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Being a liberal justice on a Supreme Court with a six-Justice conservative super-majority can be a miserable job. The opportunities for victory are scant; frustration is the baseline. There are two different models for dealing with this reality, approaches that can broadly be described as strategic and rhetorical. A strategic Justice can try to lure a conservative vote here and there, to cobble together an elusive majority and at least limit the damage. A rhetorical Justice can call out the conservatives for the sake of educating the current public and planting a flag for history. Or she—and the three liberals are all women—can tailor her response to the specific case.

Elena Kagan exemplifies this last, hybrid model. She is more than willing to let the majority have it when that is warranted; she also forges compromises with individual conservatives when it is possible to pick up their votes. The newest member of the Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is the epitome of the rhetorical Justice. Last week, as the Court prepared to finish its work for the year, Jackson issued a pair of dissents that signalled her despair over the Court’s trajectory, her refusal to sugarcoat its behavior, and her willingness to break with her liberal colleagues, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

New Justices tend to hang back; Jackson, now in her third term, spoke up from the start. In her first eight oral arguments, she spoke eleven thousand words, twice as many as the next most loquacious Justice, Sotomayor. That tendency has persisted—The Hill found that Jackson spoke seventy-five thousand words this term, fifty per cent more than Sotomayor—and it isn’t the only measure of Jackson’s assertiveness. As the Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak noted at the conclusion of Jackson’s first term on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts “did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.” Jackson’s conduct this term—in her work on the Court and her comments outside it—is not different so much as it is more so: more alarmed at the direction the Court and the country are heading, and more willing than ever to go it alone in expressing that distress.

Jackson’s independence from her liberal colleagues was on display in April, when the majority ruled that a challenge to President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison had been brought in the wrong court. Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Kagan, Jackson, and, in part, by the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was unsparing. She described the Trump Administration’s effort to “hustle” the Venezuelans out of the country before they could obtain due process as “an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.” The Court’s seeming indulgence of that behavior, she added, was “indefensible.” Jackson went further, in her own dissent. She assailed the majority’s “fly-by-night approach” of deciding cases on an emergency basis, without full briefing or oral argument—and compared the opinion with Korematsu v. United States, the discredited 1944 ruling upholding the internment of Japanese Americans. “At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” Jackson wrote. “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

Speaking last month at a judicial conference, Jackson seized the opportunity to call out “the elephant in the room, which is the relentless attacks and disregard and disparagement that judges around the country, and perhaps many of you, are now facing on a daily basis.” Two of her colleagues had already taken oblique aim at President Trump. In March, after Trump called for the impeachment of the district-court judge who handled the Alien Enemies Act case, the Chief Justice departed from his usual Olympian silence to note that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Later that month, Sotomayor went a bit further. “One of the things that is troubling so many right now is many of the standards being changed right now were norms that governed officials into what was right and wrong,” Sotomayor cautioned in an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center. “Once norms are broken, then you are shaking some of the foundation of the rule of law.” Jackson, for her part, let it rip. “Across the nation, judges are facing increased threats of not only physical violence but also professional retaliation, just for doing our jobs,” she warned. “And the attacks are not random; they seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The attacks are also not isolated incidents; that is, they impact more than just the individual judges who are being targeted. Rather, the threats and the harassment are attacks on our democracy—on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

The ferocity of Jackson’s dissents last week was remarkable in part because the opinions came in two relatively low-profile cases, not the kind of hot-button disputes that tend to bring out the adjectives. It was even more remarkable because, in both cases, one of her liberal colleagues was on the opposing side: Kagan, who tends to be more moderate than Jackson and Sotomayor, joined the majority. One case involved the important but technical question of whether the federal disability-rights law covers discrimination against retired workers in the benefits they receive. The majority opinion and the dissent each accused the other side of being driven by the desire to reach the outcome they wanted rather than by an interest in interpreting the law correctly—a charge that is about as nasty as things get at the high court. Gorsuch, writing for the majority, asserted that Jackson had resorted to examining the purpose and legislative history of the disability law because she found the method of “pure textualism”—looking only at the precise language of a statute—“insufficiently pliable to secure the result” she wanted. Jackson returned fire. “Too often, this Court closes its eyes to context, enactment history, and the legislature’s goals when assessing statutory meaning,” she wrote. “I cannot abide that narrow-minded approach. If a statute’s text does not provide a clear answer to a question, it is not our role to keep twisting and turning those words until self-confirmatory observations solidify our ‘first blush’ assumptions.”

