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It’s Zelenskiy who is setting the pace diplomatically and strategically. The US must end the prevaricating that may have needlessly prolonged the war
Biden’s latest, belated and incomplete volte-face, over providing US-made F-16 combat jets, illustrates the problem. Zelenskiy has been asking for fighter planes since the war began. Neighbours such as Poland were sympathetic. Yet afraid of provoking a fight with Russia, Biden, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Pentagon officials publicly opposed supplying F-16s until as recently as March.
Zelenskiy wanted the planes because he knew Ukraine was vulnerable from the air. As the invasion unfolded, Ukraine’s people, homes and vital infrastructure were mercilessly pounded by Russian missiles. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has explained how F-16s or similar planes might have supported air defence systems, reduced casualties and protected ground troops. But they were not forthcoming.
Biden and Sullivan also rejected proposals by experienced former US generals for Nato-patrolled “humanitarian no-fly zones”, initially in western Ukraine, to protect civilians from aerial assault. Although admittedly risky, safe havens akin to past operations in Iraq, Bosnia and Libya might have saved many lives and stemmed the refugee exodus. They still could.
Biden’s argument, then as now, is that such interventions, coming on top of large-scale US arms shipments, intelligence-sharing and aid, might be viewed by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, as escalatory. This seems sensible at first glance. Yet it’s way too cautious. Putin and his lickspittle poltroons, Dmitry Medvedev and Sergei Lavrov, are adept at playing on western fears. Whenever new forms of assistance for Kyiv are mooted, they spew dire threats, sometimes involving nuclear weapons.
Biden should listen to Antony Blinken. His secretary of state has spotted a pattern over the past year: Kremlin warnings of retaliation and direct confrontation rarely amount to much in practice. The Russians huff and puff – but mostly bluff. Putin is not entirely stupid. He knows he’d never win a fight with Nato, let alone survive nuclear warfare.
Another pattern is apparent: Biden’s chronic indecision. Protracted humming and hawing last year delayed supplies of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Patriot batteries, longer-range high-altitude missiles, and M1 Abrams battle tanks – all of which were eventually delivered. European allies such as Germany used White House waffling to excuse their own foot-dragging. These prevarications may have needlessly prolonged the war.
The F-16 U-turn, confirmed at last weekend’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, paves the way for training Ukrainian pilots and the provision of “fourth-generation” jets by Nato allies. Yet it’s a typical Biden fudge. The US itself has not committed to supply planes. If it does, it’s unclear whether they will be the latest F-16 models equipped with the latest weapons.
Unconvincing explanations are offered for US dithering. Officials say they followed a deliberate plan to ensure Ukraine first received all the heavy weaponry and armoured vehicles required for its long-anticipated counter-offensive. “We could certainly have started earlier, but there were much higher priorities, and it’s seen by some as an escalatory act,” said US air force secretary Frank Kendall, referring to F-16 training.
In fact, it was pressure from US allies that proved irresistible when the 50-nation Ukraine Contact Group met at Ramstein air base in Germany last month. US defence secretary Lloyd Austin was urged to think again by old friends such as Britain and the Netherlands, as well as by the eastern Europeans. On his return to Washington, Austin advised Biden to drop his veto.
The American shift on fighter planes is a personal triumph for Zelenskiy. His tireless lobbying bore fruit, once again overcoming Biden’s hesitancy and assuaging, if not dispelling, his misgivings. And it shone a light on yet another emerging pattern: how Ukraine’s president, not America’s risk-averse commander-in-chief or the Nato alliance, is driving the west’s wartime agenda.
Zelenskiy’s leading role was highlighted when he stole the show in Hiroshima, making a dramatic entrance after flying in late from an Arab League summit in Jeddah. Ukraine does not belong to the G7, or to the EU or Nato for that matter. But Zelenskiy has earned a place at the top table. His irrepressible diplomacy, aided by Putin’s blundering, has brought membership of both latter organisations within reach.
As a leader capable of inspiring his people and influencing international opinion, Zelenskiy puts Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Rishi Sunak to shame. He is also changing the strategic conversation in fundamental ways. US policy towards China, especially Taiwan, has hardened tangibly due to Russia’s aggression – but also thanks to Zelenskiy’s success in re-emphasising the inviolability of territorial borders and national sovereignty as globally recognised imperatives.
Ukraine is increasingly setting the pace on the ground, too, independently of its main backers. Incursions into southern Russia by anti-regime militia using US military vehicles, an audacious drone attack on the Kremlin, sabotage, assassinations and mystery explosions in occupied Crimea are a likely prelude to Kyiv’s pivotal counter-offensive. Success is vital if it is to head off Chinese and possible Franco-German pressure this winter to trade land for peace.
