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The Russian Army is gradually expanding the role of women as it seeks to balance President Vladimir V. Putin’s promotion of traditional family roles with the need for new recruits for the war in Ukraine.

The military’s stepped-up appeal to women includes efforts to recruit female inmates in prisons, replicating on a much smaller scale a strategy that has swelled its ranks with male convicts.

Recruiters in military uniforms toured Russian jails for women in the fall of 2023, offering inmates a pardon and $2,000 a month — 10 times the national minimum wage — in return for serving in frontline roles for a year, according to six current and former inmates of three prisons in different regions of Russia.

Dozens of inmates just from those prisons have signed military contracts or applied to enlist, the women said, a sampling that — along with local media reports about recruitment in other regions — suggests a broader effort to enlist female convicts.

It’s not just convicts. Women now feature in Russian military recruitment advertisements across the country. A pro-Kremlin paramilitary unit fighting in Ukraine also recruits women.

“Combat experience and military specialties are not required,” read an advertisement aimed at women that was posted in March in Russia’s Tatarstan region. It offered training and a sign-up bonus equivalent to $4,000. “We have one goal — victory!”

The Russian military’s need to replenish its ranks for what it presents as a long-term war against Ukraine and its Western allies, however, has clashed with Mr. Putin’s ideological struggle, which portrays Russia as a bastion of social conservatism standing up to the decadent West.

Mr. Putin has placed women at the core of this vision, portraying them as child-bearers, mothers and wives guarding the nation’s social harmony.

“The most important thing for every women, no matter what profession she has chosen and what heights she has reached, is the family,” Mr. Putin said in a speech on March 8.

These clashing military and social priorities have resulted in contradictory policies that seek to recruit women to the military to fill a need, but send conflicting signals about the roles women can assume there.

“I have gotten used to the fact that I am often looked at like a monkey, like, ‘Wow, she’s in fatigues!’” said Ksenia Shkoda, a native of central Ukraine who has fought for pro-Russian forces since 2014.

Some female volunteers do not make it to Ukraine. The convicts who enlisted in late 2023 have yet to be sent to fight, the six former and current inmates said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of possible retribution.

The reason for the delay in their deployment is unknown; the Russian defense ministry and prison service did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Shkoda and six other women fighting for Russia in Ukraine said in phone interviews or in written answers to questions that local recruitment offices still routinely turned away female volunteers or sent them to reserves. This occurs even as other officials target them with advertisements to meet broader quotas, underscoring the inherent contradiction in Russia’s recruitment policies.

Tatiana Dvornikova, a Russian sociologist studying prisons for women, believes the Russian Army would delay sending female convicts into battle as long as it has other recruitment options.

“It would create a very unpleasant reputational risk for the Russian Army,” she said, because most Russians would view such a breach of social mores as a sign of desperation.

The Russian Army is on the attack in Ukraine. But its incremental gains have come at very high cost, requiring a constant search for recruits.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, women who wanted to fight for the Kremlin often found their way to the front through militias in the east of Ukraine, rather than regular forces. These separatist units were chronically understaffed after a decade of smaller-scale conflict against Kyiv.

“They accepted anyone — absolutely anyone,” said Anna Ilyasova, who grew up in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and joined the local separatist militia days before Russia’s full-scale invasion. “I couldn’t even hold an automatic rifle.”

After serving in combat, Ms. Ilyasova now works as a political officer in a regular Russian battalion fighting in Ukraine.

Other women joined a Russian paramilitary unit started by soccer hooligans, called Española. It opened its ranks to women in September 2022, and has published recruitment videos publicizing their combat roles.

“These people take care of me, they are like a family,” said an Española fighter from Crimea who goes by the call sign Poshest, meaning “Plague.” She has fought with Española since 2022 as a medic, sniper and airplane pilot.

All of the interviewed female soldiers said women remained rare in their units, outside medical roles.

Russia’s cautious approach to women’s participation in the military differs from the more liberal policy adopted by Ukraine.

The number of women serving in Ukrainian military has risen by 40 percent since the invasion, reaching 43,000 in late 2023, according the country’s defense ministry. After the invasion, the Ukrainian military abolished gender restrictions on many combat roles.

The much larger Russian military also had about 40,000 servicewomen before the war. The majority, however, have served in administrative roles.

For both Russia and Ukraine, the military opportunities available to women have long fluctuated with recruitment needs.

The Russian Empire, which included most of modern Ukraine, created its first female combat units toward the end of World War I, after years of heavy losses. Decades later, the Soviet Union became the first country to call up women for combat, to compensate for the millions of casualties suffered in the first year of the Nazi invasion.

The lionization of female snipers and fighter pilots in World War II, however, masked the discrimination and sexual abuse many women faced as soldiers. The discrimination has continued into the modern era, exemplified by the way Russian women have struggled to collect the military benefits for their service in the Afghanistan War.

In Ukraine, the majority of Russian female soldiers interviewed for this article denied facing open discrimination. But some described male peers who felt the need to protect them, echoing the country’s traditional gender roles.

“My constant urge to throw myself into the thick of the battle is often halted with arguments like: ‘But you’re a girl!’” said Ms. Shkoda, the pro-Russian soldier. “And this drives me absolutely mad.”

Ms. Ilyasova, the Russian Army officer, said she had repeatedly turned down marriage proposals from a man in her unit.

“I always say that I’m married to war” to deflect the unwanted romantic attention, Ms. Ilyasova added.

Ruslan Pukhov, a Moscow-based security analyst who sits on the defense ministry’s advisory council, said the Russian Army had been trying to recruit more women for rear-guard roles such as mechanics and administrators for years, because they are viewed as hard workers who drink less.

The idea of using women in combat begun to gain supporters among generals following Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, which brought them in contact with the disciplined women fighters of the Kurd militias, Mr. Pukhov said.

The invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has brought the idea to the fore, leading Russia to consider the military potential of about 40,000 women who were imprisoned in the country in the first year of the war.

Prison officials started compiling lists of inmates with medical training in at least some jails for women soon after the invasion. The six current and former inmates said they were not told the purpose of the medical lists, but assumed that they were a shortlist for military recruitment.