Sotomayor joined that part of Jackson’s dissent, but she pointedly did not sign on to a lengthy footnote in which Jackson accused the majority of “an unfortunate misunderstanding of the judicial role,” arguing that the insistence on “pure textualism”—its refusal to consider Congress’s goals in enacting a statute—turns the interpretive task into a potent weapon for advancing judicial policy preferences.” Far from “being ‘insufficiently pliable,’ ” Jackson added, “pure textualism is incessantly malleable—that’s its primary problem—and, indeed, it is certainly somehow always flexible enough to secure the majority’s desired outcome.”

If that exchange wasn’t heated enough, in the second case—which concerned whether gasoline companies, not just automakers, have standing to challenge California’s auto-emissions standards—Jackson all but accused the majority of being in the pocket of big business. The Justices allowed the case to proceed even though the Trump Administration had signalled that it will repeal the waiver letting California set its own emissions standards. The Court “does not explain why it is so eager to resolve this highly factbound, soon-to-be-moot dispute,” Jackson wrote. “For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the Court softens its certiorari standards”—how it decides whether to hear a case—“when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests.” She added, “This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants—workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others—will further fortify that impression.” Jackson made a similar point about the Court’s finding: that gasoline companies had the right to sue. The majority’s “demonstrated concern for ensuring that the fuel industry’s ability to sue is recognized on these facts highlights a potential gap in the manner in which the Court treats the claims of plaintiffs pursuing profits versus those seeking to advance other objectives,” she wrote. Sotomayor, notably, dissented separately.

The end of a Supreme Court term is inevitably a moment for frayed tempers and jangled nerves. And Jackson is not the first Justice to sound such a bitter note. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it,” Kagan wrote three years ago, when the Court essentially invented a new rule to limit regulatory agencies. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.” Dissenting in the Presidential-immunity case last year, Sotomayor lamented that the majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law,” concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” (Jackson took some of the oomph out of Sotomayor’s opinion, which she and Kagan joined, by penning one of her own.)

Even so, the Jackson dissents—and there could be more to come before the summer recess—offer an unnerving window into a Court where Justices’ patience with one another is wearing thin. They are splintered, often angrily, along familiar ideological lines, and at the same time the diminished liberal wing, rather than being unified in opposition, often finds itself fractured. The institution that the country needs most right now is not a happy place, and the junior Justice may be the unhappiest of all. ♦

Today’s practice is designed to help you relax, reset, and build strength for the impending American civil war. Let’s begin by getting off social media. Please—it’s not helping. O.K., fine, go ahead and post one more flying cat meme. I’ll wait.

Now sit tall, with your legs crossed, or remain curled up in the fetal position—sorry, the unborn person position, as I’m now legally required to call it. Close your eyes and draw your attention inward. Notice your breath. Is it shallow and panicked? That’s O.K. It’s just your body reacting naturally to the rapid erosion of civil liberties in real time.

Breathe in through your nose, and exhale out through your mouth, releasing any tension you may still be holding after watching footage of a sitting U.S. senator being forcefully dragged out of a press conference by the Department of Homeland Security.

Feel your breath as it flows in and out. Let your shoulders melt. You are safe here, as long as you’re a white, natural-born, English-speaking U.S. citizen who has never publicly or privately (don’t forget we live in a digital-surveillance state!) criticized the U.S. government under President Trump.

Now drop your right ear to your right shoulder. Roll your chin slowly over to your left shoulder. It’ll help muffle the sound of military helicopters overhead.

Next, come onto your knees, hips about a shoulder-width apart. Let your arms drift behind you, as if they’re cuffed—elbows drawn gently toward one another, like you’re a Mexican grandmother being detained by anonymous masked men for the crime of waiting for a bus without carrying proof of citizenship. Pause here. Feel that stretch in your shoulders, and in your capacity to still be shocked, six months into Trump’s second term.

Pause in child’s pose. Forehead on the mat, arms extended forward. Remember when we all thought the problem was plastic straws?

Now sit up and let your hips sink back. Feel the ground beneath you, which I’m told has been sold by the federal government to private entities for mineral rights. Also, I hope you’re vaccinated because I just found out that someone in the last class has tested positive for measles.

Slowly lower yourself onto your back, legs extended, head on the mat, arms by your sides, and palms facing up for savasana. This is a posture of total inaction—it’s also called “corpse pose,” or “Congress.” Take a deep breath in, and, as you exhale, allow your body to collapse into the floor like a peaceful protester who just took a rubber bullet to the head. Stay here for as long as you like living in a proto-fascist police state.

Now open your eyes. Great work, everybody. You showed up! That’s half the battle, the other half is being fought by seven hundred marines and two thousand National Guardsmen deployed to downtown L.A. “for your safety.”