All this activity, licit and illicit, is compounding White House jitters as American public support for Ukraine appears to soften. Since neither of his main 2024 Republican challengers, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, is committed to assisting Kyiv, Biden must be braver and do more, faster – for his time, and Ukraine’s, may be running out. Biden describes the war as a seminal struggle between liberty and tyranny. It is. So give Zelenskiy all he needs to win.
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A policeman stands guard near a damaged residential building in Moscow following a reported drone attack on Tuesday. (photo: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
ALSO SEE: Drone Shot Down Outside Putin's Residence, Says State Duma Member
The drone attack, which was confirmed by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, occurred just hours after yet another barrage of Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which killed at least one person and injured more than a dozen.
Kyiv has been under a relentless assault of near-nightly bombings in recent weeks with Moscow seemingly intent on weakening or destroying Ukraine’s air defenses ahead of a much-anticipated counteroffensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky has said will oust the Russian invaders from Ukraine’s territory.
While Ukraine denied involvement in the drone attack on Moscow, the dueling strikes on the capital cities appeared to mark a threshold moment, as residents of Russia’s capital experienced direct consequences of their nation’s brutal hostilities for the first time.
Increased shelling of Russian towns in the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border on Tuesday offered further evidence that Kyiv seems intent on bringing the war to Russian territory before initiating offensive operations that will inevitably cause further death and destruction in Ukraine.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, said Moscow residents deserved whatever came at them.
“I’m going to say some paradoxical things and you can then analyze them: First, undoubtedly, gradually Moscow is starting to sink into the fog of war … with a very desired sensation,” Podolyak said Tuesday morning during Breakfast Show, a Ukrainian Russian-language YouTube program. “Of course we want those people who wanted to start this big European war to feel what it is like to live in state of danger."
“And of course all those terrible men who sat in the parliament and threatened everyone,” Podolyak added, “they are going to gradually receive all of that back.”
In early May, two drones were intercepted over the Kremlin in an unsuccessful attack that Moscow blamed on Ukraine and claimed was an attempt to assassinate Putin. He was not in the building at the time.
Kyiv has faced a persistent threat of missile strikes since Oct. 10 when Russia unleashed a wave of 84 cruise missiles. And on Tuesday, for the third time in 24 hours, explosions rang out across the Ukrainian capital before dawn, sending sleepless Kyiv residents for cover once again.
The relentless air raids assaults — 17 in the past month, using powerful missiles and self-destructing drones — have jolted Kyiv residents from their sleep almost every other night, wearing out families in what has become a frightening if now terribly familiar routine.
Hours after Tuesday’s attack in Kyiv, Sobyanin said drones struck two residential buildings Moscow causing minor damage. Writing on Telegram, the mayor said residents had been evacuated and that two people had sought medical attention but that there had been no serious injuries. Footage from the scene showed fire damage to the outside of a top-floor apartment and broken windows.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that the military had shot down eight drones. According to Baza, a Telegram channel linked to Russia’s security services, more than 10 drones were shot down in the Moscow region, most of them in the Istrinsky, Krasnogorsky and Odintsovsky districts, to the west of the capital.
“The Kyiv regime staged a terrorist attack with unmanned aerial vehicles on sites in the city of Moscow this morning,” the Defense Ministry said in statement. “Eight plane-type drones were used in the attack. All enemy drones were shot down.”
The statement added that some of the drones had lost control after their signals were jammed, while others were shot down by Pantsir surface-to-air missile defense systems, which are now strategically stationed throughout the Moscow region, including in the city center.
In all, more than 25 drones were reportedly involved in the morning attack. Some flew at ultralow altitude and got snared on trees and wires. Videos circulating on social media showed low-flying drones exploding in fields and intercepted by air defenses, with some flying over Moscow’s Rublyovka district, an exclusive neighborhood that is favored by the Russian government and business elite.
For the 15 months since Putin ordered the invasion, Muscovites have primarily witnessed the war — which the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation” — on television or the internet. While residents of border regions in western Russia have experienced cross-border drone strikes and other attacks, the capital has been largely spared.
Kyiv’s denials notwithstanding, the attack on Moscow shows Ukraine and its supporters are intent on bringing the fight directly to the doorstep of Russian citizens, and signals a greater willingness to deploy hybrid tactics.
The United States has signaled displeasure at cross-border attacks and urged Ukraine not to use American-provided weapons to attack Russia on its own soil fearing an escalation that would bring NATO countries into a direct confrontation. Kyiv, however, has said it reserves the right to defend its territory as it deems necessary.
Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Defense Committee in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, told Russian business daily RBC that the attack was designed to “raise a wave of panic” and that it was “an act of terror, aimed at the civilian population.”
Kartapolov added the attack had happened “because we have a very large country and there is always a loophole where a drone can fly through.”
But there has been little sympathy voiced in the Duma or on Russian state-controlled television for the terror-inducing missile strikes on Kyiv.
