A Judge Cements the Stain on Trump’s Reputation

A day after Jimmy Carter’s funeral, where Donald Trump had to hear about all the character traits he lacks, he wasn’t in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse Friday morning to hear his felony sentence pronounced. He appeared virtually from Mar-a-Lago in front of two American flags, along with his attorney (and nominee for deputy attorney general), Todd Blanche.

This peculiar reunion, seven months after Trump’s conviction for business fraud, contained little suspense. Justice Juan Merchan, who had presided with considerable patience and wisdom over the six-week trial, tipped his hand on Jan. 3 when he wrote that Trump’s sentence would be “unconditional release.”

This sounds like no punishment at all but was in fact a “masterstroke,” retired New York Judge George Grasso told me as we walked out of the courtroom.

The proof lies in the Supreme Court’s one-paragraph, 5-to-4 ruling, issued Thursday night, that “a brief virtual hearing” and a sentence of “unconditional discharge” left a “relatively insubstantial” burden of time on the president-elect. By imposing no penalty, Merchan sharply increased the odds that Trump will be known as a felon for the rest of his life.

Trump was an older first-time offender, so jail was never likely, even if he had lost in November, and probation was unworkable once Trump was re-elected. A conditional discharge would have allowed the judge to impose community service or other punishment at a later date and require Trump to appear in court at any time, even if the president needed to handle legitimate matters of state.

Merchan decided this was unreasonable under the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which gives federal law primacy over state law. He ruled that unconditional discharge was “the only lawful sentence” that avoided “encroaching on the highest office of the land.”

One of the prosecutors, Josh Steinglass, told the judge that he favored the sentence because it will “cement the defendant’s status as a convicted felon.”

Amid his slightly tamped-down bloviating, Trump strongly hinted to the court that he will try to prosecute the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and will, of course, appeal his conviction. But most of the evidentiary issues are not likely to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which is usually loath to erase jury verdicts.

The best chance Trump has to expunge this stain on his reputation is to argue that some of the testimony referring to White House conversations fell under his “official duties.” It’s possible that Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote last July’s terrifying majority opinion in the immunity case, will include this under his concocted definition of “presumptive immunity” and clear Trump.

But he (or Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the other swing vote in Thursday’s ruling) would have to ignore the 22 witnesses and 500 exhibits that provided a mountain of other evidence used by the jury to convict.

Four knee-bending justices (including one, Samuel Alito, whose recent conversation with Trump further tarnished the court) are apparently happy to protect Trump from any legal accountability at all, even for acts that brought conviction while he was out of office.

That means that preserving Merchan’s sentence will be a close shave. But it’s now a good bet that the first paragraph of Donald Trump’s obituary will include the stunning fact that this two-term American president was also a felon.

On Thursday afternoon, the performance artist Jenna Marvin was getting ready for the Cinema Eye Honors, an annual documentary film event in New York. She is the star of “Queendom,” a film by the Russian director Agniia Galdanova that has been shortlisted for an Oscar. It happens to be one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen.

“Queendom” follows Marvin between the ages of 22 and 24. Over the course of the movie, she invents and develops her performance style, struggles to be accepted as a drag performer and a nonbinary person by her family and her society, stages several breathtakingly risky protests and ultimately, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, flees Russia. The movie has a remarkably light touch, especially for a director as young as Galdanova: In many scenes, the viewer feels like a fly on the wall.

Galdanova, who grew up in St. Petersburg, studied with Marina Razbeshkina, a storied — and strict — teacher of documentary filmmaking. In her first film, Galdanova followed all of Razbeshkina’s rules: No music, no talking heads, no zoom. Only life, seen from the point of view of a person in the room. But early in the filming of “Queendom,” Galdanova accidentally broke the rules by turning on music while filming Marvin. Then she kept breaking the rules, so the movie became a seamless, and mesmerizing, blend of vérité cinema and performance art.

Marvin’s performance character is, as Marvin herself puts it, a “creature” — but not an otherworldly being as much as an expression of her own inner world. “At once beautiful and repulsive,” she told me. Just as Marvin feels limited in what she can say, her costumes, made out of electrical tape and duct tape, limit her physical movements, outwardly expressing internal constraint. In costume, she becomes some one thing, one state, one idea.

