On Sunday afternoon, the Guatemalan government issued a statement cancelling a highly anticipated meeting, scheduled for Monday, in Washington, between Jimmy Morales, the President of Guatemala, and Donald Trump. The subject of the meeting was a deal between the two countries that would allow the U.S. government to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala under the terms of a so-called safe-third-country agreement. The idea was to outsource part of the American asylum system to Guatemala, despite the fact that many of the Central-American asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border are Guatemalans fleeing poverty, hunger, and violence in their home country. “Opposition to the deal was widespread in Guatemala,” Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a newly elected member of the Guatemalan congress, told me. “Morales was acting alone.” Over the weekend, the country’s Constitutional Court was considering three separate petitions filed in an attempt to block the deal; on Sunday night, a few hours after Morales cancelled his plans for Washington, citing the pending legal case, the judges issued their ruling: Morales was forbidden from negotiating the deal on his own, without consulting the Guatemalan congress. According to a member of the Trump Administration, “if the injunctions didn’t happen in Guatemala, then the deal would have been signed on Monday.”

Reports about a possible agreement between the two countries have been circulating for more than a month, but some of the concrete details of what the arrangement would actually look like emerged late last week. The New Yorker obtained a draft of the agreement, which stated that the U.S. would be able to send asylum seekers from any country to Guatemala, including, in theory, those who never even travelled through Guatemala in the first place. As such, the over-all agreement seemed to go even further than a traditional safe-third-country agreement. According to a person with knowledge of the deal, there were additional stipulations in a second document, called the “implementation plan,” which made clear that the Trump Administration intended the agreement to apply primarily to asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador. Still, at an earlier stage of deliberations over the policy, there had been a discussion inside the Trump Administration about taking advantage of the agreement’s broad language to send more people to Guatemala. Ultimately, that position was considered too extreme, though the language of the agreement itself, which allowed for that possibility, remained intact.

“The Guatemalans did not know what they were getting into,” the Trump Administration official told me. “To this day, Morales believes this agreement is not a safe-third. They don’t want anyone to call it that.” One reason for Morales’s confusion seems to be that there were no real examples of an analogous deal for him to use as a point of reference. The U.S. does have a safe-third-country agreement with Canada—if asylum seekers arrive at a Canadian port of entry, immigration authorities will send them back to the U.S., on the grounds that they could receive a fair hearing in the American system, and vice versa—but it’s different from anything under consideration at the southern border. For one thing, the number of asylum seekers from Central America is significantly higher there, and has been on the rise. There are also serious concerns about whether Guatemala could provide a safe and stable environment in which Hondurans, Salvadorans, or anyone else travelling through the country could actually seek asylum. Manfredo Marroquín, a Guatemalan human-rights advocate and recent Presidential contender, who filed one of the three petitions to the Constitutional Court, told me, “Signing this agreement would be putting at risk the constitutional rights of Guatemalans, because the government would be forced to give to others what it hasn’t given to Guatemalans—safety, employment, health care, and education.”

Part of Morales’s considerations related to Mexico, Guatemala’s northern neighbor, which is also in the midst of tense negotiations with the Trump Administration over a safe-third-country deal, according to the person with knowledge of the negotiations. Although the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly opposed such an agreement, it conceded last month, under pressure from Trump, that the option was on the table. “The Guatemalans likely thought that partnering with the U.S. on this would help them highlight how Mexico isn’t doing enough,” the Administration official told me. “Mexico has been against signing this kind of agreement, which the Guatemalan government knows. The Guatemalans wanted to not be seen as the problem.”

A Presidential runoff in Guatemala will be held in August, and Morales has six months left in office; pursuing the deal, Jordán Rodas, Guatemala’s human-rights ombudsman, told me, “was yet another way he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Trump Administration” before the end of his term. Sunday’s court ruling in Guatemala has effectively ended speculation about the viability of a deal between the two countries. Because Morales lacks support in congress to pursue the agreement, and the Constitutional Court has barred him from acting alone, it isn’t clear what the President could do to revive the talks with Washington. “Morales wanted to end his time as close as he could to the U.S.,” the person familiar with the negotiations told me. Rodas, who also filed one of the court petitions, told me, “We cannot trust that this government won’t try this again, but it’ll be very hard now. It was very important that, once again, the Constitutional Court has asserted the rule of law.” (On Twitter, Francisco Villagran de Leon, a former Guatemalan Ambassador to the U.S. who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University, said, “It wasn’t Jimmy Morales who canceled the meeting. It was Trump. Jimmy didn’t want to miss an opportunity to go to the White House, but they told him not to go. They didn’t want to expose Trump to the fiasco of signing something that the Constitutional Court in Guatemala could have disallowed.”)