A popular pro-war Russian blogger, who publishes under the pen-name Rybar, wrote: “If the purpose of the raid was to stress out the population, then the very fact that Ukrainian drones appeared in the sky over Moscow has contributed to this.”
In terms of the scale of the attacks — and casualties — there was virtually no comparison. On Tuesday, Russia attacked Ukraine with 31 Iranian-made drones over the course of five hours, almost all of them headed toward Kyiv, Ukrainian air defense forces wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine’s armed forces successfully destroyed 29 of the drones as they approached the skies over the capital.
Falling debris from one of the intercepted drones killed a 33-year-old woman and injured at least 13 people in the city and surrounding region, said Ivan Vyhivskyi, acting head of Ukraine’s national police.
Dozens of residents reported damage to homes, offices, shops, garages and cars, according to Andryi Nebytov, head of Kyiv’s regional police.
“They are trying to hit Kyiv; they are trying to prove something,” Yuryi Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s air defense, told The Washington Post. “But as you can see, the air defense is working.”
On Monday, a rare daytime missile attack sent thousands of Kyiv residents rushing into subway stations and injured at least one person. The missiles, which were all shot down by Ukraine’s air defenses, pierced the relative calm in the bustling capital, where playgrounds and restaurant patios have been packed with families and friends enjoying the recent arrival of warm weather.
Later that day, Kostiantyn Vashchenko, Ukrainian state secretary for defense, linked the Russian bombardment of Kyiv with the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.
“Russia clearly understands our readiness for an offensive,” Vashchenko said, adding that it was an attempt to hit the country’s decision-making center ahead of the counterattack. Offensive operations could begin “very soon,” he said during the GlobSec security forum in Bratislava. “Sooner than you think … several days.”
Ukrainian military officials said that Russia is trying use drones to pinpoint the location of Ukraine’s air defense systems, and then tries to hit then them with more precise and powerful weapons, including ballistic missiles.
“With the drones, they are trying to provoke the maximum reaction, as you see from the number of drones they sent, to detect all the air defense positions and directions, to draw themselves a map of the entire operation, so that they can then hit in particular with more precise rockets or ballistic missiles,” Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern command told Ukraine’s Channel 5 television station on Tuesday morning.
In the Holosivskyi district of Kyiv, a leafy residential area, falling debris destroyed the top three floors of a 21-story apartment building, crumbling brick walls and blowing out windows.
The explosion overhead shook the entire building and sent residents rushing for cover in bathrooms and closets and in the parking lot. One woman, who lived on one of the top floors, was killed in the attack, a neighbor said, while at least four others were injured. Police on the scene declined to confirm the details, citing an ongoing investigation.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the woman had been killed by debris after she went out onto her balcony to watch the strike. Klitschko warned residents not to do this and to heed air raid warnings.
At about 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, residents lined up outside the damaged apartment building, waiting in line to return to their homes. Children played in a playground littered with pieces of debris.
Oksana Snyhirova, 48, who lives on the ninth floor, said she and her family hid in a built-in wardrobe in their apartment when they heard the explosion.
“We practice the two-wall rule,” she said. “When there’s rockets, we usually go down to the parking lot. But you have to understand … we’re a bit tired.”
After 17 recent airstrikes, almost all of them in the middle of the night, residents here and across Kyiv have settled into a routine each time they hear an explosion: Check Telegram for news, and depending on the type of weapon being used, decide whether to take cover, or to simply to go back to sleep.
Oleh Balenko, a 63-year-old grandfather, had rushed to the scene from a nearby village to help his daughter, her husband and eight-year-old granddaughter, who live on the 14th floor.
“They were hiding in the bathroom,” he said, visibly shaken. “For some reason they had this thing where if it was a rocket attack, they would go down to the underground parking lot. But if it was a drone they would think it would just be shot down and would just go to the bathroom. I think that will change now.”
Valeria Korzhyva, 26, who lives with her husband on the 19th floor, had initially hidden in the bathroom, but then fled down the stairs.
“Normally we go down to the bottom of the building, but this time we thought it wouldn’t be necessary,” Korzhyva said. “It was late. We were very tired and then it all happened.”
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New wind turbines at the Tyligulska wind farm in May in the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. (photo: Nicole Tung/NYT)
Bombarding the power grid has been an essential part of Russia’s invasion, but officials say it would take many more missile strikes to badly damage a wind farm than a power plant.
In 15 months of war, Russia has launched countless missiles and exploding drones at power plants, hydroelectric dams and substations, trying to black out as much of Ukraine as it can, as often as it can, in its campaign to pound the country into submission. The new Tyligulska wind farm stands only a few dozen miles from Russian artillery, but Ukrainians say it has a crucial advantage over most of the country’s grid.
A single, well-placed missile can damage a power plant severely enough to take it out of action, but Ukrainian officials say that doing the same to a set of windmills, each one hundreds of feet apart from any other, would require dozens of missiles. A wind farm can be temporarily disabled by striking a transformer substation or transmission lines, but these are much easier to repair than power plants.
