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    Sohei Kamiya Brings Trump-Style Populism to Japan’s Election

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    With his calls to limit foreign workers, fight globalism and put “Japanese First,” Sohei Kamiya has brought a fiery right-wing populism to Japan’s election on Sunday.The crowd of 800 people were younger than those who typically attend political rallies in Japan. But they had gathered in the shadow of a smoking volcano to hear a populist upstart in Sunday’s parliamentary elections whose heated campaign speech would sound familiar to voters in the United States or Europe.They burst into cheers when Sohei Kamiya climbed to the top of a campaign truck decorated in the orange colors of his fledgling political party, Sanseito. Grabbing a microphone, he told them that Japan faced threats from shadowy globalists, lawbreaking foreigners and a corrupt domestic political establishment that was stifling the younger generation with taxes. His solution: a nationalist agenda that he calls “Japanese First.”“Japan must be a society that serves the interests of the Japanese people,” Mr. Kamiya told his applauding audience.The crowds who turn out to hear Mr. Kamiya speak are younger than those who typically attend political rallies in Japan.Ko Sasaki for The New York TimesMr. Kamiya founded the party and is one of its two sitting members in the Upper House. Elected to a six-year term in 2022, he is not on the ballot himself this year. But he has crossed Japan to campaign on behalf of Sanseito’s 54 candidates, a large number that reflects the new party’s big ambitions.Opponents and many domestic media reports have accused him of being xenophobic, saying he is directing public dissatisfaction with high prices and stagnant wages at Japan’s growing population of foreign residents. At campaign stops, small numbers of protesters hold up signs saying “no hate” toward non-Japanese.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

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      The UK Plans to Lower the Voting Age to 16. Here’s What to Know.

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      The plan has been described as the largest expansion of voting rights in Britain in decades.The British government said on Thursday that it would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, in what it called a landmark moment for democracy and some of its opponents decried as an attempt to tilt the electoral playing field.Britain has more than 1.6 million people of age 16 or 17, in a total population of roughly 68 million, and the plan has been described as the country’s largest expansion of voting rights in decades. The last nationwide reduction in voting age, to 18 from 21, came more than 50 years ago.“Declining trust in our institutions and democracy itself has become critical, but it is the responsibility of government to turn this around and renew our democracy, just as generations have done before us,” the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, wrote in an introduction to a policy paper that included the announcement.The plan also includes promises to tighten laws on foreign donations to political parties, and to simplify voter registration.Here’s a guide to the change and its implications.Do many places give 16-year-olds the vote?Several nations do, including Austria, Malta and Brazil, while in Greece the voting age is set at 17. Others allow 16-year-olds to participate only in some elections: In Germany and Belgium, they can help choose members of the European Parliament, but they cannot vote in federal elections. Britain has been in that category: Elections for the separate parliaments that control many policy areas in Scotland and Wales already had a voting age of 16.Is this change a surprise?No. The center-left Labour Party has backed votes for 16-year-olds for some time, and the idea was part of the official platform on which it won last year’s general election. 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

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      Why We Mistake the Wholesomeness of Gen Z for Conservatism

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      “N.Y.C. art schools see record-high application numbers as Gen Z-ers clamber to enroll,” Gothamist’s Hannah Frishberg reported earlier this month. Art school has a reputation for being totally impractical and mildly dissolute. But what members of Gen Z like about art school, Frishberg explains, is that it has “a comforting, human sense of purpose.”The art school trend sounds counterintuitive at first. During times of economic uncertainty, the cliché is that young people usually go to law school or do something else that seems pragmatic, steady and lucrative. Yet art school can offer young people a set of tangible, hands-on skills and a road to employment that is set apart from an increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven corporate world.I have been interviewing 20-somethings about dating, politics, faith and their aspirations for a couple of years now. Dozens of conversations with members of Gen Z have convinced me that the most prominent aspect of their generational character is that they’re small-c conservative.This is frequently misunderstood as politically conservative (more on that in a second). But what I mean is that they’re constitutionally moderate and driven by old-fashioned values. It might be hard for us to recognize just how wholesome Gen Z is, or what that represents for America’s future. But we should try.It’s not just their “Shop Class as Soulcraft” disposition — their bias for the local and the handmade and against tech overlords — that makes this generation seem like a throwback. Or their renewed and unironic interest in things like embroidery, crocheting and knitting. There has been a lot of grown-up chatter in the past few years about the fact that Gen Z teenagers are having less sex, drinking less and doing fewer drugs than millennials and members of Gen X did. Teen pregnancy is at record lows.There’s probably not a single reason behind these shifts. Of course, Gen Z consists of millions of people, and generalizations are not going to apply to every member. But I can see, in the ways this generation is different from previous ones, a clear desire for moderation in all things.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

