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On Friday, just outside Palm Springs, Calif., you might have thought a strange mirage had appeared: One or two zillion tweens descended upon an arena, all wearing platform Doc Martens.

Had some official communiqué been issued, at a frequency undetectable to those older than 25? Had everyone been subconsciously nudged to pair boots with fishnets and leg warmers?

No one seemed to care that it was hot out. What did matter was that the boots, punky symbols of past musical rebellions, were central to the unofficial-but-conspicuously-official uniform of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour, which began that night.

Each recent tour by a major pop star has seemingly birthed an aesthetic microclimate that follows the artist from show to show, usually evaporating when the tour is over. Dressing up for concerts is not new — see Grateful Dead fans in their tie-dye, the ’90s Madonna fans in their regalia — but last summer’s blockbuster tours have upped the ante. Imagine showing up to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour without a cowboy hat or attending Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour without looking at least a little bit like a shimmery disco ball.

These uniforms grow out of fans’ desire to emulate their favorite artists and to visually identify with one another. Now social media gives people a chance to share and see what everyone else has been wearing. And it doesn’t hurt that e-commerce sites like Amazon and Shein make it easy to order and receive a pair of sequined, thigh-high boots in the time it takes for Beyoncé to fly from Vancouver to Seattle.

For fans of Ms. Rodrigo, the current poet laureate of adolescent vulnerability, what was the look going to be? They arrived at the first stop on her worldwide Guts Tour already dressed in startling unison.

In the parking lot before the concert, fans waited in long lines in every direction — for the merchandise truck, for V.I.P. tickets, for porta-potties — each one a slow-moving runway show. Purple was everywhere. Butterflies, too. Many followed the singer’s lead in drawing from riot grrrl and grunge fashion from the ’90s, like Lucy Elfelt, 14, who had some pointers for her mother on dressing to emulate a decade that only one of them had actually lived through.

“She was like, ‘Mom, you’re not grunge enough,’” Alicia Elfelt, 49, said. “I’m like, my hair’s purple.”

The uniform evoked femininity laced into combat boots, as if to outfit its wearer for the rugged territory of emotional catharsis. There were plenty of girlish details like bows, corsets and spangly miniskirts, but not without a chunky shoe or a swipe of sludgy eyeliner.

For some, maybe it was a reflection of Ms. Rodrigo’s ability to refashion the humiliations of adolescence into lethal songwriting weapons. “It’s like she read my diary,” Bridget Lee, 20, said of the artist’s songs about feeling naïve, embarrassed, vengeful, insecure. “Every song is literally me,” Diego Soriano, 19, said. Others say they relate to her because she is a Pisces, because she is of Filipino descent or because she gets angry about the same things they do.

“I love the way she screams,” Val Mok, 28, added. “Like, story of my life.”

Ms. Lee wore a tiered Betsey Johnson dress that she had found on the secondhand clothing app Depop, simply by searching for “Olivia Rodrigo.” She and a group of nine other superfans had been planning their outfits in a group chat for months. Did they follow those social media accounts that posted breathless updates on each new piece of tour merch? They giggled. “We are the accounts,” one said.

Many fans see Ms. Rodrigo’s fashion sense as flatteringly emblematic of Generation Z. But Tegan Astani, 18, said that some students at her arts high school thought Ms. Rodrigo was “basic.” Whose music do they listen to instead? They prefer less well-known artists, Ms. Astani said: “Have you ever heard of Led Zeppelin?”

When doors opened at 6 p.m., a parade of purple bows filtered into the arena. Natalia Adams, 20, settled into a seat between her parents, who were marveling at the youth of the crowd. Her father, Matt Adams, 58, remarked that there had been a long line for snow cones but no line to buy beer.

A few days earlier, when Ms. Rodrigo had released commemorative shot glasses for her 21st birthday, a user on X, formerly known as Twitter, responded that they had never seen an Olivia Rodrigo fan of legal drinking age: “What are they gonna take shots of…juice???” It was not too much of an exaggeration: A 7-year-old sat in the back row with her ears covered by massive purple headphones.

When fans dress alike, how does one stand out? Ms. Mok had constructed an entire outfit around the artist’s lyric “Coca-Cola bottles that I only use to curl my hair.” Ms. Astani had sewed a cheerleader outfit based on a costume in Ms. Rodrigo’s music video for “good 4 u.”

Others were perfectly happy to be dressed like everybody else, to slip into a sense of belonging that both a fandom and a dress code can afford. Sometimes the nudge comes from the top: Beyoncé went so far as to encourage fans to wear silver items on her tour. If Ms. Rodrigo did not offer such specific instructions, her Instagram posts and her pale purple merch offered hints of the kind of look she was going for.

Her fans turned out to have interpreted those clues correctly. When Ms. Rodrigo took the stage, she was wearing the same platform Doc Martens as everybody else.

