butler university creative writing camp

Requirements for the Minor

With concentration in creative writing.

• Minimum of 21 hours beyond first-year English
• EN 185 - Contemporary Writing Min Units: 3
• EN 218 - Intro to Creative Writing – Poetry Min Units: 3
• EN 219 - Intro to Creative Writing: Prose Min Units: 3
• Three additional EN creative writing courses
• Two EN literature electives, including at least one course at the 300 level or higher

Creative Writing Camps

Creative Writing day and overnight camps and programs listed in the CampResource.com summer camp directory.

• Academic Camp : Creative Writing
• Coed Day Camp
• San Antonio, Texas
• 210-734-9673

Creative Writing and Illustration Summer Camps

• Atlanta, Georgia
• 404-814.4016

Butler University Creative Writing Camp

• Indianapolis, Indiana
• 317-9409293

Creative Writing Summer

• Austin, Texas
• 512-905-9060

Write More Explorer Writing Camps

• Raleigh, North Carolina
• 919-8419587

Seeds of Creativity

• Delray Beach, Florida
• 561-809-3834

Creative Writing Workshops

• Denton, Texas
• 940-294-6520

The Writers Circle Summer Creative Writing Intensives for Teens

• Madison, New Jersey
• 973-900-0415

Lekha Summer Writing Camp

• San Jose, California
• 408-429-8880

A Novel Idea

• Nashville, Tennessee
• 615-430-1540

Butler University

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Summer Tuition & Fees

Summer 2024.

Tuition rate is per credit hour, based on the student’s college of enrollment. Costs apply to ALL summer courses (on campus, online and hybrid).

For a full breakdown on cost of attendance, click here .

The rates are as follows:

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Channel Imagination into the Art of Language

Creative writing (minor/concentration).

Refine your style and broaden your writing ability across multiple genres.  

interested in pursuing writing on top of your chosen major? A Creative Writing minor will help you connect with your audience to bring ideas to life. This minor will boost your marketability for careers in media, publishing, business, and areas of science.  

Students majoring in English with a Creative Writing concentration cannot add a Creative Writing minor.  

Creative Writing Degrees

• Minor in Creative Writing

View Curriculum

Creative Writing Curriculum Guides & Degree Options

Curriculum guides.

• Creative Writing Minor  

Students interested in course descriptions and academic policies can check out our  Undergraduate Catalog .

Liberal Arts Foundational Core

A Taylor liberal arts education will prepare you to live and work in a fast-changing world. It also goes a step further: laying a strong spiritual foundation that cultivates wisdom. You’ll become a well-versed individual, equipped with critical thinking skills, a lifelong love of learning, and an appreciation for God’s creation.

View Foundational Core Curriculum.

Build Skills In:

• Writing on a deadline  
• Critical thinking and analysis  
• Characteristics of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction  
• Generating ideas and workshopping  
• Revision process   
• Exploring different voices and styles  

Career Opportunities:

• Marketing copywriter  
• Arts administrator  
• Creative director  
• Digital copywriter  
• Editorial assistant  
• Magazine journalist  
• Copyeditor/proofreader  
• Web content manager  
• Writer/author  

Literary London J-Term Trip

Internships

Conferences and Camps

The English department hosts a biannual undergraduate conference, Making Literature , which gives students the opportunity to present papers for presentation, moderate paper sessions, and participate in the exciting logistics of hosting a national conference.

Participate  in WORDshop ! , an on-campus writing camp for area youth designed and taught by English education majors, who have the opportunity to learn how to build a writing community and encourage young writers.  

Related Majors

• Professional Writing
• Communication
• English Education

Experience Taylor Personally

Creative writing is part of the english & modern languages department.

Contact Carie King Department Chair & Associate Professor of English 765-998-5141 email

Contact Melinda Clester English & Modern Languages Program Assistant 765-998-5141 email

Go to the Department

The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.

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Editorial Board Member

Democrats Pushed Biden Aside. Is Eric Adams Next?

For Mayor Eric Adams of New York, watching his party swap President Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris had to be at least a little rattling.

Like Biden, Adams, who is up for re-election next year, is shockingly unpopular. One poll this spring found that just 16 percent of likely voters planned to vote for him. Another, taken in December, found that his approval rating had fallen to 28 percent , the lowest of any mayor since 1996.

In the past few months, three credible Democrats have announced plans to challenge the mayor, all of them from the left.

Scott Stringer, the former comptroller, raised over $ 400,000 . The current comptroller, Brad Lander, has raised more than $650,000 . State Senator Zellnor Myrie raised more than $326,000 over a much shorter time period, of about two months. Thanks to the city’s generous matching fund program, each of these Democrats could mount a serious challenge.

Adams still has a sharp advantage in next year’s mayoral race, where the power of incumbency is generally overwhelming. But there is a sense in the air around City Hall that this mayor may be unusually vulnerable. The big question for Adams and these challengers — in a city where the economy is robust and crime overall is down — is why?

The federal investigation into whether Adams and his campaign illegally directed foreign funds from the Turkish government into their war chest could be one reason, particularly since Adams’s phone was seized by the F.B.I. in November. Another is the arrival of about 180,000 migrants in just over two years, a logistical, budgetary and political nightmare for City Hall, which was caught off guard.

The mayor often seems more interested in gimmicky efforts like his war against rats than the more tedious work of campaigning for the bold policies the city needs, like his excellent housing campaign, known as the City of Yes, aimed at incentivizing much-needed housing development. In a city that is not always progressive but likes to see itself as thoroughly modern, Adams’s political style — which includes a penchant for hiring cronies — feels old, and not in a good way. Other times, he just sounds plain out of touch with the views of many Democratic voters in New York, as when he defended the boorish behavior of top police officials who attacked journalists and judges on social media.

