight decades later.

My colleagues and I spent several days with hibakusha, as the nuclear survivors are called in Japan, listening to their recollections of living through those days and how they wrestle with those memories today for our Opinion series At the Brink, about the modern nuclear threat. (It was the second consecutive year that Times Opinion brought to light the subject of a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s work shortly before the award. Last year’s winner was Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian human-rights activist.)

With an average age of 85, the remaining survivors clearly recognized the importance of communicating their experiences and lingering trauma to future generations. It’s imperative, each one said, that world leaders can never be allowed to unleash such a catastrophe on innocent people again.

“The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its announcement.

The committee went on to applaud Hidankyo and other hibakusha’s efforts to emphasize the nuclear taboo, which hasn’t been broken since 1945. But the committee went on to point out the alarming fact that this taboo is currently under tremendous pressure.

This is a concern Times Opinion shares as the world’s nine nuclear powers expand and enhance their arsenals. Proliferation by new nations is coming closer to reality, and threats to use nuclear weapons are becoming commonplace.

Now, near the end of their lives, many hibakusha wonder whether the world has learned from their pain or whether a similar fate will befall another generation. Keiko Ogura was 8 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven,” she told us. “I heard many survivors say, ‘What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I’ll meet my daughter I couldn’t save. I’ll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?’

“There is no answer I can tell them.”

Oct. 11, 2024, 10:37 a.m. ET

If you think the Supreme Court is out of control now, then the latest batch of polling should concern you.

I’m not talking about polls on the presidential race; I’m talking about the Senate.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Republicans are likely to regain control of the Senate after November. The chamber controls the fate of the most important presidential nominees, including Supreme Court justices. How big a deal is this?

Let’s roll back the tape to the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans reclaimed the Senate for the last two years of President Barack Obama’s term. To go by the record-low turnout that year, few Americans seemed to grasp the significance of the outcome. Then, in February 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. Within hours, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, vowed that he would not even hold a hearing on Scalia’s replacement until after a new president took office, nearly a year later. It was unprecedented, outrageous and, I hate to admit, technically legal.

More to the point, it paid off. The vacancy that should have been Obama’s to fill was instead handed to Donald Trump, who put the ultraconservative Neil Gorsuch on the bench. Almost four years later, McConnell and the Republicans played the same trick in reverse, exploiting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett only days before Election Day. Presto: The Supreme Court now has a 6-3 right-wing supermajority in a country where millions more Americans on average have preferred the Democratic presidential nominee in seven of the past eight elections.

No matter how low the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court falls, the post-Scalia rules of the game seem clear: If Republicans hold the Senate, they will never confirm the kind of justices likely to be nominated by a Democratic president. If, on the other hand, Republicans take both the Senate and the White House, they will almost surely get to replace the two oldest justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, with justices who are equally Trumpy but a generation younger, locking in a 6-to-3 court for decades. It would become a 7-to-2 court if one of the three liberals has to step down, possibly Sonia Sotomayor, who will soon be 70 and has battled health problems for years.

This should be a motivating force for those voters who are upset by the court’s hard-right swerve — up to 70 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll. It should be especially motivating to those in states with tight Senate races, like Montana, Texas and Florida, even if voters there have given up their hope of influencing the presidential race.

Whatever happens in those races, a Kamala Harris victory is the best way to ensure that the Supreme Court doesn’t veer even farther to the right in the next four years.

Oct. 10, 2024, 4:54 p.m. ET

Just beneath the layer of cronies and loyalists Mayor Eric Adams has packed into New York’s City Hall is an army of public servants, highly skilled government workers most people have never heard of who are dedicated to making the city run as it should.

It is these New Yorkers who are now running the day-to-day operations of the city, after more than half a dozen senior Adams officials have been pushed out, resigned or announced plans to resign in recent weeks amid criminal investigations into the mayor and his inner circle.

Adams finally showed some awareness of the value of these public servants this week when he announced the promotion of Maria Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor and the nomination of Muriel Goode-Trufant as corporation counsel, the city’s chief lawyer.

The promotions are the first good news out of City Hall in weeks. Goode-Trufant is an experienced municipal lawyer. Torres-Springer is another well-respected public servant who has served under three mayors and led initiatives to build more affordable housing in the city, an uphill battle that might wither altogether in New York without the kind of leadership she is known to provide.

These are encouraging developments for New York. But in recent weeks six senior officials who oversee or run critical city agencies have resigned, some under pressure, or announced plans to step down:

David Banks, the school chancellor

Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor

Philip Banks III, the first deputy mayor for public safety

Edward Caban, the police commissioner

Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner

Lisa Zornberg, chief counsel

And on Thursday, The Daily News reported that Tom Donlon, the interim police commissioner who replaced Caban, was also expected to step down after failing to pass a background check.

Even amid the flurry of new appointments and interim commissioners, questions about how well the city is really running in this extraordinary moment hang heavy in the air.

The most urgent point of concern among many current and former city officials is how much oversight and leadership City Hall is exercising over the uniformed agencies, particularly the Police Department, the Fire Department and the Corrections Department, which runs the city’s jails.

One significant test Torres-Springer will encounter is making sure the critical needs of city priorities, like housing and libraries, are properly represented in the upcoming January budget proposal. Adams’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, is known to be especially tightfisted, leaving it up to Torres-Springer to make sure key line items show up in the budget.

In normal times, managing the nation’s largest municipal government is a challenge, even for the most dedicated public servants. When your boss is an embattled mayor under criminal indictment and leaking political capital, it’s going to be a lot harder.