Category: News

SAN FRANCISCO — Golden State had been mucking up its offense for nearly the entire third quarter on Monday night when Andrew Wiggins pushed the ball ahead to Jordan Poole, a young guard with enormous confidence. Just before time expired, Poole launched a 3-pointer from 33 feet that banked off the glass before rattling through the hoop.

The heave was a buzzer-beating breath of life for Golden State in Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals — and for the team’s white-knuckled fans, who rode waves of highs and lows before the Warriors pulled away for a 104-94 victory that put them on the cusp of another championship.

Golden State, which took a 3-2 lead in the series, can clinch its fourth title in eight seasons, and its first since 2018, when the team goes on the road to face Boston in Game 6 on Thursday night.

Wiggins led Golden State with 26 points, and Klay Thompson added 21. Jayson Tatum had a game-high 27 points for the Celtics in the loss.

After a solid start, Golden State was leading by 12, but four Jaylen Brown free throws and back-to-back 3-pointers by Tatum gave the Celtics the first 10 points of the second half, a surprising turn of events given Golden State’s famously torrid third quarters. The Celtics soon took the lead when Marcus Smart and Al Horford connected on consecutive 3-pointers of their own, part of a 19-4 run.

Golden State missed its first eight 3-point attempts of the second half before Thompson finally made a couple, a much-needed boost for Golden State — and for Thompson, who had been having his share of struggles in the series.

After Poole punctuated the third quarter with his deep 3-pointer, a shot that had the home crowd at Chase Center in a state of near-delirium, his teammates seemed to ride that crest of emotion. By the time Thompson shed Smart to make another 3-pointer, Golden State was back up by 8 points.

After scoring 43 points in Golden State’s Game 4 win, Stephen Curry had a muted effort in Game 5, finishing with just 16 points and shooting 0 of 9 from 3-point range. But his teammates delivered. Golden State appeared locked in from the start, passing the ball from side to side, from corner to corner, in constant pursuit of the best possible shot. Not that the team was always able to connect, shooting 3 of 17 from 3-point range in the first half.

Still, Golden State went ahead by as many as 16 late in the first quarter before Boston began to chip away with Curry resting on the bench. Smart sank a 10-foot jumper. Robert Williams forced his way inside for a layup.

Golden State recalibrated as Curry secured a 51-39 lead at halftime with an up-and-under layup.

In the first half, Golden State was buoyed by Wiggins, who had 16 points and 7 rebounds, and by Draymond Green, who assembled one of his more assertive stretches of the finals. In the first four games of the series, he scored a total of 17 points. By halftime of Game 5, he had 8 points and was flying around the court.

Tatum, after laboring with his shot for much of the series, was doing what he could to keep the Celtics close, collecting 13 points and 8 rebounds in the first half.

Before the game, Celtics Coach Ime Udoka expressed concern that Tatum had been preoccupied with hunting for fouls rather than taking good shots. Udoka wanted him to be “more physical” on his drives.

“A lot of times he’s kind of floating, going off one leg, when he can plant and go off two, finish a little stronger,” Udoka said, adding: “We’re just telling him to be decisive. He’s done it all year, seen every coverage, and for the most part has kind of picked those apart.”

For Golden State Coach Steve Kerr, Monday was the 25th anniversary of a poignant moment from his playing career. It was Kerr’s jump shot in Game 6 of the 1997 finals that clinched another championship for the Chicago Bulls — their fifth of the Michael Jordan era — against the Utah Jazz.

“Something every young basketball player dreams of,” he said, adding: “The finals are the finals, whether you’re playing or coaching. It’s the ultimate competition in the world of basketball.”

TEL AVIV — Benjamin Netanyahu, who left office a year ago, his wife, Sara, and their eldest son, Yair, are suing his predecessor as Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, for libel after his description of them as “mentally ill” and in need of psychiatric treatment.

Mr. Olmert, for his part, is unapologetic about the aspersions he cast on the Netanyahu family in two interviews around the time of a bitter and inconclusive election in the spring of 2021.

Now the two former prime ministers — ardent political foes — are fighting it out in a lurid defamation trial that some liken to a soap opera.

On Monday, Israelis were left to parse the fallout a day after the main protagonists and other Israeli public figures took the witness stand for more than 13 hours of testimony rife with bickering, sniping and accusations of a variety of disorders afflicting the Netanyahus.

In ordinary times, Sunday’s hearing in the Tel Aviv Magistrates’ Court might have been dismissed as a sometimes grotesque sign of the depths to which Israeli political discourse can sink.

But the libel case is playing out just as the country’s current governing coalition, a fragile alliance of eight ideologically disparate parties led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, is teetering on the brink of collapse — and Mr. Netanyahu appears close to engineering a possible comeback.

Another member of Mr. Bennett’s coalition quit on Monday, leaving the government in control of only 59 seats in the 120-seat Parliament and bringing the prospect of another election, the fifth in under four years, ever closer.

“It was a reality show,” Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communications at Reichman University in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said of the trial. “Or worse, a soap opera. It’s sad.”