Weighing Adams’s political fortunes, one issue in particular caught my eye: the widespread anger this year, across the city, over the cuts Adams made to the city’s libraries. Pressed to make budget cuts last December, he chose to cut Sunday library service. The measure drew such ire that the funding was restored in June.

It’s getting harder to live in New York, and I think New Yorkers are growing impatient with Adams, whose City Hall often seems to lack a compass. The cost of housing is still soaring. Noise complaints are up . Though most crime is down, New Yorkers still tell pollsters that they feel less safe. It’s a sentiment probably exacerbated by an epidemic of street homelessness and an opioid crisis that has hit New York City in recent years, sending overdose deaths surging .

Adams is working on many of these issues. But three years in, there seems to be an increasing sense that he may not have a clear plan to get life in the country’s largest city firmly back on track from the pandemic that devastated it. Voters in New York may be looking for someone who does.

Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

A Big Oopsie for the Fed

There’s an old joke about a motorist who runs over a pedestrian, then says, “I’m sorry. Let me fix that” — so he backs up and runs over the pedestrian a second time.

Right now, the Federal Reserve is looking like that guy.

The Fed received a lot of criticism for being behind the curve in 2021 and ’22, when it was slow to raise interest rates in the face of rising inflation.

It’s not clear that this delay did significant harm. As Jared Bernstein, the chief White House economic adviser, pointed out in a recent speech , U.S. economic performance during the pandemic and its aftermath stands out among wealthy nations; we experienced similar inflation to our peers while achieving much stronger economic growth:

Still, the Fed’s credibility took a hit.

But it’s now increasingly clear that the Fed is once again behind the curve, in the opposite direction: It has waited too long to cut interest rates as inflation has subsided. Unemployment has been rising, and the latest jobs report , on Friday morning, shows that the rise has now triggered the Sahm Rule, a historically very accurate indicator that the economy has entered a recession.

I wrote about the Sahm Rule this week , warning that it might be triggered but giving reasons not to panic (a view shared by Claudia Sahm herself). And other indicators, like prime-age employment , are still holding up. Nonetheless, the Friday jobs numbers make it very clear that the Fed should have cut rates on Wednesday and probably should have begun cutting earlier this year.

The good news is that the interest rates that matter for the real economy, like 10-year bond rates and mortgage rates, are partly driven not by what the Fed has done but by expectations about what the Fed will do.

So even though the Fed has gotten behind the curve, it may still be able to head off a recession by signaling to markets that it knows that it has ground to make up; we should definitely be looking at a rate cut of half a percentage point (rather than the usual quarter-point move) at its next scheduled meeting, in September, and maybe a before-schedule cut this month if more bad news comes in.

One last point: If the Fed does the right thing, you know that Republicans will claim that it’s a political move to help Democrats. Let’s hope that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, won’t let himself be bullied into passivity.

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Nicholas Kristof

As the World Looks Elsewhere, Famine Descends on Darfur

Sudan has in this century endured genocide, civil war and partition, and now its crisis has worsened. Famine has officially been declared in part of the Darfur region in western Sudan.

Growing starvation has been apparent for many months, so this is in part a failure of the international community to apply adequate pressure on rival parties in Sudan and to provide adequate resources to address the crisis. Far more attention has been directed to conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, and while that is understandable, the upshot is that children are dying unnecessarily in Sudan.

Malnutrition is widespread around the world — about one-fifth of all children globally are physically stunted from inadequate food — but this only very rarely rises to the level of famine. In the 21st century, this is only the third official famine, after one in Somalia in 2011 and one in South Sudan in 2017.

The famine review committee, a group of independent nutrition experts, declared on Thursday that famine had officially arrived at the Zamzam camp, home to about 500,000 displaced people near the city of El Fasher in Darfur.

The cause of the famine is a civil war underway in Sudan between the army and a militia called the Rapid Support Forces, and the obstacles they have placed to impede humanitarian aid workers. Convoys of trucks have been blocked from delivering aid by the armed factions.

The international failure is particularly stark because a generation ago, Darfur was the site of the 21st century’s first genocide, as the Sudanese government backed Arab militias to slaughter members of three non-Arab Black African ethnic groups. Now the Rapid Support Forces, with backing from countries like the United Arab Emirates, are starting over and committing similar atrocities of murder and rape against the same ethnic groups.

S ome experts believe that a “repeat genocide” is underway. And whatever term one applies to the conflict in Sudan, this famine is one consequence.

“Families who fled horrific violence have been going hungry for months,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations, who for many months has been calling attention to the crisis. “Children have been eating dirt and leaves, and every day, babies have been starving to death.”

Nonetheless, she said, the two Sudanese armed factions “have chosen to let the Sudanese people starve, systematically blocking humanitarian corridors.” She called on them to immediately allow access and to attend peace talks scheduled for this month in Switzerland.

Genocide and famine deserve a place on top of the international agenda, and if the armed factions are not listening, we should use every diplomatic and military tool to make them back off and allow humanitarian access.

Brent Staples

The Trolls Don’t Understand Harris’s Life Story

Some participants in the roiling discussion about Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity are trolls like Donald Trump, who falsely claim that Harris — daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father — hasn’t always identified as African American .

The point of this deception is to distort the life story that Harris unfortunately neglects in speeches but tells well in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” The book explains a great many things, including how she gravitated toward Blackness while embracing a richly complex family heritage that includes Indian, American and Caribbean dimensions.

While Harris was growing up in the East Bay area of California, her mother’s side of the family reinforced pride in her South Asian roots while giving Kamala and her sister, Maya, a strong awareness and appreciation of Indian culture. Harris also recalls her family being involved in civil rights demonstrations and gatherings of African American intellectuals.

Her mother — who had an award-winning voice — sang along to the gospel music of Aretha Franklin and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Harris writes: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

Under most circumstances, a student like Harris, whose father was an economics professor at Stanford University , might have attended school there. Instead, she chose Howard University, commonly known as the Mecca of Black education, which opened its doors not long after the Civil War.

Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the campus in almost mystical terms in the book “Between The World and Me”: “The Mecca is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body.” While a student, Harris further steeped herself in African American culture, joining the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Harris’s embrace of Blackness reflected her mother’s encouragement and her own conscious choices. That story will be more widely understood as she takes time to explain it.

Adam Sternbergh

Opinion Culture Editor

Would Kamala Harris Be the First Gen X President?

There’s never been a president who’s a member of Generation X. Whether that would change should Kamala Harris win in November has been a subject of online debate. Is Harris, born in 1964, Gen X? The argument only intensified after she used the phrase “say it to my face,” a distinctly Gen X sentiment.

For some, it’s an open-and-shut case: She’s not. The U.S. Census Bureau defines baby boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964. Harris was born in 1964. Case closed.

However, generational borders are open to interpretation and, over time, a certain intuitive fluidity. Consider this: Generation X the cohort got its name from “Generation X,” the 1991 novel by Douglas Coupland. (Yes, the novel was named for an existing punk band, but that band had disbanded by the early 1980s.) “Generation X” follows a trio of sardonic, disillusioned 20-somethings — some might call them slackers, another term coined around the same time — and it essentially gave culture-watchers a framework and a vocabulary (e.g., “ McJob ”) to understand a generation that was ascendant in the shadow of the boomers.

Coupland, born in 1961, was 29 when the novel was published. At the time, the novel’s own promotional copy contended it was a “salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s.” Currently, the book’s publisher offers a slightly revised timeline , calling Gen X “the generation born from 1960 to 1978,” expanding the original parameters but still including Coupland and, of course, Harris.

A more compelling argument for Harris’s Gen X bona fides might be that the boomers are named for a post-World War II boom in, well, babies. A baby born in the mid-1960s hardly seems part of a postwar uptick in ardor or optimism. Not to mention that this baby would have been a child during the most distinctive boomer cultural milestones, such as the Summer of Love (1967) and Woodstock (1969). Now consider that Harris was a 20-something in 1991, the year Nirvana released the Gen X anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Some might argue that Harris is part of Generation Jones — a cohort for the late boomers who don’t logically fit with those born in the 1940s. The problem with this argument is that Generation Jones only comes up in generational-hair-splitting arguments like this one. And if you accept the originalist interpretation, bound by Coupland’s parameters, this argument resolves in a different way. We’ve already had one Gen X president: Barack Obama, born in 1961, the same year as Coupland.

Which leads to the most important point: Generational signifiers are largely an arbitrary parlor game, so they shouldn’t be bound by hard and fast Census Bureau rules. Insofar as Harris’s political narrative might include having once been overlooked and underappreciated, she certainly feels, at least to members of Gen X, like she’s one of us.

Serge Schmemann

The Joyful Release of Evan Gershkovich Came at a High Price

That more than a dozen people unjustly incarcerated in Russia have been released is obviously great news. As a journalist who spent a decade reporting from Moscow, I am particularly elated to know that Evan Gershkovich, a fine reporter for The Wall Street Journal, does not have to spend another day in Russian detention.

The treason charge against him was a pathetic concoction. But the K.G.B. in Soviet days and Vladimir Putin’s mob today are congenitally incapable of distinguishing between reporting, spying and manipulating the public, since they regard all information as the monopoly of the state. Any independent information, especially critical information, is considered an attack on their authoritarian rule.

Seizing Gershkovich secured the Kremlin a hostage. But seizing a reporter for a major American publication also sent a signal to those foreign reporters who remain in Russia that real journalism under this regime is really dangerous, and not just for homegrown media, which has been thoroughly muzzled or driven into exile.

Putin came to power after the domestic and foreign press had thrown off the muzzles of the Soviet era, and he proceeded, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, to deliberately crush it. Many foreign journalists now try to report from outside Russia; Gershkovich tried valiantly to report from within and paid a heavy price.

So welcome home, Evan! Though we will regret the loss of your reporting from Russia. And welcome home, Alsu Kurmasheva, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Paul Whelan and all the others liberated from Russian detention. And profound thanks to the Biden administration, which doggedly pursued the exchange over months and years.

Yet even as we celebrate the liberation of these innocent people, it is hard to avoid the troubling fact that Putin has successfully used their detentions to get real criminals out of the prisons where they belong, most notably Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany. Biden was right to do everything he could to bring back wrongfully imprisoned Americans, but the readiness of authoritarian states like Russia to seize innocent foreigners as hostages is galling. It’s why they are known as “abductor states” in Washington parlance.

With time, the details of how the complex exchange was arranged may come to light. One question that may never be answered is whether Putin calculated the pros and cons of concluding the exchange while Biden was still in office or waiting to see whether Donald Trump would be back to garner the garlands. Perhaps he concluded that with Trump’s changing political fortunes, such a complex deal was best done now.

Another question is why another American being held in Russia — Marc Fogel, a history teacher in a school for foreigners in Moscow — was not included in the exchange. Fogel was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony for carrying less than an ounce of marijuana, which he said he needed for medical purposes, but the State Department has never classified him as “wrongfully detained.” Why not?

Zeynep Tufekci

To Challenge Trump Directly, Give Him a Platform

When the National Association of Black Journalists announced that Donald Trump had agreed to a question-and-answer session at its annual conference, several members of the group criticized the event organizers for “platforming” the former president. Karen Attiah, a columnist at The Washington Post, even resigned her position as co-chair of the convention, saying she had not been involved in the decision “ to platform Trump in such a format.”

But inviting him was the right decision, and that was clear even before the tough-but-fair questions were asked during a highly informative session.

The idea of deplatforming, or refusing to extend a high-profile public forum to people with potentially harmful views , is not without merit. But it should not be seen as some universal response to all political figures people may find distasteful or all unpopular ideas.