Then, in autumn of 2023, men in military uniforms visited each of the two prisons twice, the inmates said. They offered women contracts to be trained to serve as snipers, combat medics or radio operators. In another female prison, in the Ural Mountains, officials put up the recruitment offer on the bulletin board, and asked interested inmates to write a petition to join the army.

“Everyone wanted to go, because, despite everything, it’s still freedom,” said Yulia, who said she applied to join the army while serving a sentence for murder. “Either I would die, or I would buy an apartment.”

Dozens of women in the three colonies, which were all in the European part of Russia, accepted the offer, the six current and former inmates said.

In interviews, these women cited enlistment motives similar to those of male convicts: freedom, money and regaining their sense of self-worth. The reality of Russian prisons for women, however, accentuated these needs.

Female inmates in Russia are subject to stricter rules and more compulsory labor than men. And on their release, they face even greater social isolation, because apart from breaking the law, they shatter the Russian society’s image of women’s behavior, said Ms. Dvornikova, the sociologist.

That was the experience of one inmate named Maria, who said she had enlisted to fight in Ukraine with just months to go on her sentence for theft. She took the risk because the pardon would erase her criminal record, allowing her to provide for her daughter if she survived.

But after signing the military contract late last year, Maria said she and other volunteers from her jail have not been called up, and she struggled to keep a job once her employers discovered her previous criminal record.

Maria said she eventually found informal work as a seamstress, but would still go to war if called up.

In jail, “all we cared about was for them to take us away, and send us to fight,” said Maria. “I will be in the recruitment office the next day, if I hear that the process got underway.”

Reporting was contributed by Oleg Matsnev, Alina Lobzina, Andrew E. Kramer and Carlotta Gall.

The director of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, says that parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a “full-blown famine” that is rapidly spreading throughout the territory after almost seven months of war.

Ms. McCain is the second high-profile American leading a U.S. government or U.N. aid effort who has said that there is famine in northern Gaza, although her remarks do not constitute an official declaration, which is a complex bureaucratic process.

“There is famine — full-blown famine in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” Ms. McCain said in excerpts released on Friday of an interview with “Meet The Press.” The interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked Ms. McCain to repeat herself.

“What you are saying is significant,” Ms. Welker said. “You are saying there is full-blown famine in northern Gaza?”

“Yes, I am,” Ms. McCain replied. “Yes, I am.”

The first American official to say there was famine in Gaza during the conflict was Samantha Power, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who made her remarks in congressional testimony last month.

Ms. McCain was appointed by President Biden as the American ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture in 2021 and became head of the W.F.P., a U.N. agency, last year.

An official declaration of famine typically involves both the United Nations and the government of the country where the famine is taking place, and it is unclear what local authority might have the power to do that in Gaza.

In the interview, Ms. McCain did not explain why an official famine declaration has not been made. But she said her assessment was “based on what we have seen and what we have experienced on the ground.”

“It is horror,” she said. “It is so hard to look at, and it is so hard to hear, also. I am so hoping we can get a cease-fire and begin to feed these people, especially in the north, in a much faster fashion.”

Gaza has been gripped by what experts have called a severe human-made hunger crisis as a result of Israeli bombardment and restrictions that have made delivering aid to the territory extremely challenging. The amount of aid entering Gaza has increased recently, but aid groups say it is far from adequate.

For the first several weeks of the war, Israel maintained what it called a “complete siege” of Gaza, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into the territory. The Israeli military also destroyed Gaza’s port, restricted fishing and bombed many of its farms.

Israel eventually loosened that siege but instituted a meticulous inspection process that it says is necessary to ensure that supplies do not fall into the hands of Hamas. Aid groups and foreign diplomats have said the inspections create bottlenecks, and have accused Israel of using them to turn away aid for spurious reasons, including water filters, solar lights and medical kits that contain scissors.

Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, said in a statement last month that Israel’s policies regarding aid in Gaza could amount to a war crime.

Israel has faced increasing pressure in recent weeks to allow aid into Gaza after its military killed seven international aid workers from World Central Kitchen in an airstrike.

An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.

I’ve known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly harrowing for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.

He performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries recently at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead.

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”

The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.

The nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier, but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought this was a way of commemorating her son.

I’ve criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it, for a child is killed or injured in the war every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations. More than 14,000 children have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health authorities. But that’s a number; this photo captures a preventable tragedy.

As I argue that it’s time to end this war, I think this photo has a persuasive power greater than my words, so I’ve given my column space over to this image. As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war unfolds through lives like Karam’s.

Here’s the photo, a reminder to us all of what’s at stake.

Back in the years 2020 and 2021, years that are increasingly easy to categorize as “the past” rather than the ongoing present, I worked from home every day, and on most of those days I exercised from home, too. In the late morning between meetings, or around lunchtime, I rode a stationary bike or lifted weights or danced to Rihanna with a choreographer who broadcast a daily live class from an enviable house in Joshua Tree.

It was easy, in those days when nothing much else was easy, to find time to exercise. The routine that had evaded me most of my life was, during those years, achievable. In the years since, this routine has become unrealistic most of the time. Days are once again organized around the office and its commute. The options for how to spend nonwork time are no longer confined to a limited lockdown menu of what can be accomplished at a distance of six feet or more. Exercise has, once again, become something that I put on a to-do list and try to squeeze in before or after work, an essential practice, but one that now competes with the entire open world for my time and attention.

I’ve settled where many of us do, on a non-routine whereby I exercise whenever I can: a before-work jog when I can rouse myself, quick rounds of strength training between meetings on days I work remotely, longer workouts on weekends. I constantly feel that I’m not doing enough, not engaged in a rigorous enough program of optimization.

I read this week about a recent study in which people who exercised in the evening saw their risk of death decline by as much as 28 percent compared with those who exercised in the morning or afternoon. This, I thought, was compelling! I should become an after-work exerciser, one of those people who changes into their gym clothes before leaving the office, who runs on a treadmill while watching “The Bachelor,” and — who knows what else might be possible? — eats three ounces of lean protein for dinner at 8, spends a good 20 minutes melting the ravages of sitting from my hips with a foam roller and is in bed with a book — no screens! — by 10.

