In a study published last week, researchers tested 13 sharks off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and found that all had traces of cocaine in their liver and muscle tissues. The levels of cocaine found in these sharks were reported to be as much as 100 times higher than in previously observed marine life.

“We were actually dumbfounded,” said Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a co-author of the study and a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil. “We were excited in a bad way, but it’s a novel report. It’s the first time this data has ever been found for any top predator.”

This was the first study to analyze cocaine in sharks, following various studies on smaller species, including mollusks, crustaceans and even eels. All 13 sharks examined were found to have unfiltered cocaine in much higher concentrations than in previous studies on other animals, indicating chronic exposure to the drug.

But the study examined only a small sample, leaving many questions about whether the exposure harms the sharks or the humans who eat them.

The study in Brazil was conceived earlier this year after researchers discovered high levels of cocaine in the rivers that form Rio de Janeiro’s watershed. Other marine experts had looked into whether sharks in the Gulf of Mexico were ingesting cocaine from the numerous packages lost or dumped in the waters in a 2023 documentary titled “Cocaine Sharks,” which served as an inspiration for the title of last week’s study.

The team of biologists from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation — an organization affiliated with Brazil’s Ministry of Health — were particularly interested in testing top predators inhabiting these watersheds. Having previously conducted tests on sharks for other contaminants, they sent to a lab samples of the Brazilian sharpnose — a relatively small species of shark from Rio de Janeiro’s coastal waters often consumed by locals.

Hauser Davis said there were several hypotheses as to how cocaine found its way to the marine creatures, including illegal labs refining cocaine or cocaine packages lost or dumped by traffickers. But she believes these account for only a small amount of the drug found in the ocean.

“We feel that the major source would be excretion through urine and feces from people using cocaine,” she said. Most wastewater treatment plants worldwide cannot effectively filter these substances, leading to their release into the ocean.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Some eighth graders at her public school had set up TikTok accounts impersonating teachers. Motz, who had never used TikTok, created an account.

She found a fake profile for @patrice.motz, which had posted a real photo of her at the beach with her husband and their young children. “Do you like to touch kids?” a text in Spanish over the family vacation photo asked. “Answer: Sí.”

In the days that followed, some 20 educators — about one-quarter of the school’s faculty — discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed or commented on the fraudulent accounts.

In the aftermath, the school district briefly suspended several students, teachers said. The principal during one lunch period chastised the eighth grade class for its behavior.

The biggest fallout has been for teachers like Motz, who said she felt “kicked in the stomach” that students would so casually savage teachers’ families. The online harassment has left some teachers worried that social media platforms are helping to stunt the growth of empathy in students. Some teachers are now hesitant to call out pupils who act up in class. Others said it had been challenging to keep teaching.

“It was so deflating,” said Motz, who has taught at the school, in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb, for 14 years. “I can’t believe I still get up and do this every day.”

The Great Valley incident is the first known group TikTok attack of its kind by middle schoolers on their teachers in the United States. It’s a significant escalation in how middle and high school students impersonate, troll and harass educators on social media. Before this year, students largely impersonated one teacher or principal at a time.

The middle schoolers’ attack also reflects broader concerns in schools about how students’ use, and abuse, of popular online tools is intruding on the classroom. Some states and districts have recently restricted or banned student cellphone use in schools, in part to limit peer harassment and cyberbullying on Instagram, Snap, TikTok and other apps.

Now social media has helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some children to weaponize them against adults.

“We didn’t have to deal with teacher-targeting at this scale before,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union. “It’s not only demoralizing. It could push educators to question, ‘Why would I continue in this profession if students are doing this?’”

In a statement, the Great Valley School District said it had taken steps to address “22 fictitious TikTok accounts” impersonating teachers at the middle school. It described the incident as “a gross misuse of social media that profoundly impacted our staff.”

Last month, two female students at the school publicly posted an “apology” video on a TikTok account using the name of a seventh grade teacher as a handle. The pair, who did not disclose their names, described the impostor videos as a joke and said teachers had blown the situation out of proportion.

“We never meant for it to get this far, obviously,” one of the students said in the video. “I never wanted to get suspended.”

“Move on. Learn to joke,” the other student said about a teacher. “I am 13 years old,” she added, using an expletive for emphasis, “and you’re like 40 going on 50.”

In an email to The New York Times, one of the students said that the fake teacher accounts were intended as obvious jokes, but that some students had taken the impersonations too far.

A TikTok spokesperson said the platform’s guidelines prohibit misleading behavior, including accounts that pose as real people without disclosing that they are parodies or fan accounts. TikTok said a U.S.-based security team validated ID information — such as driver’s licenses — in impersonation cases and then deleted the data.

Great Valley Middle School, known locally as a close-knit community, serves about 1,100 students in a modern brick complex surrounded by a sea of bright green sports fields.

The impostor TikToks disrupted the school’s equilibrium, according to interviews with seven Great Valley teachers, four of whom requested anonymity for privacy reasons. Some teachers already used Instagram or Facebook but not TikTok.

The morning after Motz, the Spanish teacher, discovered her impersonator, the disparaging TikToks were already an open secret among students.

“There was this undercurrent conversation throughout the hallway,” said Shawn Whitelock, a longtime social studies teacher. “I noticed a group of students holding a cellphone up in front of a teacher and saying, ‘TikTok.’”

Students took images from the school’s website, copied family photos that teachers had posted in their classrooms and found others online. They made memes by cropping, cutting and pasting photos, then superimposing text.

The low-tech “cheapfake” images differ from recent incidents in schools where students used artificial intelligence apps to generate real-looking, digitally altered images known as “deepfakes.”

While some of the Great Valley teacher impostor posts seemed jokey and benign — like “Memorize your states, students!” — other posts were sexualized. One fake teacher account posted a collaged photo with the heads of two male teachers pasted onto a man and woman partially naked in bed.

Fake teacher accounts also followed and hit on other fake teachers.