“Did anybody dress up?” she asked a screaming crowd.

An altercation at an Oklahoma public school involving a 16-year-old nonbinary student who died the next day began after the student “poured water” on girls who had been making fun of the teenager, according to a body camera video interview released by the Owasso Police Department late Friday.

The video of the 16-year-old student, Nex Benedict, talking to an Owasso officer provided the fullest account yet of what took place inside the girls’ bathroom on Feb. 7. The altercation drew national scrutiny after gay and transgender rights groups focused attention on Nex’s death as an example of the dangers faced by gender-nonconforming students.

The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes and took place at a local hospital, provided new details of the confrontation at the West Campus of Owasso High School. Nex, who used they and them pronouns with peers, described how they “blacked out” while being beaten on the floor of the bathroom by three girls who had previously mocked Nex and their friends “because of the way that we dress.”

“We were laughing. And they had said something like, ‘Why do they laugh like that?’ They were talking about us in front of us. And so I went up there and I poured water on them” from a plastic water bottle, Nex told the officer. “And then all three of them came at me,” Nex said.

The department also released surveillance video from inside the school showing students, including Nex, entering the bathroom and, separately, Nex walking through the halls with a staff member after the confrontation.

And the department provided audio of the 911 calls made by Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and guardian, on the day of the altercation and then on Feb. 8 as she urgently sought an ambulance for Nex.

Ms. Benedict told the dispatcher around 1 p.m. that Nex kept saying they had a headache and Ms. Benedict was unsure if it was from Nex’s head injury. Nex hit their head on the bathroom floor, Ms. Benedict said, describing the altercation the previous day.

Ms. Benedict told the dispatcher that Nex took medication at night for anxiety and “mood swings” but that Nex had not taken any that day. Asked whether Nex took illicit drugs, Ms. Benedict said no, though Nex “has vaped.”

The videos, while providing more information, did not answer the question of how Nex died. The police department has said that the death is still under investigation but that preliminary results of an autopsy found Nex “did not die as a result of trauma.” The state medical examiner’s office said its report on the autopsy and toxicology results would be made public when it was ready.

The death of a nonbinary student following an altercation at school prompted renewed scrutiny of Oklahoma’s restrictive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students — including new laws regarding bathroom usage and barring gender-transition care for minors. The state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, who has been criticized for his anti-transgender rhetoric, said the death was a tragedy but did not alter his views, including on bathroom usage or discussions of gender.

Rights groups and transgender students have said the political rhetoric by Oklahoma leaders in the Republican-dominated state has been viewed by some students as permission to harass and bully their classmates.

In their interview with the officer, Nex spoke from a bed at Bailey Medical Center in Owasso, with Ms. Benedict sitting nearby.

Ms. Benedict told the officer that the girls would not leave Nex alone. “They’re making comments, they’re throwing stuff, they’re calling us names,” Ms. Benedict said, recounting what Nex had told her.

The officer then asked Nex to describe what happened. Nex said that while they had told their family about the earlier bullying, they had not reported it to school officials. “I didn’t really see the point in it,” Nex said.

Nex said that other students had focused on Nex and their friends because of their way of dressing. The topic of Nex’s gender identity or that of their friends did not come up in the interview. Ms. Benedict referred to Nex using their birth name and pronouns during the police interview and in calls with 911.

Just before the altercation, Nex had been talking with friends inside the bathroom, while the girls were talking with their own friends nearby, Nex said.

During the altercation, “they grabbed onto my hair. I grabbed onto them. I threw one of them into a paper towel dispenser, then they got my legs out from under me and got me on the ground,” Nex said. “My friends tried to jump in and help, but I’m not sure, I blacked out.”

The officer suggested to Nex and Ms. Benedict that criminal charges might not be wise to pursue because Nex was “the one who started it by throwing an object or an item onto another individual.”

That fact “does not give them the right to put their hands on you,” the officer said. “It’s just, I hate to see you both, criminally wise, get hung up on something so minuscule. But I am here to do that if that’s what you like.” Ms. Benedict and Nex ultimately agreed not to pursue charges at that time.

The Russian authorities have transferred the body of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to his mother, his spokeswoman said on Saturday, ending a grim battle for custody of his remains, but it is unclear whether he will get a funeral that the public can attend.

“Aleksei’s body has been handed over to his mother,” Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said in a statement posted on social media. “The funeral is yet to come. We don’t know whether the authorities will interfere with carrying it out in the way the family wants and as Aleksei deserves.”

Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, on Saturday was still in the northern city of Salekhard, near the Arctic prison where Mr. Navalny was reported to have died on Feb. 16, Ms. Yarmysh said. She added that the opposition leader’s team would release information about the funeral “as it becomes available.”

