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5 Takeaways From Vance’s Interview With The New York Times

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JD Vance keeps showing up.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee and first-term senator from Ohio is talking to reporters at campaign rallies. He is scheduling network and cable interviews. And he is sitting down with The New York Times.

Something has shifted in American politics when it is noteworthy that a candidate willingly faces one unscripted question after another. But here we are.

In his latest appearance with the news media, Mr. Vance sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of “The Interview,” a New York Times podcast that features an hourlong conversation with a single guest every Saturday.

Here are five takeaways from Mr. Vance’s interview:

His critics call him spineless. He says he is complex.

Donald J. Trump seems unlikely to describe himself as reflective. Mr. Vance cannot stop.

The interview opens with Ms. Garcia-Navarro telling Mr. Vance that, as she prepared for their meeting, a persistent question emerged from people: “Which JD is going to show up?”

It is not the most flattering question for a politician, but Mr. Vance does not flinch. Instead, he embraces it, saying that holding conflicting opinions and emotional complexities is “sort of the nature of being an American in 2024.”

“Isn’t that how most people are?” he said. “Sometimes they’re frustrated with what’s going on in the country. Sometimes they are a little bit more optimistic. Sometimes it’s both, right?”

How Taryn Delanie Smith, TikTok’s Heaven Receptionist, Spends Sundays

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Before Taryn Delanie Smith was crowned Miss New York in 2022, she worked at a call center. At one point, she said, she was only pretending to take calls.

“I was actually making these little videos at my desk or on my way to work,” she said.

Ms. Smith, 28, is best known for her TikToks as Denise, a receptionist in heaven with a New York accent. Dressed in a robe and a towel head wrap, she welcomes newcomers and fields calls from heaven hopefuls through her headset microphone (a pink razor). In one video, Denise is drinking holy water at the Saints Lounge with Princess Diana and Whitney Houston. In another, she responds to viewers who want her to welcome their loved ones who have died.

She is a self-described “reigning chaos goblin” whose videos err on the side of comedy. Now with more than 1.4 million followers on TikTok, she creates videos full time and is a co-host of “Influenced,” a talk show on Amazon.

“I’ve never felt safer and more protected than by New Yorkers,” said Ms. Smith, who is from Seattle. “And so that is sort of what Denise embodies to me.”

Sundays, Ms. Smith said, are an anchor for her and her husband, Alec Castillo, whom she describes as a “big tatted-up dude who loves to cook.” They live with their “city cow,” a Great Dane named Bruce, in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Ms. Smith with her 2-year-old Great Dane, Bruce.Credit…Mimi d’Autremont for The New York Times

City Hall Is in Crisis. Who’s Running New York?

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For Mayor Eric Adams, the challenge of leading New York City has taken on an almost absurd quality, with his administration peppered in recent weeks by a half-dozen significant resignations, four federal investigations and two federal indictments, including one against the mayor.

Two of his deputy mayors and his police commissioner have resigned. His schools chancellor was just replaced. And he withdrew his pick for the city’s top lawyer when it became clear that the City Council would reject him.

With the flood of departures and chaos leaving a considerable vacuum at the top of City Hall, Mr. Adams must now rely on a flurry of new appointees and promotions to keep a complex bureaucracy running.

Earlier this week, Mr. Adams elevated Maria Torres-Springer, a veteran civil servant, to become his new first deputy mayor. She and three other highly respected women in the administration — Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s chief of staff; Meera Joshi, the deputy mayor for operations; and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services — are expected to largely oversee City Hall’s key administrative responsibilities.

Of them, Ms. Torres-Springer will play the most critical role in the coming months, handling daily operations across a vast bureaucracy of roughly 300,000 city workers with a $100 billion annual budget.

Her promotion seemed to signal a shift from the cronyism that had typified many of Mr. Adams’s significant hires, and was celebrated by a range of civic leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton; Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a business group; and progressive officials including Chi Ossé, a City Council member who has urged Mr. Adams to resign.

How Eric Adams Could Leave Office, and Who Hopes to Succeed Him

Mr. Adams’s political future is in doubt after federal prosecutors indicted him on corruption charges in one of several inquiries ensnaring City Hall.

Tracking Charges and Investigations in Eric Adams’s Orbit

Five corruption inquiries have reached into the world of Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Here is a closer look at the charges against Mr. Adams and how people with ties to him are related to the inquiries.