When you’re ready, gently return to a seated position. Place your hands on your heart—or instead, let’s keep them visible. ICE is at the door. We’re being raided. I gotta run. Namas—Actually, I’m not sure I feel safe speaking another language in public right now. ♦

On Monday night, forty-eight hours after President Donald Trump ordered a series of strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, he announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Earlier that day, Iran had fired missiles at an American airbase in Qatar, an attack that came with advance warning and resulted in no casualties. The Trump Administration had initially signalled a reluctance to formally get involved in Israel’s campaign to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, but, since the strikes on Saturday, Trump had publicly mused about the possibility of regime change. Even after his Monday announcement that he’d helped broker a pause in hostilities, Iran and Israel continued to exchange missile attacks, each side accusing the other of breaking the terms of the ceasefire. On Tuesday morning, Trump told reporters at the White House, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Nicole Grajewski is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program, and the author of the book “Russia and Iran.” (On Monday, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met in Moscow with his country’s most powerful ally, Vladimir Putin, who had criticized the American strike.) Grajewski and I spoke just prior to the ceasefire announcement, and followed up after Trump’s declaration. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we discuss why a ceasefire may be difficult to sustain, what Russia’s relationships with both Iran and Israel may portend for the region, and why a war meant to end Iran’s nuclear program may instead have delivered prolonged uncertainty.

What are your concerns about a ceasefire holding in the short, medium, and long term?

In the short term, I think my primary concern is accidental escalation. Whether that’s Iranian proxy groups in Iraq launching something against Israel and Israel responding, or because of a response to statements from Israel or Iran. In the medium to long term, my concern has to do with the acrimonious relationship between Iran and Israel which would likely continue. This ceasefire is not going to eradicate years of shadow war that Iran and Israel are locked into. And the nuclear issue continues to loom.

How so?

On Monday, the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian parliament approved an outline of a bill that would suspend Iran’s coöperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. That would curtail efforts at identifying, or at least accounting for, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and access to these nuclear sites. So there may be momentum within Iran that seems to be pushing against international oversight on its nuclear program.

Netanyahu has also been very aggressive lately—could you see him giving Trump a victory on a short-term ceasefire, as he did with Gaza, and then wanting to re-start the war?

It’s very foreseeable that Israel takes the opportunity again to go in and eliminate certain facilities or leadership. I think a lot of the escalatory dynamics probably hinge on what is left of the Iranian nuclear program and how close they are to reconstituting. Some of the uranium metal facilities have been destroyed, so that’s actually a pretty good stopgap for some of the weaponization work. But we don’t know where the highly enriched uranium that Iran had is. And then Iran has a lot of components of centrifuges, and these haven’t been under I.A.E.A. inspection since 2021. So, on the long-term side of it, you could see Iran developing a covert program. Moreover, because you did see Israel assassinating Iranian scientists in the past, Iran created a pretty robust community of nuclear scientists, nuclear engineers, nuclear physicists, so that continuity of knowledge would be maintained. So it’s not like the knowledge is eradicated either. And I think one thing that’s going to happen as a result of the mass intelligence penetration that really curtailed Iran’s military response and led to this destruction of their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (I.R.G.C.) leadership, is that there’s going to be a higher-surveillance state, a higher clampdown at a societal level, and, I think, a far more secretive program.

What internal and external dynamics do you see within Iran right now?

There is a domestic audience to whom the Iranian leadership wants to convey a semblance of stability and a semblance of strength. But this is also about signalling to the United States that Iran is not weak and that, despite these massive hits when it comes to their military facilities, when it comes to their conventional power they still reserve a right to respond. But it seems that there was some warning or signalling to America and/or Qatar before this Qatar military-base attack. Iran likely doesn’t want to get involved in a war of attrition with the United States, even if they are preparing for one.

So the signalling is just to make clear that a prolonged war is not what Iran wants?

Yeah, and there’s obviously now this concern about regime change and internal stability. And so that’s going to be something, I think, that Iranian strategists are thinking about as well, because the continuation of this war for them also increases their vulnerability when it comes to the kind of control that they have at home. Israel on Monday targeted some of the organs of repression within Iran, such as the so-called Basij force, for example, and other parts of their internal security services.

Can you talk a little bit about how the regime is structured and operates?

The regime functions on repression, and terror to an extent. That’s how it was formed in this revolutionary context and then after the Iran-Iraq War. But it’s heavily bureaucratized and also institutionalized. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is one aspect of this. And one part of that is the Basij, which is their internal clamp on power. But they also have major conglomerates of economic interests that are really predicated on corruption. And it is factionalized. There are certain factions where you have the clergy and that emphasis in just certain parts of the country. So in Qom, for example, that’s a pretty large concentration of power when it comes to the clergy. And so you see that in discussions of the Guardian Council, which oversees elections and approves legislation, or even with succession talk. But then there’s also these hard-liners who are very much entrenched in this ideology of confrontation with the United States and Israel. And this also includes a very strong emphasis on maintaining at least this kind of threshold nuclear status and also projecting its power throughout the region.