It makes sense to deprive a platform to marginal or extremist figures who thrive on provocations to try to attract attention and stay relevant . Alex Jones, for example, who falsely portrayed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as a government-crafted hoax, generally should not be handed opportunities to spread his malicious brand , even in combative settings.

And there was a time the concept may have been appropriate for Trump: in 2016, when he was able to suck up national attention on traditional and social media while being incorrectly treated as an entertainer and given a lot of time to express his views while not being properly challenged for them. Attention is a key resource in the 21st century, and Trump excels at dominating the national conversation, with skills honed from decades of grabbing publicity to enrich himself.

But as soon as Trump became president and, later, the Republican nominee for president again, the media lost the power to deplatform him. Like it or not, he could be president again, in part because of greater support among African American voters than other recent Republican candidates, and the idea that he could be deplatformed out of his advantageous position rather than challenged and exposed makes no sense. Trump is the one with the power here, and ignoring him just adds to it.

The N.A.B.J. journalists, who have invited many past presidents and candidates to their conventions, also invited Vice President Kamala Harris. I hope Harris accepts, too, and I expect moderators to be tough but fair with her, as well.

Most voters have made up their minds, but the few who will likely determine the fate of the country — so-called low-information swing voters — need to be pressed to make informed comparisons between the candidates. Neither avoiding Trump nor treating Harris with kid gloves would help provide that.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump Ventures Into the Real World, and Can’t Handle It

Trump can’t handle the real world, donald trump faced adversarial questioning, and he didn’t take it well..

Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Trump’s Plan for K-12 Schools Is Absolutely Bonkers

There’s been a lot of reporting this week about how Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a conservative takeover of the U.S. government. On K-12 education, Project 2025 suggests that “ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated” — a call echoed by the Republican Party’s 2024 platform . But while Trump’s own plans for education , which he published on his website and pushed out in a newsletter, don’t explicitly propose eliminating the Department of Education (though he has said before he would abolish it ), they might actually be more bananas and less pragmatic than Project 2025’s goals.

There’s nothing in Trump’s plans about test scores, STEM, school safety, work-force readiness or really anything that concerns most normal parents. It’s pure culture-war red meat about cutting “federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children” and ranting about “Marxists” and “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids.” Both the G.O.P. platform and Project 2025 contain panic about critical race theory, though they include fewer colorful references to pinkos.

But it’s also filled with bizarre promises that the executive branch doesn’t have the authority to fulfill, including a commitment to “implement the direct election of school principals by the parents.” This is a vow Trump has made before. Last year, Libby Stanford at Education Week asked : “Can he do that?”

The answer: “As president,” she wrote, “Trump would have little recourse to incentivize local communities to elect school principals and no ability to require it,” because neither the president nor Congress has the power to make local districts elect principals. The idea would be costly, unpopular and impractical to pull off. There is also no grass-roots support for it.

Trump also promises that he “will create a new credentialing body that will be the gold standard, anywhere in the world, to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children but very simply to educate them.” The teacher pipeline is already so busted — because of low pay, a lack of respect from their communities and the aforementioned culture war vitriol — that we don’t have enough teachers to go around. It’s absurd to think that a new credentialing system with a politically motivated “patriotic” litmus test would solve any problem.

Trump claims to want to put parents “back in charge and give them the final say.” If he really meant that, he would pay more attention to what parents say they want. In the words of an opinion essay from The 74 , an education website, “Forget Hot-Button Ed Issues — Voters Want Safe Schools and Kids Who Can Read.” It’s really that simple.

This Is What Happens When Black Women Challenge Trump

One reason Donald Trump may be afraid to debate Kamala Harris is that apparently all it takes to knock him off his game is a few tough questions from a Black woman.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s 35-minute interview with three women journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday. Clearly rattled by the audacity of Black women tossing him sharp questions, Trump let his facade crumble and slipped into the racist, misogynistic tropes of his native tongue.

“I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said of Vice President Harris, who is Black and Indian American. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person. I think somebody should look into that.” This is false. Harris has always embraced her Blackness and even attended Howard University, a historically Black school.

The journalists at the event did the country a service. Much of that work was done by Rachel Scott of ABC News. Her first question was tough, factual and fair — a model of accountability journalism — and deserves to be repeated:

A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States; that’s not true. You have told four congresswomen of color who are American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys. You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are stupid and racist. You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?

Rather than answer the question, Trump launched a personal attack on Scott, calling her “rude” for doing her job. “First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he spat at Scott. “The first question. You don’t even say hello, ‘hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”

He then said he loves “the Black population” of this country — a curious term that sounds like it was drilled into him by a political consultant to replace his usual, “the Blacks.”He also declared himself to be the “best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” to which Scott quickly replied, “Better than President Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act?”

To win the White House in a razor-thin race, Trump lately has strained to do an impression of someone who likes Black people and respects women. The persistent problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t hold up to reality. When he is challenged, the depth of his animus tends to spill out in public and get in the way.

Pamela Paul

Melania Trump Speaks, Indirectly, and It Speaks Volumes

One of the world’s great mysteries is what really goes on inside Donald and Melania Trump’s marriage. For a very public couple, one whose infidelities have played out garishly in court, their relationship remains remarkably opaque, largely because of Melania’s determined silence and Donald’s pervasive mendacity. Thus, the burning questions: What did she think about the jury determination in 2023 that he had committed sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll? His romp with Stormy Daniels, a porn star, that led to his felony conviction for business fraud? His comments about women bleeding or, say, grabbing women by the “vagina”? Why does she stay?

Melania has remained eerily silent on such matters, which has led only to endless speculation about her beliefs. Every dismissive flick of her wrist has been analyzed. Each tiny permutation of her resting mew face. Her occasionally startling fashion choices. The anti-Trump public’s desire for a whiff of rebellion has been so palpable, it’s tempting to believe that she was secretly on board with his felony convictions , as “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” suggested .