Still, he said, the courtroom drama was unlikely to have much effect on the political landscape.

“Let’s remember, there are very few people who don’t already have a firm opinion about Bibi,” he said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “So for the vast majority of the population, it won’t make a bit of difference.”

Neither Mr. Olmert nor Mr. Netanyahu is a stranger to court. Mr. Netanyahu, who holds the record as Israel’s longest serving prime minister after a total of 15 years in office, is currently on trial in the Jerusalem District Court for corruption. Mr. Olmert, in office from 2006 to 2009, was convicted in 2014 of taking a bribe while he was mayor of Jerusalem and served 16 months in prison.

The latest courtroom spectacle resurfaced alarming allegations over the pressures Mr. Netanyahu faced within his family and his inability to withstand them, offered this time under oath by some of his closest former advisers.

As the day of testimony progressed, the wild rumors and reports of disturbing goings-on that accompanied Mr. Netanyahu’s long tenure were given an airing as Mr. Olmert’s lawyer and witnesses for the defense bandied about references to eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behavior, uncontrolled tantrums, narcissism and paranoia in the Netanyahu household.

“The testimony heard in court Sunday was nauseating and horrifying, reviving grim memories of what we got rid of exactly one year ago,” Yossi Verter, a political columnist, wrote in Monday’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper.

But Mr. Verter, like other analysts, said none of it was likely to put off Mr. Netanyahu’s die-hard allies and supporters and could even benefit him, as he plays the role of a victim of persecution.

One political ally of Mr. Netanyahu’s, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker, wrote in a Twitter post that he was “squirming in disgust” at the “satanic baseness” of the efforts to defame the Netanyahu family.

The Netanyahus are suing Mr. Olmert for more than $250,000 in damages because, they said, his characterization of them as mentally ill suggested he was privy, as a former prime minister, to some hidden clinical diagnosis that did not exist and that he had crossed a red line.

Mr. Olmert’s lawyer, Amir Tytunovich, said in an interview that his client’s main lines of defense were that he was expressing an opinion at a stormy time in Israeli politics, speaking “out of emotion and concern for the future of the country,” and that Mr. Olmert was telling the truth, though he was obviously not offering a professional clinical diagnosis.

“This is my opinion and I won’t change it,” Mr. Olmert said in a brief interview with The New York Times outside the courtroom.

Mr. Netanyahu was the first to take the stand on Sunday, often turning around to play to the audience, mostly made up of the Hebrew news media’s legal reporters.

“I have no psychiatric history, and the burden of proof is on you, not me!” he declared as Mr. Olmert sat across from him in the small, crowded courtroom.

Sara Netanyahu, a certified psychologist, categorically denied reports that she had been hospitalized in a sanitarium in Vienna last year, insisting that was “a lie from start to finish.”

She asserted that an audio tape of her screaming at a publicist over the phone in 2009 had been “cooked” and “manipulated.” And when Mr. Tytunovich, Mr. Olmert’s lawyer, suggested that she was partial to vodka, she retorted that she did not drink alcohol but that a healthy stock of it had been left in the prime minister’s residence by the previous tenant, Mr. Olmert.

Yair Netanyahu, the couple’s elder son, was confronted with a slew of his own social media posts in which he ascribed mental illness to other public figures. Explaining why he had written that a former defense minister and Netanyahu rival, Moshe Yaalon, should be in a psychiatric institution, he said, “I wanted to make fun of his obsession over my father.”

Tamar Almog, the legal commentator for Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, described the proceedings as “half circus, half preschool.” But Uzi Arad, a witness for the defense who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser and close confidant before a sharp falling out, said the dysfunction he had witnessed in the Netanyahu household “exacted a price from the country.”

He described one incident when Mr. Netanyahu left unprepared for a trip to Washington and could not be briefed on the plane because he insisted on sitting with Sara the whole way, preventing Mr. Arad from sharing classified information. According to Mr. Arad, the lapse led to a huge blowup in Mr. Netanyahu’s meeting with Robert M. Gates, the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, prompting the Pentagon to cut off ties with Israel for two months.

Nir Hefetz, a former spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu who has turned state witness in his corruption trial, told the court of constant interference by Ms. Netanyahu and her son in national decision-making. He related that Yair once burst into a meeting his father was holding with other officials, got down on all fours and wagged his tongue, berating his father in crude terms for sucking up to those present.

“I should apologize after today?” Mr. Olmert said outside the courtroom.

In a Facebook post on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu wrote that Mr. Olmert “brought former employees who would give false testimony and slander my family with a baseless blood libel.”

The lawyers for the sides must now sum up their arguments before the judge reaches a verdict, the timing for which is not yet scheduled.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a protracted battle between a generation-defining virus and scientists working at a breakneck pace to fight it. Following the development of the remarkably effective first-generation Covid-19 vaccines, the virus made its response: More infectious variants have emerged, capable of infecting people who have been vaccinated or were previously infected. This is by no means a failure of the vaccines, which continue to keep millions of people protected from the most devastating consequences of the virus. But science should be ready to make its next move.