On Monday morning, the Trump Administration revealed that it had also, simultaneously, been planning a sweeping new regulation to limit asylum at the southern border. Announced by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, the regulation, which will almost certainly be challenged in U.S. federal court, states that a person cannot qualify for asylum in the U.S. if she failed to apply for asylum in a third country through which she travelled on her way to the U.S. “In one line, it’s really ending the ability of Central Americans to apply for asylum at the southern border,” Sarah Pierce, a lawyer with the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “As a result of this move, we would be deporting people who qualify for asylum in the U.S. back to the countries from which they fled.”

Megan Rapinoe, the co-captain of the champion U.S. women’s soccer team, is confidently and casually everyone’s current favorite athlete, leader, and lesbian. As I watched her take the podium at the ticker-tape parade in New York on Wednesday, her gestures and posture unapologetically what some of us watching would classify as dykey (others may say, politely, that her presentation was not traditionally feminine), I wondered what this moment felt like for another woman, the first American professional athlete to come out. So I called the tennis player Martina Navratilova, who is currently at Wimbledon, working as a commentator but also playing—in a legends doubles match—and asked.

Navratilova’s own coming-out, in 1981, was conflicted and mangled. Six years earlier, at the age of eighteen, Navratilova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, had defected to the United States. At the same time that she made the decision not to return to Czechoslovakia, she also realized that she was gay. Navratilova was then one of the world’s top two female tennis players—the other was Chris Evert. She had to talk to the press a lot, and the press was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of female athletes’ sexuality.

Navratilova had a policy of deflecting the question. “I never said no, I wasn’t gay,” she recalled. “I just said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, it’s private’—which I really feel it is, private. But they would never ask that question of a male athlete.” Sports was a manly business: “Of course they are straight, unless they are figure skaters or something. Female athletes had to prove that they were straight. It’s not a girl activity.” There were, of course, lesbians on the women’s tennis tour, but Navratilova said that the proportion was, “percentage-wise, not that much higher than the general population. There were a lot more lesbians on the golf tour, but they were more closeted.”

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In 1979, Navratilova fell in love with the writer Rita Mae Brown, whose 1973 novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle,” remains the only American lesbian-themed massive best-seller. (It was published by a feminist collective and picked up by Bantam, a few years later, when it had sold seventy thousand copies.) Brown introduced Navratilova to the world of politically active lesbians, in which she was a celebrity, and Navratilova began thinking of coming out publicly. The problem was, her application for U.S. citizenship was still pending and could be denied on the grounds of her homosexuality. (This provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act was dropped in 1990, when it was redrafted by Representative Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, who is gay.) Navratilova developed a new way of deflecting the sexuality question: she would now say, “I can’t talk about it now.” Privately, she told some journalists that she couldn’t talk about it until she became a citizen. She also told some of the other tennis players that, once she had her passport, “If anybody asks me about it, I’m just going to say, ‘Yes, I am gay.’ ”

In April, 1981, a woman named Marilyn Barnett sued Billie Jean King, one of the great female players and the founder of the Women’s Tennis Association. Barnett, who had been King’s lover for seven years, claimed that King had promised to support her for life, and was demanding compensation. Navratilova knew Barnett, who was a hairdresser and had travelled with King for several years. “She did my hair, too,” Navratilova told me. King acknowledged the relationship but said that it was an affair she regretted, and affirmed her commitment to her marriage. “She was trying to pretend that she was still straight,” Navratilova remembered. “She wasn’t, but she didn’t come out until the late nineties.”

