Aurelia Butler

Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.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

Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”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

The director Michael Gracey hopes Americans will finally get the British hitmaker, who’s depicted warts, fur and all in “Better Man,” debuting at the Telluride Film Festival.Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. The British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop-stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?Yes, you read that correctly. In the coming musical biopic “Better Man,” the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, though everyone else around him is human. It’s a leap that the director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash “The Greatest Showman,” is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance.”His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. For “Better Man,” the stage actor Jonno Davies wore the gray motion-capture suit for the entire production and was then rendered into simian form. For the chimp’s face, the eyes of the actual pop star were used.This approach not only doubled the budget of the movie, but also seemed just too far afield for most backers. Multiple times, Gracey said, “I would sit down with financiers. They would say, ‘Director of “The Greatest Showman,” Robbie Williams. I couldn’t be more excited about this. How much do you think?’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s just one thing: Robbie in the film is being portrayed by a monkey.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, yes, in some dream sequence, or he looks at his reflection and he sees himself as a monkey.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, the entire film.’ Their faces would just drop and they would say, ‘OK, well, this is the end of the meeting.’”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

Former President Donald J. Trump grappled on Friday with the lingering fallout from his visit to Arlington National Cemetery this week, offering an extended defense of his campaign’s actions leading up to an altercation between a Trump 2024 staff member and a cemetery official.Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.Accusing President Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Mr. Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.” He repeated the accusation at an event in Washington on Friday night hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group focused on education.The controversy over the cemetery photographs has overshadowed the political intent of Mr. Trump’s visit: He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.Instead, Mr. Trump has found himself struggling this week to fend off new criticisms of his long-scrutinized treatment of America’s veterans and fallen service members. At the same time, he has been twisting himself in knots to navigate the politics of in vitro fertilization and abortion rights and has confronted negative headlines for making obscene attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.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

Es fácil encontrar ejemplos de respuestas vacuas y engañosamente reflexivas que rozan lo caricaturesco de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, y es sencillo concluir que esa mezcolanza retórica es lo que ha postergado encuentros con periodistas serios, porque no es ágil en situaciones sin un guion o desenvuelta con los datos necesarios. En todo caso, esos son los argumentos de los republicanos.Pero esa valoración ignora su actuación en un debate en 2020 con el vicepresidente de entonces, Mike Pence. ¿Lo recuerdan? Fue un encuentro con mucho en juego y tan arriesgado como cualquier entrevista con cualquier peso pesado de los medios, y ella lo hizo bien. Mejor que bien, de hecho. Varias encuestas posteriores al debate, entre ellas una publicada por 538 y otra por CNN, concluyeron que Harris había ganado. Es cierto que Pence se enfrentaba a la decisión de una mosca de posarse sobre su cabeza, pero aun así. Él llevaba más tiempo en la escena política nacional que ella, y ella no vaciló.Por eso, las recientes quejas y amenazas de Donald Trump de retirarse del debate previsto en ABC News el 10 de septiembre tienen todo el sentido. Debería tener dudas. De hecho, debería tener miedo.A pesar de todas sus fanfarronadas absurdas sobre sus anteriores actuaciones en debates, muchas de ellas han sido risibles: una combinación de burlas pueriles, mentiras sin paralelo, quejas, explosiones, desprecio y regodeo. ¿Se acuerdan de esos bailes caricaturescos que hacen los jugadores de fútbol cuando han llegado a la zona de anotación en el último cuarto de un partido reñido? Ese es Trump en el atril del debate, solo que no ha marcado ni un touchdown. Ni siquiera ha movido el balón ni un milímetro.Me refiero a sus trucos con sus rivales por la nominación presidencial republicana en 2016, en tres encuentros con Hillary Clinton en las elecciones generales de ese año y en dos con Joe Biden en las elecciones generales de 2020. (Se saltó los debates de las primarias republicanas de 2024, sabiamente, dada su ventaja sobre los demás aspirantes).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