Initially, people who received the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna were around 95 percent less likely to get Covid-19 than those who had no prior immunity. Protection against severe disease was strong. Countries with high vaccine uptake saw coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and death rates plummet.

Given these powerful tools, it seemed that the worst of the pandemic would rapidly be put behind us. And it likely has been. Despite an astonishingly large fraction of the country becoming infected during this winter’s Omicron wave, deaths from Covid-19 were lower than or not far surpassing those of previous waves that caused far fewer infections. These deaths were much less likely to occur in those who were vaccinated compared to those who weren’t. Beyond the vaccines, antiviral medications have been developed that are of particular benefit to those who are unvaccinated or immunocompromised. There are many tools now that make Covid-19 less of a threat than it was in 2020.

It’s also true that the road out of the pandemic has been bumpier than many had hoped. Over half of the U.S. population has been infected, and some more than once. Importantly, post-vaccination infections and re-infections only rarely land people in the hospital, but the experience can nonetheless be miserable and disruptive.

The Covid situation, in terms of hospitalizations and deaths, is in a much better place now, but it is not the best science can do, and we must continue to advance against it. There are several ways to improve the state of immunity.

My research group studies the maintenance of immunity, and we’ve learned that the details matter. To fix dents in the armor of immunity, scientists need to understand what is still working, what has slipped, and why.

Following vaccination or recovery from an infection, the immune system leaves behind several layers of defense to counter any future virus exposures. One component of durable immunity is made of memory cells that patrol the body, looking for any signs of the virus. If such evidence is found, memory T cells can kill the infected cells while memory B cells rapidly produce antibodies, which are proteins that can stick to viruses and prevent them from infecting more cells.

Memory cells used to have enough time to find and shut down the virus before a coronavirus infection led to noticeable symptoms. But as rapidly replicating variants such as Delta and Omicron have emerged, the window of time before a person develops symptoms has shrunk, making it harder for them to clear the infection before they feel sick. Memory cells still usually catch up to the virus before it can spread through the lungs and cause severe disease, but one can feel pretty awful in the meantime.

The Covid- vaccines do a good job of inducing all kinds of memory cells. These cells remain stable over time and are relatively impervious to mutations in variants like Omicron. This is good news, and helps explain why the available vaccines continue to sharply reduce severe illness even from variants that have changed substantially from the original strain of the coronavirus. Still, it’s clear that to prevent people from getting sick, scientists need to find ways to shorten the response time of these cells even further.

A second layer of immunity is composed of specialized soldiers of the immune system called plasma cells. Each plasma cell makes antibodies at an astronomical clip — several thousand every second, whether the virus is around or not. Because antibodies themselves only stick around for a few weeks, the persistence of plasma cells is the key to replenishing and maintaining protective antibodies over time.

The Covid vaccines behave very differently from one another in terms of how many plasma cells are made and how long they live. This can be estimated by measuring the concentrations of antibodies in the blood over time. Both the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines lead to very high initial levels of protective antibodies. These antibodies then decline precipitously for six to nine months before stabilizing between 10 to 20 percent of their peak levels. Because the peak levels of plasma cells and antibodies after mRNA vaccination are so high, even a 90 percent loss would probably still leave one highly protected against symptomatic infection had the virus not evolved into new variants.

In contrast, the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine induces far fewer plasma cells and antibodies initially, and its effectiveness against Covid-19 is lower than that of the mRNA vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration has understandably limited its use because of risk for a rare but serious blood-clotting side effect. However, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine maintains and may even slowly increase protective antibodies over time. In an ideal world, people would get high levels of protection from an mRNA vaccination and then maintain it as seen with a single-dose vaccine such as Johnson & Johnson’s.

So, given this state of affairs, what are actionable things that can be done to improve the duration of immunity? There are several possibilities, ranging from options that are available now to what I expect will be coming in the next few years.

First, there are boosters. Because antibodies are maintained at high levels when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a booster after the mRNA vaccines, it’s worth considering whether there are ways to safely resurrect this vaccine for boosters, perhaps by better defining the groups at risk for the rare blood clotting side effect.

Second, the vaccines and boosters we have, currently aimed at a strain that has been gone for over a year, will be updated to match variants like Omicron. The matching of the vaccines to the virus will likely help antibodies work better, potentially providing some buffer room for them to decline. Getting a booster with an Omicron-specific vaccine could help protect people from infections or getting the virus again.

While frequent boosters could restore some portion of the original vaccines’ levels of protection against the virus, given the lower uptake of boosters so far, scientists and stakeholders must also pursue longer-lasting solutions and new tools to stop infections.

Vaccines that are received up the nose or in the mouth position memory cells and antibodies near the sites of infection and offer potential ways to prevent symptoms and perhaps even infections altogether. Some of these types of vaccines are now in clinical trials and could become available soon.

Groups of researchers are also studying single vaccines that could work against all versions of the novel coronavirus. These vaccines, which aim to be variant-proof, make it difficult for the virus to outmatch the immune system. They have shown great promise in animal experiments. Some are entering clinical trials and could be available in the next few years.