“It is our response to Russians,” said Maksym Timchenko, the chief executive of DTEK Group, the company that built the turbines, in the southern Mykolaiv region, the first phase of what is planned as Eastern Europe’s largest wind farm. “It is the most profitable and, as we know now, most secure form of energy.”
Ukraine has had laws in place since 2014 to promote the transition to renewable energy, both to lower dependence on Russian energy imports and because it was profitable. But that transition still has a long way to go, and the war makes its prospects — like everything else about Ukraine’s future — murky.
In 2020, 12 percent of Ukraine’s electricity came from renewable sources, barely half the percentage for the European Union. Plans for the Tyligulska project call for 85 turbines producing up to 500 megawatts of electricity, enough for 500,000 apartments — an impressive output for a wind farm, but less than 1 percent of the country’s prewar generating capacity.
After the Kremlin began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the need for new power sources became acute. Russia has bombarded Ukraine’s power plants and cut off delivery of the natural gas that fueled some of them.
Russian occupation forces have seized a large part of the country’s power supply, ensuring that its output does not reach territory still held by Ukraine. They hold the single largest generator, the 5,700-megawatt Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which has been damaged repeatedly in fighting and has stopped transmitting energy to the grid. They also control 90 percent of Ukraine’s renewable energy plants, which are concentrated in the southeast.
The postwar recovery plans Ukraine has presented to the European Union — which it hopes to join — and other supporters includes a major new commitment to clean energy.
“The war speeded us up,” said Hanna Zamazeeva, the head of the Ukrainian government’s energy efficiency agency.
But energy and economic analysts say much of the hoped-for green transition will have to wait until after reconstruction begins and foreign investment returns, and could depend on Ukrainian success on the battlefield.
“Developing renewables, particularly wind and solar, depends on Ukraine successfully recapturing these territories” now held by Russia, the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported in December.
Southern Ukraine’s potential for wind power was clear at the project’s opening ceremony this month when hot, dry air gusted through a wheat field dotted with huge turbines. Amid snack-covered tables, their linens flapping in the wind, the gathered diplomats and journalists had to turn their backs to the blowing dust.
The three-bladed turbines at Tyligulska, made by the Danish company Vestas, are huge, carving circles in the air more than 500 feet in diameter. Each windmill weighs about 800 tons.
The first turbine was built in February 2022, the month the invasion began, and then DTEK froze construction. In August, Evheniy Moroz, the company’s site manager, received a call from his director, who asked if they could resume work without international contractors, who had all evacuated, taking their heavy equipment with them.
“I started calling the guys I worked with to find out where they are, what contractors are still operating, and whether there are any cranes able to lift 100 tons still in Ukraine,” Mr. Moroz said.
He found just one, and it needed renovation, but this crane was the only hope. The builders modified the crane for the job and started calling it their “little dragon.” With it, construction restarted.
Builders worked in open fields about 60 miles from the front lines, hiding in a bunker when air-raid sirens sounded. Missiles fired from Russian ships in the Black Sea roared overhead but did not target the site. Cruise missiles flew lower than the turbines, trying to evade radar detection by Ukrainian air defenses.
They are a modest step toward energy security and a green transition, but the new windmills mean something more immediate for Ukraine, said Vitaliy Kim, the governor of the Mykolaiv region.
“The construction of this wind power plant is a sort of a signal that it is possible to build during the war,” he said. “Such projects have to exist for the independence of our country.”
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Ralph Yarl, a Missouri teenager, is recovering after he was shot in the head when he rang a wrong doorbell while trying to pick up his younger brothers in April. (photo: Faith Spoonmore/GoFundMe)
The 17-year-old suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was shot while trying to pick up his younger brothers in April, the Kansas City Star reported.
Yarl walked with family, friends and other brain injury survivors Monday at Going the Distance for Brain Injury, a yearly Memorial Day race at Loose Park in Kansas City, Missouri.
“It takes a community. It takes a family. It takes a support group, all of that,” Yarl’s mother, Cleo Nagbe, said ahead of the race, adding: “Let’s raise more awareness to stop the things that cause brain injuries and should not be causing them, especially gun violence."
As many as 1,000 people raced through the park, including many in neon green T-shirts who registered to be part of “Team Ralph,” said Robin Abramowitz, executive director of the Brain Injury Association of Kansas and Greater Kansas City.
“It’s important for Ralph to see that he is not alone,” Yarl’s aunt, Faith Spoonmore, said. She added that Yarl has debilitating migraines and issues with balance. He is also struggling with his emotions, mood changes and the trauma of the shooting.
Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, is accused of shooting Yarl. The teen had confused Lester's address with a home about a block away where he was supposed to pick up his siblings.