For Trump and Harris, the Media Future Is Now

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In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem basically absurd.

A year later Donald Trump won the White House, and there was a rush to find the sources of his victory in the darker reaches of the internet, in misinformation factories and troll farms. It was another window into the media future — but this time the future seemed dystopian, a realm of propaganda and manipulation.

In 2024, the media future doesn’t need to be seen through a glass darkly: For the younger generation of news consumers, it has basically arrived. But it isn’t embodied by cereal-eating YouTubers, Russian-funded disinformation operations or even the Silicon Valley-enforced progressive censorship that many conservatives feared four years ago.

Instead it’s embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.”

As a conservative with an interest in moral decline, I was familiar with “Call Her Daddy,” but I confess I had never heard of “Flagrant” before clips from the Trump interview started populating my social media feed. Which is par for the course for this campaign: The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.

There’s an impulse to interpret these media arrivistes as reinventions of the prior media dispensation — to cast a big podcaster like Joe Rogan as a muscled Walter Cronkite for the online age, or to frame appearances on “Call Her Daddy” and “Flagrant” as base mobilization operations, akin to appearing on “The Rachel Maddow Show” or “Hannity.”

Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack

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For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.

Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.

The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”

The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.

The documents, which were verified by The Times, lay out the main strategies and assessments of the leadership group:

  • Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack, which it code-named “the big project,” in the fall of 2022. But the group delayed executing the plan as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate.

  • As they prepared arguments aimed at Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders said that Israel’s “internal situation” — an apparent reference to turmoil over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plans to overhaul the judiciary — was among the reasons they were “compelled to move toward a strategic battle.”

  • In July 2023, Hamas dispatched a top official to Lebanon, where he met with a senior Iranian commander and requested help with striking sensitive sites at the start of the assault.

  • The senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to prepare; the minutes do not say how detailed a plan was presented by Hamas to its allies.

  • The documents also say that Hamas planned to discuss the attack in more detail at a subsequent meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, but do not clarify whether the discussion happened.

  • Hamas felt assured of its allies’ general support, but concluded it might need to go ahead without their full involvement — in part to stop Israel from deploying an advanced new air-defense system before the assault took place.

  • The decision to attack was also influenced by Hamas’s desire to disrupt efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the entrenchment of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Israeli efforts to exert greater control over the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, sacred in both Islam and Judaism and known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

  • Hamas deliberately avoided major confrontations with Israel for two years from 2021, in order to maximize the surprise of the Oct. 7 attack. As the leaders saw it, they “must keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm.”

  • Hamas leaders in Gaza said they briefed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political leader, on “the big project.” It was not previously known whether Mr. Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel in July, had been briefed on the attack before it happened.

Prelude to War

The documents provide greater context to one of the most pivotal moments in modern Middle Eastern history, showing it was both the culmination of a yearslong plan, as well as a move partly shaped by specific events after Mr. Netanyahu returned to power in Israel in late 2022.

Yahya Sinwar in April 2023 in Gaza City. Documents show that he and other Hamas leaders wanted time to lull Israeli leaders into a false sense of security before attacking Israel. Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

A Conversation With JD Vance

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From the moment JD Vance came onto the national stage, he was inextricably linked to Donald Trump. As the author of the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was initially the Trump whisperer, explaining the Trump phenomenon and 2016 win to shocked liberals. Back then, Vance didn’t like Trump. He called him an “idiot,” condemned what he saw as Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and wondered in a private message whether Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”

Then Vance went through a political conversion, transforming from skeptical Trump explainer to full-throated Trump supporter. In 2021, he began his campaign for Senate in Ohio. He courted, and received, Trump’s endorsement and won that race. Two years later, here we are: Vance is not only Trump’s vice-presidential running mate but also considered by many to be the heir apparent to MAGA because of his deft defense of Trumpism.

Listen to the Conversation With JD Vance

The Republican vice-presidential candidate rejects the idea that he’s changed, defends his rhetoric and still won’t say if Trump lost in 2020.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App

Vance has always been comfortable in the public eye, starting with his job dealing with the media as a public-affairs officer in the Marines. As an author, commentator and candidate, he has left a long record — in blog posts, opinion columns and podcast appearances — of his evolving views, not just on Trump but also on issues like immigration and his vision for the country. In a 2021 podcast, for example, he said that Trump, if elected again, should “seize the institutions of the left,” “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the U.S. government, “replace them with our people” and defy the Supreme Court if it tried to stop him.