Mr. Navalny’s family and aides have accused the Russian authorities of keeping his body hostage and “blackmailing” his mother into agreeing to bury him in secret. On Friday, Ms. Yarmysh said that officials in Salekhard had given Ms. Navalnaya an ultimatum demanding that she assent to such a secret funeral within three hours, or else that he would be buried on prison grounds.

That deadline passed on Friday evening without any new information from Mr. Navalny’s aides. The Russian authorities have not commented on the Navalny team’s version of events. The circumstances of Mr. Navalny’s death remain unclear; according to Ms. Yarmysh, Ms. Navalnaya’ received a medical report earlier this week that said he had died of natural causes.

The news that Ms. Navalnaya, 69, received custody of the body suggested that the Russian authorities had relented after a dayslong social media campaign by Mr. Navalny’s team. On Saturday, Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, 47, released a six-minute YouTube video denouncing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for maligning the Christian values he professes as he “mocks Aleksei’s mother and forces her to agree to a secret funeral.”

The question now is how Mr. Navalny’s funeral will take shape. The dispute over custody of his body appears to reflect the Kremlin’s fears about a public funeral in Moscow turning into a focal point for protest.

Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run for decades by Warren E. Buffett, recorded its highest-ever annual profit last year. But its chief executive found reason to blame government regulation for hurting the results of some of its biggest businesses.

In his letter to investors that traditionally accompanies the annual report, Mr. Buffett also paid tribute to Charlie Munger, his longtime lieutenant and Berkshire’s vice chairman until his death in November at age 99.

The company — whose divisions include insurance, the BNSF railroad, an expansive power utility, Brooks running shoes, Dairy Queen and See’s candy — disclosed $97.1 billion in net earnings last year, a sharp swing from its $22 billion loss in 2022 because of investment declines.

Berkshire also reported $37.4 billion in operating earnings, the financial metric that Mr. Buffett prefers because it excludes paper investment gains and losses, for the year, up 21 percent from 2022. (Investors often see Berkshire as a bellwether of the American economy, given the breadth of its business.)

Those gains arose from the powerful engine at the heart of Berkshire, its vast insurance operations that include Geico car insurance and reinsurance. The division reported $5.3 billion in after-tax earnings for 2023, reversing from a loss in the previous year thanks to fewer significant catastrophic events, rate increases and fewer claims at Geico.

The business that Berkshire is best known for, stock investments using the enormous cash that the insurance business throws off, also performed well last year. Investment income jumped nearly 48 percent amid rising market valuations. (About 79 percent of the conglomerate’s investment income comes from just five companies: Apple, Bank of America, American Express, Coca-Cola and Chevron.)

But two of the conglomerate’s biggest nonfinancial operations performed below expectations. BNSF, which operates the nation’s biggest freight railroad, reported $5 billion in operating profit for the year, while Berkshire’s utilities business earned $2.3 billion. Earnings at both were significantly below 2022.

While Mr. Buffett noted in his annual letter to investors the challenges that both divisions faced last year — BNSF was hurt primarily by falling shipment volumes and the utility business was battered by more frequent forest fires — he also pointed to government regulations as challenges.

The criticism contrasts with Mr. Buffett’s general support of government regulation, especially given his backing of Democratic policy efforts like the effort to raise taxes on the wealthy that became known as the “Buffett rule.”

In the case of BNSF, Mr. Buffett wrote that “wage increases, promulgated in Washington, were far beyond the country’s inflation goals.” And for the utility business, he went on at length about tighter regulations in several states that crimped the power utility’s profitability. “The regulatory climate in a few states has raised the specter of zero profitability or even bankruptcy,” he wrote, alluding to California’s Pacific Gas & Energy and Hawaiian Electric in Hawaii.

Mr. Buffett further warned that tighter regulations on utilities could pose a broader problem for the industry, and suggested that Berkshire Hathaway might curtail its business in certain states. “We will not knowingly throw good money after bad,” he wrote.

In the annual letter — a must-read publication for his millions of followers that is peppered with his customary folksy asides — Mr. Buffett talked up two of Berkshire’s longest-held investments, American Express and Coke, as solid financial performers. He also noted newer stock positions that he said he expected to maintain “indefinitely”: the fossil-fuel producer Occidental Petroleum, of which Berkshire owns nearly 28 percent, and stakes in five Japanese trading firms, regarded as a bet on the revival of Japan’s long-moribund economy.

In promoting the Japanese investments, Mr. Buffett took a jab at how much American companies pay their top executives. “The managements of all five companies have been far less aggressive about their own compensation than is typical in the United States,” he wrote.

Yet again, Mr. Buffett spent little time talking about what he has long called Berkshire’s “elephant gun,” the vast cash hoard it amasses from its insurance operations that he has used to strike major transactions. In recent years, the conglomerate has favored using that money to buy back its own stock as a better way to generate higher returns for investors.