“It very much became a distraction,” Bettina Scibilia, an eighth grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, said of the TikToks.

Students also targeted Whitelock, who was the faculty adviser for the school’s student council for years.

A fake @shawn.whitelock account posted a photo of Whitelock standing in a church during his wedding, with his wife mostly cropped out. The caption named a member of the school’s student council, implying the teacher had wed him instead. “I’m gonna touch you,” the impostor later commented.

“I spent 27 years building a reputation as a teacher who is dedicated to the profession of teaching,” Whitelock said in an interview. “An impersonator assassinated my character — and slandered me and my family in the process.”

Scibilia said a student had already posted a graphic death threat against her on TikTok earlier in the school year, which she reported to police. The teacher impersonations increased her concern.

“Many of my students spend hours and hours and hours on TikTok, and I think it’s just desensitized them to the fact that we’re real people,” she said. “They didn’t feel what a violation this was to create these accounts and impersonate us and mock our children and mock what we love.”

A few days after learning of the videos, Edward Souders, the principal of Great Valley Middle School, emailed the parents of eighth graders, describing the impostor accounts as portraying “our teachers in a disrespectful manner.”

The school also held an eighth grade assembly on responsible technology use.

But the school district said it had limited options to respond. Courts generally protect students’ rights to off-campus free speech, including parodying or disparaging educators online — unless the students’ posts threaten others or disrupt school.

“While we wish we could do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in what action we can take when students communicate off campus during nonschool hours on personal devices,” Daniel Goffredo, the district’s superintendent, said in a statement.

The district said it couldn’t comment on any disciplinary actions, to protect student privacy.

In mid-March, Nikki Salvatico, president of the Great Valley Education Association, a teachers union, warned the school board that the TikToks were disrupting the school’s “safe educational environment.”

“We need the message that this type of behavior is unacceptable,” Salvatico said at a school board meeting March 18.

The next day, Souders sent another email to parents. Some posts contained “offensive content,” he wrote, adding: “I am optimistic that by addressing it together, we can prevent it from happening again.”

While a few accounts disappeared — including those using the names of Motz, Whitelock and Scibilia — others popped up. In May, a second TikTok account impersonating Scibilia posted several new videos mocking her.

She and other Great Valley educators said they had reported the impostor accounts to TikTok, but had not heard back. But several teachers, who felt the videos had violated their privacy, said they did not provide TikTok with a personal ID to verify their identities.

On Wednesday, TikTok removed the account impersonating Scibilia and three other fake Great Valley teacher accounts flagged by a reporter.

Scibilia and other teachers are still processing the incident. Some teachers have stopped posing for and posting photographs, lest students misuse the images. Experts said this type of abuse could harm teachers’ mental health and reputations.

“That would be traumatizing to anyone,” said Susan D. McMahon, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators. She added that verbal student aggression against teachers was increasing.

Now teachers like Scibilia and Motz are pushing schools to educate students on how to use tech responsibly — and bolster policies to better protect teachers.

In the Great Valley students’ “apology” on TikTok last month, the two girls said they planned to post new videos. This time, they said, they would make the posts private so teachers couldn’t find them.

“We’re back, and we’ll be posting again,” one said. “And we are going to private all the videos at the beginning of next school year,” she added, “’cause then they can’t do anything.”

On Friday, after a Times reporter asked the school district to notify parents about this article, the students deleted the “apology” video and removed the teacher’s handle from their account. They also added a disclaimer: “Guys, we’re not acting as our teachers anymore that’s in the past !!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”

On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed servicemen.

The new headstones acknowledge each soldier’s rank, unit and home state — a simple honor accorded to every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous headstones that noted only their name and date of death.

The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-volley rifle salute, a bugler played taps and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.

“Can you balance the scales by what we’re doing?” Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins, was among the first 13 soldiers hanged in 1917, said at the ceremony. “I don’t know. But it’s an attempt. It’s an attempt to make things right.”

The soldiers were members of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black unit. They had been assigned to guard the construction of a training camp for white soldiers in Houston.

White residents called them racist slurs and physically harassed them. After two Black soldiers were beaten and violently arrested, a group of more than 100 Black soldiers, hearing rumors of additional threats, seized rifles and marched into Houston, where violent clashes broke out Aug. 23, 1917.

Nineteen people were killed — among them white police officers, soldiers and civilians and four Black soldiers.

At their trials, the members of the 24th Infantry Regiment were represented by a single officer who had some legal training but was not a lawyer. The court deliberated for only two days before convicting the first 58 soldiers.

Less than 24 hours later, with no chance for appeal, the first 13 soldiers were hanged on a hastily constructed gallows on the banks of Salado Creek, which runs through San Antonio. By September 1918, 52 additional soldiers had been convicted and six more had been hanged.

Angela Holder, whose great-uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, was among the 13 soldiers hanged Dec. 11, 1917, said stories of his service told by her great-aunt prompted her to research his military career. She learned, she said, that he had served in the Philippines.

“He served proudly, and to now have the headstone redressed is an acknowledgment of who he was,” Holder said. “He was a very proud soldier.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A $38 million investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies — the largest gift in the history of the city’s public schools — will transform a small existing high school into an 800-student feeder for the sprawling Mass General system, which is plagued by some 2,000 job vacancies.

Boston is one of 10 cities or regions where Bloomberg has pledged to spend a total of $250 million over five years pairing hospitals with high schools. Students will earn college credits as they train for careers in nursing, emergency medicine, lab science, medical imaging and surgery.

But in a nod to evolving views on higher education, and to surging demand for vocational training, the program will prepare thousands of students to start full-time jobs upon graduation instead of college if they choose.

“There’s a growing sense that the value of college has diminished, relative to cost,” Howard Wolfson, education program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, said in an interview Tuesday. “This should not be construed as anti-college — every kid who wants to go should have the opportunity. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge the reality that, for a lot of kids, college is not an option, or they want to get on with their careers.”