At one point in “Queendom,” Marvin encases herself in white, blue, and red tape — the colors of the Russian flag — and walks on dizzyingly high platforms in a protest against the arrest of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny. “People chased her and demanded to know what the costume meant,” Galdanova recalled. “And she just walked silently, and not a single muscle moved on her face.”

“Of course not a single muscle moved,” Marvin said. “I was scared to death.”

Marvin grew up in Magadan, 6,000 miles east of Moscow. She came out to her family at 15 as a gay man. When she moved to St. Petersburg to go to college at 19, she met drag performers and acquired an “older sister” who taught her to perform. She began to think of herself as nonbinary. She tried to tell her grandparents, who raised her. Much of “Queendom” follows that relationship. Her grandmother’s love is unconditional; her grandfather demands masculinity and conventional success. Marvin’s grandmother died in November 2022, six months after Marvin fled the country. Her grandfather sank into the world of President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda TV.

Marvin lives in Paris now. She has found success as an occasional runway model for the designer Rick Owens. She has also come to think of herself as a trans woman. “I’ve lost my fear,” she said. “I no longer need to convince my grandfather of anything — I needed that when I was scared myself. I just wish my grandmother had lived to see this. She used to say, ‘I hope things work out well for you.’ None of them could have imagined just how well they’d turn out.’” She dabbed her tears with a makeup sponge.

In less than two weeks, the moving trucks will come rumbling through downtown Washington, returning Donald Trump and his traveling circus to the White House. With a vengeful MAGA king vowing to barrel in and bust up the joint — Washington, not the White House — people keep asking if I am dreading the next four years.

Meh. It’s not really dread so much as weariness, mixed with a vaguely morbid curiosity. Like: We’re gonna do this again? Really?

A new president always brings a new vibe to official Washington, overhauling the players and the playing field, from appointees and lobbyists to social arbiters and hot restaurants. Washington is used to this kind of churn. Built for it, even. As presidents come and go, the so-called permanent political class adapts and abides and even absorbs new members. A chunk of appointees from the outgoing team slide into law and consulting firms around town, posts that are cushier and more lucrative, if not as influential as their government jobs. Others dabble in academia or become talking heads. And everyone basically hunkers down waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again. The process has a rhythm to it, and, after you watch a few rounds, can start to feel like a perpetual game of musical chairs.

I realize that Trump is in many ways different from other presidents. Eternally aggrieved, he is spoiling for a fight with the “deep state,” the political establishment — really, any piece of the federal government or official Washington not solely devoted to fulfilling his every fancy. Things around town could get extra ugly in the coming months.

That said, at least this time we have some idea of what to expect. Sure, since the last go-round, Trump and his entourage have acquired more experience and knowledge of how to manipulate, or break, the system. There is much to be anxious about. But like any sequel, this one will be derivative. The explosions may be louder, the body count higher, the plot twists more outrageous, but the spectacle will not be the fresh shock to the system his first term was.

We are, if not entirely prepared, at least braced. And those tasked with holding Trump accountable — or at least reining in his most grotesque impulses (think: Matt Gaetz as attorney general) — have hopefully learned a few new tricks as well.

And who knows? There’s always the outside chance it won’t be a total nightmare. Having won the popular vote, having proved his first win wasn’t merely some Russia-fueled fluke, Trump might decide to waste less time on petty vendettas and shock politics. A pessimist by nature, I’m not holding my breath. But with this guy, you learn never to say never.

Either way, for Washington, as for the rest of the nation, this too shall pass — albeit perhaps slowly and painfully, like a kidney stone.

It was quiet in The Times’s San Francisco bureau one morning last month when I noticed odd noises and someone said, “Earthquake?” We agreed it was and ducked under the desks — that’s what California kids are taught to do in elementary school when an earthquake strikes — as the rumbling continued. Finally it stopped, and we were fine.

Then an hour or so later, every cellphone in the office erupted with an alert, warning us of a potential coming tsunami. “You are in danger,” the notice blared. I pulled up a map showing the San Francisco County tsunami hazard map and noted with relief that the risk zone for downtown San Francisco ended half a block from our office.