That pile grew to $163.3 billion by year end, but Mr. Buffett said he saw few opportunities to profitably spend that cash at scale. “There remain only a handful of companies in this country capable of truly moving the needle at Berkshire, and they have been endlessly picked over by us and by others,” he wrote. “All in all, we have no possibility of eye-popping performance.”

Instead, Mr. Buffett emphasized Berkshire’s financial resilience. “I believe Berkshire can handle financial disasters of a magnitude beyond any heretofore experienced,” he wrote. “This ability is one we will not relinquish.”

As expected, Mr. Buffett offered a lengthy tribute to Mr. Munger, a fellow Omaha native who shared a love of investing. The two men were Berkshire’s biggest ambassadors with an often comedic buddy act: Mr. Buffett the persistent optimist, Mr. Munger the gimlet-eyed cynic.

In a lengthy introduction, Mr. Buffett praised Mr. Munger as the “architect” of the Berkshire business model of investing in good businesses at fair prices, an approach that made them billionaires and many of their longtime shareholders millionaires.

“Charlie never sought to take credit for his role as creator but instead let me take the bows and receive the accolades,” he wrote. “Even when he knew he was right, he gave me the reins, and when I blundered he never — never — reminded me of my mistake.”

In a sprawling tent encampment in Gaza, the Israeli bombs fall close enough to hear and feel. But daily life is also a struggle against hunger, cold and a growing sanitation crisis.

A lack of sufficient toilets and clean water, as well as open sewage, are problems that displaced Palestinians have struggled with since the early days of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

For two months after Salwa al-Masri, 75, and her family fled to the city of Rafah, at the southernmost tip of Gaza, to escape Israel’s military offensive, she said she would walk 200 yards to reach the nearest bathroom. If she was lucky, younger women in line would let her jump ahead. Other times, she might wait up to an hour to use a dirty toilet shared with thousands of other people.

“It’s horrible,” Ms. al-Masri said via WhatsApp recently from her family’s ramshackle tent, which they made out of wood and plastic sheeting. “I wouldn’t drink water. I would stay thirsty so I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. I stopped drinking coffee and tea.”

Many other Gazans, already facing hunger and thirst as a result of Israel’s more than four-month siege of the territory, say they, too, have tried to cut back on eating and drinking even more to avoid an uncomfortable and unsanitary visit to the toilet.

Recently, Ms. al-Masri’s son and other relatives bought a cement toilet basin and dug a hole behind their tent, where the sewage gathers. It is a closer bathroom and one she shares with fewer people.

But the challenges of getting water to wash with and of the accumulating sewage are threatening their health, and the stench of sewage fills their makeshift encampment.

Last month, the World Health Organization reported that cases of hepatitis A had been spreading in Gaza. It also said that there were several thousand people with jaundice, which is caused by hepatitis A, among other conditions. Cases of diarrhea among children have also skyrocketed. All of it is linked to poor sanitation, according to UNICEF.

“The inhumane living conditions — barely any clean water, clean toilets and possibility to keep the surroundings clean — will enable hepatitis A to spread further,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., wrote on social media at the time, “and highlight how explosively dangerous the environment is for the spread of disease.”

Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October. Their estimate represents “excess deaths” that would not have been expected without the war.

Schools, hospitals, mosques and churches have become overcrowded shelters for Palestinians seeking safety from Israeli airstrikes. The few available bathrooms have to be shared among hundreds or thousands of people who sometimes wait in lines for hours to use them.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the accompanying ground offensive have increasingly pushed Palestinians south into the overcrowded corner of Gaza around Rafah and forced them to erect makeshift tents. As a result, access to bathrooms and sanitation has only worsened.

Some 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are now in Rafah — more than half of Gaza’s total population of about 2.2 million — even as Israel threatens to invade the area.

After the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s near-complete siege on Gaza has prevented most things from coming into the territory, creating a dire shortage of food, water and medicines. Additionally, representatives of both UNICEF and the Palestine Red Crescent Society said their organizations have tried to bring in portable toilets and materials to build sanitation facilities, but the Israeli authorities prevented them.

“It is a public health concern,” said Abrassac Kamara, a UNICEF manager for the Palestine WASH program, which helps deliver safe water and sanitation services. “But the second thing is simply just dignity. It is something we take for granted, but it’s really how we are taking dignity away from people.”

Israel’s civil administration, the bureaucratic arm of its military in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, said the restrictions on certain goods entering Gaza prevented the entry of items that could also be used for military purposes.

Hamas “exploits civilian resources in order to strengthen itself militarily at the expense of caring for the civilian population,” the civil administration said, without explaining how portable bathrooms could serve military needs.

UNICEF officials said they have had to resort to constructing toilets out of wood, concrete and plastic sheeting — materials already available in Gaza — often at a high cost. The agency plans to make 500 such toilets in Rafah to help reduce the congestion.