So Iran functions as somewhat of a kleptocracy, but also a heavily ideological one. And, of course, this is all driven by an acute sense of vulnerability to any kind of internal or external upheaval that might threaten the very existence of the regime. And, of course, there’s a Supreme Leader, and he is the ultimate arbitrator within Iran, but there’s a cadre of élites around him.

I have seen you warn about the consequences of regime change. What about this regime’s structure that you have just broadly defined makes you concerned specifically?

One problem with the discussion of Iranian regime change in the United States is that it’s a goal within itself, but there is nothing with what happens after. The experience of Iraq is a good example of this. But with Iran, I think what’s worrisome is that there are such strong and also militarized factions that could potentially mount somewhat of a countercoup. The Iranian people mostly don’t support the current regime, and many Iranian people don’t support a revolutionary theocracy. But there are also the people who are actually in charge of this massive repression apparatus. And so one of my concerns is also that we pursue a policy of regime change, and what actually happens domestically in Iran is far greater repression and far more insecurity to the extent that the civilians are the ones who suffer the most. Regime change is ultimately up to the Iranian people. One would hope that this regime does fall at some point and some democratic government rises. But, you know, that’s not always how international relations play out.

How do you think the weakening or removal of Iran’s allies, whether Hezbollah after the Israeli campaign against it, or Syria after Assad’s fall, has changed Iran’s calculations?

The changing regional dynamics and the loss of Iran’s forward-defense doctrine, which is what they called it, which had provided them with strategic depth, will probably influence the response a lot. For instance, this is why Iran has so far been reliant on its missile force to serve as a deterrent or at least its retaliatory capability toward Israel. But it also, I think, ultimately shows, if you look at the debates within Iran, a failure of what they thought their defense strategy was over the years. They invested so much money in these groups that in some cases eventually turned out to succumb to almost overnight collapse. And then, of course, Assad in Syria as well. Among the so-called reformists, you would hear criticism of all this spending, especially around the time of the Syrian war. You had parliamentarians questioning why Iran is investing so much in these wars abroad when there’s endemic problems at home. But I think Iran’s retaliation shows the failure of that strategy. But if Hezbollah was stronger and Assad was there, they probably would have been able to mount a much more devastating response or a much more damaging response than they were able to.

How did the regime adjust its behavior after the nuclear deal, before Trump pulled out of it?

The nuclear issue was really about Iran’s fissile material, about its work with advanced centrifuges and the ability for Iran to potentially break out with a nuclear weapon. So I wouldn’t say the deal fundamentally changed the regime’s behavior. You saw Iran quite active in Syria at the time. That’s really when they increased a lot of their support for the Assad regime, after the nuclear agreement, and you saw Iranians supporting non-state actors throughout the region with targeted assassinations. So I wouldn’t say that the nuclear deal transformed the regime or even really prompted that much of a shift. Perhaps it pushed things underground. I think there was actually somewhat of an effort by the leadership to portray themselves as behaving on the international stage. But it didn’t shift their calculus about their security and it didn’t really shift the internal dynamics because you saw the same level of repression, you saw the same level of support for these groups. And it didn’t eradicate the discourse about Iran being a perpetual enemy to Israel and a perpetual enemy to the United States. It was really about the nuclear program. Maybe we had illusions about whether that would change the calculus of the regime. But, in reality, I think that the nuclear deal was helpful because at least we had greater transparency about what they were doing. And now this is going to be all shrouded in secrecy.

I want to turn to Iran and Russia now, but, before we do, how would you describe their relationship over the past several decades?

The relationship has never really been an easy one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians came into Iran to secure some arms agreements and civilian nuclear-energy coöperation. But they faced quite a bit of pressure from the United States to cancel some of these agreements. And you’d see the Russians really preferring to coöperate with the United States over Iran. And this also happened during the height of the Iran nuclear issue, prior to the 2015 nuclear deal that Obama made, when there were rounds of sanctions on Iran. Russia supported this. Around 2010 was when the Russia-Iran relationship was at its lowest, though, with Russia voting for probably the most stringent and damaging sanctions on Iran when it came to its economy and also a conventional arms embargo. And this even prompted former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to call Russia an enemy of the Iranian people and accuse them of caving to Satan. So their relationship wasn’t this close, tight-knit relationship at the time, though they still coöperated.

