All of the branding finally got me to talk about menopause. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/o...

“Where, indeed, does the time go?” Marguerite Delacoma writes in a letter to The Times. “At times, a long life can feel like an endurance test. But mostly, I am left weak with gratitude.”

Who will win the 2026 midterms? Times Opinion asked six pollsters and pundits for their educated guesses.

While menopause “has long been considered a salacious taboo, menopausal and perimenopausal women are in the process of upgrading sexist, ageist scripts about our biological reality,” our columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes.

“Grade inflation is as bad as they say, and it drains students’ transcripts of meaning, deprives professors of agency and turns schools into approval factories,” Frank Bruni writes. “We should be ashamed, and we should fix it.”

In our era of competing certainties, writes Charles King, “the quiet heroism” of Edward Gibbon and his epochal book on empire still speaks to us. His lesson? “The past will not confirm your most deeply held beliefs. It will probably confound them.”

“Responsible A.I. governance may really come down to something resembling a First Amendment approach,” writes Paul Ford.

“The world needs to make a bigger effort to halt the killing and mass displacement in Sudan, and the threat to El Obeid should inspire urgent action,” writes the editorial board.

“I no longer chase the endlessly receding horizon of staying informed. I’ve traded the anxiety of the shallows for the untapped wisdom of deep waters,” the classics scholar S.J. Murray writes.

“If the behaviors fitness influencers are promoting were extreme but effective, that would be one thing,” Sebastian Langdell writes. “But they are often ineffective and, sometimes, patently unhealthy.”

Why are the vigorous supporters of men like Donald Trump, Ken Paxton and Graham Platner “often such raging hypocrites — gleefully pointing out the sins and flaws in others while ignoring or rationalizing their own candidate’s profound faults?” our columnist David French writes.

“As thrilling as it’s been these past few months to be a New Yorker in Knicks land,” Lizzy Goodman writes, Serena Williams’ return to tennis “does something else for me, something more specific and personal: She makes me want to show up for myself.”

“Three years later, de-risking from predatory superpowers remains the fundamental challenge facing European leaders, but China is no longer the main country of concern: The United States is,” Jon Finer writes.

What do Trump’s Iran cease-fire, Graham Platner’s downfall and Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization have in common? Michelle Cottle, David French and David Wallace-Wells argue they all reveal something important about American politics this week.

“A straight man’s appearance seems to be an increasingly important expression of his masculinity,” Kate Manne writes. “I suggest the male gaze, long trained on women, is turning on straight men too.”

“The eastern halves of the United States and Canada are experiencing a sea change in the public health threat posed by ticks,” Jonathan Mingle writes. “Humans are in retreat from this bloodthirsty enemy.”

“Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years,” Lyman Stone writes. “They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.”

“It may be that all we need to do to avert atrocities in Sudan is to speak up,” our columnist Nicholas Kristof writes.

Fears around A.I., from parents to policymakers, “are not irrational,” Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu write. “People are asking a simple question: Will A.I. make my life better, or make it worse?”

“After decades of inaction and partisanship, any bipartisan agreement on Social Security is commendable,” Shai Akabas writes in a letter to The Times. “Now, both sides must find more common ground, including abandoning red lines against both tax and benefit changes.”

“I liked Graham Platner,” Jo Trafford writes in a letter to The Times from Portland, Maine. “Even with his baggage, he was an exciting adversary for Senator Susan Collins. But this rape allegation is too much. I am devastated.”

“American politics has become a teeter-totter in which the parties regularly exchange control, and where the reigning party, after winning control, proceeds to undo whatever its rival has achieved,” says John B. Judis, in a Q&A with Times Opinion.

Recent “restrictions on the A.I. industry are the latest instance of the White House creating its own parallel administrative state, sidestepping Congress,” David Lawrence writes. “Congress and the courts must push back.”

“If the last five years was about sun and wind, the next five are about batteries, and this technology is now moving at extraordinary pace,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben says about the green energy transition on “The Ezra Klein Show.”

“I never stopped believing in America, but America’s immigration system never believed there should be a place for someone like me,” writes Patricia Rojas, who left the U.S. for Mexico, despite having lived lawfully in Texas since infancy.

By casting Lupita N’yongo as Helen of Troy in his new film, “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan “is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes.