Of course, what happens inside any marriage is a mystery. Political marriages , whether it’s Hillary and Bill , JD and Usha , JFK and Jackie , Barack and Michelle are a constant fascination because we necessarily remain outside of them.

But Donald Trump just offered some unintentionally sad insight into how Melania really feels. In an interview last night on Fox News, in which Trump talked at length about the assassination attempt (yes, he told the story again ), Laura Ingraham asked, “What was Melania’s reaction, if you don’t mind my asking. I know this is very personal, when she learned about what happened on that field in Butler?”

“I asked her that,” Trump told Ingraham. “I said, ‘So what was your feeling?’” He went on to say that Melania can’t really talk about it. But then came a very uncharacteristic moment for Trump. He leaned far forward, exhaled abruptly and said in a rush of words, interspersed with nervous laughter:

“Which is OK because that means she likes me. Or she loves me. I mean, let’s say she could talk about it freely that wouldn’t be … I’m not so sure which is better. But, uh, she either likes or loves me and that’s nice.”

This may have been the most revelatory statement Donald Trump has made about himself or about Melania. He says she either likes him or she loves him. He’s not sure, but surprisingly and jarringly, he seemed to care. Who knew?

Jeneen Interlandi

Arrests of Drug Kingpins Won’t Solve the Addiction Crisis

It was a plot twist made for Netflix. Ismael Zambada García, a founder of the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel , was tricked ( or forced — the details are still muddy) onto a plane in Mexico and brought to the United States to face drug conspiracy charges — and hopefully justice. He had evaded capture for decades and had a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Zambada García was brought in not by U.S. or Mexican authorities but by his own godson and fellow drug trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán López (son of the infamous El Chapo ), who surrendered himself to authorities upon landing.

In the short term, the arrests could produce more violence and instability in Mexican communities that have already seen far too much of both, as rivals of every sort jockey to fill the void left by the newly captured.

They could also shake up already strained relations between the United States and Mexico, especially if Zambada García decides to offer up whatever dirty laundry he has on leaders there in exchange for some kind of leniency here.

What the arrests will not do, if history is any lesson, is stem the flow of illicit drugs out of Mexico or into the United States.

The United States invested billions of dollars in a sustained effort to stop the flow of cocaine out of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. Among other things, that effort helped bring about the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and led eventually to the waning of the notorious Colombia cartel, which was responsible for a vast majority of the global cocaine trade. Today, cocaine production is soaring, not only in Mexico (where experts say U.S. efforts in Colombia led directly to the rise of the Sinaloa kingpins) but in Colombia , too, in some of the same regions that the United States targeted so diligently for so long.

Pursuing and punishing drug traffickers is both necessary and worthwhile. These are bad people who have done terrible things. They have destroyed countless lives, both through the trafficking of fentanyl (now a leading cause of overdose deaths among American adults) and through the extreme violence that they have all made such common use of.

But arrests of drug kingpins are not the key to solving the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis. For that, we need to look within our own borders — at things like treatment , prevention and harm reduction .

Israel Can Still Avoid Regional War and Pursue a Cease-Fire

One of the great risks for the world in the latter half of this year is a wider war in the Middle East involving Iran, Lebanon and Israel. That possibility has just become more likely.

None of the parties want such a war. But each feels obliged to respond to strikes by the other in a way that ratchets up conflict and risks miscalculation and a cycle of escalation.

Today’s crisis results from what appear to be the assassinations just hours apart of Fuad Shukr, a senior member of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas leader who was visiting Iran. Israel claimed responsibility for killing Shukr, although his death was not confirmed, and Israeli agents were widely presumed to be responsible for the killing of Haniyeh.

For all the danger in the coming days and weeks, there is an offramp. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel could use the double assassinations to proclaim victory and then agree to a cease-fire in Gaza. Such a deal, assuming it is still achievable, would end the slaughter in Gaza, bring some hostages home and offer a path to de-escalate the conflict in Israel’s north with Hezbollah, allowing Israelis to return to their homes near the Lebanon border.

“The best way to bring the temperature down everywhere is through the cease-fire in Gaza,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, and he’s exactly right.

But first, prepare for a Lebanese and an Iranian response to the assassinations.

Some Israelis are celebrating the killing of Haniyeh, and it’s certainly preferable to target leaders of Hamas rather than to level entire civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. But I doubt that killing Haniyeh does anything for Israel’s security. He had a reputation for being a bit more open to deals than other Hamas leaders, and he may be replaced by someone like Khaled Mashal, who approved of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Israel had already tried to assassinate Mashal back in 1997.

Israel feels that it has to re-establish deterrence after the Oct. 7 attacks, and Iran likewise feels it must re-establish deterrence when it suffers an assassination on its soil. The upshot is that some counter-strike on Israel by Iran or its proxies is likely soon. If we’re lucky, it won’t cause many casualties and perhaps negotiations on a cease-fire can resume; if a school or other civilian site happens to be hit, then we may see more escalation and find ourselves not on a path to a cease-fire but to a wider war.

Such a war would be devastating, far more so than the Oct. 7 attack. Hezbollah is well armed and barrages of its rockets could cause countless casualties in Israel, while Israel could in turn devastate Lebanon.

Iran, along with the Houthis in Yemen, while farther away, could add to the strikes on Israel. There could well be disruptions to oil production and to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, raising global oil prices significantly. That would probably hurt Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects while helping President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

So let’s hope Netanyahu seizes the opportunity to declare victory and at long last fully embraces a cease-fire. But, sadly, I wouldn’t bet on it. Brace yourself.

Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Atlanta

In Atlanta, Harris Has Dance-Party Energy

The first person I met in the long line for Kamala Harris’s rally in Atlanta on Tuesday was Tomorrow Wright, a pre-K teacher who hadn’t been planning to vote when Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate.