It was really the Syrian civil war that transformed this relationship. Both had ties to the Assad regime, but they also saw the spectre of what they viewed as Western-led regime change, akin to Libya. And it prompted them both to bolster Assad and keep him afloat. And eventually this culminated in the Russian intervention in 2015. And that transformed the Russia-Iran relationship because for the first time they had to operate in the same military campaign. They had to create structures and institutions and different channels for coöperation. And there were tensions in Syria. Russia and Iran had competing interests. They would sometimes vie over certain contracts. But what happens as a result of Syria is you see a deepening in the institutionalization of this relationship. And it goes beyond that. There is more coöperation when it comes to their intelligence services, when it comes to their interior ministries, and even on issues like sanction evasion.

What role has Iran played in the war in Ukraine?

When Russia seemed to be faltering in the war in Ukraine, they reached out to the Iranians for drones. And Iran provided drones initially. And, eventually, Russia shifted to local production of these drones. And a lot of the individuals who were involved in the Syrian campaign actually were behind the deals with the Russians. And so you see this relationship transforming into something much deeper, where Russia now was dependent on Iran. That’s changed a bit because of the localization. And Russia doesn’t necessarily need Iran for drone components anymore. But Iran was really crucial in that regard, of establishing these factories and providing Russia with munitions to terrorize Ukrainians every night.

How have the Russians responded to the Israeli attack on Iran and to Trump’s strikes?

Russia has come out with strongly worded statements supporting Iran and calling the aggression illegal. Russia has attempted to mediate and tried to use this as a way of de-escalating, though Russia doesn’t really have much legitimacy as a mediator at the moment because of the downturn in Russian-Israeli relations. At the same time, Russia does have a quite large ethnic-Russian population in Israel. So this hasn’t been a blanket endorsement of Iranian actions. And Russia doesn’t seem to be coming in to provide any formal military assistance to Iran. But Russia is trying to lean a little bit closer to Iran.

I imagine they don’t want to get too involved, in part because they are already stretched thin in Ukraine, no?

Yeah, the question is, what can Russia do? There was a bunch of analysis saying that Russia abandoned Iran, but in reality the question should have been, like, what could Russia have done? Russia’s defense industry is already strapped. It’s not clear if the Iranians have asked the Russians for help. There’s probably some coöperation when it comes to intelligence. At the meeting on Monday in Moscow, the head of Russia’s military intelligence was there. And I think that was an effort to signal that Russia may be helping Iran in terms of intelligence coöperation, but also to maybe assuage some Iranian concerns that Russia is not doing enough.

What about in terms of Russia’s relationship with Israel? Ideologically, it makes a certain amount of sense, and Netanyahu’s closest ally in Europe might be Hungary, which is close to Russia. Why didn’t this relationship develop more?

Putin and Netanyahu had a pretty good personal relationship, and that was even evident during Putin’s second Presidency in the two-thousands. So they’ve had a pretty strong relationship. Obviously, the Soviet Union didn’t have great relations with Israel, but, actually, on a personal level, Putin and Netanyahu had pretty close ties.

It’s nice to see two guys like that come together.

Yeah. In the Syrian civil war, the Russians and the Israelis had a pretty strong relationship. They had a deconfliction hotline. Russia would actually sometimes acquiesce to Israeli strikes on Iranian assets. And so they had a pretty strong working relationship. However, after the invasion of Ukraine and the closer coöperation with Iran, the Israelis mounted their concerns, and the Russians weren’t really open to that. And then, after October 7th, it became far worse because Russia barely even condemned the attack, but hosted Hamas delegations in Russia. And then, all the while, there were actually more aggressive moves in Syria, such as electronic jamming against Israel, that really led this relationship to sour. And I think what was surprising was, when Iran launched strikes in October of 2024 against Israel, Putin didn’t even bother calling Netanyahu. The Kremlin said that it had no intention to speak to the Israelis. However, with this round of strikes, almost immediately Putin tried to de-escalate and called both Netanyahu and the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to try to serve as a mediator. So it perhaps reflects how Russia thinks the situation might be quite grave.

Yeah, it is interesting that it soured, because I remember Netanyahu being basically non-aligned on Ukraine and praising Putin.

Yeah, and there is also the Jewish Russian diaspora, and the Jewish population within Russia. Putin kept the lid on antisemitism in Russia for a while. But, after October 7th, it changed.

Going forward, if this conflict is going to be contained, what are you looking at in terms of alliances and regional dynamics?

It is really an issue between the U.S. and Iran and Israel right now. However, that could widen, and you could see Russia trying to exploit the situation as a form of horizontal escalation with the United States. The question is what form would that be? But Russia could be there as a spoiler. At the moment, they seem to be less willing to do that, because I do think that the Russians are concerned about the survival of the Iranian regime, but that could change. The Russians have shown quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to certain policies.