The foundation started by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who grew up in a Boston suburb, will establish similar partnerships between schools and hospitals in New York; Philadelphia; Houston; Dallas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina, as well as in rural areas in Tennessee and Alabama.

In Boston, the money will allow the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers to gradually double its enrollment to 800 students from 400 and offer five health care career tracks instead of the current two. The new curriculum will be developed by Mass General Brigham.

Students will choose a specialty by the end of 10th grade, then spend time as juniors and seniors training in hospital labs, emergency departments and other such settings, the school said.

Founded in 1995, the Kennedy Academy has a waiting list of 400 students, its leaders said. That mirrors interest in vocational training seen around the state and country. A 2019 state report on vocational education in Massachusetts found that student demand had increased 33% in five years, with vocational school enrollments falling far short of projected job needs in health care and other fields.

Supporters of vocational schools have pushed the state to fund more of them, and to adopt a lottery admissions system for existing programs, arguing that students of color have been unfairly excluded.

Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston said the project will be a “game changer,” helping to build a stronger, more stable middle class in a city that ranks among the most expensive in the country.

“For our community members to be able to step into well-paying jobs where they’re desperately needed,” she said, “that builds on-ramps to higher-paying careers that allow you to stay in the city and serve your community.”

Median starting salaries for some of the jobs that students will train for range from $56,000 for surgical technologists to $71,000 for respiratory therapists, according to Bloomberg.

More than 90% of students at the Kennedy Academy are Black or Hispanic; 85% are classified as “high needs,” meaning that they are from low-income households, are multilingual English learners, or have disabilities. To ensure that students succeed, the gift from Bloomberg includes money for supports such as school social workers and mental health clinicians.

Dr. Anne Klibanski, president and CEO of Mass General Brigham, said the partnership will diversify the system’s workforce, helping it more closely mirror the increasingly diverse city it serves. Filling vacant jobs will also help cut wait times for patients and ease burnout among overextended employees, she said.

Wolfson said he envisions cities across the country setting up similar pipelines to fill 2 million job openings in health care, a number projected to double by 2031. In Boston, Mary Skipper, the schools superintendent, said she can imagine feeder schools to help address the critical national shortage of teachers in addition to health care workers.

“It’s a very powerful model,” she said. “It sets a blueprint.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The 37-year-old actress has been checking off all sorts of awards-season firsts thanks to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the Martin Scorsese-directed period drama in which she plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically murdered by her husband (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle (Robert De Niro) in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land. If Mollie is the movie’s conscience, Gladstone is its center of gravity: Even when she shares scenes with A-listers such as DiCaprio and De Niro, the film bends to her.

That portrayal has so far earned Gladstone a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle and nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and major nods from the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Awards are likely to come in the weeks ahead. In the run-up to those ceremonies, Gladstone has been a hotly pursued presence for roundtables and events on both coasts, and she has taken to those opportunities with such command — using her platform to amplify other Native voices and concerns — that you’d never know that she wasn’t used to this, or that for a long time, she was hesitant to engage with Hollywood at all.

“There’s a handful of people who love film that have been aware of my career for a while, but this has been like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone said, tracing the far-flung route that has led her to all those awards-show ballrooms. “My dad’s a boilermaker, my mom was a teacher. I was raised on a reservation, went to public school. It’s a very normal, sort of working-class upbringing in one way, and in another way, I’m just a rez girl.”

On screen, Gladstone has the profile and indomitable presence of a 1940s film star. In person, when we met last month at a rooftop restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, Gladstone was more approachable but every bit as striking, with vivid brown eyes that her father once warned her were eminently readable. He said this mostly to dissuade her from telling lies, but he was right: When we feel for Mollie, it’s because of the fear and righteous indignation that Gladstone can convey in just a look.

She also has a wry sense of humor, glimpsed in some of the Scorsese film’s lighter moments, and an ability to punctuate her conversation topics and awards-season speeches with an impressive command of history and facts. “Lily is a big nerd wrapped up in this very giving, curious person,” said director Erica Tremblay, whose film “Fancy Dance” starred Gladstone. “If you’re at a dinner party with Lily, you’re going to find yourself talking about physics and bumblebees — and when I say she’ll be talking about physics, she’ll be talking about some very specific theory that Lily will know the mechanics of inside and out.”

At an Elle event in December celebrating women in Hollywood, Gladstone was honored alongside the likes of Jennifer Lopez, America Ferrera and Jodie Foster, but she particularly sparked to meeting the academic Stacy L. Smith, whose University of Southern California think tank, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, had recently issued a report about Native American representation in Hollywood. After analyzing 1,600 films released from 2007 to 2022, Smith found that the amount of speaking roles for Native American actors was virtually nil, less than one quarter of 1% of all the roles cataloged.

A leading role such as Gladstone’s in a film the size of “Killers of the Flower Moon” isn’t just unusual, it’s unprecedented, so much so that Smith subtitled her report, “The Lily Gladstone Effect.” Gladstone can hardly wrap her head around that recognition. “It’s the kind of paper that if I were a student now taking the same class, I would be citing in my studies,” she said.

For DiCaprio, Gladstone has more than earned the plaudits. “To see her rise to this occasion and be somebody that’s so formidable as far as understanding the depth of her own industry and Native American history, it’s an incredible moment to be a part of,” he said in a phone call. “I’m just glad to be next to her.”

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To tout his co-star, DiCaprio has been a willing participant in the sort of red-carpet photo opportunities and awards-season parties he’d normally eschew. “It’s insane,” Gladstone said. “It’s like I’m trotting this mythical creature around, out and about, and he’s doing so of his own volition.” The ante was upped even further when Gladstone learned that her favorite actress, Cate Blanchett, would conduct a Q&A with her after “Killers of the Flower Moon” screened in London. “I’m hugging myself right now, I know your readers can’t see that,” she told me.