“At the moment, anything that is considered construction material — mostly metal, but also sandwich panels, nails, reinforcement rods — are all banned,” Mr. Kamara said. “We are making do.”

UNICEF had planned to build another 500 toilets in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, but had to abandon those efforts as Israel’s ground offensive moved into the area recently.

“They will literally put any sort of privacy screening — plastic at the back of the tent — and just dig and bury when they need to relieve themselves,” Mr. Kamara said. “We are back to the basic sanitation of digging a hole and covering it.”

In a video posted on Instagram last month, Bisan Owda, a Gazan journalist and documentary filmmaker, chronicled the daily struggle of finding a latrine. As she walked past tents in the street, carrying a large jug of water, she narrated her challenges.

“This is my daily routine,” she said, “walking for almost 20 to 25 minutes to reach a bathroom — struggling to reach a bathroom, actually.”

Other women have lamented a desperate lack of sanitary pads in the territory, and at least one of them told The New York Times that she had started taking birth control pills to stop her period altogether.

Sana Kabariti, 33, a pharmacist from Gaza City, in the north, said she fled home with her family to the town of Nuseirat, in central Gaza, as Israeli bombs rained down on their neighborhood in the first few days of the war. She and some 40 members of her extended family, including 10 children, cloistered in a small room and shared one bathroom, she said. But there was no water and no toilet paper.

So despite the dangers, they returned to their homes.

“With regards to the toilet, there wasn’t any water,” she said. “And this is what led to the families with us to return to Gaza City, and to the danger, because they couldn’t handle the lack of water and lack of toilet paper.”

Eventually, the bombing in Gaza City became so intense that she and her family had to flee again. They headed south, first to the city of Deir al Balah and eventually to Rafah.

They are better off than many in Rafah because they are sheltering in a room in a house shared among many. But the bathroom is small, and they must trek each day to get water to wash themselves and try to keep the bathroom clean. Showering is a luxury they can rarely afford.

They do not use toilet paper. Even if they can find it at markets, the price is exorbitant: Israel’s siege has driven up the cost of what few goods are still available in Gaza.

Instead, the family cuts up pieces of fabric to use, Ms. Kabariti said.

“There are many people who aren’t willing to use the bathroom more than once a day,” she said.

In her neighborhood, she recounted meeting an older woman who refused to use the bathroom in the center where she was sheltering because it was so dirty and unhygienic. Instead, neighbors allowed her to use their bathroom.

But not wanting to impose, she uses it only once a day — right after sunrise when she has said her morning prayers. Afterward, she holds it in until the next morning.

“I don’t know how long a person’s body can continue like this after nearly four months,” Ms. Kabariti said.

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

France’s farmers vented their fury at President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday as he arrived at the annual agricultural show in Paris, a giant fair long seen as a test of presidents’ relationship with the countryside.

A large crowd that had camped outside the night before broke in and scuffled with police officers in riot gear while Mr. Macron entered through a side door to meet with unions demanding an end to hardships in the industry.

During an hourlong closed-door meeting before the fair opened, with top cabinet members at Mr. Macron’s side, farmers sang the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” at the top of their lungs, blew whistles, raised fists and shouted for the president to resign, as skittish prize cows and pigs brought to the capital from farms around the country looked on nervously from their display pens.

The rowdy confrontation was the latest in a monthlong showdown that has seen farmers blockade roads around France and in Paris — a movement that has spread to other countries, including Greece, Poland, Belgium and Germany.

At issue are what farmers say are sharply rising costs, unfair competition from imports allowed into Europe from other countries able to produce food more cheaply, and especially European Union regulations intended to contain or reverse climate change.

Agriculture accounts for about 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the European Union says drastic change is required. Farmers say European targets are imposing suffocating administrative and financial burdens.

When Mr. Macron emerged from the meeting, his face pale and haggard, he announced that his government would present a bill next month to address an “income crisis, a crisis of confidence and a crisis of recognition” for farmers in France. “We need to show recognition, respect, pride for the agricultural model and for our farmers,” he said.

It was the latest in a series of attempts, led by the new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, to appease farmers. But they are near unanimous in demanding concrete changes rather than promises.

Mr. Macron remained at the fair, known as the Salon International d’Agriculture, to engage in a spirited impromptu discussion with a select group of farmers eager to communicate their frustrations directly. Many of them wore yellow, green and red hats to signify the unions they belonged to.

“Cheap grain imports from Ukraine are destroying French agriculture. What are you going to do about it?” one farmer demanded, as Mr. Macron, without his suit jacket and in a white shirt and tie, listened and took notes.

“We can hardly make ends meet!” shouted another. “We shouldn’t have to block all the roads in the country to get the relief we need.”