And then I paused to consider: Since when does water, or any other weapon of natural disaster, listen to maps that aspire to predict where danger will stop? (This is, of course, not to disparage the very smart, informed scientists who build these maps, which are based on topography and other important factors. But still: Would a tsunami rush onto the land, get to Battery Street and say, welp, guess I’ve got to stop here?)

This was the argument I used with my mother on Tuesday night, when I called to plead with her to leave her home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The home where she’d lived for 37 years had already been evacuated, but her new neighborhood a couple of miles to the east was outside the evacuation zone. Then, while discussing whether it was really necessary to leave, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s map refreshed on my laptop screen: The evacuation zone had expanded to one block from her house.

A block. Did fire officials possess some special knowledge that would prevent an epic wildfire from staying in its lane? Better not to risk it, I argued: It was evening, and it was time to get out before the experts moved the line again and traffic, already heavy from people evacuating from points west, made leaving all the more stressful. She collected important things and left.

The neighborhood where I’ve run errands in Los Angeles for more than three decades — the post office where I mailed my college applications, where I deposited my paychecks from my first job, where we purchased every Thanksgiving turkey — is gone. On Wednesday the line moved again, to include the Santa Monica streets where I rode my bike growing up.

It’s eight blocks from the home of my oldest friend. Is that far enough? Thousands of people have lost their homes and businesses and perhaps pets; some have lost their lives. Everyone in or with a connection to Los Angeles is watching with terror and waiting for news: Is my house or store OK? What about my friends? Did the map change, and when will we know? Unfortunately, the map can be only a guide, not destiny.

Tuesday night, a historic wind event swept through Southern California, spreading horrifying fires that torched a dense urban patchwork of homes, institutions and businesses. The multiple fires in greater Los Angeles have produced only two deaths so far, somewhat mercifully. But the windstorm is expected to continue, and already much of Pacific Palisades has burned to an unrecognizable gray.

A decade ago, this kind of disaster seemed unthinkably rare. In retrospect, Canada’s 2016 Fort McMurray disaster, which formed the basis of John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather,” was the beginning of a frightening new era. Then came Santa Rosa, Paradise, Boulder and Lahaina — the deadliest North American fire in more than a century, if one that now hardly stands out in cultural memory against the other scars of urban firestorms. In neighborhoods like these, often far from the wildland-urban interface, it’s almost impossible to clear enough brush to make homes defensible, as the wildfire expert Zeke Lunder noted on Tuesday. The homes provide the fuel, and the fires jump from house to house.

These years of fire have also initiated a set of arguments about its driving factors — to what extent the new disaster landscape is the result of climate conditions or fuel buildup from decades of fire suppression and to what extent building and population patterns have pushed more people into the path of fire. At times like this, for better or for worse, those arguments and their policy implications feel less urgent than the sheer scale of the wreckage and the simple and obvious lesson: We are not prepared.

“There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this,” Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told me in 2019. “The only thing that will stop this is when the earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”

Seven of the eight largest wildfires in California history have burned since then.

The fourth Bangkok Art Biennale, running through Feb. 25, has once again turned this megalopolis into a giant art crawl — and given the infamous traffic here, crawl I did on a recent visit.

After martial law was briefly imposed in early December in South Korea, where I live, setting off political uncertainty and sending the currency into a tailspin, Bangkok became a safety zone, as it’s been for me for nearly 30 years. But this time was different. The city truly felt like the Venice of the East, as it has long been called, harboring artwork in the most obscure pockets of the city, just as Venice has done since it began the concept of a biennale in 1895.

The theme, “Nurture Gaia,” is a celebration of the healing power of Mother Earth, the giver of life and all the ways that is embodied across cultures and religions. What the biennale theme has done is create several oases within Bangkok, and as traffic, smog and noise only increase in this city, oases have become harder to find.

The city is awash with artwork, but most brilliantly in the temples that straddle the Chao Praya, which snakes its way through Bangkok. Along its tributaries — many of which now boast luxury apartment buildings more than the over-water wooden houses that defined Bangkok for centuries — are a smattering of galleries and outdoor sculpture gardens that have helped nurture the city’s booming arts scene. But the biennale has taken over the city. Some 76 artists are featured in 11 venues throughout the city.