Gladstone acknowledged that sometimes, the intensity of the awards-season spotlight can sometimes feel overwhelming. “I can’t speak from the heart if I’m not connected to what’s real about all this,” she said. In those moments, she endeavors to carry her community forward with her: “I know that all of this attention on me right now means so much more than just me.”

In other words, don’t expect Gladstone to come out of this experience transformed into a demanding Hollywood diva, as so many have before her. She can’t be bowled over, on screen or off.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who know Lily Gladstone and have been friends with her for a long time and seen this journey, and she is so steadfast and so immovable in terms of her values and her core,” Tremblay said. “I think she’ll be exactly the same, but with fancier clothes.”

As a child growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, there was one week that Gladstone looked forward to all year, when the Missoula Children’s Theater would roll up in a little red truck, construct a set out of PVC pipes and cloth backdrops, and cast local kids in a production that the whole community would come out to see at the end of the week. “I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, partly because I was just goofy,” she said. “But that one week a year is when I was cool.”

In the group’s production of “Cinderella,” the young Gladstone decided to play her ugly stepsister as if she were Roseanne Barr, studying how to walk and talk like the comedian. It was a lightning-strike moment when she realized that a little bit of craft could go a long way.

“Somebody picked up on that in the audience and said, ‘She’s funnier than Roseanne,’” Gladstone said. “And my parents reminded me that somebody there from our community said, ‘We’re going to see her at the Oscars one day,’ just from that.”

Performing has always been Gladstone’s true north, the place to which her inner compass is most attuned. She remembers watching “Return of the Jedi” at age 5 and feeling such a strong desire to be an Ewok that she knew someday, she’d be on the other side of the screen. Similarly obsessed with “The Nutcracker,” Gladstone signed up for ballet, which she assumed would be the big performative outlet in her life until the body shaming became too tough to take: “Not just weight, but things like ‘Your middle toe is too long,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, my grandma gave me that middle toe!’”

But even in ballet class, instructors told her she was a natural-born actress, less concerned with nailing movements than with communicating a character. In her teenage years, when Gladstone’s family moved from Montana to the sometimes alienating suburbs of Seattle, she plunged fully into performance, acting in off-campus plays and auditioning for independent films.

During her senior year, fellow students voted her “Most Likely to Win an Oscar.” They could already tell that acting was something she lived and breathed.

“It gave me an identity when my identity was forming and reforming,” she said. “Being known as an actress felt good even when I wasn’t working, even before I got my SAG card, when people asked what I did: ‘Yeah, I’m working at Staples right now, but I’m an actress.’”

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In her 20s, many of Gladstone’s actor friends moved to New York or Los Angeles, but she was reluctant to follow suit. “I knew if I came to LA and was doing audition after audition, it would be really difficult for me,” she said. “And I knew how easily my love of ballet had been shot down by these boxes that I couldn’t fit in, so I was like, ‘I’m going to protect this a little bit.’”

The boxes in Hollywood can be pernicious, and Gladstone is still wary of them. “I know myself and I know I’m difficult to cast,” she said. “I’m kind of ‘mid’ in a lot of ways.” Gladstone hastened to add that she didn’t mean “mid” like meh, dismissively as Generation Z uses it. Instead, she meant the word quite literally. She is in-between, hard to place, neither this nor that. Part of it is that she’s mixed-race: Her father is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, and her mother is white. But there is another part, too.

“It’s kind of being middle-gendered, I guess,” said Gladstone, who uses she and they pronouns. “I’ve always known I’m comfortable claiming being a woman, but I never feel more than when I’m in a group of all women that I’m not fully this either.”

She recalled a heartfelt moment at Elle’s Women in Hollywood event when Jodie Foster told nonbinary “The Last of Us” actor Bella Ramsey that the room was full of supportive sisters. “That’s wonderful and that’s true,” Gladstone said, but afterward, she went up to Ramsey to “introduce myself and let them know, ‘You also have siblings here, too.’”

Instead of moving to Hollywood, where she might have been prodded into walking a narrower path, Gladstone spent her postgraduate years in Montana, doing theater and renting out basements with like-minded performers just to make something. Working in independent films and Native-centric productions allowed her to qualify for the Screen Actors Guild without ever having to move her home base, and a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie “Certain Women” raised her profile considerably. Still, the megabudgeted “Killers of the Flower Moon” represents a comparative quantum leap: Though Gladstone was unsure about coming to Hollywood, in the end, Hollywood came to her.

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It’s a heady thing to go from semi-known to perceived on a major scale, as Gladstone found out during the film’s mammoth Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, when photos of her walking the red carpet with DiCaprio were beamed all over the world. But the actual premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon” in October provided an unexpected respite, since the actors strike at the time prevented Gladstone from promoting it.

A silver lining was the number of Osage people who instead spoke at the movie’s premiere, enjoying the sort of red-carpet moments that would have typically gone to the film’s striking actors. Watching them discuss and debate “Killers of the Flower Moon” reminded Gladstone that she was raised to listen to her elders, and the strike-imposed silence provided the perfect opportunity to collect her thoughts and reflect.

“There’s a level of ego that is wrapped up with being a public person speaking for other people, and a level of ego it takes being an actor, too,” she said. “So, I think it was a real gift to be able to sit there and have another reminder that this is way bigger than me.”

She spent the film’s opening day on a picket line in Times Square, marching back and forth in the rain near the New York headquarters of Paramount Pictures, the studio that distributed “Killers of the Flower Moon” with Apple. “It was a little bit of my contrarian nature to choose Paramount that day,” Gladstone admitted with a grin. Later, while dining at an Italian restaurant in the city, a couple sitting next to her asked if she was Lily Gladstone from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It was the first time she felt permission to own it.

“I was like, ‘Yes, I am. Today, I am Lily Gladstone.’” Months later, recounting the story, she was still beaming.

