“The essential problem is that there’s a strain of feminism that sees any difference between men and women as a threat to our equality,” says Leah Libresco Sargeant on this episode of “Interesting Times.”

Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of “Frankenstein” “must contend not just with the novel but with its cultural mutation,” Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes. “How will Mr. del Toro reconcile the creature Shelley created and the monster it has become?”

Zohran Mamdani “has captivated New Yorkers. The Spanberger and Sherrill wins should have Democrats feeling upbeat as well,” Michelle Cottle writes. Competent, relatable centrists “have a vital role to play in reviving the party’s fortunes outside of its urban comfort zones.”

“Earlier this month, a federal judge appointed by President Trump in 2019, did the worst thing you can do to Trump in a court of law,” our columnist David French writes. “She took him seriously.”

For institutions tied to the United Arab Emirates, choosing to speak out about the genocide in Sudan would have an economic cost, write three experts in global human rights. “Yet the cost of silence, of continuing business as usual, is infinitely greater. It will be measured in lives,” they say.

“The world is prepared to do business with useful strongmen” like President Erdogan of Turkey, Gonul Tol writes — “even if that makes the struggle infinitely harder for pro-democracy voices in Turkey and elsewhere.”

After Wednesday’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court about Trump’s tariffs, Jack Goldsmith thinks a majority of the court will be very worried about “giving a president basically unconstrained tariff authority to raise revenue that Congress as a practical matter cannot reverse,” he says.

“The odds are that Mamdani’s victory is actually less significant than you think,” our columnist Ross Douthat says. “The media, still New York-centric, even in this supposedly decentralized age, tends to hype New York mayoral politics beyond its real significance.”

“There are a lot of really deep problems with our trade relationship with China. Not all of those can be solved with trade tools,” Jason Furman says on this episode of “The Opinions,” where Furman debates with Oren Cass about why tariffs alone won’t fix U.S.-China dependence.

Zohran Mamdani’s “message resonated because he spoke about the burdens of everyday life: rent that swallows paychecks, grocery prices that never stop climbing and a sense that fairness that has long been forgotten,” Dimitris Eleas writes in a letter to The Times.

“As long as Mamdani is in office, the city will be home to haters,” writes David Wallace-Wells. “But as the temperature of the campaign season cools, the bigger challenge will likely come not from those in New York but from those in Washington.”

“If this is an opportunity for Democrats to win back lost ground — and it is — then it is also a warning to a Republican Party that has tied its entire identity to the man from Mar-a-Lago,” our columnist Jamelle Bouie writes.

“For workers under 25, mental health is now so poor that they are generally as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts,” Jessica Grose writes.

"What is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine. We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling," writes the author Gary Shteyngart.

Zohran Mamdani, “who campaigned on sweeping promises, can build a more positive legacy by focusing on tangible accomplishments,” the editorial board writes.

“It isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past,” our columnist Bret Stephens writes. “Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.”

Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, wins the governor’s race in Virginia. “As political origin stories go, Abigail Spanberger, a former House member from Virginia who is now the Democratic nominee for governor, has an enticing one,” our columnist Michelle Cottle wrote of Spanberger in August.

Dick Cheney became a fierce critic of Donald Trump after the Capitol insurrection — but by then, it was too late, Ron Suskind writes. “Mr. Cheney had done as much as anyone in history to undermine Americans’ trust in their institutions and leaders, including Mr. Cheney himself.”

Conservatives can outmaneuver Nick Fuentes’s brand of antisemitic politics by creating “a zone where normal criticism of Israeli strategy is possible — and then clearly distinguish those normal debates from paranoid and antisemitic criticism,” our columnist Ross Douthat writes.

“I find reading novels one of the most enriching things I do in my life,” Shelley Smithson writes in a letter to The Times.

“The government shutdown has forced to the surface growing tensions between President Trump’s absolute control of the Republican Party and the pressures created by the conversion of the party of Wall Street and the country club into the party of the working class,” Thomas Edsall writes.

"Americans should all be concerned about how our military is being used by the Trump administration, and what that implies for the future of our country,” writes Frank Kendall.

“For those of us who turn to the Supreme Court these days with a sense of foreboding, Wednesday morning’s argument on the legality of President Trump’s tariffs may offer temporary relief,” writes Linda Greenhouse.

“If Americans want to challenge their country’s illiberal turn, they need to stop clinging to the recent past,” writes Sven Beckert. “Like other economic regimes before it, it is gone. Resurrection is impossible and to aim for it is politically disastrous.”

“The Democratic Party has abdicated,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells David Leonhardt. “They’re not fighting for the working class. What the Democratic Party has been is a billionaire-funded, consultant-driven party — and way out of touch with where the working class of this country is.”