The lawsuit caused journalists to ask ever more questions about tennis players’ sexuality. Navratilova knew that she was about to be granted citizenship, which would have freed her to come out—except for one thing: “The sponsors had said to the people in charge that if there was another scandal that they would pull their sponsorship from the tour. So first I was protecting my citizenship, and then I was protecting the people I was with at the W.T.A. I felt I was responsible for sixty to a hundred women.” Their livelihoods depended in large part on the sponsorship money that came from Avon, the cosmetics company then behind the W.T.A.

In the summer of 1981, Navratilova got her passport. “And two days later this journalist calls me, in Monte Carlo. Now I can’t come out because I’m protecting the tour. So I said, ‘You are not going to write about it, are you?’ He said, ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’ I said, ‘Of course I don’t want you to.’ He said, “O.K., I won’t, then.” And two days later it was in the Daily News.” The headline was “Martina Fears Avon’s Call if She Talks.”

Avon did not in fact drop its sponsorship of the W.T.A. Nor did Navratilova lose the endorsements she had—the racquets and shoes stayed in place. “But I couldn’t get any deals outside of that in the U.S., because I was out,” she said. Even as her career soared, as did the popularity of women’s tennis, advertising agencies stayed away. “They would call my agent about a commercial or something, and she would say, ‘How about Martina?’ and they would say no and then Chris [Evert] would get the deal, or somebody else. It was the kiss of death. Advertisers wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”

I asked how long that lasted, and Navratilova had to think a moment. The only exceptions were Olivia Cruises, a company offering cruises for lesbians, and, in the late nineties, Subaru, the car company that ingeniously decided to advertise specifically to lesbians. Audiences, though, were more accepting than the advertisers. Two months after the article, Navratilova lost to Tracy Austin, and the crowd clapped its support for the one who lost. “So I felt accepted by the general public,” Navratilova said. “They didn’t care.”

Even after the Daily News article, Navratilova couldn’t speak openly about her sexuality. She had left Brown for Nancy Lieberman, a professional basketball player who was in the closet. “Now I was protecting her. We were ‘friends.’ Everybody knew, but I never owned up to [our relationship] because she was still trying to get endorsements and play basketball.” In theory, Navratilova believes, the question of one’s sexuality should be separate from the question of one’s relationship: “I will own my sexuality, but I don’t want people in my private life. It’s private; that’s why it’s called that.” In practice, however, she felt she couldn’t be fully out until her relationship with Lieberman ended, in 1984. Her next girlfriend, the beauty queen Judy Nelson, had no objections to being open about their relationship. A media frenzy ensued. “The first year we were together, the paparazzi followed us everywhere,” Navratilova said. “It was pretty nasty. And the stories were all about ‘her lesbian den.’ And when we split up, they were calling it our ‘love shack’ or something. We’d been together for seven years, and they were calling it a ‘love shack.’ ”

So what did it feel like now, to see the adulation of Rapinoe, the celebration of the soccer team’s victory accompanied by photographs of players kissing their same-sex partners, the ESPN photoshoot of Rapinoe and her partner, the basketball player Sue Bird? “It’s just fantastic,” Navratilova said. “It took a long time. This was thirty years ago that this was going on. It seems like it happened so quickly, gay marriage and all that, but if you are living in the middle of it, it happened very slowly. I am just thrilled that it’s not only O.K.—it’s becoming less and less of a thing. When people come out, it doesn’t make headlines anymore. It’s a non-issue, which I’ve always said—that I hope one day it will be a non-issue. That’s exactly what I’ve been marching for for decades. I’m thrilled. I’m just so thrilled.”

Well, look who just showed up at the metaphysical-supply store. Give a shout if you need help finding anything—this must all be pretty new to you. You know, I’m usually happy to see someone take an interest in the occult, but I can’t help but question your motives here.

It just seems kind of convenient that you’re suddenly into all this now that you’ve been possessed by Satan.

Back in middle school, you always made fun of me for having my tarot deck out on the lunch table. So you can imagine how surprised I was to see this new side of you. It’s almost like doing Lucifer’s bidding has turned you into a totally different person.

You said that I was going to Hell for bringing a Ouija board to your twelfth-birthday party, and now you’re dressed in all black and bleeding out of your orifices. I know one’s interests can change over time, but, when I heard that you were embracing the dark arts all of a sudden, you weren’t the only one with his eyes rolled back.