If she is nominated for a best actress Academy Award on Jan. 23, she’ll be the first Native American contender in that category. With a win, she’d be the first Native performer to earn a competitive acting Oscar.

Still, it’s one thing for Hollywood to celebrate underrepresented actors, and a whole other thing to actually provide for them afterward. Academy members were moved to vote for recent winners such as Troy Kotsur (“CODA”) and Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) in part because of their inspiring personal narratives, but follow-up projects on par with their winning films can be hard to come by. DiCaprio hopes that Gladstone’s breakthrough year will finally change things. “I think she realizes that this really is a historical moment,” he said. “I know she has a plethora of other stories that she wants to tell, and I want her to be given those opportunities.”

Whatever this season has in store, Gladstone is ready to make the most of it. At a recent Academy Museum gala, Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly asked to meet Gladstone and wondered whether the demands of campaigning had already run her ragged. Gladstone was surprised to find herself replying that so far, she was doing just fine: “Maybe it says something about me that I’m kind of enjoying all of this right now.”

The wider world appears invested in her success, too. After “Killers of the Flower Moon” received a standing ovation at Cannes, a clip of Gladstone’s moved reaction to the applause earned millions of views. Why does she think that video went viral, with so many excited commenters predicting the Oscar glory that now appears within reach?

“I think people root for folks that come up from the grassroots having this global-stage moment, this dream coming true,” she said. “That’s something that I wish on everybody at some point in their lives, in whatever form that takes, and also for Native people.”

Gladstone confessed that she had watched the Cannes clip “about a thousand times” since the premiere: “It’s a moment of transcendence that was wonderful to have captured.”

But the moment was about more than just her own time in the spotlight: She recalled the way her Native co-star William Belleau let out a whooping war cry during the ovation and how the applause for the women playing her sisters — Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins and Jillian Dion — prompted Gladstone to let out a trilling lele. It wasn’t just a celebration. It was a release.

“Whatever that oppressive system is that sometimes develops with colonial governments, that moment of transcendence for all of us, those are the healing moments,” Gladstone said. “Those are the ones that show people very clearly that we’re still here and we’re excellent. We’ve survived and we’re just soaring now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

It begins with a flat stone plucked from the earth and placed in a clearing at the base of a mountain. A kind of Genesis, giving way to an Edenic apple farm, followed by 300 years of corruption, sorrow, ambition, deception, isolation, love. Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” read by a full cast, is a kind of Odyssean epic in which the hero doesn’t leave home —a New England house and its inhabitants, over the three-century history of America.

There’s the story of an apple farmer, a Revolutionary War defector named Charles Osgood, rendered in all his gruff self-importance by the British narrator Simon Vance; the letters from the landscape painter William Henry Teale to a beloved “friend” that escalate in desperation and longing, with Mark Deakins’s placid and dignified reading giving way to a more tortured cadence; Mark Bramhall telling (among others) the heart-wrenching saga of Osgood’s twin daughters, whose inseparable bond after their father’s death is tested by temptation to explore the world beyond their property lines.

Like the unforgettable audiobook production of George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mason’s historical fiction advertises a singular strength of the form: alchemizing an ensemble of distinct voices into a harmonious, deeply resonant whole. (Random House Audio. 11 hours, 5 minutes. $22.50.) 

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“How to Say Babylon: A Memoir” by Safiya Sinclair

After her strict Rastafari father threatens to kick her out of the family home for standing up to his verbal abuse, a teenage Safiya Sinclair looks out into the darkness of the Jamaican mountains, “the thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born,” and sees the specter of a woman dressed in white, her dreadlocked head bowed “under the gaze of a Rastaman.” The woman, she realizes, is herself, a harbinger of “the future that awaited me at my father’s hands.”

While “all the rage had been smothered out of” this recurring apparition in “How to Say Babylon: A Memoir,” the same cannot be said of the author, who seethes and roars with emotion throughout this affecting account of growing up under her father’s violent and controlling hand — and of escaping it to become an award-winning poet.

Hovering above the sadness and anger are Sinclair’s vivid memories: of her mother Esther’s laughter and her soothing touch as they “fold into each other in the living room” before school, of the golden rolling paper Esther carried for the ganja whose aroma “clung to me like I clung to Mom.” She recalls her three younger siblings’ greasy fingers and gleeful screeching, her father’s repeated chant, “Fire bun Babylon!,” which he “turned … on his tongue like prayer.” Sinclair spins her own incantations out of the landscapes of her upbringing — first the fishing village lined with zinc-roofed shanties, hibiscus trees and cinder blocks; then the “towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns” farther inland, the “serried and vigilant” mountain ridge of her later childhood — her voice as sensuous as a siren song. (Simon & Schuster Audio. 16 hours, 46 minutes. $29.99.)

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“The Fraud” by Zadie Smith

Which impostor does the title of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel, “The Fraud,” refer to? Is it a novelist, William Ainsworth, whose fame and social status belie the critical reception of his work? Is it his housekeeper, Eliza Touchet? Or is it the so-called Claimant, the man presenting himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a noble fortune who was believed to have died in a shipwreck, inspiring a trial that captures the maniacal attention of the English public?

With the virtuosic agility of an actor in a one-woman play, Smith as narrator fully embodies each of her many distinct characters — using exaggeratedly quaint Edinburgh brogue, Cockney, even Jamaican patois — who expose the ways in which every one of us misrepresents ourselves somehow or other. This is a novel of manners that — thanks to the author’s ear for comic timing and eviscerating social commentary — is vigorously, insistently funny. (Penguin Audio.12 hours, 26 minutes. $25.)

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“Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein

“The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you,” Naomi Klein says in “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,”  an elegant hybrid of memoir and social science that traces the motif of the double throughout history, literature and Klein’s personal life.