At the same time, I think that the regional dynamics are quite dire. There are still non-state actors that are aligned with Iran in Iraq, which could be activated and open up another front targeting U.S. bases, and there are the Houthis in Yemen. And then, of course, there’s always the Gulf countries that are in the middle of this, and Iran has thus far been clear in signalling to them and keeping communications open, but that could also deteriorate. One thing that I am also quite concerned about is Iran’s thinking on the nuclear issue. We now know that Iran has moved or diverted some of its highly enriched uranium or perhaps some of its centrifuge components from the Fordow site that was bombed by America. It is all quite murky, but the situation doesn’t look incredible at the moment. ♦

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You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. Full disclosure: I squeamishly watch horror films through my fingers and, in real life, a mere punch in the nose is terrifying to witness. I doubt I’d ever attend a corrida—but this new documentary by Albert Serra, about the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, is one of the most transfixing I’ve seen in a while. There’s blood, and it’s not stage blood; Roca gets hurt, and bulls are killed. Yet the effect that the movie elicits isn’t horror but glory. What makes “Afternoons of Solitude” hard to watch is its assault on assumptions: perhaps justice would be served by the abolition of bullfighting, but Serra proves that, were it to vanish, a source of radical beauty would be lost, too.

Serra’s daringly restrained approach to the subject is at the very source of the film’s disturbing emotional power. There are no talking-head interviews, no voice-overs, no superimposed text or title cards to situate the action. What’s more, there’s an extraordinary austerity to its spectrum of activity, which involves only three kinds of settings: the van in which Roca and his team of about a half-dozen men travel from venue to venue, the hotels in which Roca stays, and the rings in which he fights bulls. Roca is onscreen for nearly the entire film, yet it takes a while to see him in action, because Serra, who followed him over the course of a year and a half, makes the shrewd editorial choice of preparing viewers for a bullfight as Roca himself prepares. First, he’s seen in a van just after a bout, calmly chatting with his crew while still wearing his ornate competitive finery (known as the traje de luces, the “suit of lights”). But the apparent calm of the journey soon proves to be quietly fraught: after arriving in a hotel room, where an assistant helps remove the skintight suit, Roca is still bleeding from an unhealed wound. At every turn, “Afternoons of Solitude” is a drama of blood.

Once Roca is in the ring, Serra’s method turns rigorously and prudently observational. The director and his camera operators (he mostly shoots using three cameras) are usually somewhere in the audience alongside ordinary ticket holders (and occasionally on platforms used for TV broadcasts), and Roca is mainly filmed from afar, with zoom lenses that paradoxically show him and the bulls in extreme detail while nonetheless evoking extreme distance from the action. Nothing in the movie suggests that the operators themselves are in the ring and physically dodging danger. The images have a poise, a calm, a precision that, from the contemplative safety of the stands, is all the more passionately attentive to the danger that Roca, his team, and, for that matter, the bulls confront. The takes often run very long; the resulting continuities of space and time unfold the choreographic splendor of the bullfighter’s work and convey a harrowing sense of no exit from the field of battle.

The first corrida in the film condenses its many segments into a bravura sequence of a dozen minutes: both an overview of the usual order of business and a selection of prime moments from a theatre of death. First, Roca calls, taunts, and dodges the bull as a picador lances its back; the wounded bull leaves blood on the horse’s protective blanket and the rider’s metal footbox. A banderillero enters the ring on foot and runs daringly close to the bull, planting barbed sticks in its shoulder before deftly dashing away. Then, with the bull bleeding and weakened, Roca bears his sword beneath his cape and executes close passes, turning his back on the animal, wiggling his hips, shaking his head cockily, and goading it with a cry of “Toro, toro!,” only to be knocked flat and nearly trampled by the enraged beast. Spoiler: Roca gets up, shakes it off, and, to the audience’s rhythmic chants of “To-re-ro, to-re-ro!,” returns to the fray. Moments later, after asking an associate in the stands,“You think we shut their mouths?,” Roca returns to take on another bull.

The soundtrack adds to the sense of haunted drama: members of Roca’s team wear tiny radio microphones, picking up their voices—whether discourse or cries—and that of the bullfighter himself, who refused to wear a mike, and who battles to the rise and fall of the crowd’s gasps and cheers. The language with which his entourage exhorts him has a Hemingwayesque quality of terse grandiloquence: one calls out to Roca that he’s on “the front lines of the soul.” (The dialogue also reaches a bit lower on the philosophical scale, with its frequent testicular references—“Life is nothing, you’ve got balls”—and similarly macho exclamations, as when a team member tells Roca, “Go kick ass, maestro, go with the greats.”)