These kinds of vaccines could buy us long-lasting protection against infections and disease. When combined together, our armamentarium for fighting Covid-19 is growing. This is not the end of the chess match. Our next moves are coming soon.

NASHVILLE — After all my blue false indigo was killed by a late frost, I went down to the garden center at the farmer’s market looking for more. Blue false indigo is a host plant of the clouded sulphur butterfly, and clouded sulphurs are the most reliable guests in my pollinator patch. I would hate to be caught short-handed when they returned in all their yellow glory. There have been so few butterflies lately.

Naturally I had to walk around the rest of the garden center, too, looking for other perennials that feed native pollinators, but the only ones on offer that day were flowers I already have in abundance. When I came upon a few pots of swamp milkweed tucked into a corner, I turned to leave. Milkweed is the host plant of the monarch butterfly, but I have plenty of milkweed.

As I was turning, something striped caught my eye. I looked closer. Monarch caterpillars were munching away on the leaves.

Reader, I screamed.

I also bought every caterpillar-blighted plant, worried that anybody else would simply kill the creatures eating the plants that cost $12 each. To be of use to pollinators, a garden needs two kinds of native plants: those whose flowers feed adult butterflies and those whose leaves feed caterpillars. A caterpillar in a butterfly garden is a sign that the whole hopeful plan is working.

But how many other shoppers would recognize these caterpillars as baby monarchs, or have enough milkweed in their own gardens to feed them? Milkweed is the only food monarch caterpillars can eat, and as Eric Carle taught generations of children, caterpillars are very, very hungry. Potted plants will last only a few days before being gnawed down to bare stems, but I was confident I had enough milkweed at home to see 14 baby butterflies safely into the sky.

The problem: I also have red wasps in my pollinator garden. For most of the spring it had been too cool for wasps to fly, but a wasp was patrolling the flower bed as I pulled into my driveway. Wasps hunt by dropping below blossoms, helicopter style, to check the undersides of leaves. What they are checking for is caterpillars to cut up and bring home to their own larvae.

Meanwhile, the caterpillars with the jaunty yellow and black stripes were still chewing away on the potted milkweed in the back of my car. When I opened the hatchback, they froze.

This is the thing that always breaks my heart about nature: how desperately everything wants to eat, and how desperately nothing wants to be eaten. A caterpillar is powerless against a red wasp. Its only defense is stillness: In the dappled light of a leafy summer, a caterpillar’s camouflage looks just like dappled light.

The most vulnerable time for a caterpillar is the point at which it has spun the silk button it will hang from as a chrysalis, has embedded its back legs into the silk, and is dangling upside down, trapped by a device of its own making. A dangling monarch caterpillar is very close to transforming into a chrysalis, the extraordinary jewel from which a monarch butterfly emerges. If I lean in to see how close, it will curl up tight, an “O” of fear and vulnerability.

In most cases it’s best not to interfere with natural processes, and I know that, but I stood and pondered those caterpillars anyway. Strictly speaking, these weren’t naturally occurring caterpillars. They emerged from eggs laid by wild butterflies and lived outdoors like wild caterpillars. But they hatched in a garden center on potted plants, not in a meadow filled with thousands of other caterpillars eating thousands of other milkweed leaves. In the world for which these creatures evolved, many caterpillars evade patrolling wasps. In my small pollinator garden, hardly any do.

If I were gardening for vegetables and not for pollinators, I would regard the wasps as my ally, but in truth they are neither allies nor enemies. They are simply a vital part of the ecosystem.

Anyhow, wasps are not the reason monarchs are in peril. The real explanation for the butterflies’ steep decline is an unholy trinity of pesticides, habitat loss and climate change. Since the 1990s, the Eastern monarch population of North America is down by 88 percent, and Western monarchs are down by 99 percent. Both Eastern and Western monarch populations meet the criteria for protection under the Endangered Species Act, but they aren’t listed as endangered because federal officials don’t have sufficient resources to protect them.

I’ve already done everything a regular person can do to help. I use no chemicals in my yard. I have two kinds of native milkweed to host caterpillars and dozens of native nectar flowers — with bloom times staggered across the season — to feed adults. Nevertheless, not a single monarch laid eggs in my pollinator garden last summer. And here were 14 monarch caterpillars, right in the back of my car.

So I climbed into my attic and took down the screened butterfly cage I bought when I was trying everything I could think of to help butterflies survive. I put the milkweed pots inside and hoped the plants would hold out long enough for at least some of the caterpillars to turn into chrysalides.

Ten of them made it before the milkweed leaves ran out, attaching themselves to the screen roof of the butterfly cage. I set the remaining caterpillars in the garden on a cool morning. The three largest, I believed, could find a safe spot to pupate in the densely planted garden before it was warm enough for wasps to be out. The last time I saw them they were moving deeper into the flower bed.

The smallest caterpillar stayed put on a milkweed plant right at the edge of the garden, in full view of wasps. Should I have picked the milkweed and brought it into the cage instead of taking the caterpillar into the garden? Maybe.

