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When Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, went to Washington on Tuesday, he made all the usual stops, from the State Department to Capitol Hill. But it was his pilgrimage to Palm Beach, Fla., where he met former President Donald J. Trump for dinner on Monday evening at Mar-a-Lago, that grabbed most of the attention.

Mr. Cameron is the first top British government official to meet with Mr. Trump since he left the White House. His visit — ostensibly to cajole Mr. Trump into backing additional American military aid to Ukraine — attests to Mr. Trump’s influence over a far-right faction of House Republicans who have been holding up a vote.

It also underscores how the electoral calendar is affecting political dynamics on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Cameron, a onetime prime minister, has emerged as almost a shadow British leader abroad, standing in for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is busy with a looming general election at home.

In traveling to meet Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Cameron was reaching out to a once, and potentially future, American president — one whose jaundiced views on Ukraine are seen as the biggest hurdle to the continuation of much-needed American aid for the Ukrainian military.

“We had a good meeting,” Mr. Cameron said of Mr. Trump, while standing alongside Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken after their own session at the State Department on Tuesday. “It was a private meeting.”

Mr. Cameron said he and Mr. Trump discussed Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza conflict and other geopolitical issues, but he declined to say whether he had made any headway on convincing Mr. Trump to provide additional aid to Ukraine. He said he delivered the same message he gives to other American leaders: “The best thing we can do this year is to keep the Ukrainians in this fight.”

Mr. Trump has not commented on the dinner, which included Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Karen Pierce. His campaign issued a statement saying they discussed “the need for NATO countries to meet their defense spending requirements and ending the killing in Ukraine.” They also shared their “mutual admiration for the late Queen Elizabeth II.”

So far, Mr. Cameron’s lobbying campaign in Washington has been met with decidedly mixed results. While he said he looked forward to meetings with Republicans in the House and Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday, he was not scheduled to meet with Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is the pivotal figure in scheduling a House vote on military aid to Ukraine.

The two men last met in December, when Mr. Cameron also saw Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia Republican who stridently opposes further aid. Two months later, she lashed out at Mr. Cameron, saying he had accused Republicans of appeasing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“David Cameron needs to worry about his own country,” Ms. Taylor Greene said, adding an epithet.

At his news conference with Mr. Blinken, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that he viewed his visits to Capitol Hill with “great trepidation,” noting that, “It’s not for foreign politicians to tell legislators in another country what to do.”

Mr. Cameron played down the Mar-a-Lago meeting, saying it was routine for senior British and American officials to meet opposition candidates. As prime minister, he noted, he met with the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, when he came to London on a fund-raising trip. Mr. Blinken met the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, at a security conference in Munich.

Still, there is little routine about meeting a former president at the Palm Beach estate that served as his winter White House and is still his political bastion. Mr. Trump used Mar-a-Lago for summit meetings with foreign leaders like President Xi Jinping of China. More recently, he welcomed a like-minded leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Among Republicans, a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago has at times been an exercise in political validation. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, went there three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, in a fruitless bid to win Mr. Trump’s favor. Allies like Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, and Kari Lake, the Arizona TV anchor-turned-politician, are regular visitors.

Diplomats in Britain said Mr. Cameron’s visit was a risk, but characteristic of how he has approached his job from the start. On issues from Ukraine to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, he has pushed the envelope in his public statements. With Britain’s Conservative government lagging Labour by double digits in the polls and facing voters in the fall, some said Mr. Cameron had little to lose.

“Flattering Trump about his importance and significance on this issue is an astute move on Cameron’s part,” said Simon Fraser, a former head of Britain’s Foreign Office. “Let’s see whether it delivers.”

Mr. Fraser predicted that Mr. Cameron’s visit would get a mixed reception in Britain: applauded by those who view it primarily through a foreign-policy lens; criticized by those, he said, “who can’t stand Trump.” But he said Mr. Cameron’s entree to Mr. Trump spoke to his network of global contacts, a legacy of his time as prime minister.

“He’s bringing more reach and energy and impact to British foreign policy,” Mr. Fraser said.

Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, the British research institution, said, “It may not feel tasteful, but it’s shrewd, pragmatic politics of the kind Britain especially has historically been so good at, and probably of the kind that will work best with Trump.”

“There is a lot at stake in U.S. defense of Ukraine and Europe’s security,” she added, “and frankly, I think the effort to influence the U.S. may be wiser and more effective than the aspiration to Trump-proof Europe.”

Mr. Cameron has had a bumpy history with Mr. Trump. In 2016, as prime minister, he condemned Mr. Trump’s campaign proposal to place a temporary ban on allowing Muslims to enter the United States.

Asked in Parliament whether Mr. Trump should be banned from Britain, Mr. Cameron demurred but said, “His remarks are divisive, stupid and wrong, and I think if he came to visit our country, I think he’d unite us all against him.”

Even Mr. Cameron’s welcoming of Mr. Romney in 2012 had its awkward moments. Mr. Romney, who had organized the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, questioned whether London was ready to play host to the summer games, citing reports about security concerns.

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world,” Mr. Cameron shot back. “Of course, it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

The Supreme Court reputedly has a long-awaited conservative majority committed to enforcing the meaning of the Constitution as it was understood when it was adopted. This commitment to originalist interpretation will soon be tested in two cases now before the court that have what lawyers call bad optics.

One case, United States v. Rahimi, involves a Second Amendment challenge to a federal statute criminalizing the possession of firearms by people subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders. State courts typically use these orders to forbid threatening or abusive conduct toward the subject’s intimate partner. The federal gun ban is automatically imposed if the order either says that the subject presents a credible threat to the physical safety of the partner or explicitly forbids the use of physical force against the partner.

The other case, Garland v. Cargill, involves a regulatory ban on bump stocks that enable a semiautomatic rifle to achieve a rate of fire comparable to that of fully automatic machine guns. After a 2017 Las Vegas massacre in which semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks were used to kill 60 people and injure hundreds more, the Trump administration classified them as machine guns, which made them illegal.

No judge can relish being accused of siding with domestic abusers or of allowing a weapon to remain on the market that facilitated mass murder. Unless the court rules in favor of the government in these cases, denunciations undoubtedly will follow, especially in an election year.

These cases have come before a court that has been transformed by Republican efforts to stop the politicized use of judicial power to effect progressive social change. What began with calls for judicial restraint during the Nixon era eventually became a long campaign devoted to promoting originalist theories of interpretation.

This effort had its first conspicuous success in 2008, when a 5-to-4 majority struck down a handgun ban in District of Columbia v. Heller. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion featured a detailed originalist analysis that rejected an overwhelming and longstanding consensus in the lower courts. Rather than assume that the Second Amendment protects only a right of state governments to maintain militia organizations, the court concluded that the constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms” may be exercised by individuals for the purpose of self-defense.

Although the decision was seen as a milestone for originalism, the lower courts refused to go along. They adopted a deferential balancing test — like the one advocated by Justice Stephen Breyer in his Heller dissent — under which the courts should uphold almost any regulation that might serve the worthy purpose of promoting public safety. Applying that approach, the lower courts essentially rubber-stamped virtually every gun-control law they reviewed.

In 2022 the Supreme Court struck back. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the court invalidated a New York law that forbade individuals to carry a firearm in public unless they could persuade a government official that they faced some extraordinary threat to their personal safety. This was an easy case on originalist grounds because a right restricted to a tiny subset of the population cannot be the “right of the people” that the Constitution says “shall not be infringed.”