The artwork this year is about the simple act of togetherness. For example, the Thai artist Haritorn Akarapat has created “The Horde,” an outdoor sculpture at the Wat Arun temple, the Temple of Dawn that straddles the river, consisting of 15 fiberglass snowman-like sculptures, ranging from about six to 12 feet tall.

But perhaps the best example of “Nurture Gaia” is at the Wat Pho, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, where, yes, a 150-foot-long gold-leaf Buddha is in serious comfort mode (the temple is said to be the birthplace of Thai massage). Nearby is a granite sculpture, “The Eyes,” by Louise Bourgeois, the celebrated French artist who died at age 98 in 2010. On the other side of town, at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, another of her sculptures depicts a mother as a crouching dog goddess of sorts with multiple breasts.

And Bourgeois’s legacy in Thailand began moving in a new direction late last month just days before the 20th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed some 230,000 in several Asian countries, including Thailand. There are plans afoot to return a pair of sculptures she created in 2005 to a Tsunami Sculpture Memorial Project in Krabi, Thailand, one of the hardest-hit coastal provinces.

The name of her two sculptures? “Hold Me Close.”

It’s good news that the Biden administration has formally determined that genocide has been committed in Sudan. But the move raises the question: Why are President Biden and his aides reluctant to hold a crucial culprit accountable?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the welcome announcement about the genocide determination on Tuesday, asserting that a militia called the Rapid Support Forces has targeted women for rape and slaughtered children and infants, all based on the ethnicity of the victims. The atrocities are indisputable. In September I reported from the Chad-Sudan border on this campaign of mass murder and rape, in which the Rapid Support Forces attacked villages of non-Arab tribes and went door to door, killing men and boys and raping women and girls. Other journalists and human rights groups have found the same patterns.

Blinken announced that the United States would impose sanctions on the leader of the Rapid Support Forces and seven companies the militia owns in the United Arab Emirates. “The United States is committed to holding accountable those responsible for these atrocities,” Blinken said.

Yet the announcement refused to hold accountable the United Arab Emirates itself. There is overwhelming evidence, including in reporting by my newsroom colleagues at The Times, that the U.A.E. has provided the Rapid Support Forces with the weaponry that enables its mass slaughter and mass rape.

Biden’s failure to call out the U.A.E. in strong terms for fueling these mass atrocities seems a reflection of his belief in quiet diplomacy, and it matches his efforts to restrain Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Gaza. Mass suffering continues in Sudan and Gaza alike, because leaders appear to have learned that they can ignore Biden when all he offers is carrots and no sticks.

The U.A.E. is not a rogue state. It is a major player in the world that cares about its image. International criticism led it to pull out of a disastrous war in Yemen, and it will weigh the benefits it gets from supporting a genocidal militia in Sudan — income from gold smuggling and influence in postwar Sudan — against the cost to its global reputation. Biden’s failure to speak up about the U.A.E. seems likely to leave more ordinary Sudanese dying in the atrocities his administration rightly condemns.

On its third day, New York City’s congestion pricing system isn’t going as well as hoped, but it’s still a good idea and it can be improved.

Congestion pricing is supposed to do two things: raise money and reduce congestion. I don’t know how much money it’s raising, but the numbers suggest that it has yet to meaningfully reduce congestion inside the relief zone.

Vehicles are moving faster over the bridges and through the tunnels, but they’re going as slowly as ever on city streets, according to real-time traffic data. On Tuesday at 9 a.m., for example, it took only about 11 minutes to get through the Holland Tunnel between New Jersey and Lower Manhattan. That’s around 50 percent faster than it took at that hour on Tuesdays before the congestion pricing.

But moving around inside the zone remains sluggish. To get from Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan to Midtown East took the same amount of time on Tuesday at 9 a.m. as on past Tuesdays at that hour.

That was no fluke: The pattern was the same on those routes and others on Sunday and Monday.

You can see these numbers and many others for yourself at the Congestion Pricing Tracker, which is based on Google Maps real-time traffic data. Huge credit to the creators of the website, Benjamin Moshes, a senior at Brown, and his brother Joshua Moshes, a freshman at Northeastern.

INRIX, a transportation analytics company, similarly reported that the average travel speed in the congestion relief zone was 12 miles per hour at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, slightly slower than the 12.1 m.p.h. at the same time on the corresponding Tuesday in early 2024.