The shooting drew worldwide attention and prompted rallies and protests in the Kansas City area, with critics saying Lester was given preferential treatment when police released him just two hours after he was arrested.
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A police officer. (photo: Adobe Stock)
Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are nearly three times more likely to begin with the police officer issuing a command, such as "Keep your hands on the wheel" or "Turn the car off."
That's according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that examined police body-camera footage of 577 routine car stops involving Black drivers.
Eighty-one of these stops ultimately involved searches, handcuffings, or arrests. That kind of outcome was less likely when a police officer's first words provided a reason for the stop.
"The first 45 words, which is less than 30 seconds on average, spoken by a law enforcement officer during a car stop to a Black driver can be quite telling about how the stop will end," says Eugenia Rho, a researcher at Virginia Tech.
Amid the recent high-profile killing of Tyre Nichols and other Black motorists after traffic stops, the findings offer a grim sketch of how police stops can escalate and how Black men recognize the warning signs.
Rho and her colleagues focused on Black drivers because this group is stopped by the police at higher rates and are more likely to be handcuffed, searched, and arrested than any other racial group.
"The car stop is by far the most common way people come into contact with the police," says Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford University. "With the spread of body-worn cameras, we now have access to how these interactions unfold in real time."
All of the stops in this study occurred in a racially diverse, medium-sized U.S. city over the course of one month; the researchers won't identify the city for privacy reasons.
"The vast majority of the stops that we're looking at are stops for routine traffic violations, not for other things that are more serious," says Eberhardt.
The scientists controlled for factors such as the officer's gender and race, as well as the neighborhood crime rate. About 200 officers were involved in these stops.
"It's not really a function of a few officers driving this pattern," says Rho.
The words or actions of the person behind the wheel of the car didn't seem to contribute to escalation.
"The drivers are just answering the officers' questions and explaining what's going on," says Eberhardt. "They're cooperative."
To understand how Black men perceive the initial language used by police officers during a car stop, the researchers asked 188 Black men to listen to recordings of the opening moments of car stops.
It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, those Black men were highly attuned to the implications of a police officer starting an interaction with a command.
"When officers began with orders without reasons, Black male participants predicted that the stop would escalate in over 84% of those cases," says Rho.
And even though none of the stops in this study involved the use of force, Black men worried about the possibility of force 80% of the time when they heard a recording of a law enforcement officer issuing a command without offering a reason.
"In this country, we know much more about fearing Black people than the fears of Black people," says Eberhardt. "Many Black people fear the police, even in routine car stops. That fear is a fear that could be stoked or set at ease with the first words that an officer speaks."
Eberhardt notes that millions of people know about the killing of George Floyd in May of 2020 after police officers pulled him from his car, but far fewer people know what happened in the first moments when he was approached by an officer.
"We analyzed the first 27 seconds of Floyd's encounter with police on that day. And we found that Floyd apologizes to the officers who stand outside his car window, Floyd requests the reason for the stop, he pleads, he explains, he follows orders, he expresses fear," she says. "Yet every response to Floyd is an order."
From the very beginning, police officers issued commands without giving Floyd an explanation — the same linguistic signature associated with escalation in this study.
Tracey Meares, a Yale Law professor and a founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, reviewed this study and says she found it gratifying to see this kind of social dynamic measured with such precision.
"It's hard to deny then," she says, noting that some communities are rethinking whether they want armed law enforcement to be involved in traffic violations.
"There are stark racial differences in who is stopped and who's not," says Meares, who points out that in the one-month period covered by this study, the city's police officers did 588 stops of Black drivers and only 262 stops of white drivers.
Over 15% of Black drivers experienced an escalated outcome such as a search, handcuffing, or arrest, while less than 1% of white drivers experienced one of those outcomes.
"They're not drawing any conclusions from that, but these are things we should just be paying attention to," says Meares. "It strains credulity that there are that many more traffic violations."
Rho says in planning this study, they had initially set out to look at patterns related to traffic stop escalation for white drivers too, but realized that it happened so infrequently for white drivers that there just weren't sufficient numbers to even include them in the analysis.
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Paul Simon. (photo: Tabatha Fireman/Redferns)
On “Seven Psalms,” the artist continues his spiritual seeking, imagining a divine presence only to interrogate its borders.
This month, Simon, who is eighty-one, released “Seven Psalms,” his fifteenth solo album. It’s a beautiful, mysterious record, composed of a single, thirty-three-minute acoustic track divided into seven movements. Simon’s soft, neighborly voice has yet to be shredded by age or hard living, and its sustained tenderness makes me feel as though everything is going to be O.K. His long discography contains threads of sorrow (“Hello darkness, my old friend,” the gloomy opening line of “The Sound of Silence,” from 1964, has been adopted as a meme), but just as many moments of levity and gratification. Despite being a songwriting virtuoso, Simon tends toward understatement, and his lack of vocal histrionics can make his music seem unusually (and deceptively) effortless.