I quickly realized this was a ridiculous fantasy. I’m a dutiful exerciser, a doing-it-because-I-have-to person, always under slight duress, wanting to have it done so that I can feel accomplished but also always fighting my essential nature, which is, I’ve grown OK with admitting, a little lazy. My exercise regimen is not a movable feast that I can shift into an optimal time slot. I jumped to the part in The Times’s story on the study that I always look for in stories of this ilk, the one that assures me that while the study is convincing, the most important thing about exercise for most people is that they do it. There it was, courtesy of Angelo Sabag, an exercise physiologist who led the study: “Whenever you can exercise,” Dr. Sabag said. “That is the answer.”

Here is where I’d like to stop, having determined that any exercise is better than none, and pat myself on the back for doing enough. And I will, for today, because it’s Saturday and I have the luxury of midday exercising and I’m not going to waste it. But I’m trying these days to approach things about myself that seem fixed with more curiosity. So while I jog around the park in the springtime sun, I’m committed to mulling some questions. What is it about the way I approach exercise that fills me with a bit of dread, that makes it a chore rather than a joy or a privilege or at least something I approach with interest? If I wanted to exercise in the evenings, for potential health benefits or just because it might be nice to switch things up, how can I do that in a way that doesn’t feel like punishment?

Last week I wrote about considering the way we’re spending our days, remembering that our time is limited. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” as Annie Dillard wrote. “What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” If what we are doing this or that particular hour is exercising, how can we make it a little more agreeable? How can we make it a blessed hour rather than a cursed one?

For more

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Music

• Israel is under pressure to end the war. Behind the scenes, its officials are considering a postwar plan in which Israel would oversee Gaza alongside Arab countries and the U.S.

• Turkey halted trade with Israel until Israel stops bombarding Gaza and allows in more humanitarian aid.

• A Times investigation, based on videos from journalists and witnesses, shows how counterprotesters instigated violent clashes with a pro-Palestinian encampment at U.C.L.A., and how the police waited hours to respond.

• Some faculty members at U.C.L.A., Columbia and other universities have joined pro-Palestinian student protesters, given them food and even been arrested.

• China, Iran and Russia have mounted online campaigns amplifying the protesters’ messages, criticizing the police and otherwise stoking U.S. political divisions.

Other Big Stories

CULTURE CALENDAR

😹 “Woke Foke” (Saturday): Even if you didn’t watch the Katt Williams interview that broke the internet earlier this year, you probably read a hot take, watched a highlights reel or were vaguely aware that he had a beef with someone. My colleague Elena Bergeron got into all of that in a new profile of Williams that was published this week, and this weekend his comedy special “Woke Foke” airs on Netflix. It’s only the second time the streamer has gone live with a comedian (the first was Chris Rock in 2023), and as Williams told Elena, discussing himself in the third person, “The benefit of Katt Williams live is that you don’t, in any way, know what he’s going to say.”

Asparagus, Goat Cheese and Tarragon Tart

We’ve reached peak asparagus season in much of the country, meaning now is the time to show it off. My asparagus, goat cheese and tarragon tart is perfect for a light dinner, a delicate appetizer if you’re doing a multicourse meal, or a festive springtime nibble to serve with drinks. It’s at its flakiest, creamiest best while warm, but still good a few hours later after cooling down.

REAL ESTATE

The hunt: An Alabama native looked around Brooklyn for a one-bedroom for less than $500,000. Which home did she choose? Play our game.

What you get for $2.1 million: An 1830 Cape Cod-style house in Provincetown, Mass.; a 1939 two-bedroom cottage in Austin, Texas; or an 1840 house in Charleston, S.C.

Living small: The tiny Bolt-Together House in Delancey, N.Y., had no heat or toilet, but it was theirs for $85,000.

No surprise needed: Some couples, rejecting traditional engagements, are opting for joint proposals.

Beauty: As a child, Sofia Coppola used to melt down lipsticks to look like a character in a Roman Polanski film. That’s inspired her new line of tinted lip balms.

Travel: Chacarita is a quirky low-profile neighborhood in Buenos Aires where you can find Art Deco houses on cobblestone streets and decadent churros.

Senior daters: Rates of certain sexually transmitted infections are rising among older people. Read about how to be safe.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

It’s time to clean out your camera roll

If you’re anything like me, your phone’s photo library is a mess. I have more than 50,000 images stored in Google Photos, and while powerful search tools and facial recognition make managing this massive collection easier, I still spend a lot of time scrolling to find what I’m looking for. To get organized, Wirecutter’s experts have some advice, including building a “delete day” habit. Take a few minutes daily to search the day’s date in your photo software of choice and then delete, hide or sort photos from that day in years past. With a little work, you can transform your photo warehouse into a curated gallery. — Max Eddy

Minnesota Timberwolves vs. Denver Nuggets, N.B.A. playoffs: The Timberwolves, fresh off their first playoff series win in two decades, must now face last year’s champions. The Nuggets have the two-time M.V.P. Nikola Jokic, a 7-footer whose water polo-inspired passing makes him unlike anyone else in the game. But do they have an answer for Anthony Edwards, the Timberwolves’ 22-year-old star, whose explosive athleticism (check out this dunk from the first round) has drawn comparisons to a young Michael Jordan? 7 p.m. Eastern tonight on TNT

NOW TIME TO PLAY

In flip-flops and shorts, one of the finest soldiers in a resistance force battling the military junta in Myanmar showed off his weaponry. It was, he apologized, mostly in pieces.

The rebel, Ko Shan Gyi, glued panels of plastic shaped by a 3D printer. Nearby, electrical innards foraged from Chinese-made drones used for agricultural purposes were arrayed on the ground, their wires exposed as if awaiting surgery.

Other parts needed to construct homemade drones, including chunks of Styrofoam studded with propellers, crowded a pair of leaf-walled shacks. Together, they could somewhat grandly be considered the armory of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force. A laser cutter was poised halfway through carving out a flight control unit. The generator powering the workshop had quit. It wasn’t clear when there would be electricity again.