Sick of being confused with the ’90s feminist-turned-conspiracist Naomi Wolf, Klein uses her own exasperation as a lens onto the black-and-white bifurcation of almost every aspect of contemporary life: the economic inequality made even more stark by the sacrifices of essential workers to protect the wealthy from COVID-19; the stigma of being on the autism spectrum and the parents who deny their children lifesaving vaccines in hopes of avoiding it; fitness influencers who condemn “less healthy” bodies for their susceptibility to disease.

Rather than alienating the “other side,” as it were, Klein uses the doppelganger rubric to pull the unfamiliar closer, seeking out thoughtful context for how seemingly irreconcilable factions arrived at their extremes. “This is the trouble with the Mirror World,” she says, her tone very the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house. “There is always some truth mixed in with the lies.” (Macmillan Audio. 14 hours, 47 minutes. $32.99.)

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“Same Bed Different Dreams” by Ed Park

Intertwining the recorded pasts of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground rebellion and a parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”

But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the prowess of the audiobook’s narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the signposts we can get in this intricate maze, which winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.

Park’s novel braids together three narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding, ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American tech employee who becomes obsessed with the titular unfinished manuscript that falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of alleged nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive; and Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black veteran of the Korean War. Characters, too, repeat, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they arrive.

That’s OK. The point isn’t to grasp every detail. The fun in this audiobook is the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life crash head-first into heartfelt, hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life. (Random House Audio. 18 hours, 36 minutes. $25.)

The political potency of abortion rights proved more powerful than the drag of President Joe Biden’s approval ratings in Tuesday’s off-year elections, as Ohioans enshrined a right to abortion in their state’s constitution, and Democrats took control of both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly while holding on to Kentucky’s governorship.

The night’s results showed the durability of Democrats’ political momentum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. It may also, at least temporarily, stem the latest round of Democratic fretting from a series of polls demonstrating Biden’s political weakness.

After a strong midterm showing last year, a blowout victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April and a series of special election wins, Democrats head into Biden’s reelection contest with the wind at their backs. The question for the party is how they can translate that momentum to Biden, who remains unpopular while others running on his agenda have prevailed.

Here are key takeaways from Tuesday:

There’s nothing like abortion to aid Democrats and Biden.

Democratic officials have been saying for months that the fight for abortion rights has become the issue that best motivates Democrats to vote, and is also the issue that persuades the most Republicans to vote for Democrats.

On Tuesday, they found new evidence to bolster their case in victories by Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who criticized his opponent’s defense of the state’s near-total ban; legislative candidates in Virginia who opposed the 15-week abortion ban proposed by the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin; and, above all, the Ohio referendum establishing a right to abortion access. A Pennsylvania Supreme Court candidate who ran on abortion rights, Daniel McCaffery, also won, giving Democrats a 5-2 majority.

Abortion is now so powerful as a Democratic issue that Everytown, the gun control organization founded and funded by Michael Bloomberg, used its TV ads in Virginia to promote abortion rights before it discussed gun violence.

The anti-abortion Democrat who ran for governor of Mississippi, Brandon Presley, underperformed expectations, losing by twice the margin that his party’s nominee did in 2019.

It’s a sign that no matter how weak Biden’s standing is, the political environment and the issues terrain are still strong for Democrats running on abortion access and against Republicans who defend bans.

The last six Kentucky governor’s elections have been won by the same party that won the presidential election the following year. The president may not be able to do what Beshear managed — talking up Biden policies without ever mentioning the president’s name — but he now has examples of what a winning road map could look like for 2024.

In Virginia, a Republican rising star faces an eclipse.

Youngkin had hoped a strong night for his party would greatly raise his stature as the Republican who turned an increasingly blue state back to red. That would at the very least include him in the conversation for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, if not 2024.

But Youngkin’s pledge to enact what he called a moderate abortion law — a ban on abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother — gave Democrats an effective counter as he sought full control of state government.

Virginia Democrats sweep control of Senate and House in sharp loss for Gov. Youngkin

The Democratic argument won the day, at least in part. The party seized the majority in the House of Delegates, kept control of the state Senate and definitely spoiled Youngkin’s night. The results offered nervous national Democrats still more evidence of abortion’s power as a motivator for their voters while upending the term-limited Youngkin’s plans for his final two years on office, and possibly beyond.

Live Hampton Roads election results Nov. 2023

A Democrat can win in deep-red Kentucky, if his name is Andy Beshear.

Being the most popular governor in the country turns out to be a good thing if you want to get reelected.

Beshear spent his first term and his reelection campaign hyperfocused on local issues like teacher salaries, new road projects, guiding the state through the pandemic and natural disasters and, since last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, opposing his state’s total ban on abortion.

That made him politically bulletproof when his Republican challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, sought to nationalize the campaign and juice GOP turnout by tying Beshear to Biden and attacking him on crime and LGBTQ issues. (Beshear vetoed new restrictions aimed at transgender young people, though GOP lawmakers voted to override him.)

It’s not as if Republican voters stayed home; all the other Republicans running for statewide office won with at least 57% of the vote. Beshear just got enough of them to back him for governor. A Democrat who can win Republican voters without making compromises on issues important to liberal voters is someone the rest of the party will want to emulate in red states and districts across the country.

Attacks on transgender rights didn’t work.

As abortion access has become the top issue motivating Democrats, and with same-sex marriage broadly accepted in America, Republicans casting about for an issue to motivate social conservatives landed on restricting rights for transgender people. On Tuesday, that didn’t work.

In Kentucky, Cameron and his Republican allies spent more than $5 million on television ads attacking LGBTQ rights and Beshear for his defense of them, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising. Gov. Tate Reeves in Mississippi spent $1.2 million on anti-LGBTQ ads, while Republicans running for legislative seats in Virginia spent $527,000 worth of TV time on the issue.

Indeed, in Virginia, Danica Roem, a member of the House of Delegates, will become the South’s first transgender state senator after defeating a former Fairfax County police detective who supported barring transgender athletes from competing in high school sports.

In Ohio, voters back both abortion and weed.