That is what Vance sounds like when he’s talking to his base. But a very different Vance appeared recently on the debate stage, where, when speaking to a national audience, he was much less divisive and much more willing to engage in a civil discussion with a political opponent — in this case, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president.

With the election a few weeks away, and the race so tight, Vance may very well be the next vice president of the United States, and the second in command to someone who could be the oldest-ever commander in chief. So, which Vance can Americans expect if he’s elected? I asked him.

Seven Ways to Love Better

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Two decades ago, on Oct. 31, 2004, a short note appeared on the front page of this newspaper along with stories about Yasir Arafat’s health and the looming election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. It read: “Modern Love: Introducing a new weekly column about love and relationships. Today, Steve Friedman says he is just fine after getting dumped. Just fine. Really.”

So began my long, strange trip editing Modern Love, talking to strangers every week about the most intimate details of their romantic, familial and platonic entanglements — and then publishing their stories for hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers.

I never dreamed I would still be doing this job 20 years and some 200,000 submissions later, but it has been a wonderful run. Over time, with the help of my colleague, Miya Lee, Modern Love has grown to include a podcast, books, live performances, another weekly column of 100-word Tiny Love Stories, and television shows in the United States, India, Japan and the Netherlands.

Modern Love began the same year as Facebook, three years before iPhones, eight years before Tinder, and 11 years before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide. The world has changed a lot in two decades, and my life changed, too. When this column started, I was 41, married for 12 years, with two children in grade school. Now I am 61, separated for three years, my two children having long left home for jobs and lives of their own.

I published hundreds of stories about separation, divorce, online dating and blended families without ever thinking they might one day apply to me.

I read tens of thousands of essays about the death of a loved one without having experienced that myself — until earlier this year when my father died.

‘Who Is That? What’s Happening?’: Decoding the Art World at Frieze

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Every October, one of the world’s major art fairs takes place in a huge tent on the edge of Regent’s Park. For five days, the park’s year-round population — joggers, parents pushing buggies, teenagers playing soccer — is augmented by thousands of people at Frieze London seeking an encounter with contemporary art — or at least an encounter with the contemporary art world, which is just as much of a spectacle, in its way.

Some of these people wear all black, some dress like the rich villains in “The Hunger Games” and some carry battered LL Bean tote bags that say “GAGOSIAN.” Striding into the tent on the preview day this Wednesday, they were talking with varying degrees of enthusiasm about what and who they were going to see. I overheard two women use the words “fresh hell,” and saw a young man so excited he was practically in tears.

Even for veterans of the art fair circuit, there is a frightening amount to see at Frieze London: over 160 booths this year from 43 countries in the main tent and a sister event, Frieze Masters, devoted to pre-21st century artworks, across the park. For an outsider, the challenge is compounded. In addition to looking at as much as art as possible and attempting to form a handful of defensible opinions, there is the difficulty of decoding the system itself, its rules and what makes it tick.

Visitors near George Condo’s “Rainbow Portrait,” (2015) on the Sprüth Mager booth.Credit…Sam Bush for The New York Times

An hour after the fair had opened on Wednesday morning to a restricted audience of high-paying collectors, curators, reporters and art-world cognoscenti, a lesson about how hype develops was playing out in the Focus section, which highlights young galleries and emerging artists.

A small group of people had begun to gather near the booth for Brunette Coleman, a London gallery showing at the fair for the first time, with works by Nat Faulkner, a young English artist who makes experimental photographs. Faulkner had just been announced as the winner of a prize: the Camden Art Center Emerging Artist Award, which offers an artist from the Focus section the opportunity to realize a solo show at the London art space, supported by its curatorial team. As more people drifted over without quite seeming to know why, Martin Clark, the center’s director, began to give a presumably heartfelt, but almost inaudible, speech (sound travels strangely in a tent) about the need to give young artists space for risk and experimentation.

6 Takeaways From the Christopher Reeve Documentary ‘Super/Man’

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The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.

It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.

The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.

The unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”

In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.

Here are some takeaways from the film.

Reeve found megastardom playing Superman.Credit…Alamy, via Warner Bros.