Despite the ragtag conditions, rebel drone units have managed to upend the power balance in Myanmar. By most measures, the military that wrested power from a civilian administration in Myanmar three years ago is far bigger and better equipped than the hundreds of militias fighting to reclaim the country. The junta has at its disposal Russian fighter jets and Chinese missiles.

But with little more than instructions crowdsourced online and parts ordered from China, the resistance forces have added ballast to what might seem a hopelessly asymmetrical civil war. The techniques they are using would not be unfamiliar to soldiers in Ukraine, Yemen or Sudan.

Across the world, the new abilities packed into consumer technology are changing conflict. Starlink connections provide internet. 3-D printers can mass produce parts. But no single product is more important than the cheap drone.

In Gaza last year, Hamas used low-cost drones to blind Israel’s surveillance-studded checkpoints. In Syria and Yemen, drones fly alongside missiles, forcing American troops to make difficult decisions about whether to use expensive countermeasures to swat down a $500 toy. On both sides of the war in Ukraine, innovation has turned the unassuming drone into a human-guided missile.

The world’s outgunned forces are often learning from each other. Drone pilots in Myanmar describe turning to groups on chat apps like Discord and Telegram to download 3-D printing blueprints for fixed-wing drones. They also gain insight on how to hack through the default software on commercial drones that could give away their locations.

Many also take advantage of the original use of these hobbyist gadgets: the video footage they take. In Ukraine and Myanmar alike, kill videos are set to heart-pumping music and spread on social media to boost morale and help raise money.

“It’s exponential growth, and it’s taking place everywhere,” said Samuel Bendett, a fellow at the Center for New American Security who studies drone warfare. “You can get on YouTube and learn how to assemble, on Telegram you can get a sense of tactics and tips on pilot training.”

In Myanmar, both sides have come to fear the whir of the propeller blades agitating the air above them. But without the air power of the junta, the resistance must rely far more on drones as they fight to overthrow the army and win some sort of civilian rule. Rebel-operated drones have helped capture Myanmar military outposts just by hovering overhead and spooking soldiers into fleeing. They have terrorized the trenches. And they have made possible sweeping offensives into junta-controlled territory, targeting police stations and small army bases.

As his rebel unit’s most skillful pilot, Mr. Shan Gyi said he had racked up dozens of successful strikes by flying drones with gentle flicks of joysticks on a video game controller. Bigger homemade drones can carry almost 70 pounds of bombs that can blow up a house. Most, though, are smaller and carry several 60 millimeter mortar shells, enough to kill soldiers.

“I didn’t play video games as a boy,” Mr. Shan Gyi said. “When I hit the bull’s-eye on the battlefield, I feel so happy.”

‘A Tech Disrupter-Type Mind-Set’

The head of the militia’s drone unit — he goes by the nom de guerre 3D because of his success at printing drone parts — might seem an atypical rebel. A computer technology graduate, 3D recalled the first time he assembled a 3-D printer during his college years.

“Not so hard,” he said.

Looking to make use of his skills when he joined the resistance movement, he first tried to print rifles. When they did not work well, he turned his attention to drones, which he had read were redefining warfare in other parts of the world.

“They had a tech disrupter-type mind-set,” said Richard Horsey, a senior Myanmar adviser at the International Crisis Group. “A lot of innovation happened.”

As 3D set out to build his fighting force, he had no training manual. Instead, he consulted with other young civilians setting up similar units across Myanmar. After the coup and brutally suppressed protests in 2021, young people who had grown up in a digitally connected Myanmar took to the jungle to fight.

Though none of his team’s 10 pilots had flown drones before the coup, they delved into online chat rooms, learning how to convert drones designed to spray pesticides for a more lethal use — against humans.

“The internet is very useful,” 3D said. “If we want, we can talk to people everywhere, in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria.”

Dozens of drone units are scattered across Myanmar, and a few are all-female. In 2022, Ma Htet Htet joined a militia fighting in central Myanmar.

“I was assigned to a cooking role because they hesitated to put me on the front lines simply because I’m a girl,” she said.

Last year, Ms. Htet Htet, now 19, joined a drone unit. The work put her on the front lines, since drone pilots must operate from the heat of a conflict zone. Her unit’s 26-year-old leader is still recovering from shrapnel injuries she sustained during battle. The women make their own bombs, mixing TNT and aluminum powder, then layer metal balls and gunpowder around the volatile core.

From October 2021 to June 2023, the nonprofit organization Centre for Information Resilience verified 1,400 online videos of drone flights carried out by groups fighting the Myanmar military, the majority of which were attacks. By early 2023, the group said it was documenting 100 flights per month.

Over time, drone use has shifted from off-the-shelf quadcopters made by companies like DJI to a broader mix, including improvised drones like the ones 3D makes.

A Game of Cat-and-Mouse

Recently, 3D went on a shopping spree. He was seeking a solution perfected in the trenches of Ukraine’s front lines for a problem he and his pilots were facing: Russian-made jammers that could take out drones by blocking their signals.

Within a few months of 3D forming his drone army, the junta started using jamming technology from China and Russia to scramble the GPS signals that guide drones to their targets.

3D has been searching for ways to fight back. When the Myanmar army sends up its drones to pursue rebel fighters, it must pause the jamming, opening a window through which he can dispatch his own aerial fleet, too.

Newer first-person-view drones, or F.P.V.s, offer another potential solution to the problem of getting through electronic defenses. Hobbyist racing drones repurposed into human-piloted weapons, the F.P.V.s can be less vulnerable to jamming because they are manually controlled rather than guided by GPS, and they can sometimes be piloted around the interference emitted by drone defenses.

The newer drones have reshaped the conflict in Ukraine, and parts to make F.P.V.s have been dribbling in to the Myanmar rebels in recent months. But they are much harder to fly than conventional drones, operated with goggles that allow the pilot to see from the perspective of the drone. In Ukraine, pilots often train for hundreds of hours on simulators before getting the chance to fly in combat.