Mr. Macron, who has struggled throughout his almost seven-year presidency to connect with the poorer and more rural parts of France, where he is viewed as remote and aloof, urged farmers not to see the situation as “catastrophic,” saying that French agriculture was “not falling apart.” Later, he strolled through the salon under heavy security, speaking freely with farmers and tasting their cheeses and meats, as an aggressive crowd outside the building grew more raucous.

He called for calm. “We will not respond to this agricultural crisis in a few hours,” he said, adding that his government was taking numerous steps to address deep-seated problems, including holding negotiations next month at the presidential palace with farmers unions, food manufacturers and retailers to build “an agricultural plan for 2040.”

That seems a long way off to farmers and their families struggling to make it to the end of the month.

Mr. Macron said an “emergency cash-flow plan” would bring together banks and the agricultural sector to help farms having difficulties, and promised to push for a Europe-wide solution to another issue: large supermarket chains that form purchasing consortiums to bargain down food prices, which farmers say strips them of a fair income. He also announced the establishment of a production cost index that would “serve as a price floor.”

“I stand alongside our farmers and French agriculture,” Mr. Macron insisted.

Before Mr. Macron’s visit to the fair, Mr. Attal had sought to avert protests by outlining a package of measures aimed at reassuring farmers that agriculture remained a top priority for the government.

“We want to place agriculture among the nation’s fundamental interests in the same way as our defense or our security,” Mr. Attal said.

But those promises did not appease the throngs that had descended on the salon early Saturday morning. The crowd was so dense and rowdy that at one point, farmers and police officers appeared to risk being crushed. People tumbled over one another into hay-filled goat enclosures in one part of a vast hall holding livestock.

Visiting the salon has been a political rite of passage for every French president since Jacques Chirac, who was in office from 1995 to 2007, often serving as a barometer of the ability to connect with rural France. Mr. Chirac, considered something of a gentleman farmer, was usually warmly welcomed, while his successor Nicolas Sarkozy lost his cool with a protester whom he told to “get lost, poor idiot” — a moment that would dog him for the rest of his presidency.

Early in Mr. Macron’s tenure, he was greeted at the salon with an egg thrown near his face, but he continued his tour, meeting and greeting farmers in the hall.

But the mass clashes with the police on Saturday were like nothing at the fair in recent memory. They suggest that the farmers’ movement is unlikely to die down any time soon.

Imagine a short story from the golden age of science fiction, something that would appear in a pulp magazine in 1956. Our title is “The Truth Engine,” and the story envisions a future where computers, those hulking, floor-to-ceiling things, become potent enough to guide human beings to answers to any question they might ask, from the capital of Bolivia to the best way to marinade a steak.

How would such a story end? With some kind of reveal, no doubt, of a secret agenda lurking behind the promise of all-encompassing knowledge. For instance, maybe there’s a Truth Engine 2.0, smarter and more creative, that everyone can’t wait to get their hands on. And then a band of dissidents discover that version 2.0 is fanatical and mad, that the Engine has just been preparing humans for totalitarian brainwashing or involuntary extinction.

This flight of fancy is inspired by our society’s own version of the Truth Engine, the oracle of Google, which recently debuted Gemini, the latest entrant in the great artificial intelligence race.

It didn’t take long for users to notice certain … oddities with Gemini. The most notable was its struggle to render accurate depictions of Vikings, ancient Romans, American founding fathers, random couples in 1820s Germany and various other demographics usually characterized by a paler hue of skin.

Perhaps the problem was just that the A.I. was programmed for racial diversity in stock imagery, and its historical renderings had somehow (as a company statement put it) “missed the mark” — delivering, for instance, African and Asian faces in Wehrmacht uniforms in response to a request to see a German soldier circa 1943.

But the way in which Gemini answered questions made its nonwhite defaults seem more like a weird emanation of the A.I.’s underlying worldview. Users reported being lectured on “harmful stereotypes” when they asked to see a Norman Rockwell image, being told they could see pictures of Vladimir Lenin but not Adolf Hitler, and turned down when they requested images depicting groups specified as white (but not other races).

Nate Silver reported getting answers that seemed to follow “the politics of the median member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.” The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney discovered that Gemini would make a case for being child-free but not a case for having a large family; it refused to give a recipe for foie gras because of ethical concerns but explained that cannibalism was an issue with a lot of shades of gray.

Describing these kinds of results as “woke A.I.” isn’t an insult. It’s a technical description of what the world’s dominant search engine decided to release.

There are three reactions one might have to this experience. The first is the typical conservative reaction, less surprise than vindication. Here we get a look behind the curtain, a revelation of what the powerful people responsible for our daily information diet actually believe — that anything tainted by whiteness is suspect, anything that seems even vaguely non-Western gets special deference, and history itself needs to be retconned and decolonized to be fit for modern consumption. Google overreached by being so blatant in this case, but we can assume that the entire architecture of the modern internet has a more subtle bias in the same direction.