But the court went further, adopting a new legal test designed to enforce the original meaning of the Second Amendment. When defending a law that deprives an individual of the freedom to keep or bear arms, the court said, the government has the burden of proving that the law “is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Thus, for example, the absence of a historical regulation “distinctly similar” to a modern gun-control law is evidence of the modern regulation’s unconstitutionality. And Bruen ruled out “traditions” that did not begin until the 20th century.

This is a plausible way to identify certain exceptions to the Constitution’s linguistically unqualified prohibition. Just as the court has assumed that the First Amendment’s protection of “the freedom of speech” was not meant to ban longstanding and uncontroversial laws against perjury and fraud, similarly longstanding and well-accepted regulations of weapons would presumably not infringe the right protected by the Second Amendment.

Under Bruen’s originalist test, Rahimi should be an easy case. The government has not informed the Supreme Court of a single pre-20th-century law that punished American citizens, even those who had been convicted of a violent crime, for possessing a gun in their own homes. Not one.

The subject of the case, Zackey Rahimi, however, is an unsympathetic defendant. His ex-girlfriend obtained a protective order against him on the ground that he had assaulted her, and he has been charged with several crimes involving the misuse of firearms. Although he apparently had not been convicted of any offenses when the restraining order was issued, that order immediately and automatically criminalized his possession of a firearm under federal law.

If the court pretends that a historical tradition of such laws existed, it will not be faithful either to Bruen’s holding or to the court’s repeated insistence that the right to keep and bear arms is not “a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.”

Imagine that an overwrought woman called her ex-boyfriend and threatened to scratch his eyes out. If a state court ordered her to refrain from making such calls and from physically attacking him, the federal statute at issue in Rahimi would automatically make her a felon if she kept a gun in her own home. And that would be true even if she had good reason to fear a violent attack from the ex-boyfriend or his criminal associates. But no court would uphold a statute that made this restraining order a sufficient basis on which to criminalize her possession of a telephone. We will soon find out whether the Supreme Court takes the Second Amendment as seriously as the First.

The fidelity of the conservative justices to originalist legal principles will also be tested in Garland v. Cargill. Under those principles, only the text of a statute is the law, which cannot be changed unless Congress amends it by enacting a new law. That means courts may never give precedence over the text to their own views of good policy or to their speculations about what policies are popular in Congress.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 places very stringent regulatory restrictions on machine guns, which Congress defined as any weapon that shoots “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Because bump stocks like those at issue in the case now before the court require the shooter to release and then depress the trigger again after each shot, the government initially concluded that they do not turn a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun. That conclusion was dictated by the unambiguous language of the statute, which requires that multiple shots be fired “by a single function of the trigger.”

Since bump stocks permit a semiautomatic firearm to achieve a rate of fire comparable to that of a machine gun, it’s perfectly understandable that the government would want to update the 1934 law. Congress has done that repeatedly, going so far as to freeze the supply of legally owned machine guns in the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986. But if there is one central tenet in the originalist principles of statutory interpretation, it is that only Congress, not the president or the Supreme Court, has the constitutional authority to amend statutes. Upholding the Trump reclassification would require a majority of the justices to repudiate that principle, whether they admit it or not. And for what? To spare Congress the trouble of enacting a simple and presumably popular fix?

The goal of the conservative legal movement has been to replace the result-oriented adventurism of the Warren court during the 1950s and 1960s with respect for the original meaning of the Constitution, including its allocation to Congress of the sole authority to enact and amend statutes. If the government wins either of these cases, let alone both, that movement should recognize that its project has not succeeded.

Nelson Lund is a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and has written widely on constitutional law, including the Second Amendment.

Source images by Sean Gladwell and LPETTET/Getty Images

President Biden condemned a decision by Arizona’s Supreme Court on Tuesday to uphold an 1864 ban on nearly all abortions as “cruel” and “extreme,” saying the law was first enacted well before women even had the right to vote.

In a statement released within an hour of the decision, Mr. Biden called the ruling an “extreme agenda of Republican elected officials” and promised to continue the fight for reproductive rights and a restoration of Roe v. Wade, which had protected the right of women to have abortions for nearly a half century.

“Millions of Arizonans will soon live under an even more extreme and dangerous abortion ban, which fails to protect women even when their health is at risk or in tragic cases of rape or incest,” Mr. Biden said. “This cruel ban was first enacted in 1864 — more than 150 years ago, before Arizona was even a state and well before women had secured the right to vote. This ruling is a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.”

The decision in Arizona, a critical battleground state, comes as Mr. Biden’s campaign and Democratic officials blame the dwindling access to abortion care in America squarely on former President Donald J. Trump.

The issue has been central in several recent Democratic election victories.

Mr. Trump on Monday released a video saying that abortion rights should be left to the states. The former president, whose conservative appointees to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe in 2022, had for months refused to say whether he supported restrictive measures on abortion like those outlined in the 160-year-old law that Arizona’s highest court said on Tuesday “is now enforceable.”

The overturning of Roe “paved the way for the chaos and confusion we’re seeing play out across the country today,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday.

“There are now 21 extreme state abortion bans in effect across the country,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “One-third of all women of reproductive age now live in a state with an abortion ban.”

The White House also said Vice President Kamala Harris would visit Arizona on Friday to highlight “extremists” in the state who were pushing for abortion bans.

During a trip there last month, Ms. Harris criticized Mr. Trump’s role in the spread of state-level abortion restrictions.

“The former president, Donald Trump, handpicked three members of the United States Supreme Court because he intended for them to overturn Roe,” Ms. Harris said last month. “He intended for them to take your freedoms, and he brags about it.”

The Arizona law bans nearly all abortions, a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for women’s health care and election-year politics. Doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines and prison terms of two to five years.

Abortion was legal in Arizona through 15 weeks of pregnancy until Tuesday’s ruling.

Mr. Biden on Tuesday reaffirmed his support for a federal law that would restore abortion rights once protected by Roe v. Wade. But congressional action on abortion protections is unlikely.

In an unusual move, the five major broadcast and cable news networks have prepared a joint open letter that urges President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump to participate in televised debates ahead of Election Day, according to two people with direct knowledge of their plans.

The letter — endorsed by ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — thrusts into public view a question that has swirled within media and political circles: whether the presidential debates, one of the nation’s last remaining mass civic rituals in a polarized age, will occur this year at all.

“We, the undersigned national news organizations, urge the presumptive presidential nominees to publicly commit to participating in general election debates before November’s election,” the letter reads, according to a draft version obtained by The New York Times.

The letter is not yet final, and the networks are also seeking endorsements from other leading national news organizations, including newspapers.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly declined to commit to participating in the three debates scheduled for September and October. His aides say they are concerned that the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan group that has organized the telecasts since 1988, will be unable to enforce the rules when Mr. Trump takes the stage.

Mr. Trump has vowed to debate, and has taken to taunting Mr. Biden for not following suit. But Mr. Trump’s track record is mixed: In 2020, he pulled out of a debate against Mr. Biden at the last minute, prompting its cancellation, and in the recent Republican primary he refused to appear onstage, even once, with his opponents.

The television networks’ letter was organized as a response to the uncertainty, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions about an ongoing effort.

“General election debates have a rich tradition in our American democracy, having played a vital role in every presidential election of the past 50 years dating to 1976,” the draft letter reads. “In each of those elections, tens of millions have tuned in to watch the candidates debating side by side, in a competition of ideas, for the votes of American citizens.”