On a recent afternoon when the rebel force’s generator was working, one drone pilot, Ko Sai Laung, sat in a bamboo shack sharpening his skills on a laptop loaded with Ukrainian drone simulation software.

He cradled a joystick in his hands, occasionally wiping away the sweat trickling down his face as he piloted a virtual drone above simulated Ukrainian farmland toward Russian tanks. He crashed and crashed again.

“I’m tired,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But I have to keep practicing.”

Targeting the Capital

On April 4, a shadow Myanmar government formed by ousted lawmakers and others announced that a fleet of drones, launched by a pro-democracy armed group, had attacked three targets in Myanmar’s capital: the military headquarters, an air base and the house of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader.

Despite the shadow government’s excitement, none of the kamikaze drones caused significant damage that day. An analysis by The New York Times of satellite imagery found no apparent evidence of smoke, burning or other signs of a successful strike.

Still, the simple act of flying drones so close to the nerve center of Myanmar’s military is itself a potent psychological weapon. Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, was built from scratch in the early 2000s as a fortress city.

The objective of the drone strike on Naypyidaw, said Dr. Sasa, a spokesman for the shadow government, was not so much to kill but to send a signal to the junta that it “should not feel comfortable freely roaming in and out.”

Such operations, however, are a one-way mission for the painstakingly built drones, and can require sacrificing dozens of them at a time in the hope that even one might make it through defenses. The opposition fighters lack ample financing and a reliable supply line for parts. Parts and munitions that can be assembled by hand into one favored multirotor drone design that can carry heavier loads costs more than $27,500, 3D said.

Still, the battles, and the casualties, grind on.

On March 20, Mr. Shan Gyi, the rebel force’s star pilot, was flying a drone from a spot on the front line. Suddenly, a much more menacing flying machine — a junta fighter jet — shrieked overhead. Its bombs struck, 3D explained later, and Mr. Shan Gyi was killed in action. He was 22.

Muyi Xiao contributed reporting.

On March 19, Volker Türk, the United Nations’ human rights chief, said in an official statement that Israel’s policies regarding aid in Gaza might amount to a war crime.

“The extent of Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime,” he wrote.

His comments made waves. Using starvation of civilians as a weapon is a serious violation of international humanitarian law, and a war crime under the Rome Statute, the treaty of the International Criminal Court, or I.C.C.

Israeli and foreign officials told The New York Times last week that they were worried that the I.C.C. was preparing to issue arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials — including potentially over accusations that they prevented the delivery of aid to civilians in Gaza. (They also said they believed that the court was considering arrest warrants for Hamas leaders, which could be issued concurrently.)

Let me be clear: There is a high evidentiary bar for war-crime prosecutions, and we have no way of knowing at this stage what a full investigation would reveal, particularly because independent observers have had limited access to Gaza.

We do know that a humanitarian crisis is underway in the enclave and that the specter of famine has loomed increasingly close in recent weeks. Months of Israeli restrictions have prevented the delivery of sufficient aid into Gaza, and it has proved even harder to bring it into the northern part of the strip, which is under Israeli military control and is where the hunger crisis is most severe.

The active nature of the conflict has also curbed aid distribution: The mass displacement of civilians, a lack of police to protect aid convoys, and the violence itself have stopped some aid from reaching the people who need it most. Aid workers have been killed while trying to do their jobs. All of this has contributed to the “catastrophe” that Türk described: widespread malnourishment and the deaths of children and other vulnerable people from starvation and starvation-related diseases.

When I reached out to the Israeli military for comment this week, it said in a statement that since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Israel had been “engaged in a war against the terror organization” and that it had worked in coordination with the U.S., Egypt and international aid groups to get aid to Gaza residents. “Israel is constantly making significant efforts to find additional solutions to facilitate the flow of aid to the Gaza Strip and in particular to the north,” a spokesperson added, saying this was evident in the coordination of airdrops and aid packages coming via sea.

Israel has previously vehemently denied placing limits on aid, accusing the United Nations of failing to distribute aid adequately, and Hamas of looting supplies. U.S. and U.N. officials have said there is no evidence of that, other than one shipment that Hamas seized earlier this week, which is now being recovered. In recent weeks, under pressure from the United States and other allies, Israel has loosened some restrictions and there has been a modest increase in aid deliveries.

It is not yet clear whether any I.C.C. warrants are actually imminent, or if they would be made public — warrants can be issued secretly and kept under seal. It is also possible that the warrants, if issued, could refer not to starvation but to other crimes. Under the I.C.C.’s rules, a warrant requires “reasonable grounds to believe” that a suspect has committed the crime in question. I’m going to examine how that standard might apply to the war crime of starvation of civilians, and why it matters.

What is the threshold for criminal liability?

Although intentionally starving civilians has been considered a violation of international humanitarian law since at least the 1970s, it was only designated as a war crime in 1998, when the I.C.C. was established. And no international tribunal has ever tried someone for the crime of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.

There are two main elements of the crime, according to the I.C.C. statute. The first is the act itself: actions or policies that deprive civilians of “objects indispensable to their survival,” including by interfering with relief supplies. The second is the intent: Starvation must be deliberately used “as a method of warfare.”

Some legal experts point to an announcement made by Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, two days after the brutal Hamas-led assault on Israel, in which over 1,200 people were killed, as evidence of Israeli intent.

“We are imposing a complete siege,” Gallant said, adding, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

In the days that followed, other officials, including the energy minister and the head of the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the occupied territories, also pledged that Gaza would be completely cut off from outside supplies. No aid trucks were allowed into Gaza until Oct. 21, nearly two weeks after Gallant’s statement. Because the strip was already heavily reliant on receiving essential supplies from Israel, that had an immediate impact on civilians.

The publicly announced “complete siege” created a plausible basis to believe the elements of a war crime had been met even before actual starvation took place, according to Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who is an expert on the law of sieges and starvation.

“I don’t think there’s really any other way of understanding the declaration of the total siege, and the specific identification of food and water as core components of the list of objects that would be deprived, as anything other than denial of those objects for their sustenance value,” he said.