“On much of the MAGA right, attempts to impose taboos have themselves become the ultimate taboo,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes.

“To have real leverage, his tariffs must be part of a quiet grand strategy, but Trump’s fire-ready-aim strategy has been anything but that,” our columnist Tom Friedman writes.

“Our house is on fire,” Judith Guenther-Adams writes in a letter to The Times. “A read-aloud of a fire safety book is not a sufficient response. Don’t blame the Democrats if they try to organize the neighbors into a fire brigade when the fire department is not going to come.”

“In recent years, we have seen the damage that public leaders can do to their own causes when they misread public opinion,” writes German Lopez.

"Americans didn’t vote for Trump because they wanted him to demolish the East Wing and pave the Rose Garden—much less enrich his family with crypto. They wanted him to unrig a system they felt was rigged against them," writes Molly Jong-Fast.

“Night comes earlier in November — a whole hour earlier, as of yesterday — but it comes more quietly now, nearly devoid of song,” writes Margaret Renkl.

A battle rages across America “over what it means to be an American and what our nation should aspire to be,” writes Colin Woodard. “It’s part of a war between two stories of nationhood that we’ve been waging since the United States was created 249 years ago.”

“The burden of food procurement and cooking is still shouldered overwhelmingly by women, most of whom now also work outside the home,” writes Julia Belluz.

“When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?” writes our columnist M. Gessen after speaking with Jewish Israeli dissidents.

“Maduro’s survival offers critical insight on why it is so difficult to bring down autocracies,” writes Javier Corrales of the Venezuelan dictator.

“We might hope that keeping our own data private could protect each of us from unwanted outcomes. But A.I. doesn’t need to know what you have been doing; it only needs to know what people like you have done before,” Maximilian Kasy writes.

“The assumption that being a centrist — whatever that means right now — is somehow nonpartisan, and a virtue unto itself, is misguided,” Allison Lirish Dean writes in a letter to The Times. “Being a centrist is just as ideological or partisan as anything else.”

The work of the Italian friar and artist Fra Angelico can make even nonbelievers experience a moment of faith, Cody Delistraty writes. “I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.”

“Who needs Congress — or the law for that matter — when the president is in command?” our columnist David French writes. “Even when it comes to matters of war and peace, MAGA defers to the man who tells them exactly what they want to hear.”

“When pundits, journalists and scientists talk about the climate crisis as the dawn of a new era in history, they plaster over the long-simmering injustices that create climate vulnerability in the first place: poverty, oppression, conflict and colonization,” Stephen Lezak writes.

Día de los Muertos “can still turn over a new leaf,” Claudio Lomnitz writes. “To do so, all those who celebrate it must be capable of facing and processing the implications that Mexico’s many dead and disappeared have had on the fabric of society.”

The Democratic Party doesn’t need to move left or right, it needs to get bigger, our columnist Ezra Klein writes.“That is the spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation. Not progressivism. But, in the older political sense of the term, representation.”

“Women, and especially mothers, don’t necessarily need remote work. We don’t need so-called flexible work schedules,” Corinne Low writes. “What we need are plain old boundaries — jobs where work stops at a set time and allows other parts of life to exist without interruption.”

“Even as the U.S. government advises other countries to end a cruel practice, at home we preserve what amounts to legally sanctioned statutory rape,” our columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about child marriage.

Maureen Dowd asks: Can the current trend of “cool male friendship ads” — Zach Braff and Donald Faison pushing T-Mobile, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson selling Salesforce, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in a Moncler campaign — serve as a positive example amid an epidemic of male loneliness?

“As someone who’s cooked family dinner almost every night for more than 30 years, I can honestly say that I seldom spend more than half an hour in front of the stove — that’s usually with a drink. Family meals can (and should) be simple affairs,” Robert Voss writes in a letter to The Times.

“Allies of the president insist that there is a plan — a loophole — that might allow Trump to circumvent the Constitution and serve another four years or more,” our columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “This sounds plausible, but it is wrong.”

“At every turn, ‘Dawn of the Dead’ invites us to consider whether the real zombies are the undead desperate to enter the mall or the living humans equally desperate to keep the mall to themselves,” the horror scholar Adam Lowenstein writes.

“In times of political defeat, there is a bottomless appetite for prescriptions that reassure the defeated party members that they just need to be truer to themselves, more effective, more ruthless,” Ross Douthat writes. “This is the psychological spot where many Democrats find themselves today.”

Three claims about the war in Gaza, so far largely unchallenged by many Israelis, must be up for debate, Michael Gross writes: “that killing tens of thousands in Gaza was necessary, the killing was not Israel’s fault and the death toll was the inevitable outcome of a high-tech war.”