Contacted on Tuesday, the five TV networks either did not comment or deferred to the text of the letter.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has already announced dates, venues and eligibility requirements for this year’s matchups. “Though it is too early for invitations to be extended to any candidates, it’s not too early for candidates who expect to meet the eligibility criteria to publicly state their support for, and their intention to participate in, the commission’s debates planned for this fall,” the draft letter reads.

“If there is one thing Americans can agree on, during this polarized time, it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high,” the letter continues. “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of the nation.”

If no debate were to occur this year, it would be a sea change for the modern presidential campaign cycle. In every election since 1976, Americans have witnessed at least one live televised encounter between the leading contenders.

The debates are by far the most-watched moments of a presidential campaign, and in an increasingly partisan media environment, they offer a rare chance for the candidates to spar face to face outside the presence of spin doctors or sycophantic pundits. They are also simulcast on every major cable and broadcast network, a throwback to a more quaint media age when Americans absorbed information from the same group of news sources.

The Biden campaign has not ruled out agreeing to the debates, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to share details intended to be private. But the campaign does not see an advantage to publicly committing to participate this early in the year, the person said.

Mr. Biden’s team was also incensed in 2020 at proceedings during the first presidential debate in Cleveland. A former aide has said that Mr. Trump tested positive for the coronavirus several days before the event, during which Mr. Trump stood several feet away from Mr. Biden. The debate commission had established medical testing protocols that Biden aides believe Mr. Trump managed to elude.

That debate was notably chaotic, with Mr. Trump refusing to follow the instructions of the moderator, Chris Wallace, and frequently talking over Mr. Biden. It led the debate commission to tweak its rules for the final 2020 debate, allowing a producer to mute each candidate’s microphone while his rival had the floor.

Several of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are longtime critics of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Anita Dunn, who spearheads Mr. Biden’s communications strategy, was a lead organizer of a 2015 report that called for a wholesale restructuring of the presidential debate system. That report, which was coauthored by Ron Klain, formerly Mr. Biden’s White House chief of staff, argued that the commission’s debate format should be changed to reflect a more modern media environment.

Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on Mr. Biden’s reluctance to commit to the debates. “It is important, for the Good of our Country, that Joe Biden and I Debate Issues that are so vital to America, and the American People,” he wrote in a Super Tuesday post on Truth Social. “Therefore, I am calling for Debates, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE!” (The haphazard capitalization is verbatim.)

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, repeated that pledge on Tuesday, adding, in a statement, “Biden won’t get away with the basement routine this time.”

In the past, Mr. Trump has railed against the Commission on Presidential Debates, accusing it of a pro-Democratic bias and claiming, with no proof, that the commission interfered with his microphone in 2016. Mr. Trump also supported a pledge by the Republican Party to boycott future debates organized by the commission, although that stance appears to have softened.

“The Debates can be run by the Corrupt DNC, or their Subsidiary, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD),” Mr. Trump wrote in his Super Tuesday post. In fact, the commission is an independent, nonpartisan entity with no link to the Democratic Party.

The Biden campaign on Tuesday referred to Mr. Biden’s past remarks about the debates. Asked by a reporter in March if he would debate Mr. Trump, the president replied, “It depends on his behavior.” He has also joked about Mr. Trump’s demands for a debate, saying, “If I were him, I’d want to debate me, too. He’s got nothing else to do.”

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, one of Mr. Biden’s closest allies, invoked the chaotic Cleveland debate when he was asked about the issue last month on CNN. “Donald Trump just busted through every possible rule or regulation of decency or decorum,” Mr. Coons said. Pressed by Jake Tapper on whether Mr. Biden should debate this year, Mr. Coons equivocated. “I think that’s up to him,” he said.

The format of the debates is not hugely different from the first televised bouts, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. And while some mass media events like the Oscars and Grammys have waned in viewership, Americans still tune in for the debates, in enormous numbers: Mr. Trump’s first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016 is the highest rated on record, with 84 million people watching. In 2020, an average of 68 million people watched the Biden-Trump debates, far outstripping audiences for political conventions or a State of the Union address.

Arizona’s highest court on Tuesday upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for women’s health care and election-year politics in a critical battleground state. The 1864 law, the court said in a 4-2 decision, “is now enforceable.” But the court put its ruling on hold for the moment, and sent the matter back to a lower court to hear additional arguments about the law’s constitutionality.

The Arizona Supreme Court said that because the federal right to abortion in Roe v. Wade had been overturned, there was no federal or state law preventing Arizona from enforcing the near-total ban on abortions, which had sat dormant for decades.

The ruling could prompt clinics in Arizona to stop providing abortions and women to travel to nearby states like California, New Mexico or Colorado to end their pregnancies. Until now the procedure has been legal in Arizona through 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The ruling concerned a law that was on the books long before Arizona achieved statehood. It outlaws abortion from the moment of conception, except when necessary to save the life of the mother, and it makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines and prison terms of two to five years.

The court’s ruling was a stinging loss for abortion-rights supporters, who said it would put women’s health in jeopardy.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, called it “unconscionable and an affront to freedom.”

“The Court has risked the health and lives of Arizonans,” she said in a statement. “Today’s decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state.”

Ms. Mayes also suggested that she would not play a part in prosecuting doctors under the ban. “As long as I am Attorney General, no woman or doctor will be prosecuted under this draconian law in this state,” she said.

Even some Republicans expressed misgivings about the reinstatement of the near-total ban, and had supported retaining the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed into law in 2022 by the previous governor, Doug Ducey, a Republican.

The stakes could be significant for Arizona after former President Donald J. Trump said this week that he thought abortion rights should be left up to the states to decide.

Democrats, who seized on abortion to win campaigns for governor and attorney general in midterm elections two years ago, condemned the ruling and said it would galvanize their supporters to push for a state constitutional right to abortion as a ballot initiative in this November’s elections.

For nearly two years, supporters and opponents of abortion rights in Arizona have been fighting in court over whether the 1864 law could still be enforced, or whether it had been effectively overtaken and neutered by decades of other state laws that regulate and restrict abortion but stop short of banning it entirely.

The 1864 ban had sat mothballed for decades, one of several sweeping state abortion-ban laws that were moribund while Roe v. Wade was in effect but became the focus of intense political and legal action after Roe fell.

Abortions in Wisconsin were largely halted because of an 1849 ban, but resumed last September after a judge said the law did not make abortions illegal. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signed a repeal of a 1931 ban on abortion last spring after voters added abortion-rights protections to the state constitution.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating claims made by a Boeing engineer who says that sections of the fuselage of the 787 Dreamliner are improperly fastened together and could break apart mid-flight after thousands of trips.

The engineer, Sam Salehpour, who worked on the plane, detailed his allegations in interviews with The New York Times and in documents sent to the F.A.A. A spokesman for the agency confirmed that it was investigating the allegations but declined to comment on them.

Mr. Salehpour, whose résumé says he has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, said the problems with fastening the sections came about as a result of changes in how the enormous sections were fitted and fastened together in the manufacturing assembly line. The fuselages for the plane come in several pieces, all from different manufacturers, and they are not exactly the same shape where they fit together, he said.

Boeing concedes those manufacturing changes were made, but a spokesman for the company, Paul Lewis, said there was “no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.”

Mr. Lewis said Boeing had done extensive testing on the Dreamliner and “determined that this is not an immediate safety of flight issue.”

“Our engineers are completing complex analysis to determine if there may be a long-term fatigue concern for the fleet in any area of the airplane,” Mr. Lewis said. “This would not become an issue for the in-service fleet for many years to come, if ever, and we are not rushing the team so that we can ensure that analysis is comprehensive.”