Israel has said that its officials’ statements about the siege were not a true reflection of its policies, and pointed to an Oct. 29 cabinet meeting at which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “we must prevent a humanitarian disaster” and directed that aid to the Gaza Strip should be increased, along with other cabinet decisions that it says show its efforts to send aid to the territory.

Getting aid in

Israel conducts rigorous checks of the aid trucks that line up at border crossings to bring food and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza, in an attempt to block items that could be used by Hamas. Those inspections have often been slow, aid agencies say, and can result in entire trucks getting rejected for “dual-use” items, such as medical scissors and water filters, that Israel says could have military as well as civilian purposes.

After Oct. 21, Israel began to allow some aid into Gaza, but its restrictions continued to make it impossible to bring in and distribute enough to avert a humanitarian crisis there, according to the United Nations and aid organizations.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, told the U.N. Security Council on March 12 that “the natural way of providing support through roads is being closed, artificially closed,” in Gaza, and that “starvation is being used as a weapon of war.”

Tal Heinrich, an Israeli government spokesperson, called Borrell’s statement “false and outrageous” and said that there was “no restriction on the amount of food and water” allowed to be delivered to the Gaza Strip.

In a March 15 letter to a British parliamentary committee, David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, expressed his “enormous frustration” that aid supplied by the United Kingdom had been “routinely held up” on its way to Gaza. “The main blockers remain arbitrary denials by the government of Israel and lengthy clearance procedures including multiple screenings and narrow opening windows in daylight hours,” he wrote.

Before Oct. 7, around 500 trucks entered Gaza each day, carrying both aid and commercial items, Mr. Cameron said. That number fell by approximately 75 percent in the early months of the conflict, and although there has been a modest increase in April, the most recent weekly average for which figures were available was only 202 trucks per day, according to the U.N.

As of April 17, at least 28 children under 12 had died of malnutrition or related causes in Gaza hospitals, according to local health authorities, including a dozen babies under a month old. Officials believe that many more deaths outside hospitals have gone unrecorded.

According to international law, Israel has a right to do things like inspect aid convoys for items that might aid Hamas, such as weapons, and set the times and routes for humanitarian access. But the right is not limitless, experts said: Context matters.

“If there’s not a prospect of civilian starvation, one can engage in that kind of action for those military reasons other than sustenance denial,” Dannenbaum, the Tufts professor, said. But once civilians are at risk of starvation, a party to the conflict “cannot abuse the authority to inspect and set times and routes in a way that arbitrarily impedes humanitarian access to starving civilians,” he added.

Yuval Shany, an international law professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said that such restrictions could potentially satisfy the criminal statute’s intent requirement. “When you are blocking the aid, and the inevitable consequence of doing that is starvation, then you are in an area where knowledge and intent actually collapse into one another.”

What might happen next?

There have been some improvements to aid flows in recent weeks, and on Wednesday Israel reopened the Erez border crossing, allowing some aid to cross directly into northern Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis is most acute. But foreign officials and aid agencies say it is still not enough. “This is real and important progress, but more still needs to be done,” Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, told reporters this week after visiting an aid warehouse in Jordan.

Legally, improvements now do not cancel out possible criminal liability for past actions, Dannenbaum said.

But also, having reasonable grounds for a warrant is not the same thing as having sufficient evidence for a conviction.

“Those inquiries tend to be extraordinarily factually intensive, requiring long and painstaking investigations by the prosecutor’s office,” said Chimène I. Keitner, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a former international law adviser for the U.S. State Department.

At this stage it appears unlikely that any Israeli official would actually stand trial in the International Criminal Court, even if warrants are issued. The court, which has no police force to carry out arrests directly, relies on national governments to arrest suspects within their territories. Individuals who avoid I.C.C.-friendly jurisdictions are therefore fairly safe.

If I.C.C. indictments were announced, however, they would bolster a growing international perception that Israel’s actions in Gaza have violated international law. And that could contribute to the growing political pressure on Israel’s allies to limit their support for Israel, Keitner said.

“Oh, goody! An 800-page novel about the peasant uprisings of 1549!” Marilyn Stasio, the longtime mystery and crime reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, began a column in 2019.

It was an assessment of “Tombland,” the seventh work of historical fiction by C.J. Sansom to feature Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective whose exploits solving chilling murders in Tudor England come steeped in suspense and granular historical detail. Readers are made privy to the court intrigues of Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII, eavesdrop on women arguing in a market stall, and inhale the stench of London streets.

Ms. Stasio’s enthusiasm was real, not snarky. “Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” she wrote.

Mr. Sansom, who earned a Ph.D. in history and a law degree before turning to writing in his late 40s, quickly becoming one of Britain’s most popular historical novelists, died of cancer in hospice care on April 27. He was 71.

His death was announced by his publisher, Pan Macmillan, which did not say where he died. In 2012, Mr. Sansom disclosed that he had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, but said it was in remission after treatment. The disease returned during his work on “Tombland,” forcing him to quit writing for six months. He eventually resumed working two hours a day and finished the book, his last to be published.

He died just days before the May 1 streaming debut of the series “Shardlake,” on Disney+, an adaptation of his novels starring Arthur Hughes in the title role and Sean Bean as Cromwell.

“An intensely private person, Chris wished from the very start only to be published quietly and without fanfare,” Maria Rejt, his longtime editor and publisher, said in a statement.

In Mr. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, the reader is borne along by galloping narrative and expository dialogue that can seem like Wikipedia entries dramatized. He did not enjoy the prestige of such novelists as Hilary Mantel or Maggie O’Farrell, who also wrote of Tudor times, a period whose soap-operatic court intrigues have been grist for recent movie, television and stage productions.

Mr. Sansom’s lawyer-turned-detective hero combined his first career as a solicitor and his love of murder mysteries

Shardlake’s physical deformity, a hunchback that manifested at the age of 5 and for which he is openly mocked in a superstitious age, carries certain parallels to Mr. Sansom’s own childhood as an outcast. In 2018, he disclosed in a deeply personal essay in The Sunday Times of London that, beginning at age 4, he had been bullied at the private George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. He bore the scars long after, living a solitary life.