But a butterfly cage, which keeps caterpillars safe from predators, isn’t necessarily the safest place for a butterfly to emerge from its chrysalis: If the butterfly falls and can’t right itself, it will die. A garden provides a softer landing place in case of falls, and many footholds to help an emerging butterfly get into the right position for its wings to dry.

Monarchs emerged from all 10 of the chrysalides in my butterfly cage, but only nine of them survived. Most emerged without incident, and two fell when I was nearby to help. The third emerged not in the afternoon, the usual time, but sometime shortly after dawn. By the time I found it, upside down on the bottom of the cage, it was lost, a puddle of mangled orange wings.

This is the trouble with trying to help a natural world in so much peril. It’s never entirely clear when it’s right to intervene and when it’s wrong. The more closely we engage with nearby nature, the more these questions arise. Something as simple as hanging a bird feeder can be problematic — when a Cooper’s hawk stakes out the feeding station, for example, or when there’s a local outbreak of avian illness like Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis. Wanting to help is not the same thing as helping.

And even when the right thing to do is perfectly clear, our efforts don’t always change the outcome. The five baby bluebirds in my nest box safely fledged this spring, but within a few days only two fledglings were still following their parents around our yard. What happened to the other three? Eaten by a Cooper’s hawk? Hit by a car? I will never know.

As the ecologist Kaeli Swift writes in her recent blog post, “A letter to the broken hearted nest observer,” a terrible end is sometimes just part of the deal: “As hard as it is to watch animals get eaten, it’s vital to remember that predation is what keeps wildlife wild. It’s what keeps ecosystems complex & beautiful.”

I’ve watched a hawk carrying away a baby starling and a rat snake full of baby chickadees emerging from a nest box. I’ve seen the wasp-ravaged caterpillars in the garden. And I keep thinking of that smallest monarch caterpillar. For two hot days it was alive and well. On the third day it was gone. Did it move deeper into the milkweed patch? Find a place far from the milkweed to pupate? Either is possible. Neither is likely.

I will never know for sure, just as I have no way of knowing if the nine butterflies I released survived after they lifted from my hand. Each one flew straight up and away. They all seemed healthy and strong, but of course I can’t know that either.

The Tony Awards returned to Radio City Music Hall on Sunday for the first time since June 2019. And after such a roller-coaster ride of a year, the ceremony was a welcome chance to celebrate all those people (from understudies and swings to stage managers and Covid safety officers) who made sure the show went on again (and again). Ariana DeBose, the former theater understudy turned recent Oscar winner, was the host of the three-hour broadcast portion of the ceremony on CBS. But it was Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, hosts of the first hour of the ceremony on Paramount+, who delighted one of our writers with their endearing eagerness to put on a show. As for the awards themselves: There were a few pleasant surprises but voters showed that they were craving the familiar. Here are the highs and lows as our writers saw them. NICOLE HERRINGTON

Best Schtick: Billy Crystal Makes Silly Compelling

The telecast was professional, smooth, well paced and bland. Part of the problem: the generally lugubrious choice of musical material. Another: the overly careful and inoffensively middlebrow tone. Which may be why one of the few moments that broke through the taste and torpor was Billy Crystal’s lowbrow schtick from “Mr. Saturday Night,” the new musical based on his 1992 film. Actually, the “Yiddish scat” he performed — nonsense guttural syllables and spitty consonants sung in the manner of an Ella Fitzgerald improvisation — has been part of his act forever, with good cause: It’s so stupidly funny you can’t help but fall for it. And when he brought it out into the audience, and threw it up to the balcony, he showed how precision delivery and command of a room can make even the oldest, silliest material impossibly compelling. JESSE GREEN

Best Mid-Show Relief: A Win for ‘A Strange Loop’

For the first half of the ceremony, I was sweating over the fact that “A Strange Loop,” which had been nominated for 11 awards, hadn’t won anything. I was expecting the Pulitzer Prize-winner to make a full sweep, but once the broadcast was underway, it was clear that the Tony voters had been more inclined toward the predictable picks for the winners’ circle. So when “A Strange Loop” won its first award of the night, for best book of a musical, it was thrilling to see Michael R. Jackson take the stage to celebrate his “big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway” show. Jackson’s boundary-pushing, thought-provoking script manages to be both hilarious and devastating, as well as wide-ranging in every sense of the word. MAYA PHILLIPS

Best Shout-Out: Nods to Understudies

In the weeks leading up to the Tony Awards, a buzz had been building — on various social media platforms — around demands that the Tonys honor swings, understudies and standbys. In a season often disrupted by Covid-19 transmission, these performers filled in for named players at show after show, sometimes at just a few moment’s notice.

As the evening’s host Ariana DeBose noted in her opening monologue: “A show is put on by many people, not just the faces that you know and love.”

No understudy could be nominated, but winners and presenters found ways to salute them. During the “Act One” special on Paramount+, the director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, a winner for “MJ,” shouted out “all the swings and understudies who kept us onstage this season. I bow to you.”