In recent years, the global economy has had to navigate a series of economic and actual conflicts, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas writes. “Too often, these shocks are viewed as isolated disruptions. They are not. They are interconnected symptoms of a deeper fragmentation reshaping the global economy.”

The choice to frame shootings as “gun violence,” John McWhorter writes, “obscures the vivid picture of something horrible that happens disproportionately in Black communities.”

“Any meaningful lessons from this campaign have to grapple with the reality that the enthusiasm for Platner was real, organic and pervasive in Maine,” Alex Seitz-Wald says, in a typed conversation with Michelle Goldberg and Matthew Yglesias.

“I have always found the excuses some celebrities use for not speaking out against injustice to be wanting,” the actor Debra Winger writes in a letter to The Times. “They don’t want to ‘create more division’? What could be worse than what is happening to our democracy now?”

America is at risk of extreme political upheaval, Rod Dreher tells our columnist Ross Douthat on “Interesting Times.” “It may not be Hitler 2.0. It may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it’s not going to be what we’re used to.”

This seems a time when we need a dollop of hope about America and its future. Here's mine: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/o...

“When you grow up conservative and Republican, you are made keenly aware of the anti-American left,” our columnist David French writes. On the flip side of that, “I had not, however, been taught about an anti-American right.”

How could SpaceX “simultaneously be viewed as a top-tier investment and something that might not be able to pay its bills?” Bethany McLean asks. “The answer starts with Wall Street’s long-held distinction between ‘smart money' and ‘dumb money.’”

“The real disaster from which the country won’t be able to recover is when Democrats allow themselves to become mirror images of MAGA Republicans,” Bret Stephens tells Frank Bruni in their weekly conversation.

“Everybody who believes in freedom and democracy and the dignity of the person and the right of nations to self-determination should be working toward the destruction of the United States’ capacity to project power,” Stephen Marche writes from Toronto.

“The trouble in Maine goes beyond a single candidate,” writes the editorial board.

“Will the United States still be vibrant on our 500th birthday?” our columnist Nicholas Kristof asks. “Or will we go the way of Byzantium and the Abbasids? Our vulnerabilities are obvious.”

Alex Karp’s rant on CNBC “highlighted several genuine and growing questions about the way those big A.I. labs have sold the rest of us on their paths to global domination,” David Wallace-Wells writes. “He is not alone in asking them.”

“I urge Democrats, including those who represent me in Washington, to set the bar higher for endorsements,” Emily Gold Boutilier writes in a letter to The Times. “I propose that we start with no Nazi tattoos and no domestic violence.”

“Multiple things can be true about GLP-1s,” Jessica Grose writes. “They are truly miracles and may treat a whole range of conditions beyond obesity and diabetes. And they are often misused, partly because we have told women in multiple ways that being thin makes them valuable.”

In Times Opinion's latest focus group, 13 Black Democratic voters discuss Donald Trump, America today and the future of the Democratic Party.

Despite all its problems, “the United States is still looking pretty sharp among all of the major blocs in the world,” Dan Wang says on “The Opinions.” He and Natasha Sarin discuss why America’s economy may be in a stronger position than many people realize.

“The world’s most global game produces some of its strongest feelings of national belonging,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes in a round table discussion about the World Cup.

Millions of Americans are caring for aging parents, often at great personal cost. To understand the realities of caregiving, we spoke with dozens of family caregivers across the country. “What if this goes on for another 10 years? How long am I going to be able to maintain this?” one caregiver asks.

“The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist and former Google engineer, writes.

Democratic leaders should “make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words,” our columnist Bret Stephens writes. “They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.”

“To my Belgian friends: Bedankt. Danke. Merci beaucoup,” Roland Nicholson Jr. writes in a letter to The Times. “Your national team’s performance spared us from weeks of needless controversy and allowed the World Cup to proceed on the merits of the game.”

“The transition from an era driven by economic efficiency to one defined by geoeconomics and economic statecraft is no longer theoretical,” Mohamed A. El-Erian writes. “It is the new operating system for the global economy and its markets.”

May Pundak and Rula Hardal, the co-executive directors of A Land for All, want to move beyond the two-state solution and toward a new plan. “If we don’t start now and present that alternative now, we’re absolutely never going to get there,” Pundak tells Ezra Klein.