“All my life I have found it impossible to trust others, or to allow them to get close to me,” he wrote.

His first book, “Dissolution,” is set in a remote monastery in 1537, as Henry VIII is dispossessing Catholic monks of their lands and riches after the king’s rupture with Rome. Shardlake is sent there by his patron, Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, to investigate a murder. He finds corruption, sexual depravity and more suspicious deaths.

Published in 2003, “Dissolution” was a popular success, and Mr. Sansom was signed to a multibook deal. He went on to publish six more Shardlake mysteries over 15 years. More than three million copies are in print.

His second installment, “Dark Fire” (2005), set during a sweltering London summer, includes child murder and culminates in Cromwell’s real-life execution in 1540. A reviewer, Stella Duffy, writing in The Guardian, praised Mr. Sansom for offering a dizzying window on the times: “Tudor housing to rival Rachman, Dickensian prisons, a sewage-glutted Thames, beggars in gutters, conspiracies at court and a political system predicated on birth not merit, intrigue not intelligence.”

Apart from the Shardlake series, Mr. Sansom also wrote two other commercially successful historical novels, “Winter in Madrid” (2006), set during the Spanish Civil War, and “Dominion” (2012), which imagines a post-World War II Britain in which Winston Churchill was never prime minister and homegrown fascists rule the realm.

Besides their precise plotting and historical verisimilitude, the appeal of the Shardlake novels is the psychological realism of Mr. Sansom’s main character, a thoughtful and humane but socially awkward lawyer whose character echoed aspects of Mr. Sansom’s social isolation.

The emotional abuse he experienced during his hellish schooling, he wrote, could most likely be traced to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which was not diagnosed at the time. He was mocked by other boys and some teachers for being “odd” and ungainly, for breaking into tears easily and for being perpetually distracted. At lunch and other breaks, he hid in empty classrooms or under a pile of chairs covered by a fire curtain.

“I did have friends from time to time,” he wrote, “though my endless talking would drive them away.”

At 15, he attempted to die by suicide and was committed to a mental hospital for a year.

The A.D.H.D. symptoms eventually receded, and he went on to earn bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in history from Birmingham University. He later switched to studying law and worked for 11 years as a lawyer, during which he told himself that he would find time to write after retirement. When he inherited a modest sum after the death of his father in 2000, he took a year off from the law to try his hand at a novel.

Though success made him wealthy, the childhood bullying — which Mr. Sansom clarified was not sexual and rarely physical — always shadowed him. “It’s like a dog — if you keep kicking a dog, it expects to be kicked,” he told The Sunday Times in 2018. “And I’m afraid that, having been kicked for so many years, the fear of everyone turning around and kicking you again never goes away.”

Christopher John Sansom was born on Sept. 19, 1952, in Edinburgh, the only child of Trevor and Ann Sansom. His father was an English engineer who worked in naval research; his mother was Scottish. The home, he once said, was “Conservative with a small c and a capital C.”

Mr. Sansom, who never married or had children, left no survivors.

At his death he was working on a new Shardlake novel, “Ratcliff,” about a 1553 expedition to find a route to China around the top of Norway. His editor, Ms. Rejt, said that “his worsening health made progress painfully slow: his meticulous historical research and his writing were always so important to him.”

Of course, there was no Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Morse in Tudor England: London’s first detective force was not organized until the 1800s. Mr. Sansom recognized the anachronistic aspects of his signature creation, but he was unconcerned.

“It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to write a character well in the past who is not a projection back of modern sensibilities,” he told The Guardian in 2010. “My defense would be that the 16th century was the time when rational, skeptical inquiry was beginning. This is the age of the humanists; we’re leaving medieval thought patterns behind. I’m not saying a man like Shardlake did exist then, but he could have, where even 20 years earlier he couldn’t. That’s enough for me.”

Three Indian nationals have been arrested and charged in the killing of a Sikh leader in British Columbia in June, Canadian authorities announced on Friday. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had accused India of orchestrating the brazen killing, setting off angry back-and-forth denunciations between the two countries.

The case widened a rift between Canada and India and set off a political dispute between the two already apprehensive nations.

Here is what we know:

Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and what happened to him?

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, was born in the North Indian state of Punjab. After several unsuccessful attempts to gain entry to Canada, he moved there in the mid-1990s, according to Indian news reports, just after a period of Indian crackdowns on a Sikh separatist movement.

In Canada, Mr. Nijjar worked as a plumber, married and had two sons. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 2015, Canada’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, said on social media. In 2020, Mr. Nijjar became the president of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara.

Mr. Nijjar was a self-proclaimed “Sikh nationalist who believes in and supports Sikhs’ right to self-determination and independence of Indian-occupied Punjab through a future referendum,” according to an open letter he wrote to the Canadian government in 2016. He was a key figure in British Columbia in rallying votes for a referendum in Canada supporting the establishment of a nation called Khalistan that includes the northern state of Punjab.

The Indian government declared Mr. Nijjar a terrorist in 2020, decades after he left India. It accused him of plotting a violent attack in India and of leading a terrorist group called the Khalistan Tiger Force. In Punjab, however, politicians and journalists asserted that despite the charges, many locals had never heard of him or his movement.

Mr. Nijjar was shot in June near the Sikh temple that he led. While investigators from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police later said he had been ambushed by masked men, they did not disclose if the attack had been politically motivated.

What is known about the arrests?

The three men in custody are in their 20s and were arrested on Friday in Edmonton, Alberta. They were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The police identified them as Karan Brar, Kamalpreet Singh and Karanpreeet Singh.

The men had been living in Canada for three to five years and were not permanent residents, the authorities said.

Several other investigations are ongoing and include exploring the possible involvement of the Indian government, said David Teboul, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He added that the relationship with Indian investigative partners had been a challenge.

In announcing the arrests, Canadian authorities cited the help of people in the Sikh community but did not provide specifics.

What did Canada say?

In September, the Canadian prime minister told lawmakers that “agents of the government of India” had been linked to Mr. Nijjar’s killing on Canadian soil.