It’s early yet, but the difficulty that the congestion pricing system is having in speeding up traffic inside the zone shouldn’t surprise anyone: Its main impact is on personal vehicles, which accounted for only 35 percent of the vehicles inside the zone before congestion pricing began, according to the Traffic Mobility Review Board.

For-hire vehicles (such as Ubers) and taxis accounted for 52 percent of vehicles in the zone, and they are more lightly charged per unit of congestion that they cause. The same is true of trucks and commercial vans, which pay once and then can drive around all day inside the zone.

The solution is to raise congestion fees for those types of vehicles, as Michael Ostrovsky of Stanford and Frank Yang of the University of Chicago wrote in a research paper last year. The city is already giving incentives to delivery trucks to make more of their deliveries at night.

It was the middle of the night, and my husband and I were taking turns trying to soothe our inconsolable 1-year-old. When the vomiting began, I remember thinking: So it’s come for us. A group chat of parents in our day care had warned that a stomach bug was spreading. The messages promised it would be brief and brutal.

Within hours, I was hunched over the toilet. By late afternoon, one of our weekend guests had also succumbed. Then came a text from my cousin, who, along with her husband, babysat my son recently: “It happened last night.” They had both been hit; one of them slept in the bathtub.

Norovirus outbreaks are rising across the United States; it is impressively contagious: The virus spreads rapidly, symptoms appear suddenly, and the virus can survive on surfaces for days to weeks. Each year, norovirus causes an estimated 19 million to 21 million illnesses in the United States alone. Despite its havoc, there’s no vaccine. We need one.

Developing a vaccine is in part a scientific challenge. Norovirus has been notoriously difficult to study in the lab. To get a sufficient amount of virus to assess, researchers traditionally relied on a tricky process that used stool samples from sick patients to infect volunteers.

Then in 2016, Mary Estes, a virologist currently at Baylor College of Medicine, figured out a way to create a human gut in a petri dish. She used stem cells to grow gut tissue in cultures known as organoids and added human bile to the cultures to get certain virus strains to replicate. These mini gut cultures allow scientists to grow different norovirus strains in the laboratory without making people sick.

But other hurdles remain. It’s unclear how many strains of norovirus a vaccine needs to target or which strains might appear in a given testing location. Funding and research have justifiably focused so far on diseases with higher rates of hospitalization and death. Norovirus has been “a little lower on the list,” said Estes.

That may be changing. There are vaccines for norovirus under study. One vaccine by the biotech company HilleVax failed in 2024 to prove its effectiveness in a clinical trial of infants. “I am sort of devastated,” said Estes, who did some of the early research behind the vaccine.

An mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna for norovirus recently began human clinical trials. I hope it succeeds. What better way to remind people of the power of vaccines than to eliminate the misery of puking?

The urgency I feel for a norovirus vaccine is a testament to the progress society has made. We knew that with day care could come seemingly endless illness, but even one of the scariest diseases currently prevalent among young children, respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., now has a vaccine. If the biggest health threat my family faces this winter is a stomach bug, it’s because diseases that once killed or disabled children in the United States are now part of a not-so-distant past.

Let’s go further. Children’s lives may not depend on it, but parents’ sanity might.

In politics, the pendulum never stops, and yesterday’s excitement becomes tomorrow’s handicap. Justin Trudeau should have known that: His father, Pierre Trudeau, bowed to public fatigue with his charisma and progressive policies in 1984 after 15 years as prime minister of Canada. Some of Justin Trudeau’s colleagues had urged him for some time to take a “walk in the snow,” a reference to what his father said he did before making his decision to step down.

Somewhat like his father, Justin Trudeau entered Canadian political life in a burst of excitement and hope. He was 43, handsome and fresh; his mantra was “sunny ways,” and he promised a return to the progressive vision that the Liberal Party championed in the 1960s and 1970s, one that his father’s successors then tried to erase.

His challenge in October 2015 to the hawkish Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, was “nothing less than an existential struggle over what it means to be Canadian,” wrote the Canadian author Guy Lawson in The New York Times at the time. The Trudeau vision — in effect, a progressive Canada of universal medical care, bilingualism, multiculturalism and internationalism — won and, for a while, dominated.