The effect is practically martial. Roca is a man at war, and even when he wins, he sort of loses. In one bout, he’s first flipped to the ground and prodded by the bull, then slammed into the ringside boards, only barely spared a horrific goring by getting pounded by the bull’s head mainly between the horns. Roca—with his pants torn and blood showing through—returns to fight and ultimately brings the bull down with one fierce thrust, leaving the sword in its back. An angry and relieved teammate taunts the vanquished animal, “Go join your fucking mother cow.” Roca’s response, however, is nearly a eulogy: “Bull, you spared me.” Serra is respectful, too. The camera operators catch the animals in full and furious closeups, and they pay dignified attention to bulls’ death agonies, their thrusts and their tremors, their gazes misting over, their eyes rolling back in their heads—and to the banal last rites of the corpses, chained to the horses that drag them off.

Roca’s maneuvers have both a theatrical elegance and a fearsome daring; his bravado is refined by his bravery, his defiant gaze challenging not just the bull but death itself. His teammates wax philosophical to extoll his achievements—“You can’t get more purity in bullfighting”; “You fought that first bull so truthfully”—and their intuitions of truth and purity inhabit the movie’s aesthetic as well. Though the making of “Afternoons of Solitude” involved the uncertainty and surprise that are intrinsic to documentary filmmaking (Serra estimates that he shot between six hundred and seven hundred hours of footage, for a feature that runs two hours and five minutes), the movie’s tightly controlled range of images is akin to tautly understated prose. Each bullfight has a similar order of activity, and Serra films them all similarly, too, but the subtle variations in weather and mood, angle and framing, the shifts between full-body shots and closeups, strike enormous differences in affect—and those differences are differences of contrast and comparison, the work of keen-eyed editing (which Serra and the cinematographer, Artur Tort, did together).

The film’s few anecdotal elements—as when a squire ritualistically but strenuously dresses Roca, lifting him by the waistband and tightening the fit as if to leave bulls no loose fabric to catch by the horn—cast the bullfighter’s entire existence in the shadow of danger and death. The movie includes nothing about the economics, the business, or the politics of bullfighting. The raising and readying of bulls is clearly expensive, as are the competitors’ finery and the administrative infrastructure of the sport. Yet “Afternoons of Solitude” offers no sidebars and no backstory to show or tell of the obviously elaborate training that Roca has undergone or how he entered the field, nothing about any rehearsals or dry runs or managerial preparations that he and his team might engage in. The film is a rarefied exaltation of bullfighting as an inherently but latently cinematic domain that’s been waiting for its closeup—and which reveals its essence only by way of the special powers of the cinema.

In this regard, “Afternoons of Solitude” is consistent with Serra’s remarkable career, which is itself a risky field of self-imposed challenges. He’s forty-nine and made his first feature in 2003; his oeuvre has included such distinctive films as “Honor de Cavalleria” (a refracted version of “Don Quixote”) and “Story of My Death” (a drama that brings together the real life of Casanova and a fictional one of Count Dracula). Serra is essentially a formalist in drama, by his choices of subject, which are matched by his conceptual approach to visual compositions. His films reflect tension between extremes of physicality and of abstraction, between stories of a potentially grotesque carnality and images of rigorous design. The balance is hard to strike. Some of his films are insufficiently grounded in drama; others undercut ample drama with effortful direction. In “Afternoons of Solitude,” with its blend of intimacy and majesty, of breathless action and overarching monumentality, he achieves a unity, a synthesis, and a far-reaching vision that he has only occasionally found in fiction. My thumbnail definition of tragedy is when truth, beauty, and justice are in conflict. Though “Afternoons of Solitude” shows only the present tense of bullfighting, it looks deep into history and spotlights the tragic contradictions of modern life itself. ♦

In the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” the characters are keenly aware that they live in interesting times. Early in the series, which is set in the eighteen-eighties, an estate lawyer observes that million-dollar fortunes are made and lost by the day in the railway business. One of its titans, the robber baron George Russell (Morgan Spector), envisions an express line that will enable cross-country transport at an unprecedented pace. Thomas Edison makes real the once fantastical notion of an entire building lit up by electricity, and Oscar Wilde charms the New York aristocracy with his witticisms, if not his plays. The promise in the air inspires immigrants, unionists, suffragettes, and a rising Black bourgeoisie. But though “The Gilded Age,” which returned for its third season on Sunday, alludes to all of these historical developments, it’s primarily occupied by the social-climbing efforts of George’s wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), who’s hellbent on dominating Manhattan high society. Although an entire city beckons, the first season hinges in part on whether the Russells’ neighbor—the huffy, old-money Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski)—will ever cross Sixty-first Street to visit.