At first, I worried that I might be coming down too hard on you, so I read your tarot to gain some perspective. First, I drew Judgement reversed, which I think speaks to a lack of self-awareness and a general feeling of insecurity on your part. The next four cards I drew were the Devil, which checks out. The very last card, though? The Tower, which represents a chaotic change in your life—one that you might want to reconsider.

Look, you’re not the only former normie who’s waltzed in here calling herself a witch just because she’s draped in black satin and hovering above the ground on a whisker broom. And you definitely won’t be the last guy to buy a deck of tarot cards just to have it collect dust while he’s busy jet-setting around another plane of existence.

From where I’m standing, it looks like you’re here only so that you and your friends can post yet another video where they’re huddled around a pentagram, pleading for the demon to leave your body. It’s like, look, we get it—you’re the anointed cherub now. You don’t have to wave it in our faces.

If I were you, I’d stop spinning my head around in circles and focus on getting it on straight. Do you really want to go down this road? Take a moment to ask yourself if you’re really into the occult or if you just crave the attention from all the exorcists and priests.

If this is only a passing phase, then I seriously suggest that you move on to the next trend already. I’ll still be here with everyone who’s sincerely into smudging, trying to piece together why the devil chose the most self-possessed person on Earth to be his human vessel.

Aziz Ansari has been evasive. The celebrity figure invokes the right to avoid reality in times of personal crisis. Early reviews of “Working Out New Material,” Ansari’s recent standup tour, picked at the comedian’s seemingly spooked circumventions of what everyone in the audience already knew. Ansari’s comedy had never been one of lacerating introspection, but it had been one of bro-y complicity; he situated himself as a callow, slick-suited jester, a co-conspirator of the millennial life-style cult that praises interracial mixing, feminist dating, social-media optimism, and bleeding-heart politicking. With a sociologist, he’d co-written a courtship digest called “Modern Romance.” On “Master of None,” he fell in love in Italy in black-and-white. The allegation against him, published by the now defunct Web site babe.net, in January of 2018—that he had pressured a young woman, pseudonymously referred to as Grace, to have sex after a date—made Ansari’s expertise seem fraudulent. Not acknowledging as much smelled like creative cowardice.

In “Right Now,” his new Netflix special, Ansari finally musters some honesty. At the outset of the hour, he breezes through an old-faithful setup: an anecdote about a well-meaning New Yorker confusing Ansari for a fellow Netflix mainstay, the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who is also Indian-American. The man, in Ansari’s telling, quickly notices the gaucheness of his blunder, and course-corrects by frantically listing Ansari’s C.V.—the romantic “Master of None,” the antic “Parks and Recreation,” and “You had that whole thing last year, sexual misconduct.” Ansari eyes widen, and his arms violently flail as he pantomimes his own response: “That was Hasan!”

Then Ansari dials down his loud and nasal drawl to sotto voce. Nominally, he has just told a joke, but the audience is making a sound that rings less and less like laughter. Ansari wades from comedy to crafted contrition. For Grace’s story, he has developed a shorthand—“that whole thing.” That whole thing made him feel, he tells the audience, “scared,” “humiliated,” and “embarrassed,” and, “ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.” The speech is fine and obligatory, elevated to artful by the director of the special, Spike Jonze. Wearing an Easyrig, Jonze is onstage with Ansari, orbiting him from close range. He applies harsh police lighting to Ansari, who is not so much seated on his stool as he is condemned to it. It is so bright that it illuminates people waiting in the wings of the stage, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the special was filmed, people who might be Ansari’s managers and agents and yes-men. The shot is ugly, intriguingly framed.

Those same words could summarize the whole of “Right Now,” which reads to me as Ansari’s first authentic comedy special. I hadn’t previously thought deeply about the cultural presence of Ansari, because his body of entertainment had not invited me to do so. He specialized in increasing the banal pleasure of the crowd. On “Parks and Recreation,” as Tom, he encouraged you to “treat yourself.” He rode around in designer vehicles with Jay-Z and Kanye West in the music video for “Otis” (also directed by Jonze). He was a foodie who at the same time cannily dismissed “foodie culture.” But in “Right Now” Ansari is a fitting ambassador for a certain bourgeois ambivalence. The special bristles with shame, indecision, anger, and guilt. Ansari has feasted, and this is the hangover. Two refrains ground the material, which roves like a drone over events that, in Ansari’s telling, expose the terminal hypocrisy of modern culture. The first is that Ansari hopes that everyone, including himself, wants to be a better person. The other: “We’re all shitty people.”