But then the pendulum swung the other way, and not only in Canada. Canadian voters began seeing Trudeau as too far left; they came to blame him for rising costs and housing shortages, which they linked to looser immigration policies. The pandemic did its damage; a few political scandals muddied his image; he and his wife separated; his approval ratings plummeted. The Liberal Party’s approval ratings fell to 20 percentage points behind the Conservatives.

With elections mandated by next October, the Liberals under Trudeau had no chance. Announcing his resignation on Monday, Trudeau said he would remain prime minister until the party chose a successor, which could take months.

But a vision turned sour is not a vision that was wrong. Much of what the Trudeaus, father and son, championed has become an indelible part of Canadian identity. So before saying au revoir to Trudeau, it’s worth reliving the high moments. Or the high moment.

Justin Trudeau, unlike his father, was not cerebral, and like any heir, he had to cope with the perception that he was just a privileged offspring cashing in on his name. He soon showed he was different, winning his first seat in Parliament in a working-class district in Montreal. But it was another act that really distinguished him forever from his papa, or any other politician: He challenged a tough Conservative senator, Patrick Brazeau, known as Brass Knuckles, to three rounds in the boxing ring for charity.

Brazeau clobbered Trudeau in the first round. But then, in the best “Rocky” style, Trudeau took charge, and the bout was stopped to preserve Brass Knuckles. “I can hear it already,” said the commentator: “Trudeau for leader.”

It’s worth recalling that fight not only for its sentimental value but also because that pendulum never stops. And Trudeau has three children.

Anna Marks, Opinion staff editor: The first statuettes of the 2025 awards season were handed out Sunday night at the Golden Globes. Despite a valiant effort by the host, Nikki Glaser, the show was, on the whole, rather boring, as always. Can it be saved?

Adam Sternbergh, Opinion culture editor: The Globes need to make a splash somehow! Just being Oscars Lite won’t cut it. Last night was fine, but it definitely felt like Oscars Lite.

The Globes used to be delightfully wacky in their TV selections, but now it’s a rehash of the Emmys. The TV wins were the most predictable of the night, from “Shogun” to the absent Jeremy Allen White.

Jessica Grose, Opinion writer: “The Bear” is the most overrated show on the planet, so of course he won.

I was happy to see Kieran Culkin win for “A Real Pain,” because he is delightfully wacky. For the most part, the speeches felt like everyone played it safe to avoid getting ripped apart on the internet.

Marks: Even the dresses were rather tepid. Pretty much everyone was in their best Old Hollywood-style glam, which is like the tradcore of red-carpet fashion. Ick.

Sternbergh: If the Globes want to survive, they must become the Oscars’ wacky drunk cousin. That starts on the red carpet. Jeremy Strong’s outfit fit the bill. You ask for red-carpet risks and I give you a mint-green bucket hat!

Marks: Ha! Honestly, I’ll take any risks, anywhere. I guess that’s why “The Substance” getting its shine, in the form of a best actress award for Demi Moore, felt so good — that movie’s actually interesting, if gruesome.

Sternbergh: I’ll be curious to see how much of the momentum of “The Substance” carries over to the Oscars. It feels like a Golden Globe movie and decidedly not like an Oscar movie.

Grose: Moore’s got an uphill battle — the Oscars hate horror. Even if the movie’s rebuke of right-wing gender conformity is so urgently political.

Marks: It’s indeed a deeply political film, with body horror that subverts traditional gender presentation. It also critiques cosmetic “enhancement” culture, which was a stark contrast to an awards show in which nobody’s forehead moved.

Grose: There were so many ads for GLP-1s during the show. Like, a truly wild amount of them.

Marks: The entire show was a GLP-1 ad. It’s sort of nutty to be handing out awards to a film that is in part about the punishing restrictions of beauty standards while everyone watching is being sold a way to better conform to the standards on display in the show itself.

Grose: It’s also troubling that the actresses from “Wicked” — a movie with a message about acceptance despite physical differences — seem to be wasting away. The politics of the film do not match the body politics of its stars.

Sternbergh: Perhaps another path to relevance for the Globes would be embracing an activist political role. An activist Globes would have more overtly celebrated “The Apprentice,” rather than leaving it for Sebastian Stan to mention in an acceptance speech for an award he won for a different movie.