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      The Gender Gap That Ate the Democrats

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      Much of the analysis of the 2024 election focused on Democratic losses among working-class minorities, especially Hispanic and Black voters. But the dominant theme of the contest was, in fact, the broader shift of men of all races and ethnicities to the Republican Party.If men had supported Kamala Harris at the same level as women did, Harris would have won the popular vote and possibly the Electoral College. Donald Trump beat her by 2.28 million votes, in an election that saw the male vote for the Democratic presidential nominee fall by 3.54 million from 2020 to 2024 and the female vote fall by just over 844,000.The Democratic Party lost ground in the 2024 election among almost all demographic groups — white people, Black people, Latinos, the young, rural and exurban voters — but all the defections had one thing in common: Democratic losses were significantly greater among men than among women.These developments are well documented in two extensive election analyses by organizations that offer some of the best demographic studies of voting patterns: “What Happened in 2024” by Catalist, a liberal voter-study firm, and “Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition” by Pew Research.Catalist found that in 2024 Harris, the second woman to run for president as the Democratic nominee, received just 1 percent less support than Joe Biden did in 2020 from white women, while Harris’s backing from white men fell by four percentage points. Among Black voters, Harris saw a one-point drop among women and an eight-point decline among Black men; among Latinos, Harris lost seven points among women, 12 points among men.Catalist summarized its findings on the differences between the partisan shifts of men and women:The partisan gender gap remains high and grew in 2024. Women have long been more likely to support Democrats than men do. The gender gap in partisan preferences increased in 2024: women continued to support Harris (55 percent support) at roughly the same levels that they supported Biden in 2020 (56 percent). But men moved toward Trump in 2024, from 48 percent support for Biden in 2020 to 42 percent support for Harris in 2024.The most severe declines in Democratic voting, according to Catalist, “were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support for Democrats from 2020 to 2024 among young Black men dropped from 85 percent to 75 percent and support among young Latino men dropped from 63 percent to 47 percent.”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

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      Zohran Mamdani Won by Listening. Democrats Should Try It.

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      In the doldrums of last November, depressed and paralyzed by Donald Trump’s victory, I stumbled upon a video in my social media feed of an affable young man in a suit and tie, microphone in hand, interviewing voters in immigrant-heavy areas in Queens and the Bronx.“Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?” he asks. And then, “Who did you vote for?”Some didn’t vote at all. But many voted for Trump.What struck me about the video was the young man’s open-ended curiosity. Through it all, he simply listened to the responses to his questions, his friendly face inquisitive.Toward the end of the video he finally makes his pitch to a voter: “You know, we have a mayor’s race coming up next year, and if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality — are those things that you’d support?”“Absolutely,” the man replies.New York Democrats did indeed embrace that message, vaulting that young man, Zohran Mamdani, who was as unknown to most New Yorkers as he was to me, to the top of the heap last month in the very crowded Democratic mayoral primary field. Like many people, I was resigned to an Andrew Cuomo romp, despite his odious past and his lazy campaign. Instead, we got an electrifying rout by a young, charismatic democratic socialist. When the final tally under ranked-choice voting was announced on Tuesday, Mamdani had won 56 percent of the vote, a 12-point margin on Cuomo, the heavy favorite.In the dizzying days since that stunning upset, there has been a great deal of hand-wringing about its meaning. Unsurprisingly, Republicans have had a racist freakout, portraying Mamdani, a Muslim who was born in Uganda to Indian-origin parents, as a dangerous jihadist who will impose Shariah law and invite the slaughter of Jewish New Yorkers. Without a trace of irony, they have also pilloried him as a godless Communist who will destroy the financial capital of the United States by seizing the means of production. Trump mused about arresting him.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

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      The Supreme Court Case on Trans Care Ruled Against My Daughter

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      There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. No mother imagines that her everyday fight to do right by her child would land her there.My daughter, L.W., came out as transgender late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she is thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter’s care in 2023, we fought back by suing the state. Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessee’s ban on such care.I am beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The compelling, expert legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were not enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She’s angry, scared and hurt that the American system of democracy that we so put on a pedestal didn’t work to protect her.My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband’s demands in our lawsuit against the ban felt quite basic: Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don’t let our child’s very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough.Raising a transgender kid in Tennessee, we know that not everyone understands people like her or her health care — and that’s OK. We don’t need to agree on everything. But we do need our fundamental rights respected.I have devoted myself to finding our daughter consistent care in one state after another. The nightmare of our disrupted life pales in comparison to the nightmare of losing access to the health care that has allowed our daughter to thrive. After Tennessee passed its ban, we traveled to another provider in a different state. After that state passed a ban, we moved on to another one. We are now on our fourth state. The five-hour drive each way, taking time off work and school, is hard, but thankfully, we found a clinic and pharmacy that take our insurance.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