“Seven Psalms” is a series of hymns, but somehow it feels imprecise to call the piece religious. When it comes to the fallibility of the body and the enigma of the spirit, Simon, who is Jewish, does not seem beholden to any one world view. In interviews, he has been adamant about the fact that his cosmology is not organized. “I’m not a doctor or a preacher / I’ve no particular guiding star,” he sings on “My Professional Opinion.” Instead, “Seven Psalms” is focussed on a more expansive, open-ended notion of God. Simon has described the piece as “an argument I’m having with myself about belief—or not.” Over and over, he imagines a divine presence, and then interrogates its borders. “The Lord is my engineer / The Lord is the earth I ride on, ” he sings on “The Lord.” He returns to the construction in a refrain, finding the sacred everywhere and nowhere:
The Lord is a puff of smoke
That disappears when the wind blows
The Lord is my personal joke
My reflection in the window
Outside religious spaces, posing the big questions—how we arrived here; what we’re supposed to do with the time we’ve been allotted—is generally considered the terrain of undergraduate philosophy majors and people who have gravely misjudged their tolerance for edibles. Western culture has tidied and sanitized the moments (childbirth, death) that truly force the inquiry. In the delivery room, a mother might only be granted a dazed hour to cradle her newborn before everyone is cleaned up and wheeled off. Death is medicalized; the deepest mourning happens mostly in private. Yet once you become awake to the puzzle of existence, via loss or its opposite, it can be extremely difficult to think about anything else. On “Love Is Like a Braid,” Simon sings of being undone by such an event:
I lived a life of pleasant sorrows
Until the real deal came
Broke me like a twig in a winter gale
Called me by my name
Partway through the verse, an elegant guitar figure is punctuated by a crash, signalling a moment of transformation. People who have endured a major loss—the real deal—often speak about feeling reborn in its wake. Simon is not explicit about what might have happened, but it seems he was left in a state of earnest wondering.
A trailer for the release of “Seven Psalms” includes footage from “In Restless Dreams,” a forthcoming documentary. In it, Simon talks about making music as reaching for something that might not be reachable; it might not even exist. For Simon, the riddle of his work—why, for example, a toy harmonica might sound better than a grand piano, or a major chord might do something a minor chord can’t—runs parallel to his spiritual quest. “I’m looking for the edge of what you can hear,” he says. “I can just about hear it, but I can’t quite. That’s the thing I want.” He pauses. “How do you get there?”
Simon has always been a seeker. In 1968, Simon … Garfunkel released “America,” a haunting song about being young, bewildered, and hungry:
“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”
Over time, his concerns became more existential. On “The Only Living Boy in New York,” from 1970, he admits, “Half of the time we’re gone, but we don’t know where.” Pilgrimage, homecoming, and absolution became recurring themes. On “American Tune,” from “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” (1973), he sings about death as a glorious release:
And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
The melody of “American Tune” was inspired by “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” a seventeenth-century hymn built around a medieval Latin poem that describes Christ’s body on the Cross. It’s not the only explicitly Christian material tucked into Simon’s discography. On “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” a track from 2011, Simon lifts chunks of a sermon from the Reverend J. M. Gates, a Baptist preacher who released 78-r.p.m. records from the twenties to the forties. (In a 2011 interview, Simon tells a story about Paul McCartney showing up backstage after one of Simon’s shows and joking, “Aren’t you Jewish?”)
Even “Graceland” (1986) expresses a deep interest in, well, grace. The estate is protected by a white pearly gate; Elvis Presley and several of his family members are buried in a small cemetery adjacent to the mansion; fans send ephemera to decorate the graves. Simon sings of being pulled there by some preternatural force: “For reasons I cannot explain / There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland.” For me, the most interesting nod to religion comes on “The Obvious Child,” a propulsive, charismatic cut from “The Rhythm of the Saints” (1990). Simon sings:
And we said, “These songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free,”
And hey
The cross is in the ballpark
The final line of the verse can be read in several ways. Perhaps Simon is suggesting that we’re capable of locating God in anything we love, including baseball. Perhaps he’s making a point about how religion is inextricably stitched into the cultural fabric of America. It may be an allusion to Pope Paul VI holding Mass at Yankee Stadium, in 1965. He could be saying that, although Christianity is not foolproof, it’s close enough. Or maybe he’s simply suggesting that faith—in the world, in ourselves—is always within reach. We’re never so far from mercy.