In a subsequent statement, Boeing said it was “fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner,” adding, “These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft.”

Mr. Salehpour’s allegations add another element to the intense scrutiny that Boeing has been facing since a door panel blew off a 737 Max jet during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, raising questions about the company’s manufacturing practices. Since then, the plane maker has announced a leadership overhaul, and the Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation.

Mr. Salehpour’s concerns are set to receive an airing on Capitol Hill later this month. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigations subcommittee, is planning to hold a hearing with Mr. Salehpour on April 17. Mr. Blumenthal said he wanted the flying public to hear from the engineer firsthand.

“Repeated, shocking allegations about Boeing’s manufacturing failings point to an appalling absence of safety culture and practices — where profit is prioritized over everything else,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement.

The Dreamliner is a wide-body jet that is more fuel efficient than many other aircraft used for long trips, in part because of its lightweight composite construction. First delivered in 2011, the twin-aisle plane has both racked up orders for Boeing and created headaches for the company. For years, the plane maker has dealt with a succession of issues involving the jet, including battery problems that led to the temporary grounding of 787s around the world.

Boeing has also confronted a slew of problems at its plant in South Carolina where the Dreamliner is built. A prominent Boeing whistle-blower who raised concerns about manufacturing practices at the plant, John Barnett, was found dead last month with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The Dreamliner was a pioneer in using large amounts of so-called composite materials rather than traditional metal to build the plane, including major sections like the fuselage, as the aircraft’s body is known. Often made by combining materials like carbon and glass fibers, composites are lighter than metals but, as comparatively newer materials, less is known about how they hold up to the long-term stresses of flight. Those stresses create what engineers call fatigue, which can compromise safety if it causes the material to fail.

Mr. Salehpour said he was repeatedly retaliated against for raising concerns about shortcuts he believed the plane maker was taking in joining together the pieces of the Dreamliner’s fuselage, or the body of the aircraft.

Debra S. Katz, a lawyer for Mr. Salehpour, said that her client did everything possible to bring his concerns to the attention of Boeing officials. She added that company officials did not listen. Instead, she said that her client was silenced and transferred.

“This is the culture that Boeing has allowed to exist,” Ms. Katz said. “This is a culture that prioritizes production of planes and pushes them off the line even when there are serious concerns about the structural integrity of those planes and their production process.”

In its statement, Boeing said it encouraged its workers “to speak up when issues arise,” adding, “Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”

The F.A.A. interviewed Mr. Salehpour on Friday, Ms. Katz said. In a statement, Mike Whitaker, the agency’s administrator, did not specifically address Mr. Salehpour’s allegations, but he reiterated that the regulator was taking a hard line against the plane maker after the Alaska Airlines episode.

“This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing,” Mr. Whitaker said. “They must commit to real and profound improvements. Making foundational change will require a sustained effort from Boeing’s leadership, and we are going to hold them accountable every step of the way.”

Norfolk Southern announced on Tuesday that it agreed to pay $600 million to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from a February 2023 derailment of a train carrying hazardous materials in East Palestine, Ohio.

The settlement, which must be approved by U.S. District Judge Benita Y. Pearson, includes payments to residents and businesses within 20 miles of the derailment. It also resolves personal injury claims within a 10-mile radius of the derailment.

“Individuals and businesses will be able to use compensation from the settlement in any manner they see fit to address potential adverse impacts from the derailment,” Norfolk Southern said in a statement. “This could include health care needs and medical monitoring, property restoration and diminution, and compensation for any net business loss.”

The lawyers representing the victims said the settlement was “a fair, reasonable and adequate result for the community on a number of levels,” including the speed in which the resolution was reached and how much money residents and businesses would receive.

Beth Graham, a lawyer at Grant & Eisenhofer who represented the plaintiffs, said her team has received an “overwhelmingly positive” response from East Palestine and its surrounding area. It’s still unclear exactly how many people would be eligible for compensation, but it will likely be tens of thousands, she said.

“The community as a whole has been grateful and relieved that this is the first step in putting this behind them and getting them some sort of compensation,” Ms. Graham said in an interview.

The derailed train was carrying a variety of cargo, including 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride, a chemical used to make plastics. Fearing an explosion, officials released the contents of the car carrying the chemical and set them ablaze in the town, sending up huge plumes of smoke and alarming residents.

Hundreds of people were evacuated after the derailment. Many remain concerned about contamination and say they do not trust the assurances they have received from Norfolk Southern and state and federal officials that their town and homes are safe.

After the incident, regulators vowed to double down on rail safety and lawmakers promised to pass legislation to prevent similar disasters. But proposals to improve rail safety have been bogged down in Congress and the number of derailments at the five biggest railroads increased last year.

President Biden traveled to East Palestine in February, where some residents, including the town’s mayor, lamented how long it took him to visit.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said in a court filing that they would seek approval from Judge Pearson no later than April 19. The settlement is in addition to the more than $100 million Norfolk Southern has already paid to the community, including $21 million in direct payments to residents.

The company said that it was not admitting liability or fault. The settlement was reached after “extensive fact discovery, expert development and three days of mediation,” according to a Tuesday court filing by the company and the plaintiff’s lawyers.

Norfolk Southern is still facing a lawsuit filed by the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, for the environmental damage that resulted from the derailment. In a February statement, Mr. Yost said he would not settle the suit “without a detailed understanding of what happened, who is responsible, and how we avoid other communities like East Palestine from being victims to this type of incident.”

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident but has not yet released its final report.

The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer.

“I don’t believe in welfare,” the governor, Jim Pillen, a Republican, said in December.

A group of low-income youths, in a face-to-face meeting, urged him to reconsider. One told him she had eaten less when schools were out. Another criticized the meals at the existing feeding sites and held a crustless prepackaged sandwich to argue that electronic benefit cards from the new federal program would offer better food and more choice.

“Sometimes money isn’t the solution,” the governor replied.

A week later, Mr. Pillen made a U-turn the size of a Nebraska cornfield, approving the cards and praising the young people for speaking out.

“This isn’t about me winning,” he said. “This is about coming to the conclusion of what is best for our kids.”

Mr. Pillen’s extraordinary reversal shows the conflicts shaping red-state views of federal aid: needs beckon, but suspicions run high of the Biden administration and programs that critics call handouts.

The new $2.5 billion program, known as Summer EBT, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and every Democratic governor will distribute the grocery cards this summer. But Republican governors are split, with 14 in, 13 out and no consensus on what constitutes conservative principle.

One red-state governor (Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas) hailed the cards as an answer to a disturbing problem. Another (Kim Reynolds of Iowa) warned that they might increase obesity. Some Republicans dismissed the program as obsolete pandemic aid. Some balked at the modest state matching costs. Others hinted they might join after taking more time to prepare.

The program will provide families about $40 a month for every child who receives free or reduced-price meals at school —$120 for the summer. The red-state refusals will keep aid from about 10 million children, about a third of those potentially eligible nationwide.

The rejection of federal aid has parallels to the bitter fights over the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Ten states, mostly Southern and low income, decline to run an expanded Medicaid program largely financed by Washington.

Still, some analysts find the rejection of the grocery cards surprising. Summer EBT is much cheaper for states than Medicaid, it passed Congress with Republican support and it grew from a pilot program widely deemed successful. Plus, it targets children.

“It should be less controversial than it’s been,” said Elaine Waxman, a hunger expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group.

