• In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”
• What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.
• Trump’s election acted as the pivot point for this trend, giving corporate leaders cover to do what they’d long wanted to do anyway. “The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcement after announcement from major corporations pulling out of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all levels of American society.
• That the beginning of the resistance took the form of a women’s march on Washington — not a Democratic march, or an anti-Trump march — fit the times. That the #MeToo movement followed soon after was no accident. Masculinity was toxic. The future was female.

• I won’t make any claims about the future, but the present feels decidedly male. Trump’s campaign in 2024 was gaudily masculine. Hulk Hogan and Dana White, the chief executive of UFC, spoke on the night of Trump’s speech at the Republican convention. The campaign fanned out to the podcasters young men listened to and embraced crypto culture. It connected to a larger anger building among men — a sense that there was no recognized masculinity aside from toxic masculinity, that there wasn’t much room for them in that female future.

  Trump’s win, in turn, has been felt as a victory for a particular type of man in the gender wars. In the hours after his victory, the taunt “your body, my choice,” filled social media. Attention has focused on the spaces in culture that embraced Trump, from Rogan to crypto to UFC, deepening the sense — or recognition — of their power.

• Cowen may have correctly called the shift in vibes, but he isn’t particularly comfortable with it. If 2024 was partly a backlash to the Democratic Party and culture of the last four years, what might a backlash to this more culturally confident and overwhelming form of Trumpism look like?

  “I’ve taken to insisting to my friends on the right: ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ ” Cowen told me. “You might get it.”

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• There will be plenty to oppose. Our central message must revolve around opposing Republicans’ tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It is deeply unpopular, and we know they want to do it again. And then we attack the rest. We know Republicans will most likely skyrocket everyday costs with slapstick tariffs; they will almost certainly attempt to slash the Affordable Care Act, raising premiums on the working class; and they will probably do next to nothing to curb the cost of prescription drugs. In a truly stunning display of inhumanity, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has already lacerated health care funding for Sept. 11 emergency workers and survivors. There will be much, much worse to come.

  But of course, opposition is only half the coin.
• Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in. I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.

• The technological precondition was the rapid adoption of iPhones and social media, which allowed the memetic spread of new ideas and terms. Twitter in particular was the perfect forum for political correctness to flourish. It favored morally uncomplicated positions. It encouraged activists and clout-seekers to gain audience share and political influence by mustering braying crowds to render summary judgment on the basis of some fragment of video or text. The instant consensus that formed on Twitter felt like reality to those absorbed inside of it, an illusion that would take years to dispel.

• Women internalize this kind of judgment, making the individual desire to keep things clean inextricable from the social expectation to do so. Women are critiqued for having pans in the sink and grime on the countertops in a way that men aren’t. Women’s cortisol levels go up when their space is messy in a way that men’s cortisol levels don’t. Asking women to clean less means asking women to accept more criticism, to buck their culture, to put aside their desire for a socially desirable space. At the same time, men internalize the message that an untidy home is not their responsibility.

• The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president.
• “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”
• In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with. (Because they don’t feel strongly attached to a party, independents rely on other characteristics of the candidates to make up their mind.)
• When researchers ask voters to list the traits that they want in a president, they rate masculine-coded traits, such as strength, as more important than feminine-coded ones, such as compassion. “The prestige and the height of the office contributes to the perception that women are just too big of a risk to take,” Nichole Bauer, a political-communication professor at Louisiana State University, told me.
• Masculinity is so important to the presidency that candidates often try to cast their male opponents as feminine: Think of George W. Bush painting John Kerry as effete in 2004, and Marco Rubio’s opponents mocking him for his high-heeled boots in 2016.
• As a female presidential candidate, “you’re upsetting not just our idea of what presidents should be,” Anderson said, “but you’re upsetting a whole bunch of gender norms.”
• Essentially, a female candidate would have to overcome her femaleness in order to win a presidential race. She would have to be running with significant tailwinds—as a “change” candidate during a terrible economy, say—so that voters wouldn’t pay too much attention to her gender. This is similar to what happened in 2008: An unpopular Republican was president, the economy was a wreck, and the preternaturally charismatic Barack Obama stepped into the breach. He became the first Black president, and now no one questions whether there could be another. But we’re still holding out for the female Obama. We might be waiting for a while.

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• Much of the gender divide is driven by the youngest generation of voters: The poll shows that 69 percent of women ages 18 to 29 favor Ms. Harris, compared with 45 percent of young men — a difference that far exceeds that in any older generation of voters.

• Yet what makes Shakespeare controversial is also what makes him essential — and contemporary. His work deals with issues that remain just as relevant and contested today as they were in his time. His comedies suggest the fluidity of gender and the ambiguities of desire. His tragedies show us human beings coming face to face with their own failings. His history plays show us characters pursuing power at the expense of others. “The Merchant of Venice” and “Othello” show us how prejudice and hate divide us. In great philosophical and political plays like “The Tempest,” all these themes come together.

• Although some Democrats worry that Black and Latino men may be more resistant to women leaders, Undem said her data show that a rising share of both groups agree that women make better political leaders. (The share of Black men expressing that view has more than quadrupled since 2016 from 5 percent to 22 percent, she found.) To the extent that Trump is gaining among men of color, “that growing openness,” Undem told me, “is unrelated to gender—it really is economic in nature,” centered on a belief that he can manage the economy more effectively than a Democratic president. This suggests that Harris, rather than facing intractable objections rooted in her identity, has an opportunity to regain at least some ground with men of color if she can mount a persuasive economic case.

• Paris has seen its share of upheaval over the centuries. To walk its streets is to be accompanied by history and to be ambushed from time to time, even after many years, by some previously unnoticed inflection of beauty.
• To be a “flâneur,” poorly translatable as a wanderer, is a particularly Parisian state, capturing the random meandering of the observer who is entranced by the city and its people. “America is my country and Paris is my hometown,” said Gertrude Stein, the novelist and art collector.
• Wonderment is a common condition here. The way the light falls — on a golden dome, or through the leaves of the plane trees, or on the limestone walls of a handsome boulevard, or across the shimmering water of the Seine at dusk — stops visitors in their tracks. The City of Light is also the city of etched shadows ever redrawing its lines.

• What is this magical harmony of Paris?

  It is grace and it is calm and it is consolation for the weary, but perhaps in the end it cannot be pinpointed, and that is of the nature of magic. “Fluctuat nec mergitur,” says the city’s motto. “She is rocked by the waves but does not sink.” With luck, the Olympics will raise Paris still higher and, in a world marked by wars, offer reconciliation and peace.

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• After he was hired by the Olympic Committee, Jolly commissioned four writers to help him draft a script: a medieval historian, an award-winning novelist, a screenwriter and a playwright. They traveled up and down the river on boats, brainstorming.
• The jumble and overlap of history along the banks make for a passionate stage design. “The history of France is this: a story that clashes, is rebuilt, then deconstructed,” Jolly said. “It’s enthralling.”