The second reaction is more relaxed. Yes, Gemini probably shows what some people responsible for ideological correctness in Silicon Valley believe. But we don’t live in a science-fiction story with a single Truth Engine. If Google’s search bar delivered Gemini-style results, then users would abandon it. And Gemini is being mocked all over the non-Google internet, especially on a rival platform run by a famously unwoke billionaire. Better to join the mockery than fear the woke A.I. — or better still, join the singer Grimes, the unwoke billionaire’s sometime paramour, in marveling at what emerged from Gemini’s tortured algorithm, treating the results as “masterpiece of performance art,” a “shining star of corporate surrealism.”

The third reaction considers the two preceding takes and says, well, a lot depends on where you think A.I. is going. If the whole project remains a supercharged form of search, a generator of middling essays and infinite disposable distractions, then any attempt to use its powers to enforce a fanatical ideological agenda is likely to just be buried under all the dreck.

But this isn’t where the architects of something like Gemini think their work is going. They imagine themselves to be building something nearly godlike, something that might be a Truth Engine in full — solving problems in ways we can’t even imagine — or else might become our master and successor, making all our questions obsolete.

The more seriously you take that view, the less amusing the Gemini experience becomes. Putting the power to create a chatbot in the hands of fools and commissars is an amusing corporate blunder. Putting the power to summon a demigod or minor demon in the hands of fools and commissars seems more likely to end the same way as many science-fiction tales: unhappily for everybody.

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Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States has the capacity to keep Kyiv supplied with the weapons, technology and intelligence to fend off a takeover by Moscow. But Washington is now perceived around Europe to have lost its will.

The Europeans, in contrast, have the will — they just committed another $54 billion to reconstruct the country — but when it comes to repelling Russia’s revived offensive, they do not have the capacity.

That is the essence of the conundrum facing Ukraine and the NATO allies on the dismal second anniversary of the war. It is a stunning reversal. Only a year ago, many here predicted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, bolstered by European tanks and missiles and American artillery and air defenses, could push the Russians back to where they were on Feb. 24, 2022.

Now, some harsh lessons have emerged. The sanctions that were supposed to bring Russia’s economy to its knees — “the ruble almost is immediately reduced to rubble,” President Biden declared in Warsaw in March 2022 — have lost their sting. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction that the Russian economy would shrink considerably was only briefly true; with the huge stimulus of military spending, it is growing faster than Germany’s. Income from oil exports is greater than it was before the invasion.

With the setbacks, and the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, hope has just about collapsed that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will conclude anytime soon that he can make no further gains and should enter a serious negotiation to end the war.

American and European intelligence officials now assess that Mr. Putin is determined to hold on, even at the cost of huge casualties, in the hope that a failure in Congress to fund Ukraine’s effort sufficiently or a victory by former President Donald J. Trump in November will make up for the Russian leader’s many early mistakes.

Biden administration officials still insist that Mr. Putin has already suffered a “strategic defeat.” His military is humiliated by its early failures and huge casualties, and Russia can count on only China, Iran and North Korea as reliable suppliers.

At the same time, NATO has enlarged. Sweden is set to become the 32nd member state within a few days, after the addition of Finland last year, and two-thirds of its members will each spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a significant increase.

For the first time since NATO was founded in 1949, Europeans are finally taking seriously the need for a defense infrastructure independent of the United States.

Still, as recent intelligence reports in Europe indicate that NATO nations might be Mr. Putin’s target in the next three to five years, the question remains: Without a durable American commitment, can Ukraine and Europe defend against a new Russian threat?

Strategic Stalemate

At the core of the current strategic stalemate is the absence of any serious prospect of a negotiated settlement.

As recently as last summer, senior members of the Biden administration held out hope that Ukrainian advances on the battlefield would force Mr. Putin to find a face-saving way out. The most commonly discussed possibility was a negotiated settlement that left unclear the future of the parts of Ukraine seized or annexed by Russia, but which would at least end the fighting.

At the same time, at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mr. Biden and his aides were discussing with President Volodymyr Zelensky putting together an “Israel model” of aid for Ukraine. Even if short of actual membership, the plan aspired to provide a decade-long guarantee of the arms and training that Ukraine would need to keep Russia at bay.

But even hope for those muddled outcomes has been cast aside amid the congressional debate over renewing short-term help for Ukraine, and as pessimism sets in that Ukraine can hold out long enough to think about the long term.

As isolationism rises in a Republican-controlled Congress beholden to Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden has shifted from promising to give Ukraine “whatever it needs, for as long as it takes” to last December’s less ambitious “as long as we can.”

At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, struck an even more sober note: Ukraine would have to learn how to fight on a tight budget.

Even if the “$61 billion of supplemental aid to Ukraine goes through, I have to be honest with you, that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield,” he said. “The amount of munitions that we can send to Ukraine right now is very limited.”