The outcome illuminates the arbitrary nature of the American safety net, which prioritizes local control. North Dakota and North Carolina are in; South Dakota and South Carolina are out. Children can get aid in Tulsa but not in Oklahoma City, as state and tribal governments clash. In the impoverished Mississippi Delta, eligibility depends on which side of the Mississippi River a child lives.

As with Medicaid, poor states are especially resistant, though the federal government bears most of the cost. Of the 10 states with the highest levels of children’s food insecurity, five rejected Summer EBT: Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

Like the school lunch program, it serves families up to 185 percent of the poverty line, meaning a family of three would qualify with an income of about $45,500 or less.

The initial school meal program faced resistance, too. Congress created it in 1946, partly from fear that poor nutrition weakened military recruits. But opponents saw free meals as socialism, and Southern states demanded assurance that federal aid would not undermine segregation.

More than a decade later, only half of schools ran the program, Susan Levine, a historian at the University of Illinois Chicago, noted in her 2008 book “School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program.”

A separate Summer Food Service Program followed in 1968. But it offers meals at limited sites, which some families cannot reach, and serves only about 15 percent of children fed during the school year.

Some critics see the new program as an extension of pandemic aid. (A similar effort, Pandemic EBT, distributed grocery cards when the coronavirus closed schools.) But Summer EBT, having started experimentally in 2011, long predates the pandemic. Evaluators found that even benefits as low as $30 a month cut “the most severe food insecurity among children by one-third.”

Drawing on those results, Congress in 2022 established the program nationwide. In exchange for the federal benefits, states pay half the administrative costs. Perhaps sensing some might resist, a Republican backer, Senator John Boozman of Arkansas, said in a promotional video, “We’re counting on you to put these new tools into action.”

His home-state governor, Ms. Sanders, did. As a White House press secretary under President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Sanders does not want for conservative credentials, but she celebrated the federal aid.

“Making sure no Arkansan goes hungry, especially children, is a top concern for my administration,” she said in a news release. Arkansas officials estimate the program will cost the state about $3 million and deliver $45 million in benefits.

Iowa rejected the program with equal verve. In forgoing about $29 million in federal benefits, Governor Reynolds called the program “not sustainable” and criticized the lack of constraints on which food parents can buy. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” she said.

The pilot program found the opposite: EBT cards “increased consumption of fruits and vegetables,” evaluators wrote, and lowered the consumption of soft drinks.

More than half of the children whom Republican governors have excluded from aid live in Texas and Florida. Both states have noted the program’s administrative complexity: Schools often lack current student addresses or the technology to share data easily with agencies that issue EBT cards. But neither has ruled out future participation.

The Biden administration, seeking to protect the program from a partisan gloss, has generally not criticized states that refused the aid.

“A number of the nonparticipating states have told us they were challenged by the timeline and hope to implement the program next year,” said Stacy Dean, the deputy under secretary of agriculture.

Some Republicans, in rejecting the aid, found critics in their own ranks. After Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina dismissed Summer EBT as a duplicative “entitlement,” State Senator Katrina Shealy, a fellow Republican, wrote a column with a Democratic colleague warning that “hunger does not stop during summer break.”

In an interview, Ms. Shealy said the state should not reject $65 million “just because Biden is president,” and perhaps just partly tongue-in-cheek wrapped her plea in Trumpian bunting: “Everyone wants to say, ‘America First’ — well, let’s feed our children first.”

Oklahoma initially said it rejected the program because federal officials had not finalized the rules. But responding to critics, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, sharpened his attack, calling Summer EBT a duplicative “Biden administration program” that would “cause more bureaucracy for families.”

Tribal governments, which have influence over large parts of the state, stepped in. Already feuding with Mr. Stitt, they promised to distribute cards to all eligible families on their land, regardless of tribal status, while bearing the $3 million administrative cost. The five participating tribes will cover nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma’s eligible children, most of them not Native American.

“I remain dumbfounded that the governor of Oklahoma would turn down federal tax dollars to help feed low-income children,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

In Nebraska, Governor Pillen was an unlikely candidate to support a new poverty program. A wealthy pork processor, he ran on vows to fight critical race theory, resist “the federal government’s invasion” and “keep the socialist agenda out of our state.”

The existing meal sites were preferable to Summer EBT, he said, because they let children socialize and allowed staff members to check their well being. But many families lack the time and transportation to get children to the sites, especially in rural areas.

Historically, the number of children Nebraska feeds during the summer is only about 7 percent of those fed in school, one of the lowest ratios in the country, according to the Food Research & Action Center, a Washington advocacy group. By contrast, Summer EBT would reach nearly every family eligible for a subsidized school meal.

After the governor rejected the program, thousands of Nebraskans signed a protest petition, and 19 members of the unicameral legislature backed a bill to force the state’s participation. They included Senator Ray Aguilar, a senior Republican, who said in an interview that the program reflected conservative values because “kids need to eat.”

The state’s fiscal analysts estimated that the program would cost about $360,000 a year and bring $18 million in benefits.

Megan Young, 25, does not follow politics but heard about the dispute. Relying on school meals growing up, she ate less in the summer and watched her mother go hungry. Food insecurity, she said, deepened her mother’s depression, which sent her into foster care. “I was shocked,” she said, to hear the governor call EBT cards “welfare.”

Ms. Young was in a program that let disadvantaged teenagers and young adults lobby the governor on an issue of their choice. Her group chose Summer EBT.

Standing before Mr. Pillen in the State Supreme Court, Matthew Floyd, 18, said federal cash would help the economy. Lexie Simonsen, 18, brought a brown-bag lunch to argue that the meal-site fare was meager and unappealing.

Ms. Young spoke in the most personal terms, explaining that “my mother would go without or very little so that we could eat.” She did not tell the governor about her journey into foster care and homelessness, for fear he might find such hardship implausible.

The presentation lasted eight minutes. The governor seemed unpersuaded. He doubted the group’s estimate of how many children would benefit from the cards. He insisted that the summer sites met children’s needs. “I’m not asking you to agree with me,” he said.

The group left dejected.

Ms. Simonsen was in study hall a week later when she learned that the governor had reversed himself and announced Nebraska would send out the EBT cards. He cited several youth groups, including hers, for altering his view.

It was unusual, she said, for powerful men to change their minds, and she credited Mr. Pillen, a former college football star, for not making the issue a contest he had to win.

“The fact that he listened and said Nebraska can do better — that blows my mind,” she said.

In the Where to Eat: 25 Best series, we’re highlighting our favorite restaurants in cities across the United States. These lists will be updated as restaurants close and open, and as we find new gems to recommend. As always, we pay for all of our meals and don’t accept free items.