It would be tempting to compare “Seven Psalms” to Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” or David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” two albums, both from 2016, that tussle with mortality. Yet Cohen and Bowie each knew an end was imminent. Simon appears to be in good health. “My hand’s steady, my mind’s still clear,” he sings on “Wait.” It’s plain from the lyrics on “Seven Psalms” that Simon’s domestic life is a sustaining force. He has a house in the Texas Hill Country with his wife, the singer Edie Brickell. “Heaven is beautiful,” he sings in the piece’s final movement. “It’s almost like home.” Death is on his mind, but it has always been on his mind. On “Your Forgiveness,” he sings:
I, I have my reasons to doubt
A white light eases the pain
Two billion heartbeats and out
Or does it all begin again?
“Seven Psalms” begins and ends with bells, which evoke church, certainly, but also a sense of ritual. Much of the instrumentation, which includes gamelan, gongs, harmonium, flute, and glockenspiel, feels out of time, nearly ahistorical, as though it predated our existence and will remain long after we’re gone. Drums were once a cornerstone of Simon’s repertoire, from the cavernous snare strike in the chorus of “The Boxer” (delivered by the beloved session drummer Hal Blaine, who set up his kit near an elevator shaft) to the vibrant Brazilian percussion Simon used on “The Rhythm of the Saints.” (In 1990, Simon told the Times that the title “The Rhythm of the Saints” came from the belief that “the holy spirit was inside the drums used in the rituals of religions . . . that syncretized African deities with Catholic saints.”) “Seven Psalms,” though, is not particularly interested in groove. It aims instead to elicit a mood of gentle contemplation.
Simon’s willingness to engage so directly with unanswerable questions is bold; his inquiries linger in the air, like warm mist after a summer storm. In the wake of the pandemic, it can sometimes feel as though Americans have become more proudly reclusive, less open to the benefits of community. Yet, for Simon, the distance between people has never been less significant. “It seems to me / We’re all walking down the same road,” he sings on “Trail of Volcanoes,” over anxious strings. “Seven Psalms” made me think of the Trappist monk, poet, and mystic Thomas Merton, who wrote often about the loneliness of our path to comprehending the sublime. “Although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling,” he observed. Merton also believed that it was possible to see God everywhere. “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time,” he said, in 1965. Merton was a Catholic, but he seems to be saying that God—whatever, whoever that might mean—will always appear to a person who is looking. In fact, Merton was sure of it: “This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true.”
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A Meals on Wheels volunteer delivers food. (photo: Savahnah Pierre/Community Cooperative)
Meal delivery programs are uniquely positioned to keep the most vulnerable safe during climate emergencies.
She called Suzanne Washington, who runs the local chapter of Meals on Wheels. “That overlap of their demographic and the demographic that faces great risk from heat is almost identical,” Papaefthimiou said.
Over the next couple of days, Washington and a group of staff identified their most vulnerable clients, recruited volunteers and started making calls. “We were asking, ‘Do you have a fan? Do you know this heat is coming? Are you prepared? Could you get to a cooling center? Do you know where [the nearest one] is?” Washington said.
She and her team collected donated fans and air conditioners, which drivers brought with them on their food-delivery routes. They conducted wellness checks by phone and helped clients find rides to cooling centers.
Washington remembers calling a woman in her eighties who said she had just fainted, had a headache and didn’t feel well. “We sent out help,” she said. “That person was in the heat exhaustion phase and heading towards the next phase”— heatstroke, a life-threatening condition. Their quick actions and persistent outreach most certainly saved lives.
Meals on Wheels, which originated in the United Kingdom during the Second World War, is not a climate organization — or even an emergency-response organization in the traditional sense. Rather, these programs are best known for delivering hot meals to lower-income seniors.
But in recent years, as climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, the broader mission — to “improve the health and quality of life” of the seniors these programs serve — has taken on new urgency.
Climate-related disasters, like extreme heat, hurricanes and wildfires do not affect all populations equally. If you’re Black, or poor, you’re more likely to live in an urban heat island that can get dangerously hot during a heatwave. You’re also more likely to live in a low-lying area prone to hurricane damage and flooding.
People who are older, who have limited mobility and who are isolated are among the most vulnerable during climate emergencies. In Multnomah County, which encompasses Portland, 56 of the 69 people whose deaths were attributed to the heat event were over 60 years old. Forty-eight of the dead had lived alone.
There are more than 5,000 Meals on Wheels programs across the country serving more than 2.4 million people, according to Meals on Wheels America, the leadership organization that supports local branches. These programs, which often have long waitlists, have been shown to improve older Americans’ diets and nutritional intake, but their benefits go beyond food security.
Heat kills about 12,000 Americans each year, and around 80% of those deaths are in adults over 60. When Hurricane Ian killed 148 people last year, most of those who died were over 60. When the Camp Fire engulfed the California town of Paradise, killing 85, the average age of the dead was 72 years, according to a Cal Matters analysis.
“Anytime you’re dealing with a natural disaster or climate change-related event, you’re dealing with events that cause morbidity and mortality and ultimately lead to people succumbing to their chronic medical illnesses,” said David Dosa, a geriatrician and researcher at Brown University.