Ohioans once again showed the popularity of abortion rights, even in reliably Republican states, when they easily approved a constitutional amendment establishing the right to an abortion.

The vote in Ohio could be a harbinger for the coming presidential election season, when proponents and opponents of abortion rights are trying to put the issue before voters in the critical battleground states of Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Abortion rights groups entered Tuesday on a winning streak with such ballot measures since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And ultimately, Ohio voters did as voters before them had done — electing to preserve the right to an abortion in their state.

And with a margin that was almost identical to the abortion vote, Ohioans also legalized recreational marijuana use. That will make Ohio the 24th state to do so.

Where abortion wasn’t an issue, a Republican won easily.

Mississippi’s governor’s race was the exception to this off-year election’s rule on abortion: The incumbent governor, Reeves, and his Democratic challenger, Presley, ran as staunch opponents of abortion rights.

And in that race, the Democrat lost.

Presley hoped to make the Mississippi race close by tying the incumbent to a public corruption scandal that saw the misspending of $94 million in federal funds intended for Mississippi’s poor on projects like a college volleyball facility pushed by retired superstar quarterback Brett Favre. He also pressed for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to save Mississippi’s collapsing rural hospitals.

But in Mississippi, Reeves had three advantages that proved impenetrable: incumbency, the “R” next to his name on the ballot, and the endorsement of Trump, who won the state in 2020 by nearly 17 percentage points.

In Kentucky races beneath the marquee governor’s contest, Democrats also did not run on abortion, and they, like Presley, lost.

Rhode Island sends a Biden aide to the House.

Rhode Island is hardly a swing state, but still, the heavily Democratic enclave’s election of Gabe Amo to one of its two House seats most likely brought a smile to Biden’s face. Amo was a deputy director of the White House office of intergovernmental affairs and as such, becomes the first Biden White House aide to rise to Congress.

The son of African immigrants, Amo will also be the first Black representative from the Ocean State.

White House officials said the president congratulated his former aide on his victory. The special election fills the seat vacated by David Cicilline, a Democrat who left the seat to run a nonprofit.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Covered up for reasons that remain unspecified, the image of the young man of African descent was erased from the work around the turn of the last century and languished for decades in attics and a museum basement.

But a 2005 restoration revealed him, and now the painting has a new, very prominent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I’ve been wanting to add such a work to the Met’s collection for the past 10 years,” said Betsy Kornhauser, the curator for American paintings and sculpture who handled the acquisition, “and this is the extraordinary work that appeared.”

Kornhauser said the museum acquired the work, known as “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” this year, as part of its larger effort to reframe how it tells the story of American art. The painting, attributed to Jacques Amans, a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite, will hang in the American Wing this fall and again next year during the wing’s centennial celebration.

One reason “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” has drawn attention is the naturalistic depiction of Bélizaire, the young man of African descent who occupies the highest position in the painting, leaning against a tree just behind the Frey children. Although he remains separated from the white children, Amans painted him in a powerful stance, with blushing cheeks and a kind of interiority that is unusual for the time.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)Since the Black Lives Matter movement, the Met and other museums have responded to calls to reckon with the presentation of Black figures. When the European Galleries reopened in 2020, the museum included wall texts to highlight the presence of African people in Europe and to call attention to issues of racism, previously unmentioned. In the American Wing, which had presented “a romanticized history of American art,” Kornhauser said, a presidential portrait was recast with the consciousness of the present: John Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of George Washington and his enslaved servant William Lee, identified only the former president until 2020, when Lee’s name was added to the title. However, unlike Bélizaire, Lee is depicted at the margins, lacking any emotion or humanity.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)Jeremy Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, spent years trying to find the painting with the enslaved youth after seeing an image of it online in 2014, following its restoration, that featured all four figures. Intrigued, he kept searching and found an earlier image from 2005, after the painting had been deaccessioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art and was listed for auction by Christie’s. It was the same painting, but the young Black man was missing. He had been painted out.

“The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview.

For years, Simien looked for the painting in old auction records, catalogs and photo archives. He asked friends if anyone had seen it and someone had, in an antiques shop in Virginia. From there Simien tracked the painting to a private collection in Washington and eventually purchased it for an undisclosed amount.

At the time, he didn’t know who any of the people in the portrait were. But he was drawn to the story of the Black youth and the attempt to erase him.

“We knew we needed to find out who he was, as a son of Louisiana,” said Simien, “and as somebody who is worthy of being remembered or known.”

Simien hired Katy Morlas Shannon, a Louisiana historian who researches the lives of enslaved individuals. She figured out the identities of everyone in the portrait and used property and census records to land on a name for the young man who had been covered up: Bélizaire.

From there, Shannon pieced together the details of Bélizaire’s life. He was born in 1822 in the French Quarter. His mother was named Sallie. His father is unknown. Bélizaire had other brothers and sisters — all but one were sold away.

When he was 6, Bélizaire and his mother were sold to Frederick Frey, a banker and merchant who, with his wife, Coralie, and their family, lived in a large French Quarter home on Royal Street, and owned a number of enslaved people.

Bélizaire is listed as a domestic and his mother as a cook, roles that would have kept them in proximity to the family.

Records suggest the portrait was painted around 1837, when Bélizaire was 15. He was the only person in the painting to survive to adulthood. Two Frey sisters, Elizabeth and Léontine, died the same year, likely of yellow fever. Their brother Frederick died a few years later.

Nearly 20 years later, after the elder Frederick Frey’s businesses had faltered and he died, his widow sold Bélizaire to Evergreen Plantation. Shannon, who was employed by the plantation at the time of her research, said he is the only enslaved person at the plantation for whom there is an image.

Bélizaire was listed on inventories until 1861, when the Civil War began. Soon after, New Orleans fell to the Union Army.

“Did he survive past the Civil War and live long enough to experience freedom?” Shannon said. “We don’t know because the trail stops.”