Logan Square

Ramen

Akahoshi Ramen might be the country’s highest-profile restaurant whose chef earned his bona fides on Reddit. The chef and owner, Mike Satinover, was studying in Japan when a bowl of miso ramen in Hokkaido drove him down a path of obsession. For the next decade, Mr. Satinover fastidiously published his ramen research and recipes on the internet forum Reddit, attracting a legion of fans, including established ramen chefs. He brought that viral momentum into this brick-and-mortar restaurant, where reservations are snapped up within minutes of release. Only four ramens are on the menu (the Sapporo-style miso and soupless tantanmen are superb), and Mr. Satinover’s craftsmanship is present in every bowl: Noodles, tare, broth and toppings are all meticulously prepared from scratch. KEVIN PANG

2340 North California Avenue, Chicago; akahoshiramen.com

Walking into the sprawling Al Bawadi Grill transports you to a sumptuous Bedouin tent — ceilings draped with colorful fabric, the waft of grilled meats ever-present. Applying fire to meat has long been a crowd-pleasing tradition, and here, generous portions of kefta and shish kebabs, chicken, lamb and seafood are cooked over glowing mesquite hardwood. Even hunks of chicken breast stay remarkably juicy, the product of a grillmaster with keen eyes and gut feel. These meats (sure, there are plenty of non-animal options) arrive at the table on banquet-size platters, with enough hummus, rice and grilled vegetables to make leftovers the next day, and possibly the day after. KEVIN PANG

7216 West 87th Street, Bridgeview; 708-599-1999

8501 West Dempster Street, Niles; 847-957-1999; albawadigrill.com

River North

Basque

Order steak at this Basque chophouse, and instead of choosing rib-eye or filet mignon, you pick which cow you’d like. Maybe it’s Holstein, dry-aged for 18 days and tasting of buttered popcorn. Or Galiciana, a breed raised for more than five years (unlike the 18 months for supermarket steaks), with ruby-red meat and a fat cap so nutty in flavor you’d swear it was Ibérico ham. Whichever of the rotating cattle on the menu you choose, the steaks grilled by Asador Bastian taste like no other beef in town. And they’re not even the best thing on the menu: Seafood dishes, like the creamy paella-esque arroz cremoso, whisk you from this stately townhouse restaurant in the Gallery district to the Bay of Biscay. KEVIN PANG

214 West Erie Street, Chicago; 312-800-8935; asadorbastian.com

West Loop and River North

Mediterranean

When Avec opened in 2003 among the meatpacking houses of the West Loop, it won a reputation for breaking restaurant conventions. The dining space and kitchen were one narrow room, like a shipping container, necessitating communal bench seating with strangers. The food came on shareable small plates bearing ingredients from the Mediterranean, like harissa and labneh. Two decades on (with a larger second location in River North), a night at Avec still feels like attending Chicago’s coolest after-hours dinner party. Bacon-wrapped and chorizo-stuffed medjool dates remain an obligatory starter, as is the melty, luscious potato and salted cod brandade with garlic crostini. It’d be hard, though, to top the focaccia baked with ricotta, taleggio and truffle oil, a dish so luxurious it feels like a quesadilla for owners of superyachts. KEVIN PANG

615 West Randolph Street, Chicago; 312-377-2002

141 West Erie Street, Chicago; 312-736-1778; avecrestaurant.com

There’s an inherently magical quality to Lee Wolen’s cooking at Boka: the way he transforms beets into something resembling smoked beef tartare, or the exquisite stuffed chicken with impossibly perfect striations of skin, sausage and breast meat. And yet, Boka has always been the kind of refined, modern restaurant that you never feel you need an anniversary or birthday to visit — call it unfussy, relaxed or jeans-casual. Mr. Wolen’s dishes are almost too impressive for a neighborhood spot like Boka, which recently turned 20 years old. His honey-glazed roasted duck — yielding the most lacquered, gossamer-crisp, perfect bite of duck skin in Chicago — is pure culinary prestidigitation. KEVIN PANG

1729 North Halsted Street, Chicago; 312-337-6070; bokachicago.com

River North

French

In the 1980s, many critics considered Le Francais — 30 miles north of Chicago in Wheeling, Ill. — the finest restaurant in the country. This was a time when high gastronomy in America was almost always associated with classical French cuisine, involving foie gras and pressed ducks served on bone china. Nowadays in Chicago, upscale non-bistro French cooking is rarely seen; Brindille is an exception. The cousins Carrie and Michael Nahabedian (she’s the chef, he’s the wine director) still believe in the power of a beluga caviar course with mother-of-pearl spoons, and that the potato reaches its ideal when puréed as Joël Robuchon would. Lemon madeleines are still baked to order here, and for $30 a waiter will rain down shavings of Périgord truffles on any course you desire. KEVIN PANG

534 North Clark Street, Chicago; 312-595-1616; brindille-chicago.com

West Loop

Tasting Menu

After closing their three-Michelin-starred Grace in 2017, the chef Curtis Duffy and his partner, Michael Muser, nearly immediately set about expanding upon that restaurant’s vision. Now nearly four years old, Ever is a highly refined but gracious experience. The tables are spaced such that you dine on a private island, only vaguely aware of your neighbors and occasionally visited by installments from Mr. Duffy’s menu. His cooking — he was the chef de cuisine under Grant Achatz at Alinea — is meticulous and often surprising. A compressed carrot terrine shares a plate with flavors of black olive and pistachio. Hamachi is frozen with liquid nitrogen and then shaved into curls that thaw to a pleasing texture and are discreetly accented with a piquant sauce of finger limes. Even the butter service — presented in a stacked ribbon reminiscent of a Frank Gehry building — puts on a show. BRIAN GALLAGHER

1340 West Fulton Avenue, Chicago; ever-restaurant.com

Andersonville

Belgian Beer Bar

No bar in Chicago treats beer with the intense reverence Hopleaf does. For the 125 bottled Belgian beers offered (and another 62 beers on tap), the bar stocks 87 glasses of varying sizes and shapes that best express how each beer should be served. A tall fluted glass, for example, shows off the colors of a fruit lambic. That level of devotion has made Hopleaf, 32 years in Andersonville, a national monument for beer geeks. Even those who can’t tell a dubbel from a saison have a reason to come. The Belgian-inspired food menu features the hearty likes of sausage plates, rabbit confit and steak frites. Naturally, you have a choice of which beer the mussels are cooked in: witbier or lambic. KEVIN PANG

5148 North Clark Street, Chicago; 773-334-9851; hopleafbar.com

Elmwood Park

Italian Beef

Italian beef is a Chicago sandwich born of poverty. A century ago, Neapolitan immigrants looking to feed a crowd roasted a flavorless hunk of meat (often bottom round) with heavy seasoning, shaved it thin and piled it sopping-wet into a roll. The sandwich is topped with a spicy bricolage of pickled vegetables called giardiniera. It wasn’t well known outside the city like deep-dish pizza or Chicago hot dogs, but that changed when the FX show “The Bear” romanticized the Italian beef into a culinary objet d’art. For Chicagoans, it remains an Everyman sandwich, a beautiful mess of bread and garlicked beef that resists highfalutin treatments. Johnnie’s Beef has operated in Elmwood Park since 1961; standing in line here, ordering a “beef-hot-dipped,” and eating over the hood of your car remains an indelible Chicago experience. KEVIN PANG

7500 West North Avenue, Elmwood Park; 708-452-6000; facebook.com/people/Johnnies-Beef

To eat at Kasama is to experience the seamless blending of the talents of the husband-and-wife team Genie Kwon and Timothy Flores. Ms. Kwon, a pastry chef who worked at Eleven Madison Park in New York and Flour Bakery & Cafe in Boston, puts out delicate, inventive treats, including a ham-and-cheese Danish like none you’ve tasted, replete with raclette and topped with dainty shavings of serrano ham. Mr. Flores’s Filipino food, which includes staples like lumpia and adobo, is unpretentious and soul-warming. Try his excellent take on a Chicago-style Italian combo sandwich, made with longaniza. For a more high-end experience, the restaurant offers a tasting menu in the evening. PRIYA KRISHNA