During the main program, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, a winner for “Take Me Out,” thanked his own understudy. Patti LuPone, a winner for “Company,” hailed not only understudies, but also the Covid-19 compliance officers. And in the big production number, DeBose, took another moment, while being hoisted into the air, to thank the swings.

Perhaps the greatest tribute came during the production number for the musical “Six.” Playing Jane Seymour was Mallory Maedke, the show’s dance captain, who had subbed in hours earlier after the actress who usually performs the role, Abby Mueller, tested positive for Covid-19. Maedke stepped in. The show went on. ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Best ‘Glee’ Alum: Darren Criss

It’s fitting that Darren Criss was one of the hosts at the 2022 Tony Awards: Before starring on Broadway, he got his big break in “Glee,” a series that was instrumental in bridging pop music and Broadway. He and Julianne Hough — a former “Dancing With the Stars” pro who didn’t miss a step even as her costume was coming off before the scheduled moment — had a sparkly showbiz quality peppered with an adorably enthusiastic nerdiness during their hourlong hosting gig of the “Act One” portion of the Tonys. And their opening number, written by Criss, for the Paramount+ stream, had more zest than Ariana DeBose’s opener in the flagship section hosted by CBS. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

Worst Display: The Evening-Long Amnesia

Imagining alternate worlds and stepping right into them is what theater people do. But there was some serious cognitive dissonance on display in the collectively imagined world of the Tony Awards ceremony, a four-hour celebration of a post-shutdown Broadway season that made it through thanks to stringent Covid-safety measures — most visibly, masks strictly required for audience members.

Disturbingly, the picture that the industry chose to present to the television cameras at Radio City Music Hall was a sea of bare faces, as if Broadway inhabited a post-Covid world. In the vast orchestra section, where the nominees sat, there was scarcely a mask anywhere.

A brass band from “The Music Man” paraded through the aisles; Ariana DeBose, this year’s Tonys host, sang right in audience members’ faces; and three winners from the revival of “Company” — Patti LuPone; her director, Marianne Elliott; and their producer Chris Harper — made mocking reference to a mask-refusing audience member at their show. Funny, sure, but they, too, were now barefaced in a crowd.

For all the loving shout-outs that the Tonys and Tony winners gave to understudies, swings and Covid safety teams for their indispensability in allowing so many productions to go on, it was hard not to wonder about Broadway choosing a normal-looking TV visual over caution, knowing how scary it can get when positive test results start rolling in. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Best Look: Theater Stars Deliver Shine and Sparkle

The Tony Awards aren’t exactly known for being a major fashion event, at least compared to the other awards shows that make up the initials of EGOT. But maybe it should be. On Sunday, we saw major stars in major looks, with the biggest trend being found in high shine and sparkle, befitting of theater’s big night.

Just look at Joaquina Kalukango, who won the Tony for lead actress in a musical while wearing a golden gown dripping in gems, tied with an electric lime green bow — a dress that was designed, she said in her acceptance speech, by her sister.

Then there was Ariana DeBose’s head-to-toe black sequined gown; Kara Young’s metallic two-piece ball gown; Utkarsh Ambudkar’s suit covered in pearly buttons; Vanessa Hudgens’s big, gold abstract planetary earrings; and Billy Porter’s space-age jacquard silver tuxedo. There were women who wore their crystals and beading like armor. There were men who channeled Michael Jackson (with fringed epaulets) and Elvis (in a high-collared, low-cut shirt) — bringing enough glitz, glamour and intricate embroidery to occupy several Broadway costume designers. JESSICA TESTA

Worst Attempt at Nostalgia: Not So ‘Smooth Criminal’

I have numerous grievances about “MJ,” the Michael Jackson jukebox musical, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I found the Tonys performance — the star, Myles Frost, and some of the company performing “Smooth Criminal” — a bit lackluster. The musical is inherently hollow; the opacity of Michael Jackson and his life of traumas and controversies make it difficult to find material compelling and cohesive enough to tell a story onstage. So the name of the game is nostalgia, and the show moonwalks by with the momentum of fans happy to see and hear some of the most iconic performances of Jackson’s career. But everything is an impression, with even the choreography restrained to the tried and true with little nuance and variation. The airless enormity and formality of the Tonys stage drained what little bit of charisma “MJ” might have otherwise had — though by the end of the evening the show was still a big winner, with Frost nabbing the best leading actor in a musical award. MAYA PHILLIPS

Best Experimental Inspiration: Love for ‘Weird Art’

Dierdre O’Connell’s win for “Dana H.”— which earlier in the evening presenters had referred to as both “Donna H.” and “Diana H.” — came as a marvelous surprise. O’Connell, 70, an actress of absolute passion and precision, has made her career Off and Off Off Broadway, enriching the work of two generations of playwrights, in works both traditional and very strange. (She is currently starring in Will Arbery’s “Corsicana” at Playwrights Horizons.)