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      Real Risk to Youth Mental Health Is ‘Addictive Use,’ Not Screen Time Alone, Study Finds

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      Researchers found children with highly addictive use of phones, video games or social media were two to three times as likely to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves.As Americans scramble to respond to rising rates of suicidal behavior among youth, many policymakers have locked in on an alarming metric: the number of hours a day that American children spend glued to a glowing screen.But a study published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA, which followed more than 4,000 children across the country, arrived at a surprising conclusion: Longer screen time at age 10 was not associated with higher rates of suicidal behavior four years later.Instead, the authors found, the children at higher risk for suicidal behaviors were those who told researchers their use of technology had become “addictive” — that they had trouble putting it down, or felt the need to use it more and more. Some children exhibited addictive behavior even if their screen time was relatively low, they said.The researchers found addictive behavior to be very common among children — especially in their use of mobile phones, where nearly half had high addictive use. By age 14, children with high or increasing addictive behavior were two to three times as likely as other children to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves, the study found.“This is the first study to identify that addictive use is important, and is actually the root cause, instead of time,” said Yunyu Xiao, an assistant professor of psychiatry and population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College and the study’s lead author.Addictive behavior may be more difficult to control during childhood, before the prefrontal cortex, which acts as a brake on impulsivity, is fully developed.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

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      I Think My Son Is Gay. Should I Talk to Him About Coming Out?

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      I’d love to be able to have honest conversations about what he’s going through.I am the mother of two delightful teenage boys in the throes of navigating all the challenges that youth brings. Over the past few years, it has become evident to me that my younger son is most likely gay. I believe I am the only person in the family to have noticed his interest in rainbow flags or his outrage at injustices to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, among other, subtler, indications.I’ve always thought it quite unfair that only those who fall under the L.G.B.T.Q.+ umbrella have the onerous burden of “coming out.” Last summer my son weathered the heartbreak of a dear friend, likely a crush, moving away. For Valentine’s Day, a female classmate asked my son out, and he turned her down. His life is getting increasingly complicated. I don’t want to push him to come out before he’s ready, but I’d love to be able to have honest conversations about some of what he’s going through. My question is: Should I wait and let him come out when he’s ready, or is there a way I can save him the trouble? What is the most thoughtful way to approach this? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:I get why you want to spare him the awkward dance of coming out, but for many young people, it’s a way to claim an identity on their terms. (For many parents, in turn, it involves pretending that the declaration comes as news.) Pressing fast-forward could leave him with the sense that he has lost a measure of agency — that a big moment has been pre-empted. It could also make him feel exposed or rushed. There are all sorts of ways that you can indicate your loving acceptance and reassure him that you’ll be a soft place to land. Indeed, I’m sure you’ve already done so. When he’s ready, you’ll be there — arms open, heart steady, no script needed.Readers RespondThe previous question was from a reader wondering whether to disclose the toxic products used on the shared lawn when selling a condo. The reader wrote: “I am hoping to sell my condo. I live in a homeowner’s association that still uses many toxic landscaping products. … Several residents have worked over the past two years, without success, to change the association’s landscaping practices. What is my obligation to disclose these harmful products to prospective buyers, especially those with young children and pets?”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

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      Youth Climate Activists Sue Trump Administration Over Executive Orders

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      The complaint argues that orders aimed at increasing American fossil fuel production infringe on the rights of young people to a healthy environment.Young people who sued state governments over climate change have begun a legal challenge aimed at President Trump’s spate of executive orders on climate and the environment.The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Montana, argues that three of the executive orders are unconstitutional and would cripple the clean energy industry, suppress climate science and worsen global warming.The 22 plaintiffs, ranging in age from seven to 25 years old, are mostly from Montana, as well as Hawaii, Oregon, and other states, and are represented by the nonprofit legal group Our Children’s Trust. That group has notched two important legal victories in recent years, winning cases against the state of Montana and the Hawaii Department of Transportation.“Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” said Eva Lighthiser, 19, the named plaintiff. “I’m not suing because I want to. I’m suing because I have to. My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line.”The plaintiffs argue that they are already experiencing harms from a warming planet in the form of wildfires, drought and hurricanes, and that Mr. Trump’s executive orders will make conditions even worse. They say the executive orders violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty by infringing on their health, safety and prospects for the future.Further, they argue that the orders constitute executive overreach, because the president cannot unilaterally override federal laws like the Clean Air Act.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