1001 North Winchester Avenue, Chicago; 773-697-3790; kasamachicago.com

Westmont

Tavern-style Pizza

Chicagoans eat deep-dish pizza only on special occasions. The more frequent choice is tavern-style, a thin-crust pie typically topped with sausage and a dash of oregano, then cut into squares. Tavern-style pizzerias tend to be family-run, with recipes that stay unchanged over many decades. At Kim’s Uncle Pizza, three young pizza entrepreneurs opted to tackle tavern pies, applying modern and unconventional techniques like fermenting the dough for a whole week. The result? The Platonic ideal of Chicago tavern-style pizza: crackly crust throughout (even the center squares), deeply flavorful tomato sauce, juicy nubs of spiced Italian sausage. What makes this pie even more desirable is how hard it is to score one, as this shoe-box-size operation usually sells out on weekends by 5:30 p.m. KEVIN PANG

207 North Cass Avenue, Westmont; 630-963-1900; unclepizzawestmont.com

Logan Square

Eclectic

Twenty-five years on, Lula Cafe remains as confounding to categorize as ever. The menu reads like roll call at the United Nations: soups from Indonesia, chickpea tagines, French omelets and a bucatini dish by way of Greece, pairing brown butter with feta and cinnamon. In cross-pollinating ingredients from different parts of the world, often together on one plate, the chef Jason Hammel is arguably a key influence for Chicago cooks today. Lula Cafe can claim to other firsts: It called Logan Square home a full decade before it became a desirable dining neighborhood, and was among the earliest Chicago restaurants to adopt a farm-to-table approach, showcasing ingredients from local purveyors as a selling point. The best way to describe Lula Cafe? It serves Lula Cafe food. KEVIN PANG

2537 North Kedzie Boulevard, Chicago; 773-489-9554; lulacafe.com

West Town

Eclectic, Global

Reservation sites require that restaurants label themselves with a particular cuisine. The chef of Maxwells Trading, Erling Wu-Bower, begrudgingly agreed to “contemporary American,” but he’d like to make clear that he despises the term. His mother is Chinese, his father Creole. The parents of the executive chef, Chris Jung, are Korean. Both chefs grew up in large melting-pot cities, equally comfortable picking up food with chopsticks as with Ethiopian injera. Maxwells Trading is unconstrained by pithy labels — “city food by city kids,” Mr. Wu-Bower said — which makes a dish like French onion dip with Chinese scallion pancakes both unexpected and obvious. Peruvian and Thai flavors converge in a striped bass ceviche with lemongrass and fermented chile paste. The restaurant feels very 2024, a reflection of the borders-erasing cultural gumbo that Chicago has become. KEVIN PANG

1516 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago; 312-896-4410; maxwellstrading.com

Logan Square

Mexican

The organizing principle here is to treat Mexican cooking as a medium for storytelling. The chef Diana Dávila’s printed menu lists dishes and prices, of course, but it’s also where she often adds a few lines of narrative context. You’d learn that mole de novia, a Oaxacan white sauce made with pine nuts, is served to brides on their wedding days. You might be surprised to find a steak burrito on the menu, until you learn that it’s a homage to the thousands of burritos Ms. Dávila made at her parents’ restaurant (and it’s a fabulous steak burrito). Suffusing food with her stories somehow makes Ms. Dávila’s polished and gorgeous cooking taste even better. KEVIN PANG

2800 West Logan Boulevard, Chicago; 872-315-3947; mitocaya.com

Of the Chicago restaurants pushing Italian cooking beyond the domain of antipasto salads and eggplant Parmesans, Monteverde might be the most popular in town. For one, pasta is treated here as a spectator sport: Perched on a platform behind the bar are two nonnas who lovingly knead and shape dough, visible to diners via overhead mirrors, like live-action Pasta Grannies. From there pasta is handed off to the chef, Sarah Grueneberg, who interprets dishes in ways that are equal parts avant-garde and classic. Ms. Grueneberg can execute a chile oil-slick seafood arrabbiata charred in a scorching wok, or do something as simple as coaxing peak summer sweetness from a basic pomodoro sauce. KEVIN PANG

1020 West Madison Street, Chicago; 312-888-3041; monteverdechicago.com

West Loop

Tasting Menu

The chef Noah Sandoval is conducting an exercise in balance. After arriving for your meal in a gated cargo elevator, you will be ushered to an elegant bar for a one-on-one cocktail consultation. The dining room, where the Smiths are a regular on the sound system, is as much artist’s loft as food temple. The menu finds a similarly cosmopolitan level. You may get a buttery sablefish dolloped — that’s bigger than a dab, right? — with osetra caviar. Or a toasted brioche topped with a generous piping of foie gras and ornamented with anise hyssop. But they will be followed shortly by a serving of capellini that you might even call homey, if it weren’t showered in truffle shavings. BRIAN GALLAGHER

661 West Walnut Street, Chicago; 312-877-5899; oriolechicago.com

Near North Side

Chinese

Though Chinese restaurants in Chicago span a wide landscape of regional cooking — Sichuan, Guangdong, Taiwan — nearly all are casual enough that you can walk in without a reservation. The one exception is Shanghai Terrace in the Peninsula hotel, overlooking opulent Michigan Avenue (with prices to match). A high-end chain based in Hong Kong, the Peninsula imported to Chicago a style of Chinese luxury dining rarely seen outside Asia. The chef Elmo Han’s shumai emerge from the bamboo steamer as ornate as jewel boxes, each dumpling topped with a different color of tobiko. Fried rice studded with Wagyu beef and taro elevates a humble dish to the realm of five-star exquisiteness. That Shanghai Terrace’s menu features a dedicated section for abalone signals the lavishness diners should expect. KEVIN PANG

108 East Superior Street, Chicago; 312-573-6744; peninsula.com

Norwood Park and Wheeling

Hot Dogs

In a city where the components of its hot dog are unyielding and sacrosanct, Superdawg — a happy little drive-in halfway between downtown and O’Hare — serves one of the city’s finest Chicago dogs, even if it’s technically not a Chicago dog. Traditional interpretations call for a beef wiener nestled in a poppy-seed bun with mustard, diced onions, neon green relish, sport peppers, red tomato slices, celery salt and a dill-pickle spear. Though Superdawg subs out the red tomatoes for a pickled green tomato wedge, Chicago dog purists tend to overlook this discrepancy. Is there another hot-dog stand frozen in 1950s charm, where two 12-foot wiener statues — sausage-pomorphized versions of the original owners Maurie and Flaurie Berman — perpetually stand guard? KEVIN PANG

6363 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago; 773-763-0660

333 South Milwaukee Avenue, Wheeling; 847-459-1900; superdawg.com

Avondale

Keralan

This former food-hall stand serving fare from Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast of India, has found a larger home for its loud flavors, courtesy of the owners Margaret Pak and Vinod Kalathil. Everything here, down to the stainless-steel plates the food is served on, feels home style. Expect fish fries, yogurt rice and coconutty curries whose remnants you’ll eagerly sop up with appam, lacy domes made of rice and coconut. Even the more playful dishes, like Tater Tots dusted with chaat masala, feel like clever snacks devised in a pinch by an enterprising home cook. PRIYA KRISHNA

2601 West Fletcher Street, Chicago; 773-754-0199; thattu.com

Kevin Hickey’s great-grandmother once owned a place called the Duck Inn in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, where he grew up. After a few decades cooking for the Four Seasons hotel chain, Mr. Hickey came home to Bridgeport to resurrect his family restaurant. The Duck Inn reopened in 2014 in a pre-Prohibition corner tavern surrounded by bungalows, and it’s safe to say there’s no restaurant of this ambition for many blocks in any direction. Mr. Hickey’s time in the luxury-hotel business is evident in his dishes, none more so than a rotisserie duck with a salad dressed in its jus, served dramatically atop a chopping block. And his fine-dining pedigree shows up in other surprising ways: Mr. Hickey’s Chicago dog features a housemade sausage made with duck fat, and an Italian beef with luscious shavings of prime rib. KEVIN PANG