Green groups wary as EU bets on future carbon capture to meet climate targets

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As EU officials gatherED in Pau, France on Thursday (10 October) to discuss the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS), environmental groups have pointed to a huge drain on public money and a track record of project failure, while the European Commission is in talks with governments who have missed a legal deadline related to a CO2 storage target.

“Relying on CCS as a climate solution will force European governments to introduce eye-wateringly high subsidies to prop up a technology that has a history of failure,” said Andrew Reid, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a sustainable energy think tank.

Reid is the author of a report released today that examines almost 200 projects on the drawing board across Europe today. He found CCS costs to be prohibitively high and concluded that upcoming projects currently on the drawing board in Europe could cost as much as €520 billion and require €140 billion of government support.

The report notes that the EU plans to ramp up the annual CO2 storage capacity to 50 million tonnes by 2030, 280MT a decade later, and 450MT by mid-century.

“As the small number of operational projects show, CCS is not likely to work as hoped and will take longer to implement than expected,” Reid said.

His report came just two days after the campaign group Oil Change International put out its own briefing which identified €3.3bn in subsidies already sunk into CCS projects in the EU, with up to €16bn more made available since 2020 as carbon capture has climbed back up the EU policy agenda.

“Despite 50 years of failure and over €3bn in subsidies from EU taxpayers, the fossil fuel industry still pushes carbon capture to boost its corporate profits, delay climate action, and distract from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era,” said Myriam Douo, a campaigner with the US-based non-profit.

‘No alternative’

But EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson, opening the European Commission’s fourth Industrial Carbon Management Forum in Pau, southwest France, made it clear the EU executive now sees CCS as an integral part of its plan to meet the 2050 net-zero emissions goal, and the interim target it is set to propose early next year.

“Storage will play a major role in our journey to [net-zero by] 2050,” the EU’s top energy official said. “The 2040 climate target plan underlines that industrial carbon management is not just an alternative – it is a vital complement to renewable energy and energy efficiency.”

Related
  • Carbon capture key to reaching net-zero, but climate chief urges caution

Citing the newly operational Northern Lights undersea storage project in Norway, and Denmark’s awarding in June of Europe’s first licences to explore onshore sites for potential CO2 storage, Simson spoke of “tangible on the ground progress” but warned that high capital costs remained a barrier to deployment.

“We must implement targeted derisking measures and provide the necessary financial support,” Simson said. “This will help reach final investment decisions on these projects.”

CCS Europe, a trade association lobbying in Brussels on behalf of pipeline and technology providers and carbon intensive sectors like cement and incineration plants, has previously rejected criticism from both the IEEFA and Oil Change International, with director Chris Davies accusing them of a “lack of objectivity and perspective”.

“It claims that carbon capture projects consistently fail, but in Europe, Norway’s Sleipner and Snohvit projects continue to capture and store some 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually after nearly 30 years in use,” he said of projects where carbon dioxide removed during natural gas extraction is pumped back underground.

Davies told Euronews he hoped to see swift action from the next Commission such as the proposaL, within 100 days of taking office, of a requirement for governments to submit “national industrial carbon management strategies with timescales for delivery and details of financial support mechanisms that will be introduced”.

Missed deadline

In a bid to overcome the thorny question of who should pay to get the scale-up rolling, the EU recently adopted legislation that forces oil and gas companies – among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for CCS over the years – to put in place at their own expense storage facilities capable of locking away 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year from 2030.

Related
  • Net Zero Industry Act sign-off heralds carbon capture deployment

For comparison, the Northern Lights project, in development since at least 2017 and opened with great fanfare last month, is expected to support injection of just 1.5MT a year – and backers Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies only made a final investment decision after the Norwegian state put up the bulk of the cost.

Chairing a debate at the Pau conference, Davies voiced his frustration at the slow pace of development, and had representatives from Germany, Greece and Romania – all of whom are banking on CCS to help meet emissions reduction targets – admit that no final investment decisions had been taken so far in their countries.

Under the Net Zero Industry Act signed into law in May, petroleum firms will have to deploy permanent CO2 storage capacity in proportion to their share of EU oil and gas production between 2020 and 2022. Governments were required to provide the Commission with the relavent data by 30 September.

But only 18 member states have so far provided any data to the Commission, which is now focused on persuading the remaining nine governments – including the Netherlands – to comply with the law before it can divide the 50MT target among petroleum majors like ENI, Shell and TotalEnergies who are active in Europe.