I got a weird feeling, watching “Right Now,” that the #MeToo story had liberated Ansari, forcing him to kill his old persona and give his new one teeth. “That old Aziz who said, ‘Oh, treat yo’self’? He’s dead,” he says, at the special’s end. He has developed a disdain for the brand of bland likability he formerly hawked, even as he can’t quite escape its skin. He audits his old bits mercilessly, indicting his former willingness to do or say anything for a laugh. Harris, the “chubby cousin” who had been a mainstay in Ansari’s family-manners riffs, is buff now, Ansari assures us, and works out compulsively; he acknowledges that he had been “fat-shaming” Harris for a national audience. He recalls that, in his first standup special, he had described going to an R. Kelly concert. “Clap if you’re done with R. Kelly,” he asks the crowd at BAM, after wondering aloud why it took a “bingeable documentary” to get people to care about the singer’s abuse of young black girls. He similarly flays the response to the recent documentary about Michael Jackson and riskily spotlights a ten-year-old kid sitting in the front row. The point—that entertainment excuses evils, and that we don’t process truths unless they entertain us—is both banal and impossible to emphasize enough.

Ansari makes clear that it isn’t exclusively remorse that is pushing him to reëvaluate the recent past. “Gotta be careful about what you say and about what you said,” he cautions, the irritation bright in his voice. Ansari is older now, and he’s got a bone to pick with “wokeness,” the spoils of which he had previously enjoyed. Ansari mocks progressive white people—his crowd—for ultimately only caring about accruing social capital through performing escalating acts of political correctness, like a game of “progressive Candy Crush.”

“Right Now” is conscious of the manipulative powers of performance, although Ansari is not yet clear-eyed about who it is he wants to lecture. One cheap bit, which involves Ansari repeating the word “niggardly,” feels like he is brushing up against the third rail to prove that he won’t be cowed by his public reckoning. He admits that the new wokeness is not all hollow—in his thirty-six years, he’s never felt white people as attuned to the problems of minorities as they are today. The audience is his toy in a game of fluctuating self-loathing; his crowd work is frequent, casual until it quickly becomes a little cruel. At one point, he lays a trap, meandering toward a story: “A guy orders a pepperoni pizza, the pepperonis are arranged to look like a swastika, but now some people online are saying it doesn’t look like a swastika.” A man in the audience claims to have read about the incident in the Washington Post. Then Ansari reveals that he made the whole story up. “You think your opinion is so valuable, you need to chime in on shit that doesn’t even exist,” Ansari scolds. It’s cutting, and, like many moments in the show, it is impossible not to hear it as a coded personal grievance.

“Right Now” isn’t very funny, and perhaps a “#MeToo comeback” shouldn’t be; I think I’d like Ansari’s special less if it were. I winced a little when, early in the show, Ansari recalled a friend saying that the controversy surrounding Ansari had prompted him to reflect on his own treatment of women in the past. “It’s made not just me but other people more thoughtful,” Ansari says. “And that’s a good thing.” This is a complicated maneuver, a claim to #MeToo allyship that is also showy self-sacrifice. It’s hard to believe that Ansari believes any part of the event was “a good thing.” In a few other moments, he seems to retreat toward crowd-pleasing fare—a joke about the lack of male birth control and his girlfriend’s IUD bruising his penis; a parody of the girlfriend, who is a Danish physicist unlearned in American racism. But the contradictions of “Right Now” are destabilizing enough to draw me back in. Ansari knows that the stakes have been raised.

On a sunny afternoon in mid-June, several hundred students and lecturers from the Lebanese University, in Beirut, gathered in a square outside the Prime Minister’s office. Some stood on top of a pickup truck loaded with loudspeakers, leading chants against proposed government budget cuts to the university. “We want to continue our year and we worry about having our lessons,” a biochemistry student named Claudia Khalil told me. Professors at the university had been on strike for weeks demanding an increase in pay. In May, retired members of the military burned tires and demonstrated in the same square against proposed cuts to their pensions and benefits. “Thieves, thieves!” they shouted at the old Ottoman building.