The phrase “the gilded age” is borrowed from Mark Twain’s 1873 novel of the same name, a political satire about the materialism and corruption of the years following the Civil War. The era is frequently invoked to explain the skyrocketing inequality of our own time. But the creator of “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes—whose earlier period drama, “Downton Abbey,” drew criticisms as a rose-colored apologia for the British aristocracy—is single-minded in his focus on the loveliness of the veneer. It’s hard to think of another series currently on the air as lavish, or as vacuous. A businessman’s quip that banks are like women—they “panic at the unimportant and ignore the essentials”—is supposed to scan as boorish but inadvertently summarizes many of the show’s story lines. Plenty of series have managed to make frivolity feel meaningful, or at least fun. But so little actually happens, episode by episode, that “The Gilded Age” scarcely qualifies as a soap opera: by the time the Russell and Van Rhijn butlers begin passive-aggressively debating the placement of salad forks and coffee spoons, it’s clear we’re meant to feast on scraps.

Part of the problem is that there have been no real stakes to the proceedings. Other series about the ultra-wealthy, such as “Succession” and “The White Lotus,” illustrate how money cannot protect against emotional (or even physical) harm; if anything, the characters’ riches make them more vulnerable to it. “The Gilded Age” takes place during a time of extreme flux, and the variability of its characters’ fates is meant to be central to its premise. The expectation is set early in the series, when an alderman who tries to swindle George bankrupts himself in the process, then kills himself in shame. But nothing so consequential has happened since—if ruin ever looms, it doesn’t stick. Toward the end of the second season, for example, Agnes’s son, Oscar (Blake Ritson), loses the family fortune. Oscar, who is in the closet, has spent the series seeking a wealthy heiress through whom he can maintain his life style; the woman he chooses turns out to be running a scheme of her own, with disastrous repercussions for the Van Rhijns. His widowed mother suddenly faces the prospect of selling her home and living out her final years with her sister, Ada (Cynthia Nixon), in dire straits, while her household staff are left to fend for themselves. The twist is one of the show’s few satisfying developments: comeuppance for a would-be conniver! And then, in the next episode, through an inheritance bequeathed to Ada out of the blue, the family’s money troubles are instantly over. Agnes and Ada’s niece exults that “nothing needs to change.”

The series is not entirely unaware of its characters’ myopia. In the first season, Bertha focusses on the minutiae of her daughter Gladys’s entrée into society while her husband faces the possibility of imprisonment, and the previously uxorious George finds her increasingly ridiculous. In the new season, when Bertha believes that she’s found the right match for Gladys—an English duke whose old-world title would give the new-money Russells a social trump card—she acts more like a madam than a mother, icily dismissing the girl’s feelings in order to close the deal. But Fellowes refuses to treat it as a heel turn, even clumsily transforming Bertha into a proto-feminist who picks a fight about female suffrage at a dinner party and risks her own social status to advocate for divorced women. The attempted redemption arc never quite rings true.

It doesn’t help that Fellowes reaches repeatedly into the same small bag of tricks. Even with Baranski’s flawless line readings, there are only so many times we can expect to be amused by Agnes dubbing things “fiddle-faddle” or “hobbledehoys,” or being scandalized by, say, the newfangled prospect of hot soup for lunch. She’s an obvious successor to Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess on “Downton,” and not the only retread that reaches a point of diminishing returns; the upstairs-downstairs contrast was key to the earlier show’s appeal, but the secrets that are forever being tearfully confessed by the servants of “The Gilded Age” are no substitute for inner lives. (Denée Benton’s Peggy, the sole Black lead, is the only member of “the help” to stand out, but she travels so far afield of the Manhattan and Newport enclaves where the rest of the series is set that she often feels like she’s on a different show.) On the higher floors, engagements are made and broken with the regularity of a Swiss clock.

In this season, though, consequences arrive at last. It’s not a coincidence that it’s the series’ strongest. Seeds planted at the outset are coming to fruition—most significantly, Bertha’s pitiless ambition leading to the formerly unthinkable crackup of the Russell marriage. Across the street, the foundations of the Van Rhijn home are also shaken after Ada’s unexpected windfall enables her to challenge Agnes as head of the household. These plotlines deliver on the anything-goes unpredictability that the show had initially promised: “The Gilded Age” won’t force any of its characters to relinquish the gilt, but their luxurious environs are now the backdrop for more serious woes.

Fellowes is even letting some of these characters evince more complicated emotions. Late in the season, an irreversible calamity does strike: one of Oscar’s lovers is killed, and he’s left unable to express to his family the extent of his grief because he cannot reveal the nature of their relationship. Even after the arc resolves itself, the rawness of his sorrow lingers. For all the references to real-life personages and historical events, this fictional beat is one of the few times when “The Gilded Age” offers genuine insight into what it must have been like to live in such an era. The rest is fiddle-faddle. ♦