Evidence of the ambush was based on intelligence gathered by the Canadian government, according to Mr. Trudeau, who added that he had raised the issue directly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India “in no uncertain terms” at a Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.

“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Mr. Trudeau said in September, adding that Canada would pressure India to cooperate with investigations into Mr. Nijjar’s death.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, also announced that it had expelled an Indian diplomat, whom she described as the de facto head of India’s intelligence agency in Canada.

How did India respond?

The Indian government vehemently denied the allegations by Mr. Trudeau. Mr. Modi “completely rejected” them, according to India’s foreign ministry.

In a statement, the ministry office also spurned “any attempts to connect the government of India” to Mr. Nijjar’s killing and called the accusations “absurd.”

On Labor Day in 2022, John Fetterman found himself in a room in Pittsburgh with President Biden.

Fetterman, a Democrat who was then the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and in the middle of his successful run for the U.S. Senate, had a simple message he wanted to share: Go big on legal weed.

And how did the president respond? “He was just, like, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’” Fetterman told me yesterday.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it had recommended that federal restrictions on marijuana become a whole lot chiller. And while it is not clear that lobbying from Democrats like Fetterman has played any role, the move was the latest step by the Biden administration to liberalize the nation’s cannabis policy — something his allies believe comes with an obvious political upside when more than two-thirds of Americans support legalization of the drug.

“High reward, zero risk,” said the perpetually sweatshirted Fetterman, joking that he advises Biden only on matters of fashion and weed policy.

Biden, a suit-wearing president who is more statesman than stoner, has become something of the pot president. It could elevate his standing specifically with young voters, who support rescheduling, or reclassifying, marijuana as a less serious drug, as well as with supporters of changes to criminal justice laws.

One of the president’s allies just wishes he would talk about it more.

“He has pardoned people, he initiated this rescheduling, but he has not embraced it. It’s not too late,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, the 75-year-old Democrat who has been pushing for looser cannabis policy for half a century. “The public needs to know that this is the single most significant step that has been taken by the federal government in the more-than-50-year-old war on drugs.”

A careful embrace of cannabis reform

For much of his career, Biden pushed for tough-on-crime policies. And as a presidential candidate in 2019, he got made fun of by Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, for saying he opposed federally legalizing marijuana — although he also said during that campaign that no one should be in jail for smoking it.

As president, Biden has sought to make good on that promise, pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession under federal law. In directing his cabinet to review marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug, he opened the door to a major federal change that would subject the drug to fewer restrictions on production and research — and make it easier for people who use it or build businesses around it to access lifelines like public housing, banking and tax breaks.

Biden promoted those actions at events including his State of the Union address in March, though when the White House held a round table on cannabis reform about a week later, it was hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris, not Biden himself. He has been quiet about the rescheduling of marijuana this week. When asked about it, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said she did not want to get ahead of the complex process underway at the Justice Department.

Blumenauer warns that Biden is leaving a political opportunity on the table. Fetterman helped his party keep its hold on the Senate with a campaign that pushed for legalizing marijuana.

“In terms of energizing young people, in terms of being on the side of reform, being on the right side of history, I think this is something that Joe Biden and his administration should embrace,” Blumenauer said. “This is not low-hanging fruit. This is picking the fruit up off the ground.”

It is not clear, however, that marijuana policy is as important an issue to younger voters as issues like abortion rights or the economy.

In some ways, Biden has handled the issue of marijuana similarly to how he handled another progressive priority: student loans. Progressives spent months urging him to cancel $50,000 in student debt for those who had it in one fell swoop. His administration proceeded more cautiously, carefully reviewing its legal options before rolling out a more moderate approach.

Mild objections signal a broader shift

The administration’s move comes as 38 states and the nation’s capital have already legalized marijuana for medical reasons. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., have legalized it for recreational use.

And, perhaps for that reason, some Republicans sought to minimize the impact of Biden’s action on policy as well as on the political landscape.

“It’s an election year. A lot was said in 2020, but not much has been done,” said Representative Dave Joyce of Ohio, a Republican and a former prosecutor who has worked with Blumenauer on cannabis reform. Biden’s move won’t prompt immediate change, he said.

Gov. Chris Sununu, Republican of New Hampshire, said marijuana policy was essentially a nonpartisan issue. He has come to the conclusion that legalization is inevitable in New Hampshire, so he is open to it as long as it is carefully regulated.

“I don’t think politically it’s some great win,” Sununu said. “I think people understand it’s a gateway drug.”

The lack of fiery Republican attacks on Biden for his marijuana policy, however, seems to say something about how deeply marijuana has shifted in the American political psyche.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Fetterman said, before referring to a name given to those who are still deeply opposed to the drug. “The reefer madness caucus is probably smaller than the ‘I like to shoot my dog’ caucus.”

The search for Christine O’Donnell

My colleague Reid Epstein recently went looking for every living Republican who ever ran against Biden during his decades representing Delaware in the Senate. One was a little harder to find than the others. I asked him to tell us more.

To hear Christine O’Donnell tell it, first they stole her election, and then they stole her political identity.

Last week, I went in search of O’Donnell, forever infamous for her “I’m not a witch” declaration in 2010, to speak with her about her experience as the last Republican to run against Joe Biden for the Senate, in 2008. She had not given an interview in eight years.

O’Donnell was one of the first Republicans to adopt the sort of novice political populism that Trump would use to ride to the White House. She went on to claim in a 2011 book that her 29-percentage-point loss to Biden was marred by voter fraud. There is no evidence for this.

These days, she believes — wrongly — that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. I asked her if her campaigns for office simply came too soon, before voters were ready to get behind somebody who questioned the infrastructure of American democracy.

“Humility wants me to answer that, like, ‘Oh, no,’” O’Donnell replied. “But by me taking the hit, it opened up the political process for other people.”

After Trump went to the White House, O’Donnell moved to Florida and enrolled at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples. She has been living a largely anonymous existence. Yet her past has never been too far away.

“I put on the television during a study break, and I heard someone on CNN who said, ‘You know who we have to blame for Donald Trump? Christine O’Donnell.’ I was, like, ‘Turn off the TV.’”

—Reid J. Epstein