Mr. Vance went on to make a second point: Those limited resources should be saved for competing with China and defending Taiwan.

“There are a lot of bad guys all over the world,” he said. “And I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe.”

Mr. Vance’s assessment was met with a stony silence. Shortly afterward, a senior American military official who declined to speak on the record said that the Republican debate in Washington and the mood among Ukraine’s ground forces were reinforcing each other, “and not in a positive way.”

In the view of Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor who served as a national security official in the Obama administration, that means the United States should be exploring ways to get negotiations started to end the war.

“Even if Russia can stay the course, I don’t think Ukraine can,” he said. After two years of war, Mr. Kupchan said, “there is no foreseeable pathway toward a battlefield victory for Ukraine,” even with the imminent arrival of long-range missiles or F-16s.

Mr. Zelensky faces a stark choice, he said: whether to keep every inch of sovereign Ukrainian territory, or find a way to secure an economically viable state, with a democratic future, Western security guarantees and eventual membership in the European Union and in NATO.

In private, some senior Biden administration officials say they have been trying to nudge Mr. Zelensky in that direction. But Mr. Biden has instructed his staff not to deviate from the slogan it used at the beginning of the war: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

The result is that American military officials in Europe, led by Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, have been quietly warning that the best the Ukrainians can hope for is a largely frozen conflict.

General Cavoli rarely speaks publicly, but officials emerging from recent briefings with him described a downbeat assessment, one in which, at best, the Ukrainians use 2024 to defend, rebuild and attempt another counteroffensive next year.

Even in Europe, where support for Ukraine has been strongest, public opinion is shifting, too. In a recent opinion poll conducted in January for the European Council on Foreign Relations in 12 countries, only 10 percent of Europeans said they believed Ukraine would win the war, though what would constitute a win was not clearly defined. Twenty percent said they believed that Russia would win, and a plurality, 37 percent, thought the war would end in some kind of settlement.

But if the United States withdraws support from Ukraine and presses Kyiv for a deal, 41 percent of Europeans polled said their governments should either increase support to try to replace Washington or continue support at the current level. Roughly a third said that European countries should follow Washington and pressure Kyiv to settle.

“Things are not going well,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania, said bluntly as he left the Munich Security Conference last week.

“Ukraine is starved of ammunition and forced to pull back, Europe is facing challenges which might test Article 5, and global instability emerges because autocrats are emboldened by Russia’s action and our cautious response,” Mr. Landsbergis said on the social media platform X, in a reference to the section of the NATO treaty that calls for each member to come to the aid of any member under attack. “This is not pessimism. This is fact.”

Awakening to a Larger Threat

For years, American officials have urged Europe to spend more on its defense. Now, Europeans are beginning to confront the cost of complacency.

No matter who Americans elect as their next president in November, the United States may no longer be willing to take its traditional lead in deterring Russia or defending the West. That will inevitably place more of the burden on a Europe that is not yet fully prepared.

Germany’s military is better equipped, but it is not of the size or skill level needed to face the challenges ahead, its defense secretary, Boris Pistorius, has warned. Finland adds considerable technological capability to NATO, but Sweden’s military, American officials say, will need to be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, Europe is piecing together packages of help for Ukraine that were first meant to supplement, but now may be intended to replace, aid from the United States.

This month, European Union leaders pledged another 50 billion euros, about $54 billion, in new aid to Ukraine over the next four years. In aggregate, European countries have outpaced the United States in aid provided to Ukraine.

To date, said Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, the United States has provided $75 billion in security, economic, and humanitarian assistance. But, she said, “Europe and our global partners have provided even more, $107 billion, in addition to hosting 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees in countries across Europe.”

Yet to fully replace American military assistance this year, according to an assessment by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe would still have “to double its current level and pace of arms assistance.”

And European efforts to provide another 5 billion euros, about $5.4 billion, over each of the next four years to buy arms for Ukraine have stalled because of objections by Germany and France.

The Germans say they are paying too much into the fund, given their large bilateral funding of aid to Ukraine, the second largest in the world after the United States.

The French are, as ever, insisting that weapons purchased with European money should be made or at least partly made in Europe — though Europe doesn’t have the capacity to provide them.

And European promises to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March have fallen well short.

Still, European arms production has been increasing, with senior European officials saying that the continent should be able to produce a million shells a year by the end of this year, compared with about 350,000 shells 18 months ago.

While Europeans point proudly to the changes they have made, it remains far from certain that those changes are happening as fast as the world demands, especially when it comes to Ukraine.

“Strategically the goal should be to change Putin’s calculations,” said Mr. Kupchan, the former Obama administration official. “Disrupt the field. I know it’s not easy, but it is better to admit mistakes and chart a new path forward rather than to engage in empty self-congratulation.”