“Biden and Trump, I wasn’t with neither one of them,” she said, adding that Biden had disappointed her by not doing more to cancel student loan debt. But Harris had electrified her, and she’d queued at noon for a rally — her first ever — that wouldn’t start until evening, shading herself from the brutal southern sun under a pink umbrella.

Most of the other people I met at the Georgia State Convocation Center, where around 10,000 people packed the stadium for Harris, said they’d intended to vote for Biden. But with the energy on the ground moribund, many told me they couldn’t rouse themselves to do much more for him, like go to events or volunteer.

“I’ve campaigned since ’08, and I couldn’t go campaign,” said Tammy Clabby, a longtime Democratic activist who worked for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “How could I tell a young person to vote for Joe Biden when he couldn’t finish a sentence in that debate?” Harris’s ascension, however, changed everything. Clabby compared the vibe to Barack Obama’s first electrifying run.

It was an analogy I heard over and over at the ebullient rally, which often felt like a dance party, and not just when the Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion was performing. All the Democrats’ fervent yearning for a fighter to take on Trump, their desperate hope for hope, has converged on a woman who until just weeks ago was regularly overlooked and underestimated.

Some conservatives, seeming discombobulated by their sudden change in political fortunes, appear to think that the explosion of Democratic enthusiasm for Kamala Harris is a media psy-op.

“Is it possible to completely manufacture a cultural phenomenon by taking a vapid, leftist San Francisco Democrat and turning her into something that she’s not through nonstop gaslighting?” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wrote on social media.

They should keep telling themselves that.

Are Israel and Hezbollah Headed for a Dangerous Escalation?

A rocket lands on a playing field on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 children and teenagers. Israel vows a “severe” response, and the United States and other Western leaders urge restraint. The response comes on Tuesday: a strike on a dense residential neighborhood in southern Beirut, which Israel says was targeted against the Hezbollah commander responsible for the rocket attack. The suspense is tangible: Is this it?

Is this the next war that has been a threat to Israel and its neighbors through all the nine months of the conflict with Hamas? A war that would be far deadlier than the one in Gaza, with the Israeli Defense Force pitted against the most heavily armed militia in the Middle East, one wielding a vast arsenal of attack drones, rockets and missiles far greater and more sophisticated than anything Hamas has?

This may not be the moment. Hezbollah, the political party and militia that controls southern Lebanon, has denied that Saturday’s attack was its doing, though that may be intended more to deny responsibility for killing members of the Druse community, a small offshoot of Shia Islam who have lived on the Golan Heights since before Israel seized the area 57 years ago, and who have tried to stay clear of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Neither Israel nor the United States doubt that Hezbollah was responsible, especially given that tit-for-tat rocket attacks have been constant since the Gaza war erupted last Oct. 7. Saturday’s missile was most likely intended for a nearby Israeli base, not the Druse youngsters. Still, a strike on a non-Jewish community in Israel also put pressure on Israel to show that it cares about the security of all its citizens. In the Middle East, nothing is ever simple or binary.

The intended target on Tuesday, Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah official, was killed in the attack , according to the Israeli military, and there were reports that 35 people were wounded.

It’s not clear whether Israel’s strike on Beirut, if the response ends there for now, will provoke Hezbollah to escalate the duel. But even if none of the actors involved want an all-out war at this juncture, the conditions for one to erupt will remain. Hezbollah has vowed to continue popping rockets into northern Israel so long as the fighting continues in Gaza, leading to retaliatory Israeli strikes and to the evacuation of thousands of residents from both sides of the border — 60,000 Israelis and a far greater number of Lebanese.

According to Amos Harel, a defense analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, writing recently in Foreign Affairs (before the latest exchange), there is a strong longing in Israel to deal with Hezbollah “once and for all.” And in the north, Harel wrote, Israel is far better prepared for a major clash than it was in the south. In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when confusion reigned along the Gaza border, three Israeli divisions were rapidly deployed to preclude Hezbollah from opening a second front.

For President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose reaction to a dangerous crisis will be closely scrutinized now that she is the probable Democratic candidate for president, preventing a dangerous new war, one that would reverberate across the Middle East, is a critical challenge.

Farah Stockman

It’s Not Too Late for Change in Venezuela

The Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro wants the world to believe he won Sunday’s presidential election . But nobody should believe that until he releases precinct-level vote tallies and submits to an independent audit. That authorities have failed so far to do that “tells you everything you need to know about the election,” Geoff Ramsey, a specialist on Latin America at the Atlantic Council, told me.

Maduro has done everything in his power to tilt the election in his favor, from barring rivals to arresting their campaign staff members. But even that doesn’t seem to have been enough. Now he appears to be faking the numbers and declaring victory. It’s already being called the “ mother of all stolen elections .”

Luckily, the Venezuelan opposition anticipated that Maduro would try to rig the vote, and dispatched volunteers to collect precinct-level tally sheets from voting centers across the country. The opposition says it has collected some 70 percent of such tally sheets , enough data to prove that voters overwhelmingly rejected Maduro.

And why wouldn’t they vote him out? He has presided over the worst economic collapse of any country not at war . Since 2014, the country’s economy shrank by roughly three-quarters , and about 20 percent of citizens have left, thanks to Maduro’s corruption, mismanagement of the oil industry, and U.S. sanctions brought on by his policies. Who would vote for six more years of that?

Every country in the region has suffered from Venezuela’s collapse and would benefit from its recovery. Leaders around the world — and those who prop up the Maduro regime — should ask themselves how much more Venezuela can take and insist that Maduro come clean with the precinct-level results.

“There is a lot of consensus even among governments that have been traditionally friendly to Maduro —Mexico, Brazil, Colombia — that there has to be transparency around the results,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told me.