The big wins for “Emilia Pérez” did feel somewhat political, given that its subject matter — gender transition — has become so politically charged.

Marks: That film’s lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, gave the most overtly political speech of the night. Perhaps it was so personal that it didn’t feel out of place.

Is the key to politics at awards shows that the most powerful and wealthy people who attend actually have a stake in the issue at hand?

Grose: Yeah, probably — otherwise it just looks like rich people cosplaying as social justice warriors for a night before returning to their mansions. No one wants to hear celebrities talking about politics directly anymore.

Sternbergh: Sure, no one wants to hear about politics in acceptance speeches, but the show itself should be more explicitly political in its nominations. Otherwise it ends up being a weak echo of the Emmys and a weak preview of the Oscars.

Grose: I don’t think the Globes need to exist. The night just felt like more Hollywood self-congratulation. Do we really need more of that in a moment when celebrities are more powerful than ever?

Marks: What say you, Adam? Should we abolish the Golden Globes?

Sternbergh: I would say that if the Globes disappeared, no one but publicists and red-carpet stylists would notice. It did disappear a few years ago, and no one noticed! I can’t make an impassioned case for its continued existence — but since it’s improbably staggered back from the grave, the Globes need to make the case on their own. They haven’t yet.

At Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, two of the nominees for best supporting actress are probably better known to the world as pop stars: Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez.

Pop stars in films are not a new phenomenon. Cher dazzled the world in “Moonstruck,” David Bowie dominated the cult-favorite “Labyrinth” and, more recently, Lady Gaga growled her way through “A Star is Born.” To succeed in films like these, a star has to suppress the overwhelming performance of identity she has concocted over a long career, to become someone else. It is surely a tremendous and fulfilling artistic challenge.

But over the last half-decade or so, pop stardom has dominated the wider entertainment industry at new heights. Consider Grande and Gomez. Each nominee got her start on children’s television (Gomez on Disney; Grande on Nickelodeon); each climbed to wider cultural prominence atop the Billboard Hot 100; each has a cosmetics line — Gomez’s has made her a billionaire. Unlike their antecedents, they possess the sort of cultural and economic power once only in reach of the most beloved royals, in the form of mastery of the global attention economy, impeccable personal branding and a horde of deeply devoted, adoringly parasocial fans.

In 2022, the researcher Adam Mastroianni wrote convincingly that pop culture has become an oligopoly, in which the bulk of audience attention to films, books, television shows, music and video games has become concentrated around a handful of predictable, largely familiar projects. In no industry was this more visible than film, in which studios, wanting safe economic bets with preexisting audiences, prized features with already baked-in audiences, leading to a glut of sequels and franchises and astronomical box office figures.

Pop stars can bring audiences without the messiness and fatigue that franchises do, since their fans are usually happy to put their purchasing power behind any project of their star’s, no matter how weird or experimental.

On its face, this doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad state of affairs. Gomez and Grande are passable actresses and the films for which they were nominated were a thousand times more interesting than yet another sequel in an over-baked cinematic universe. But I worry that their ascendance is a warning sign of a forthcoming shift: instead of power concentrating among specific projects and formats, it will now coalesce around a precious few stars who largely were selected by executives for their prized societal position when they were merely teenagers. It’s easy to imagine that the entertainment industry might be leaving its pop culture oligopoly behind, in favor of a pop culture oligarchy that crosses media and industries.

In the long run, this state of affairs may serve studios and stars, but audiences should be wary. Pop stars aren’t just artists; they’re also multinational brands with financial aims and carefully calibrated images. Plumbing the contradictions of their presence in other media risks shattering the delicate illusion that underpins popular art — that it’s art first and commercial second — thus revealing the whole enterprise as deeply cynical.

Is the Golden Globes an awards show for the most talented actors or, as Brooks Barnes noted in The Times last month, is it a “cash register” to promote movies and hawk fashion? Would “Emilia Pérez” have received such attention if a superstar wasn’t attached to it? Was “Wicked” a film that just had to be told in two parts, or a conveniently lengthy vehicle to sell every product tie-in known to man, on the back of another superstar’s never-ending press tour?

The answer is at the box office.