2701 South Eleanor Street, Chicago; 312-724-8811; theduckinnchicago.com

West Loop

Brasserie

As the talk of the town centers on Smyth, which received its third Michelin star last year, its sibling restaurant the Loyalist continues to operate in its shadow, quite literally. Karen Urie and John Shields’s subterranean brasserie shows that dinner omelets, anchovy toasts and trout Grenobloise have a place in Chicago, especially if presented with the elegant touches you’d find one flight upstairs at Smyth. The Loyalist has acquired a reputation as the gateway restaurant to the Shields’s culinary sensibility, and it doesn’t hurt that it serves what might be the city’s most acclaimed cheeseburger: griddled patties, onion aioli, charred onions, double cheese and a Martin’s sesame seed bun toasted golden. KEVIN PANG

177 North Ada Street, Chicago; 773-913-3773; smythandtheloyalist.com

O’Hare International Airport

Mexican Sandwiches

One could experience the Mexican cooking of Rick Bayless, one of Chicago’s most famous chefs, a number of ways: with ceviche and margaritas at his festive flagship Frontera Grill, the quiet artistry of Topolobampo, or via a flight of rare mezcal at Bar Sótano. But his most expectations-defying restaurant is Tortas Frontera, inside the culinary hinterland that is O’Hare International Airport. Why suffer through a stale turkey sandwich made last Wednesday when there’s freshly griddled choriqueso, an audibly crunchy sandwich of oozy Jack cheese, chorizo and avocado? Or a bowl of tortilla soup, the very recipe served on nearly every table at Frontera Grill? Close your eyes and forget that you’re awaiting boarding group 7. KEVIN PANG

Inside Terminals 1, 3, 5 at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, 10000 West O’Hare Avenue, Chicago; rickbayless.com

Homewood

South Side Chicago Barbecue

South Side Chicago barbecue is a singular style of smoking meats, brought north during the Great Migration by Black pitmasters from the Mississippi Delta. Pork hot links and rib tips, the often-discarded knobby end of the spare rib, get cooked inside a plexiglass aquarium smoker. Unlike, say, brisket that smokes untouched for hours, Chicago barbecue requires constant monitoring; pitmasters spray down the fire with a hose to control temperature and steam. This explains why the number of Chicago pitmasters has dwindled to a handful. Aja Kennebrew, thankfully, is keeping the tradition alive. Taking over recently from her retired father, Garry Kennebrew, she has kept her family’s succulent rib tips as appealingly crusty and mahogany as ever, while adding smoked turkey to her menu. KEVIN PANG

17947 South Halsted Street, Homewood; 708-960-4612; unclejohnsbbq.com

Hyde Park

Southern

Hyde Park, bordering Lake Michigan on the city’s South Side, has for years tried and failed to establish a destination restaurant worth venturing from downtown, a place that doesn’t just cater to students from the University of Chicago. Virtue changed everything. Opened by the James Beard award-winner Erick Williams and fronted by the chef Damaar Brown, Virtue’s sophisticated approach to Southern foodways draws huge crowds, who come for the deeply dark and deeply flavorful gumbo, or the exquisitely blackened catfish with barbecued carrots. Given that the South Side is a historically important destination of the Great Migration, Virtue’s success in championing the cooking of the African American diaspora cannot be overstated or overcelebrated. KEVIN PANG

1462 East 53rd Street, Chicago; 773-947-8831; virtuerestaurant.com

The name of a restaurant says a lot, and Warlord conjures a place that is loud and intense, lit two shades above total darkness. You expect a menacing wood hearth radiating fire from the open kitchen. This Avondale hot spot checks those boxes. It’s near-impossible to get in (they don’t take reservations), and in its first year has established itself as one of Chicago’s most thrilling and audacious restaurants. Some menu items read like transcripts from a fever dream, yet turn out unexpectedly brilliant — Bavarian cream doughnuts draped with sea urchin, a mocktail of gochujang and coconut milk with black sesame rimmed around the glass. But the restaurant’s mastery of the hearth is what consistently wows; the dry-aged rib-eye with house-fermented Worcestershire sauce is magnificent. Warlord, all culinary fire and brimstone, totally rules. KEVIN PANG

3198 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago; warlordchicago.com

Germany on Tuesday defended itself at the International Court of Justice against accusations that it was furthering genocide in Gaza by supplying arms to Israel, saying that such claims were at worst a “deliberate distortion” of reality and arguing that it had long been a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights.

Nicaragua brought the case against Germany to the court in The Hague. In hearings that opened on Monday, Nicaragua argued that Germany was facilitating the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by providing Israel with military and financial aid, and it asked for emergency measures ordering the German government to halt its support.

Berlin has denied violating the Genocide Convention or international humanitarian law, and on Tuesday its representatives argued that Nicaragua’s accusations rested on an assessment of military conduct by Israel, which is not a party to the proceedings.

“Germany firmly rejects Nicaragua’s accusations,” Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, an official at Germany’s Foreign Ministry and the lead counsel in the case, told the court. “They have no basis in fact or law.”

Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States and a nation whose leadership calls support for Israel a “Staatsräson,” a national reason for existence, as a way of atoning for the Holocaust. But the mounting death toll in Gaza and humanitarian crisis in the enclave have led some German officials to ask whether that backing has gone too far.

At the court, Ms. von Uslar-Gleichen said that Germany has tried to balance “the legitimate interest” of both Israel and the Palestinians, and urged the 15-judge bench to throw out the case.

“Germany has always been a strong supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Ms. von Uslar-Gleichen said. “This is, alongside Israel’s security, the second principle that has guided Germany’s response to the Middle East conflict in general, and to its current escalation in particular.”

In 2023, Germany approved arms exports to Israel valued at 326.5 million euros, or about $353.7 million, according to figures published by the economics ministry. That is roughly 10 times the sum approved the previous year.

Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a vice president of Germany’s Parliament, told Deutschlandfunk, a public broadcaster, in an interview aired Tuesday that the German government discusses “each individual arms delivery and talks with Israel about compliance with international humanitarian law in this military conflict.”

She cited Germany’s “special responsibility toward Israel,” especially after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza, adding: “Israel’s existence is a matter of state for us.”

On Monday, Carlos Jose Arguello Gomez, Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Netherlands, told the court that “it does not matter if an artillery shell is delivered straight from Germany to an Israeli tank shelling a hospital” or goes to replenish Israel’s stockpiles. The case brought by Nicaragua raises new questions about the liability of countries that have supplied weapons to Israel for the war in Gaza.

Lawyers say that Germany is an easier target for a suit than is the United States, by far Israel’s main military supporter. Germany has granted full jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice. But the United States denies its jurisdiction, except in cases where Washington explicitly gives its consent.

Nicaragua’s case is the third before the court in recent months to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Earlier this year, the court heard arguments by South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered the Israeli government to take steps to prevent such atrocities, although it has not ruled on whether genocide was in fact taking place. Israel has strongly denied the genocide allegations.

Some analysts have suggested that there is increasing concern in Germany that global outrage over the war in Gaza is so strong that the perception of Berlin’s unconditional support for Israel was damaging important international relationships. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recently noted that Germany is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and said it would send a delegation to Israel as a reminder of the duty to abide by international humanitarian law.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.