In “Dana H.,” she lip-synced to harrowing audio recorded by the mother of the playwright, Lucas Hnath. And in her acceptance speech, which came midway through a ceremony in which more traditional fare was typically rewarded, O’Connell dedicated her Tony to every artist who has worried if the art they are making would prove too esoteric for Broadway. She insisted that her presence should inspire haunting art, frightening art, art that no one else may understand.

“Please let me standing here,” she said, “be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.” So go ahead, writers and directors of Tonys future: Make the weird art. ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Best Spotlight: A Playwright Medley

On typical Tony Awards shows, playwrights are about as prominent as animal trainers and child wranglers. (It’s a permanent embarrassment that they seldom get to talk even if their work wins.) This year’s presentation may not have heaped upon them the glory they deserve — they are, after all, at the heart of the entire enterprise — but it gave them a longer-than-usual segment that was also clever and insightful. Each of the five best play nominees answered a few simple questions about themselves and their work; their answers were edited together like a medley. What one word would Tracy Letts, the author of “The Minutes,” use to describe it? “Hilarious,” he said, with a self-serving twinkle. What is Lynn Nottage’s favorite line from “Clyde’s”? “A little salt makes the food taste good. Too much makes it inedible.” And how would Ben Power, the author of “The Lehman Trilogy,” describe a play about his own life? “As long as ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’ but with a happier ending.” JESSE GREEN

Worst Trend: Rewarding Marquee Names

The worst part of the evening was not a single moment but the fact that almost every time the most famous person or show won. It felt as if the voters were craving something familiar for the first full post-Covid Broadway season — even when that familiarity was draped in a seemingly (but not really) edgy concept like a gender-flipped Sondheim show (“Company”) or a fun retread of the Spice Girls (“Six”).

There were two major exceptions to that trend: the Off Broadway veteran Deirdre O’Connell winning best actress in a play for “Dana H.” and Michael R. Jackson’s bracing “A Strange Loop” winning for best musical. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

Best Heroine: Joaquina Kalukango Lifts ‘Paradise Square’

“Paradise Square” is not the best musical. And that makes Joaquina Kalukango’s moving performance, as the show’s tough-broad-heroine Nelly O’Brien, that much more impressive. In an otherwise drab Tonys broadcast, the excerpt from “Paradise Square” brought some much-needed vitality to the stage. Beginning with an ensemble song and dance that showed off the musical’s jaunty choreography, the segment then turned into a solo showcase for Kalukango, who blazed through her character’s big number “Let It Burn.”

Thanks to the camera close-ups (something we don’t often get in the world of theater) we got to see the particulars of Kalukango’s performance; her face seems to open up into a dauntless roar, and by the end of the song her whole visage darkens with tears. It’s no surprise that she later won the award for best actress in a musical; watching her perform is like watching the bursting of a Roman candle in a starless night — that kind of powerful, that kind of beautiful. MAYA PHILLIPS

WASHINGTON — The bipartisan gun safety deal announced Sunday is far from what Democrats would have preferred in the aftermath of the racist gun massacre in Buffalo and the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, but it is considerably more than they hoped for initially.

The proposal, which still has a long way to go before becoming law, focuses less on the “gun” part of gun control and more on other factors, such as a buyer’s mental health or violent tendencies, in a concession to Republican hesitation and the hard political reality that tough limits on sales, let alone outright bans on firearms, are far out of reach.

Though it would not raise the age to buy assault rifles from 18 to 21, the plan would enhance background checks on those under 21 before they could take possession of a gun — perhaps the most significant element of the emerging measure. Republicans say enough sentiment exists for a direct age increase, but perhaps not enough to forestall a filibuster.

Democrats would much rather ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, impose universal background checks and take other stringent steps to limit access to guns. But they will accept the agreement as a step in the right direction.

“We cannot let the congressional perfect be the enemy of the good,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, who said he would have preferred to bar military assault weapons. “Though this agreement falls short in this and other respects, it can and will make our nation safer.”

In interviews over the past two weeks, multiple Senate Democrats made it clear they were ready to embrace almost anything the bipartisan talks could produce, rather than engage in another fruitless standoff on the Senate floor and ending up with nothing.

That outcome might have allowed them to make a potent political point, pummeling Republicans for standing in the way of popular gun control initiatives, but it would not have answered the public outcry for action. Stymied on multiple legislative fronts, Democrats are also eager to claim a win for a change.

“While more is needed, this package will take steps to save lives,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday in a statement, indicating she will back it even though the House last week passed much more sweeping measures.

As the talks got underway two weeks ago, it appeared more likely that the effort would collapse, as so many had before it, once the initial outrage of the most recent mass shootings had died down. And the designation of Senator John Cornyn of Texas as the lead Republican negotiator limited the possibilities from the start, since Mr. Cornyn quickly declared that he would not be backing an assault weapons ban or other steps to make weapons harder to obtain.

But as the talks continued, Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, the lead Democratic negotiator, said steady progress was being made, and that the talks had a different feel from the failed efforts of the past. On Sunday, he said on Twitter that he thought Americans would be “surprised” at the scope of the legislative framework, which included more substantial measures than the ones initially on the table.

