A gentle and clever comic novel; a poetic and tender essay on addiction.Édouard Manet/Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial CollectionDear readers,Anyone who is bad at meditating will be familiar with the tension that obtains when you try to force serenity. Nothing could be more aggravating than being told to relax — especially when you’re issuing the order yourself.In lieu of attempting to clear my head through more direct means, I’ve been gravitating toward contemplative novels and poetry this spring. Two of them below, for your consideration.—Molly“Judgement Day,” by Penelope LivelyFiction, 1980First, the place. Laddenham is a country village in England The time is 1980-ish. Light industry is booming and new houses are going up to capture prosperous overspill from London.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More

The logic offered by the director of national intelligence for restricting in-person briefings for Congress on foreign meddling in the election campaign doesn’t pass the smell test.John Ratcliffe indicated in so many words on Friday that he was worried there would be leaks of classified information, so Congress will receive primarily written briefings instead.But isn’t warning voters just weeks away from an election that they are potentially being manipulated by hostile foreign powers the whole point of gathering this information? What good is knowing that Russia is trying to keep President Trump around for four more years, if it’s kept secret?Russia knows what it is doing. Russia knows the United States knows. Besides, how does relying on written rather than oral reports reduce the threat of leaks?The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, urged the intelligence community to be more forthcoming with information for lawmakers as a way to help tame the deluge of misinformation and propaganda polluting American democracy.The only obvious advantage to written briefings is that the information can be massaged, and it can’t be challenged under direct questioning.So there is more than a dollop of disingenuity when Mr. Ratcliffe — a fiercely partisan former Republican congressman from Texas who was tapped by Mr. Trump for the intelligence job in May — says he is ending in-person briefings to ensure that the intelligence information “is not misunderstood nor politicized,” and to better protect “sensitive intelligence” from “disclosures or misuse.”Mr. Trump promptly pitched in with a tweet about the end of the briefings that “Probably Shifty Schiff, but also others, LEAK information to the Fake News.” Just imagine, for a moment, how seriously the administration and the Republican Party would take foreign election interference if the Russians were helping Joe Biden.The fact that Russia’s fingerprints are all over the 2020 campaign on Mr. Trump’s side, or that to a lesser degree China and Iran are mucking around social media against Mr. Trump, are outrages about which the American public and their representatives must have full, reliable and up-to-date information. Secret briefings for a handful of legislators, as Mr. Ratcliffe suggested, and written statements potentially vetted by Trump loyalists are insufficient.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Democrats hope to make November’s midterm elections a referendum on Roe v. Wade, the linchpin decision upholding abortion rights, which the Supreme Court is almost certain to strike down this summer. That strategy makes sense. Polls show that roughly two in three Americans oppose overturning Roe and almost 60 percent support passing a bill to set Roe’s protections in a federal law. What’s more, polls showed a rising number of voters listing abortion as their top midterm issue after news of Roe’s imminent demise leaked in the form of a draft court opinion published by Politico.Unfortunately, their current plan is almost sure to fail.After the Democrats came up with just 49 votes to bring a Roe-protecting bill before the Senate on May 11, they promised to keep fighting and, in the words of Senator Amy Klobuchar, “take that fight right to the ballot box” in November. But you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table.Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.At present, there are likely 48 Senate Democrats who can make that pledge. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are dead set against any changes to the filibuster — a fact you likely know because most of President Biden’s agenda has been bottled up behind their refusal for the past year. Some claim that Senators Manchin and Sinema are just taking the public heat for a number of other Senate Democrats who are also unwilling to change the filibuster rules. That’s highly unlikely. But if any do have misgivings, that’s why the public commitments are so important. Getting a list of holdouts down to a publicly named handful is the first step to persuading them to fall in line.If my math is right and there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge, they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress. And that is the party’s message that makes the 2022 midterms a referendum on Roe: “Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023.”No ambiguity, no haggling, no living in Senator Manchin’s head for a year. You give us this, and we’ll give you that. That tells voters exactly what will be delivered with a Democratic win. It also defines what constitutes a win: control of the House and two more Senate seats.The campaign message is clear: If you want to protect Roe, give us those majorities. If this is your passion, here’s where to channel that passion. These are the Senate seats we need to hold (in New Hampshire, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada) and here are the ones we need to win (in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and possibly in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina). With those commitments in hand, one question should be on the lips of every Democratic candidate. Will you make a firm commitment to never vote for a federal law banning abortion nationwide?Few, if any, Republicans would be able to make that pledge. And their evasions wouldn’t just make them look ridiculous; that would put squarely on the table the very real threat that Republicans would enact a nationwide abortion ban as soon as January 2025. That could prove enough to win Senate races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio.In a way, though, this strategy isn’t so much about winning the 2022 midterms or even making Roe into a federal law, although it’s the best way to accomplish both. It’s just an example of how you win elections.Effective campaigns are built on connecting the intense beliefs of the electorate — their hopes and fears — directly to the hard mechanics of political power. You’ve got to connect those wires. If you were testing some new electrical contraption, that’s the first thing you’d do: make sure the energy supply is wired to the engine that makes it run. This is no different. Without tying a specific electoral result to a clear commitment to a specific legislative action after the elections, you’re not connecting those wires.What Democrats would be proposing is a classic small-c conservative solution in the best sense of the word. Codifying Roe would preserve the set of rights and protections that the vast majority of Americans have lived their entire adult lives with and that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to change. The threat that the court will strike down such a law is real but overstated. And in any case, refusing to act because of what opponents might do is the definition of political paralysis.So how do Democrats get from here to there?They likely can’t rely on the party’s leaders, at least not at first. But they’re not essential. It’s really up to voters and activists and particularly committed members of Congress. Probably half the Democrats in the Senate would be happy to sign on this dotted line by the end of the day. Those who are up for re-election, even in safe races, will come around quickly.Some senators may resist at first. And that wouldn’t be surprising. Politicians seldom see any advantage to committing themselves in advance or reducing their room for maneuver. It’s always safer to keep your options open and be as general as possible until the final moment. That’s why assembling a clear public list of commitments is critical. Once the list gets down to a handful of hesitaters, the pressure from Democrats nationwide, focused on those members, will be overwhelming. If there are real holdouts, they’ll fold in short order.You don’t need to wait on Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or President Biden. You can get the ball rolling by calling up your Democratic senator today.Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) is the founder and editor in chief of the political news website TPM.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More