This is far from the first time that Maduro has been accused of rigging the vote. But the ability of the opposition to collect such compelling proof of it is a testament of the incredible bravery and surprising unity of the opposition under the leadership of Venezuela’s “Iron Lady,” María Corina Machado , an opposition front-runner who was barred from running.

Undaunted, Machado rallied behind Edmundo González Urrutia, a little-known former diplomat who was allowed on the ballot. Exit polls and opinion surveys suggest that he won in a landslide. Anger at Maduro’s attempts to claim victory has led to mass protests and even the toppling of a statue of Hugo Chávez . The Venezuelan people deserve better, and they know it.

Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

Trump vs. ‘America’s Border Czar’

“Border czar.”

If Donald Trump and his campaign staff could tattoo that epithet onto Kamala Harris’s forehead or dress her in a sandwich board bearing only that phrase, they would. So it’s not surprising to encounter it at the start of the first major ad that the Trump campaign has released since Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee.

“This is America’s border czar,” says an unseen narrator, in an ominous voice, as the words “Border Czar Kamala Harris” appear onscreen, just to hammer home the designation. They’re superimposed over video of Harris, in a kaleidoscopic blouse, dancing at an unspecified celebration. Message: She’s not just out to lunch. She’s out having a blast while the country implodes.

On a scale of 1 to someone screaming that Harris is an agent of the apocalypse, the ad rates about a 9. It’s as subtle as Trump. And like him, it doesn’t play fair — in tying illegal border crossings to terrorism and in assigning her ultimate responsibility for those crossings. She was charged not with fortifying the border but with the vaguer task of working with Central American countries to deter migration by identifying and alleviating its causes.

But the ad is smart, and it’s a clear signal of what will be a main theme, possibly the main theme, in Republicans’ attacks against Harris in particular and Democrats in general. Americans are much more concerned about illegal immigration than they were in the past, and polls show that they trust Trump more than they do Democrats to hold back the tide.

That’s a big reason that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is on Harris’s short list of potential running mates: He represents a border state and has spoken forcefully for greater border security. Harris must persuade voters that she’s concerned about and focused on that issue.

But Trump must take care, too. The ad — which is scheduled to appear in the six top battleground states — underscores that. The colors in Harris’s blouse, the lightheartedness of her dance moves, a carefully selected snippet of remarks she made to Lester Holt of NBC News: Those details and others combine to suggest that Harris is frivolous, different, even other, especially because there’s an image of Trump in the ad, too, and he’s striding purposefully in a suit and red tie outside what appears to be the White House.

Serious man. Silly (and dangerous) woman. That’s the contrast being drawn, and it could turn off many voters.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Biden Is Right: End Lifetime Tenure on the Supreme Court

House Speaker Mike Johnson was probably right to describe President Biden’s Supreme Court reform proposals as “dead on arrival” in his chamber, but that’s just because Republicans don’t want anything to interfere with their 6-to-3 supermajority on the court. It wasn’t that long ago that many Republicans fully supported the most compelling of Biden’s ideas: term limits for justices.

In 2012, before he was a Republican senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley wrote an article saying that if justices knew they would not serve on the court for life, it would “foster a more circumspect attitude toward the court’s role.” The independence created by life terms, he wrote, breeds “an overconfidence in the justices’ capacity to get constitutional questions right.” (And he was in a position to know, as a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts.) Term limits were also supported by Senator Marco Rubio , and Senator Ted Cruz proposed putting justices up for election every eight years.

Now it’s Democrats who want to end lifetime appointments, having seen the six justices in the supermajority trample individual rights and do nothing about shameful ethical abuses within their ranks. But an 18-year maximum tenure for justices, as Biden and many others have proposed, shouldn’t be ping-ponged around by whatever faction is dissatisfied with the current court. It’s a good idea born of a mistake by the Constitution’s drafters, who weren’t able to foresee the problems caused by lifetime appointments.

For one thing, life spans were shorter then. Through the 1960s, the average term on the court was around 15 years; after 1970, it became about 26 years. The founders did not fully anticipate how a justice might become insulated from reality after serving on the court for many decades. They didn’t anticipate the potential for arrogance and corruption, as long-serving justices — like Clarence Thomas — would take lavish gifts from special interests without the possibility of penalty.

And they didn’t anticipate that a president like Donald Trump would outsource his appointment power to fierce ideological warrior groups like the Federalist Society, who scour law schools for the most conservative students, get them clerkships and then promote them at a young age for judicial openings, in hopes of keeping them on the bench for more than a quarter-century.

The United States remains the only major constitutional democracy without either term limits or a mandatory retirement age for judges on the highest court. Almost every American state, in fact, has some kind of term limit for high-court justices. Only Rhode Island has neither a term limit nor an age restriction.

Johnson says the system has worked fine for centuries, but it clearly has not. The time for change is long overdue. Biden deserves credit as the first president to join the call for an overhaul.

The Tradwife Life Is Nothing New

Hannah Neeleman , whose nom de internet is Ballerina Farm, was described as “the queen of the tradwives,” by Megan Agnew of The Times of London this month. Neeleman previously claimed to be “unfamiliar with the term,” which describes social media influencers who often promote traditional gender roles and present idealized domestic scenes.

I believe tradwives when they say they are happy living this way. But getting behind the images of Ballerina Farm confirmed what I already suspected: Being a tradwife is not appealing or aspirational for many modern women, despite how beautiful it looks in photographs.

Neeleman is an ex-Juilliard ballerina who is married to an heir to the JetBlue fortune, and the two live on a farm in Utah with their “8 littles” as she puts it in her Instagram bio . Ballerina Farm’s brand of tradwifery might best be described as internet pastoral: home-schooling children, making croissants, drinking turmeric lattes made from raw milk from the farm. The profile asks: Does Neeleman’s lifestyle represent “an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?”