Lebanon’s profound economic dysfunction is coming to a head this summer, as its political leaders try to impose austerity measures on a restive public, while failing to enact anti-corruption measures that France, the World Bank, and the country’s other primary foreign donors insist on to reform a political system renowned for its graft and dysfunction. Lebanon ranks a hundred and thirty-eighth out of a hundred and eighty nations in the 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, released by the global anti-corruption group Transparency International. Nearly thirty years after the country’s civil war ended, its people still endure rolling power blackouts owing to corruption and inefficiency in the country’s state-dominated power company.

In May, 2018, the country held its first parliamentary elections since 2009, raising public hopes of more effective governance. So far, the results have disappointed many Lebanese. It took nine months of political fighting and deadlock before a government could be formed, in January, with Saad Hariri as Prime Minister. The Sunni leader, however, was left weakened, losing a third of his party’s seats, while Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite political party and militant group, made major gains.

This week, the Lebanese parliament’s finance committee approved a draft budget that analysts dismissed as riddled with economic half-measures—some tax increases and spending cuts. The draft budget, which should have been approved six months ago, is expected to be voted on by the full parliament next week. The budget could spark further public protests as Lebanon’s four and a half million people struggle with a tepid economic growth rate of one per cent, rising cost of living, and barely functional public services. At the same time, more than a million Syrian refugees are living in the country, placing further strain on the economy.

According to the Beirut-based research consultancy firm Information International, eighty-five per cent of Lebanese citizens don’t trust their politicians. Tarek Serhan, a student activist, told me that the new tax increases will fuel further civil unrest against the country’s ruling élite. He predicted a summer of protests. “The normal people, let’s say, like, the students, the waiters, the bartenders, even the small businesses will be affected” by the taxes, he said.

Today Lebanon is the third-most indebted country in the world, with around forty per cent of its annual government revenue going toward servicing debt. At the same time, there are growing concerns that the Lebanese currency, the lira, is at risk of devaluation. In January, the ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Lebanon’s credit rating to junk status, on fears that the country could default on its debts.

Government officials told me that the passage of a budget was a reason for cautious optimism. They said it would give the country an opportunity to receive a better credit-rating assessment in August. “I think we want Lebanon and the government of Lebanon to send as positive [a] message as possible,” one senior official at the central bank, who did not wish to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said. “The budget and the budget deficit—will it witness a decrease?”

Last year, France hosted a meeting of international donors designed to bolster Lebanon’s economy in the wake of the war in Syria. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and several nations pledged eleven billion dollars in soft loans, money that the country desperately needs to avoid financial collapse in the future. Donors, however, have not released the money, because Lebanon’s government has not met their conditions—including reducing the country’s vast budget deficit of eleven per cent of G.D.P. to 7.5 per cent, and enacting major economic reforms.

The proposed 2019 budget now being considered by parliament includes some spending cuts, but it primarily consists of freezes and an increase in taxes to raise government revenue, such as increasing the taxes on interest earned on bank deposits, from seven per cent to ten per cent. Analysts say the government half-measures will only exacerbate the country’s economic problems. “This will deepen the problem,” Sami Nader, a financial and political analyst and the director of the Beirut-based Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, said. Nader said that Lebanon’s ruling élites appear to be betting that European powers do not want to see the country’s economy collapse because it could result in a new wave of Syrian migrants heading toward them. “They think that all the world will be on its knees begging us to take whatever we want but in exchange we will keep the refugees,” he said. “It’s not like that. No one is begging us.”

After the civil war, which was fought from 1975 to 1990, Lebanon’s political and religious factions agreed to a complex power-sharing agreement that divided government power along sectarian lines. Since then, political deadlock has regularly ensued, with the country’s parties and sects fighting for control of positions, policy, and lucrative government contracts. Lebanon’s political divisions have crippled the country’s economy, with graft and sectarianism working in tandem to fuel the current economic crisis. Nader, the analyst, told me that state institutions, rather than being viewed as providing important services to Lebanese citizens and the country, are divided up between powerful politicians as sources of income. “Here every single procurement contract is a way to finance political parties,” Nader said. “You have electricity that is under the control of one party, the waste management under the control of another party, the port authority under the control of a third party.”