Older people are more likely to struggle with mobility, making it more difficult to evacuate an area that is flooding or in the path of a wildfire. They are also more likely to have health issues that require electrical devices, such as oxygen tanks or refrigerators for medicine, making power outages potentially deadly. And they are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions exacerbated by stress.
“When ‘Mrs. Smith’ dies in her apartment a week after a heat wave, she’s dying of COPD [Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] or heart failure. She’s not necessarily ‘dying of the heatwave,’ even though chances are good that she was destabilized by the heat,” Dosa said. “The real body count ends up being much higher” than the official count, he added.
Residents of assisted living facilities don’t necessarily fare better during emergencies. According to a Senate report released in February, extreme weather events in 17 states have forced evacuations or led to injuries and deaths in long-term care facilities. In Florida, nine residents of a single nursing home died of heat exposure in 2017 after Hurricane Irma knocked out the facility’s air conditioning.
What does keep people safe is contact with others and contingency plans — such as having a list of emergency contacts on the refrigerator and enough food, water and medication on hand to last several days, said Dosa.
As Hurricane Ian approached South Florida last year, Stefanie Ink-Edwards, CEO of Community Cooperative and head of Fort Myers’ Meals on Wheels, raced to distribute hundreds of hurricane kits with water, nonperishable food, flashlights and batteries. Staff and volunteers offered rides to shelters and made sure clients had those emergency numbers on the fridge.
The storm hit Fort Myers on Wednesday, September 28. That night Ink-Edwards could barely sleep. “I was so worried about all of our homebound seniors, some of whom lived in really low-lying areas,” she said. “That’s the really scary part for us, not so much the preparation for the storm but: What’s it going to look like during the storm and then after? Are we going to be able to get to them?”
The next morning, Ink-Edwards inspected the organization’s kitchen and was relieved to discover it had sustained minimal damage. “By Friday, we were delivering meals and supplies again,” she said.
The roads were littered with debris, and clients had a litany of requests: bottled water, a generator for an oxygen tank, help to remove a branch that had crashed through a roof. “We do whatever we can,” she said. “We’ll end up finding a roofer, but in the interim, to put the bandaid on it, my volunteers and staff are the ones tarping roofs.”
Researchers have found that nonprofit meal-delivery programs can reduce loneliness, risk of falls and the need for institutional care. One economic analysis of the model found that a 1% increase in the number of people using the service was associated with a $109 million reduction in Medicaid spending.
“What sets these programs apart is the daily interaction — the informal wellness check-in and the socialization that recipients receive by nature of these meals showing up at lunchtime, every day, multiple days a week,” said Kali Thomas, a researcher at Brown University who has authored several studies on meal-delivery programs.
In New York, the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated one of the most dangerous hazards of old age: isolation. “There are still so many who are afraid to go out, afraid to shop,” said Beth Shapiro, the executive director of Citymeals on Wheels. “The meal and the check-in coming to their door are really a lifeline.”
Jackie, a 73-year-old Queens resident and Citymeals client who asked that her last name be withheld, said she looked forward to her six-days-a-week deliveries. Two volunteers — Pablo and Veronica — take turns dropping meals off at her home. “It’s like having a niece and nephew visit every day,” she said.
Jackie, who struggles with shortness of breath, heart palpitations and poor vision, has lived alone since her mother died several years ago. “I hibernate when it’s hot out because of my breathing problems,” she said. During the summer, she relies on a single air conditioner in her living room and deliveries from her local pharmacy and deli to stay out of the heat. “I’m fortunate to have people like that because when you’re alone — no family, no siblings — you have to be independent,” she said.
She said that Citymeals has the phone number of one of her friends, who lives down the street. “If for some reason I don’t answer the phone, they’ll call her to make sure that she knew I was okay. If they can’t get ahold [of me or] her, they’ll call 911 to make sure that I’m not dead or unconscious on the floor,” she said. (Cities, including New York, have adopted similar buddy-system programs to keep vulnerable residents safe during heatwaves.)
During the first two years of the pandemic, Citymeals on Wheels more than doubled its annual deliveries and started substituting in-person visits with wellness calls. Volunteers have largely gone back to making in-person visits, but Shapiro said her organization is investing in expanding its check-in call program.
Citymeals is also training volunteers to identify signs of heat-related illness. “The people we’re feeding are living on extremely fixed incomes,” she said. “They’re making the decision to — if they have an air conditioner — to turn it on or not. So we have to be very aware of what’s going on and check in,” she said.
For Shapiro, the climate crisis hasn’t changed Citymeals’ mission so much as focused it. After Hurricane Sandy, the organization bought a 25,000 square-foot building in the Bronx to use as its operations hub. Shapiro never thought they’d use the entire building. “And then came COVID and we were filled to the gills,” she said.
She added, “So much of our planning is now around emergencies.”
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