The more extensive background check for buyers aged 18 to 21 is a narrower version of a change Democrats have been promoting for years, which would allow more time to vet potential gun buyers who are flagged by an initial instant check. And for the first time, juvenile and mental health records will be allowed as part of that review.

The deal includes federal incentives for states to enact so-called red flag laws to seize guns temporarily from those deemed a threat to themselves and others. And in a long-sought change that has been opposed by Republicans in the past, it would also make it harder for those accused of domestic violence to obtain guns, adding dating partners to a prohibition that currently applies only to spouses.

Any one of those provisions is likely to draw significant opposition from Republicans who believe in giving no ground whatsoever on gun safety measures, which are seen as intolerable infringements on Second Amendment rights. But the Republicans engaged in the talks believe they have made worthwhile concessions without treading on the gun rights so many Republican voters see as sacrosanct.

Even this proposal could be achieved only because the potential political backlash for the Republicans directly involved is limited. Four of the 10 Republicans who are backing the proposal — Senators Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania — are retiring, and may never face voters again. None of the other six Republicans who signed on to the compromise is on the ballot in November.

But the fact that Republicans engaged to the level that they did showed that they were hearing from voters at home about the epidemic of mass shootings after the horrific episode in Uvalde, Texas, to a greater extent than they have in the past.

“They are all asking that Congress act,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and one of the lawmakers behind the compromise, after her Memorial Day travels around her state. “They are not sure what should be done, but there are things that Congress can do that will make a difference. There is more of a sense of urgency that something has to be made into law.”

Some Democrats said they were worried that they were handing Republicans a face-saving win that would allow G.O.P. lawmakers to claim they were acting on guns despite an unwillingness to take more significant steps, including gun control measures that polls have shown are backed by large majorities of Americans. But they said they were willing to set those reservations aside in the interest of getting an agreement with both substantive and political wins for each side.

The agreement still has to be turned into legislation, and failure to agree on the terminology and the exact reach of some of the provisions could prove difficult and still imperil the deal. Gun rights groups and legislative opponents are also certain to raise the alarm and attempt to build opposition to it.

“I will vote against the Biden-Schumer gun confiscation legislation, which includes red flag gun confiscation that violates the Second Amendment rights of my constituents,” Representative Mary Miller, Republican of Illinois, declared in on Twitter on Sunday, soon after the framework was disclosed.

Representative Lauren Boebert, the right-wing Republican from Colorado who has made gun rights her calling card, circulated the names of the 10 G.O.P. senators backing the deal on Twitter, calling it a “list of Senate RINOS,” using the acronym for “Republican in name only.”

Though gun safety proponents on Sunday said they hoped the proposal was the beginning of a new era of compromise, this is considered likely to be the best opportunity on gun safety for some time.

Given rising public alarm over the mass shootings and crime in general, both parties were ready to act and give some ground. Enough Republicans were also in a position to take the political leap required, and negotiators in both parties had the backing of their leadership to try to make something happen. But with Republicans poised to win the House and threatening to take the Senate in November, the outlook for more expansive changes sought by Democrats in the months ahead is not bright.

Still, both sides saw what they could agree on as worthwhile, and as evidence that Congress, in light of unspeakable gun violence, could for once offer more than thoughts and prayers.

“When we put our partisan differences aside and focus on what’s best for the American people, the Senate is capable of making a substantial, positive impact in our society,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. “This is a step forward for the Senate, and if this proposal becomes law, will be a much bigger step forward for gun violence prevention and our nation.”

Follow the latest live updates and photos from the Tony Awards.

The Tony Awards are taking place tonight at Radio City Music Hall for the first time since June 2019. The awards ceremony, which honors the plays and musicals staged on Broadway and is resuming its traditional calendar after a long pandemic disruption, honors work that opened on Broadway between Feb. 20, 2020, and May 4, 2022. (“Girl From the North Country” opened on March 5, 2020, just a week before theaters shut down for the pandemic.)

Ariana DeBose, the former Broadway understudy turned Oscar winner, is hosting the three-hour broadcast portion of the Tony Awards ceremony, which starts at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS. Presenters so far have included Jessica Chastain; Bebe Neuwirth; and two of Michael Jackson’s children, Paris Jackson and Prince Jackson. And there will be performances from the past year’s most prominent musicals: “A Strange Loop,” “Company,” “Girl From the North Country,” “MJ,” “Mr. Saturday Night,” “The Music Man,” “Paradise Square” and “Six.”

The CBS broadcast was preceded by a one-hour segment, hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, that began at 7 p.m. Eastern on Paramount+.

An updating list of winners is below.

Best Choreography

Christopher Wheeldon, “MJ”

Best Orchestrations

Simon Hale, “Girl From the North Country”

Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement

Angela Lansbury

Isabelle Stevenson Award

Robert E. Wankel

Regional Theater Tony Award

Cort Theater (Chicago)

Special Tony Award

James C. Nicola

Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater

Asian American Performers Action Coalition
Broadway for All
Feinstein’s/54 Below
Emily Grishman
United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829, IATSE