The result of such vast corruption is that government-owned companies that should provide public services rarely do so effectively. Instead, they eat into the state budget and push the government deeper into debt. The state power company Electricité du Liban is among the worst offenders. Each year, it receives at least $1.5 billion in financial support from the government. Despite that vast expenditure, Lebanon has not regained twenty-four-hour electricity since its civil war ended. To avoid blackouts, residents pay high prices for power produced by a network of privately owned neighborhood generators. Above Beirut’s streets, a jerry-rigged, tangled mess of heavy black cables connects hundreds of thousands of apartments to generators.

In April, the parliament passed sweeping legislation designed to reform the power sector, including the building of new power plants and the provision of twenty-four-hour electricity by 2020. The measure was the type of reform demanded by the donors who gathered in Paris last year. In June, Lebanon’s constitutional court struck down a major part of the law after several members of parliament filed a lawsuit questioning the fairness of the issuing of contracts to build new power plants. The ruling stalled the power-sector-reform effort. Nader, the analyst, said that corrupt politicians were blocking reform across the economy. “Why would they privatize the electricity if they are getting their money from the electricity?” he asked. “Why would they open the sector of telecom to competition if they are financing their parties, if they are employing their people?”

Even trash disposal hasn’t escaped political payola. In 2015, Beirut’s landfill had well surpassed its capacity for garbage. Despite years of warnings, neither the government nor the state-contracted company, Sukleen, had developed an alternative site. At the same time, Sukleen’s garbage-collection contract ended. As politicians fought over who would get the next contract and how much it would be worth, piles of rotting garbage accumulated underneath bridges and in carparks. Residents of densely populated neighborhoods in Beirut burned their garbage, and tons of refuse was illegally dumped in rivers, valleys, and the Mediterranean Sea. The owners of Sukleen are close allies to Prime Minister Hariri’s family. Thousands of protesters staged angry demonstrations in Beirut, organized under the banner “You Stink,” to show their anger at politicians whom they blamed for creating the crisis. It was a rare moment of unity in a deeply divided society, showing that anger at the country’s ruling élites cut through its religious divisions.

Lebanese politicians and political parties operate vast patronage networks that provide government jobs to party loyalists. The result is a bloated civil service. There are an estimated four hundred thousand civil servants in Lebanon, so roughly a tenth of the population receives a government salary. The state-owned railway continues to fund an office of several dozen staffers, even though it hasn’t had a functioning railway in decades. Government salaries and pensions account for thirty-five per cent of the state’s total budget. Before the 2018 parliamentary elections, the public sector was promised a pay raise—a popular move among voters, but not a financially viable one. Now those same government workers are protesting over the potential cuts to their wages that donors say are needed to stabilize the economy.

Hariri has warned that “painful” austerity will be needed if Lebanon is to avoid “catastrophe.” But persuading the international donor community that real change is finally taking place will be difficult. Getting the population to shoulder the cost of decades of economic mismanagement will be an even harder sell, after decades of postwar corruption and graft. Serhan, the student activist, told me that Lebanon’s leaders are to blame, not its people. “They are the ruling authority and they have been ruling this country for tens of years,” he said. “They put us in this trouble, not us.”

When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon on Friday, the sight was at once familiar and strange—strange, in part, for seeming so familiar. The two men were meeting for the fortieth time, the fourteenth at a major. They had met only five weeks before, in the semifinals of the French Open. Nadal had run away with that one, but that was to be expected, given that the match was happening on clay. The win improved Nadal’s record against Federer to 24–15—though Federer had won their previous six matches. And now they were meeting at Wimbledon, where Federer has won eight titles to Nadal’s two. The last time they had faced each other there was in 2008, in what many consider the greatest match ever played. Federer was twenty-six then, and Nadal twenty-two; now they are thirty-seven and thirty-three, respectively. They were seeded two and three in this tournament, behind Novak Djokovic, rather than one and two, as they had been then. They have less hair than they used to. In 2008, the match had seemed to represent a passing of the torch or a changing of the guard—pick your favorite cliché. Except the torch wasn’t passed, and the guard didn’t change: instead, what we got, in the years to come, was a long, incredible rivalry. One that has gone on so long that, these days, it can seem that tennis is caught in a time warp.