I would argue that all she represents is an old model of wealthy white womanhood, disseminated by new technology. This model valorizes the performance of motherhood if you act joyful all the time, are buoyed by an ocean of family money and can compete in a beauty pageant two weeks postpartum, as Neeleman did. But it has no material support for the human beings who have more complex feelings than a perfect facade allows.

Pitting tradwives against feminists is a trap . That makes it seem that feminists don’t care about families or hate stay-at-home parents or big families, which is false. Many feminists are stay-at-home parents, but tradwives are a separate category who tend to believe in cultural values like submitting to one’s husband.

Neeleman certainly defers to her husband, Daniel, about basically every major life decision she has made since they met in their early 20s. As Agnew notes: “Daniel wanted to live in the great Western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any.”

Hannah Neeleman’s version of womanhood represents an age-old glorification of maternal suffering. Her family has the money to employ nannies and many people to do other household tasks, but she must go without additional child care because her husband doesn’t want her to have it. She sometimes falls so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.

While her social media feed makes her suffering appear glamorous, if you take off the pageant sequins, all that’s left is a vulnerable person, worn into the ground.

Thomas L. Friedman

Democrats Could Regret Calling Trump and His Supporters ‘Weird’

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate , Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, the author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Jonathan Alter

Harris Should Pick Walz, and Then Put Shapiro and Kelly to Work

While Kamala Harris could easily make a surprise pick, I’m assuming the accuracy of reports that the short list consists of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

My suggestion is that for the next 100 days, she should effectively choose all three.

At first glance, Kelly or Shapiro might seem to help more by joining the ticket. While Harris is now comfortably ahead in Minnesota, she’s behind or dead even in Arizona and Pennsylvania polls.

But this assessment doesn’t take into account what the V.P. nominee will actually do in the 14 weeks before the election: Lambaste Donald Trump, spearhead fund-raisers in big cities, back Democratic Senate candidates in close races and campaign in battleground states when Harris is elsewhere.

That’s not the best use of Kelly’s and Shapiro’s time. Kelly’s priority should be to help nail down Arizona, where he has great credibility on the border issue that threatens Harris. Likewise, Shapiro should stay put in Pennsylvania. By helping Harris reposition herself on fracking, Shapiro, who is surprisingly popular in rural Pennsylvania, can cut Trump’s margins there and help Democrats carry the state. And by not putting Shapiro on the ticket, Harris avoids splits in the party over the war in Gaza.

If Harris visits both Arizona and Pennsylvania once a week for two or three events, as she should, that’s a whopping 28 to 42 joint appearances in each state with these popular figures.

Walz, meanwhile, would spread his nimble Midwestern charm as the actual V.P. nominee. He has a résumé that looks as if it was designed in a lab: raised in a Nebraska town of 400; geography teacher and coach of football state champions; 24 years as a noncommissioned officer of the Army National Guard; moderate Democratic House member from a deeply red Minnesota district; highly effective governor with crowd-pleasing wins on cannabis, paid family leave and mandatory gun background checks, among others. He connects culturally in rural America, which would provide critical balance on a ticket headed by a member of the coastal cultural elite.

Walz last week launched the creative “they’re weird” talking point about the Trump/Vance ticket, now taken up by the whole Democratic Party, and there’s more where that came from. Vice-presidential nominees are meant to be attack dogs, a role that political consultants in Arizona and Pennsylvania say neither Kelly nor Shapiro is especially well equipped to play. Walz is already embracing that task with relish, a happy warrior who stays light and upbeat on TV.

Selecting Kelly, Shapiro or Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina would reassure moderate voters — a critical task for Harris as she faces a fierce assault for being too liberal. But there are other options for doing so. One good way to start: Harris should announce that Mitt Romney will be her secretary of defense or homeland security.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

The Important Unanswered Question About Kamala Harris

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

For all the Democratic defections from President Biden and euphoria over Vice President Kamala Harris, there’s an important unanswered question about whether Harris can do something that Biden got very, very right in 2020: Be appealing to independent, undecided and swing voters with a centrist message emphasizing normalcy and uniting the country.

I think that message won Biden victory in the Electoral College. And a lot of Democrats are telling me two things right now: Harris will win the popular vote in November (thanks to strong margins in blue states), but it’s far from clear if she will win the Electoral College vote. She’s got to prove herself to those independent, undecided and swing voters in battleground states, or else she’s not going to win the presidency. And for all the record fund-raising and meme excitement, Harris hasn’t started indicating how she plans to do so.

Blue America is undoubtedly fired up and closing the enthusiasm gap fast against Donald Trump, and that’s a big deal — it’s what Democrats needed to do in Week 1 of the 15-week Harris presidential sprint. As we enter Week 2, I’ll be watching today for signs of a swing-voter message from two star governors and possible Harris running mates — Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — who are jointly campaigning for Harris in the Philadelphia suburbs. And I’ll be keeping an eye on new Harris campaign ads and her next big event, in Atlanta on Tuesday.

So far, Harris has mostly been talking to friendly Democratic audiences. She is leaving it to surrogates to make her case in more challenging venues, as Pete Buttigieg did Sunday on Fox News , or speak most pointedly to swing voters and small-town Americans in purple and red areas, as Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has.

Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton won the presidency because they made real attempts — through policy ideas, speeches, campaign travel and, sometimes, criticism of their party or allies — to show that they had a measure of independence, thought for themselves and, yes, were looking out for all Americans, not just team blue. Both Bushes broke with some in the G.O.P. too (most notably on taxes and then immigration). Now that Harris has fired up the base faster than perhaps even she expected, what will she do to go beyond that base?

I’m really curious about what she says at her Atlanta event and where she plans to campaign in the days and weeks to come. And I’m also curious to see if she can really put Trump on the defensive over debating her ; she could reach a lot of those swing voters through debates, as well as prosecuting the case that Trump is unfit to lead the country again. Making a serious proposal to Trump that they meet for one debate a week starting in September would take this historic election to a new level.