The state court found that throwing out otherwise eligible ballots because they were undated or had the wrong date on the outer envelope would violate the State Constitution.Pennsylvania’s two most populous counties cannot throw out otherwise timely and eligible mail-in ballots because they are undated or do not have the correct date on the outer envelope, a state court ruled on Friday.The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, siding with voter advocacy groups, found that tossing ballots because they did not comport with a 2019 law requiring voters to date and sign the outer envelope would violate a State Constitution clause guaranteeing “free and equal elections” and pose a “substantial threat of disenfranchisement.” The ruling could play a critical role in November in the battleground state, which polls now show to be a tossup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. Election officials disqualified nearly 16,000 mail-in ballots for irregularities during April’s primary election. Almost half were disqualified because of issues like missing signatures and wrong dates on outer envelopes.The ruling applies only to Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties. Whether it will extend across the state will most likely depend on county officials and guidance from the office of the secretary of the commonwealth, who leads Pennsylvania’s Department of State.“This ruling makes clear a voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be a cause for disenfranchisement,” the department said in a statement. Gov. Josh Shapiro hailed the court’s decision in a statement posted on social media, calling it “a victory for Pennsylvanians’ fundamental right to vote.”The state Republican Party, which had intervened in the suit in support of the state law, known as Act 77, is likely to appeal the ruling to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The party’s state chairman referred a request for comment to its office in Harrisburg, which did not immediately respond.In 2022, the same Commonwealth Court ordered the counting of undated mail-in ballots after David McCormick, a Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate, filed a lawsuit during his close race against Mehmet Oz, the TV personality also known as Dr. Oz.Voting by mail in Pennsylvania rose roughly tenfold between the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles to 2.7 million ballots, which amounted to about 39 percent of all ballots cast across the state. The rise followed the passage of Act 77 in 2019, which allowed all Pennsylvanians to cast their votes by mail.The law also prohibited county officials from processing or counting mail-in ballots until the morning of Election Day. That slowed vote counting and results, which contributed to some protests in downtown Philadelphia in 2020.Officials across the country have been scrambling to figure out how to count ballots with only months before the election. In Georgia, local officials are trying to make sense of new rules about certification from the state election board.Nebraska is in the middle of a court battle over whether the votes of people convicted of felonies should be counted. Like in Pennsylvania, the Nebraska dispute hinges on whether a new state law comports with the State Constitution. More

The prominent A.I. start-up is also considering a change to its corporate structure to make it more appealing to outside investors.Amid a flurry of news around its funding plans, OpenAI has tapped the political veteran Chris Lehane as its vice president of global policy.Mr. Lehane held a similar role at Airbnb and served in the Clinton White House as a lawyer and spokesman who specialized in opposition research. He earned a reputation as “the master of disaster” during his time working for President Bill Clinton.As OpenAI has built increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technologies, it has warned of their potential danger, and it is under pressure from lawmakers, regulators and others across the globe to ensure that these technologies do not cause serious harm. Some researchers worry that the A.I. systems could be used to spread disinformation, fuel cyberattacks or even destroy humanity.Mr. Lehane could help navigate an increasingly complex social and political landscape. Through a spokeswoman, he declined to comment.A spokeswoman for OpenAI, Liz Bourgeois, said, “Just as the company is making changes in other areas of the business to scale the impact of various teams as we enter this next chapter, we recently made changes to our global affairs organization.”OpenAI is negotiating a new funding deal that would value the company at more than $100 billion, three people familiar with discussions have said. The deal would be led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, which would invest more than $1 billion.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

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Friday that he would vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would expand abortion access in the state, clarifying his stance after having suggested a day earlier that he might support the measure.“I’ll be voting no,” Mr. Trump told Fox News, even as he said he disagreed with his home state’s current ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.Passage of the ballot measure, called Amendment 4, would allow patients to seek an abortion up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Mr. Trump, who had long avoided taking a firm position on the measure, said he was “going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” His campaign promptly sought to clean up those remarks, saying in a statement that they were not indicative of how he would vote in November.His comments were also met with backlash from social conservatives and abortion opponents. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, said Mr. Trump would be undermining a long-held opposition to abortions after five months of pregnancy if he voted for the measure.“We strongly support Florida’s current heartbeat law,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement, adding that she had also spoken privately with the former president. “For anyone who believes in drawing a different line, they still must vote against Amendment 4, unless they don’t want a line at all.”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