The Opinions

Many undecided voters aren’t undecided; they’re just uncomfortable, Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, argues. In this episode of “The Opinions,” he says that “uncomfortable Trump voters” — people who don’t want to admit that they’re going to vote for Donald Trump — could end up costing Kamala Harris the election.

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Since coming down the escalator to announce his bid for president in 2015, Donald Trump has disparaged and dehumanized immigrants. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada, an immigrant from Peru, reflects on what it means to not just discuss the issue but to be at the center of it.

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In the wake of the Dobbs decision, South Carolina banned abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy. The law does have a few exceptions, including rape and incest. Dr. Kristl Tomlin, a pediatric and adolescent gynecologist, saw what those exceptions look like in practice for young victims of rape — and she decided to leave the state. In this episode, Dr. Tomlin describes how having to involve the sheriff’s department and lawyers in her work hurt her patients, and pushed her to leave the community she loved.

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Florida’s two major hurricanes in the past month highlight how decades of deregulation and overdevelopment under Republican leadership have made the state increasingly vulnerable to climate change. After more than 30 years of living through Florida hurricanes, the writer Jeff VanderMeer believes a “managed retreat” is a necessary response to the growing frequency and intensity of storms.

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Melania Trump promoted her recent memoir, “Melania,” with a series of glossy and cryptic promotional videos stating the desire “to share my perspective: the truth.” But what does the self-titled memoir reveal to us about the often inscrutable former first lady? The bookish Opinion columnists Carlos Lozada and Pamela Paul discuss what they learned — and often, what they did not — from her work.

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Despite concerns over the falling birthrate, especially on the right, the Times Opinion columnist David French recognizes that the push to have more families — and bigger ones — has become problematic. In this audio essay, French explains why he thinks the recent political conversation on the topic reveals “the worst form of natalism.”

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This week, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bombing survivors, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.” Over the summer, in an effort to bring light to this new and terrifying nuclear era, Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the writer W.J. Hennigan interviewed Japanese survivors of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this audio essay, they share stories from two of the survivors they met, Chieko Kiriake and Keiko Ogura, who were just 15 and 8 years old on Aug. 6, 1945.

To see more photographs and read more stories from them and other survivors, click here.

This piece originally appeared on nytimes.com on Aug. 6, 2024.

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Mirielle Silcoff received backlash when she wrote a guest essay for Times Opinion about paying her 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a novel. In this audio essay, Ms. Silcoff explains why she doesn’t regret her decision, and why she felt like the experience for her daughter was worth the cost.

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Donald Trump has been on a tour of the Gen Z influencer ecosystem, from Theo Von to Adin Ross. In this episode of “The Opinions,” Daniel Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, argues that Trump is trying to win the support of young men, a once loyal Democratic constituency. Mr. Pfeiffer says Democrats ignore these voters at their peril, for the 2024 election and beyond: “There is no post-Trump era if Gen Z men become firmly adherents of MAGA philosophy,” he explains.

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The last time Mosab Abu Toha, a poet and teacher, was in a classroom in Gaza, it was to shelter with his students and their families, all seeking refuge from Israeli airstrikes. Since then, he and his family have fled Gaza, and they temporarily reside in the United States. In this audio essay, he shares what it means when classrooms cease being places of learning and become a family’s only hope for survival.

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