In the days leading up to Friday’s match, there was a great deal of talk about that match in 2008—the replays of old points on TV seemed, at times, to overwhelm the coverage of tennis that was actually happening in the present. It was irresistible: old footage of the early rain on that day, and then the fade into twilight; the dramatic rallies and momentum swings. As for any new analysis, it was mostly halfhearted. What was there left to say? Federer, after he won on Wednesday and knew who his next opponent would be, said, “Well, we have a lot of information on Rafa, and so does he about us. You can either dive into tactics and all that stuff like mad for two days, or you’re just going to say, ‘You know what? It’s grass-court tennis, and I’m going to come out there and play attacking tennis.’ And, if he can defend that, that’s too good. And, if he can’t, well, then, that’s good for me.”

Nadal’s and Federer’s careers are intertwined now—they form a tiny ecosystem, in which each of them has forced the other to change. It was once easy to caricature the stylistic differences between them, and, although the contrast remains, there has also been convergence. Nadal hits that heavy hooking forehand and can still run for days, but he comes into net more often, and, in the past couple of years, he has developed a brutal serve. Federer still floats into that fluid forehand with the long extension, serves with perfect precision, and plays with invention. But, assisted by a bigger racquet face, he drives his backhand hard, making it less of a liability.

On Friday, then, it was no surprise when the first set favored both servers: aces and classic 1–2 patterns. There were forays to net, and long rallies—most notably on Federer’s break point at 4–3, which lasted twenty-one shots, with Nadal’s topspin forehand bouncing higher and higher, and Federer fighting it off with his one-hander up around his shoulders, until finally the Swiss player blinked. It was the only real opening on either man’s serve in the first set, which went to a tiebreaker. There were more fireworks: Nadal running down a Federer volley and flicking his backhand to drop deep in the corner, an impossible get; Federer flying in on his forehand. When there were errors, they were of the smallest margins—lines missed by millimetres, ground strokes rolling off the tape.

Federer came away with the first set, and the match seemed on its way to becoming another classic. As the second began, each player ratcheted up the pressure on the other’s serve. Federer exploited his superior timing to take the return early and put Nadal on his back foot; Nadal’s intensity rose to a pitch that only he seems capable of. Federer was hitting about twice as many winners as Nadal, following his aggressive game plan, but Nadal was an unbreakable force; he came away with the match’s first break.

Then something unfamiliar happened: Federer fell apart. The errors came fast, and Nadal started toying with him. He took the set, 6–1. Federer had won only fifteen of the set’s forty-five points. But another swerve was in store. Federer regained his form on his serve and rediscovered his forehand, and Nadal struggled to break. Federer took the third set, 6–3. In the fourth and final set, Federer’s ground strokes, unexpectedly, allowed him to outlast Nadal in rallies. He took the final set, 6–4. Was it revenge for 2008? Not really. But that wasn’t the point.

Meetings between Federer and Nadal were once almost crude in their symbolism: brute force versus elegance, right versus left, passion versus cool. Now those old story lines feel a little silly. Even the debate over which player is the greatest of all time can seem a little off point (and, besides, Djokovic may have something to say about that). The more they play, and the more they distance themselves from almost everyone else, the more they seem to share. Most notably, they have in common a calmness under incredible pressure, a mental fortitude that others can’t match, and an ability to recover, physically and emotionally, even mid-game. On Friday, they even shared in the ebbs and flows of the match.

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However high the level was for stretches of the match, it wasn’t a classic—not quite, no matter how much we may have wanted or expected it to be. But, like all the matches between these two men, it offered a chance to watch two players who have made each other, improbably, almost impossibly, improve, in order to keep pace with the other. The pressure, at this point, is off, or should be. Their semifinal was one more data point in their long rivalry, not a definitive showdown. It didn’t decide who is the best ever, or even who is the best in the world right now. (That title belongs to the man whom Federer will play in the final, on Sunday, Djokovic.) Toward the end of the fourth set, as I watched Nadal fend off four match points—in an astonishing stretch that matched the level that he and Federer showed more than a decade ago—I found myself simply submitting to each shot, without worrying what it meant in a larger sense. They were just playing grass-court tennis, and we had the privilege just to watch.