The portrait remained in the Frey family for more than a century. It is unclear when Bélizaire was painted out but Craig Crawford, a conservator who did additional restoration work last year, estimates that based on the crackular pattern, the cover-up likely happened sometime around 1900. Who did it and why are unknown, but segregation is known to have deepened in turn of the century New Orleans. Shannon said about the era, “No white person of any social standing in New Orleans at that time would have wanted a Black person portrayed with their family on their wall.”

In the 1950s, Eugene Grasser, Coralie Frey’s great-great-great grandson, remembers picking the painting up from the attic of an elderly aunt with his father, and strapping it to the roof of their car (along with another family portrait later identified as the work of Jacques Amans). They stored it in a garage behind his parents’ house.

In 1971, Grasser’s mother offered him the work, but the painting did not fit with his modernist décor. So it was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Photographs of the painting, then called “Three Children in a Landscape,” show a fourth figure ghosting through. According to museum documents, the portrait contained “the slave who took care of the children.”

The New Orleans museum did not clean or restore the painting and put it into storage for 32 years until the museum de-accessioned the work.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)The former director of the museum, John Bullard, said the decision to sell the painting came at a time when the children were unidentified and the artist was unknown.

“It was not in exhibitable condition,” he added, “so the museum would have had to invest a certain amount of money to have it totally reconditioned.”

“I think in hindsight it was a mistake,” he acknowledged. “Mistakes happen.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)At auction, the painting sold for $6,000 to an antiques dealer from Virginia who was interested in what might be under the overpaint. He asked a conservator, Katja Grauman, to do a test cleaning.

She treated small areas where the figure appeared to be and first revealed a coat and then a face. “We’ve restored plenty of American portraits of children and very rarely do you see a Black person in it,” she said.

The dealer later sold the painting to a private collector in Washington, where Simien found it in 2021, seven years into his search.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)The New Orleans Museum of Art, by then aware that the enslaved youth had been uncovered, expressed excitement about reacquiring the work, Simien said, but he became frustrated that they did not move faster, and acquired the painting himself.

Mia Bagneris, professor of art history and Africana studies at Tulane University, who taught a class about “Bélizaire,” called the museum’s decision to deaccession the work and failure to rectify the mistake “unconscionable” and said it had a responsibility to ensure that its staff, its board and its collection represent “all of the people who live here.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)Neither the Met nor Simien would disclose what the museum paid for the Frey family portrait. But 19th century portraits of people of African descent, even with unidentified sitters, have drawn high prices. In January 2023, a portrait of two girls, one white and one African American, sold at Christie’s for just under $1 million. In May 2022, at an auction in North Carolina, a portrait of a free woman of color sold for $984,000 to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

The Met plans to investigate the Frey family painting to learn more about Bélizaire’s life. What led to his inclusion in such an intimate family portrait? Did he survive the Civil War? Are there descendants?

But the identification of Bélizaire, who had been purposefully erased, is a startling discovery. Met officials said the painting is actually the first naturalistic portrait in the American Wing of a named Black subject set in a Southern landscape.

To have “the full documented information about this young man who appears in the portrait is really extraordinary,” Kornhauser said.

It was crucial to the Met’s decision to acquire the work. Without Simien and Shannon’s efforts to uncover his identity, the painting would likely still be in a private collection, out of view, waiting to be known.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

“I wouldn’t sign the pledge,” he said in an interview with conservative outlet Newsmax. “Why would I sign a pledge? There are people on there that I wouldn’t have.”

The decision would seem to rule out the possibility of him being at the debate on Aug. 23, yet he also said that he would announce next week whether he planned to take part.

Asked for comment on Thursday, the Republican National Committee, which sets the rules, referred to past interviews in which its chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, has defended the pledge and said the committee will hold everyone to it.

“The rules aren’t changing,” she said on CNN last month. “We’ve been very vocal with them.”

In the Newsmax interview, Trump said, “I can name three or four people that I wouldn’t support for president,” without naming them. “So right there, there’s a problem right there.”

Trump also said in the interview that he wasn’t convinced it was worth it for him to debate given how far ahead he is in the primary. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed him leading the field by an enormous margin, more than 35 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

“Why would you do that when you’re leading by so much?” he asked.

Trump’s vacillation over the pledge is not new; he objected to signing the same loyalty pledge during his first campaign eight years ago. He ultimately did, but then took it back.

That history underscores that the pledge is, in practice, unenforceable. Party leaders can refuse to let a candidate debate for not signing, but they can’t force someone who does sign to actually support another nominee next year.

One of Trump’s opponents, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, has said that he will sign the pledge, but that he would not support Trump if he is the eventual nominee: “I’m going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016,” he told CNN.

Another opponent, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, has suggested that — if he otherwise qualifies for the debate, which he hasn’t yet — he would sign based on the far-from-safe assumption that Trump won’t be the nominee and Hutchinson won’t actually be tested.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The indictment unveiled Tuesday accused Trump of enlisting six co-conspirators in “his criminal efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power.”

It outlined five distinct ways in which Trump and his co-conspirators carried out the “unlawful” scheme to overturn the election results, including organizing a false slate of electors in seven swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden. Those states included Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia, where a local prosecutor is also scrutinizing the fake slate of electors.

According to the indictment, Trump and his co-conspirators also used false claims of election fraud to spur state lawmakers into action to “subvert the legitimate” results of the election.

“On the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the Defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the Defendant,” the indictment said.

Trump and his co-conspirators also tried to use “the power and authority” of the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations” and fuel lies about the election. They also pressured Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election on Jan. 6, essentially seeking to enlist him in the conspiracy. (When he resisted, Trump at one point chided Pence for being “too honest.”)

Finally, according to the indictment, Trump and some of his co-conspirators stoked tension during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The co-conspirators “exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud,” the indictment said.

Although special counsel Jack Smith did not announce charges against any of the co-conspirators — nor are they named in the indictment — he could still be investigating their role in the plot to overturn the election results.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.