Modern compression socks were invented by Conrad Jobst, a dashing German engineer who lived in Toledo, Ohio, and suffered from varicose veins. He also developed precision gun sights for the U.S. during the First World War and patented the car sunroof, but compression socks, which he invented around 1950, were his flagship achievement. On paper, there’s not much to them: they’re very tight socks. Tightest near the ankle, but still pretty tight up top. They work by countering hydrostatic pressure in the wearer’s legs—that is, the bulging of the veins and tissues caused by fluid that’s been pulled down to the extremities and can’t get up.

It’s a phenomenon that I first encountered on a trip to India with my mother, to visit relatives, several years ago. I’d been making this journey all my life, with no physical consequences. Now, getting off the plane, I noticed that my feet had become distinctly puffy. The slope of my instep was as smooth and soft as a freshly fluffed pillow. The bone structure of my ankle had been swallowed in flesh. The swelling was still there the next morning, and the morning after that. My mother was having the same problem. I looked at my grandmother, sitting in a wheelchair, her feet permanently inflated like two dainty balloons: a vision of my genetic destiny.

Still, I thought little of the problem until a couple of years later, when I was planning what to wear to a friend’s wedding in South Africa. I hoped to wear a pair of shiny red heels, but then I pictured my feet as I knew they would be after the flight—as round and peg-like as a baby elephant’s. I turned to Google, which insisted that the way to prevent one’s feet from swelling on long-haul flights is to wear compression socks on the plane. I’d heard of compression socks as a remedy for deep-vein thrombosis, a condition that seemed as abstract and distant to me as amnesia or face blindness. But it appeared that, if I wanted to wear the heels, I would first have to wear this serious-sounding medical device, usually indicated for the bedridden, the elderly, the pregnant.

Compression socks are often marketed as “travel socks” and disguised to look like normal socks. You can find any number of designs online: argyle compression socks, or polka-dot compression socks, or patriotic compression socks. You could go silky and sleek or vaguely sporty. But I wasn’t going to have some novelty-hosiery company compressing me. Instead, I took careful measurements of the circumference of my feet, my ankles, my calves, according to instructions I found online (buy the socks too big and there’s no point, too small and they cut off circulation) and then headed to a medical-supply store on the Upper East Side as though I were shopping for a bespoke suit.

Amid the walkers and shower stools and adult diapers, the compression socks had half an aisle to themselves. There were dozens of pairs to choose from, of different heights and pressure ratings, but they were almost all solid black or nude. Some came in clear plastic bags without branding; others, from Jobst, the company started by Conrad, were packaged in flat little boxes with pictures of beautiful young models on coffee dates and at business meetings. I selected a classic style—just like the ones they use in hospitals—with a low pressure rating.

They are knee-high and flesh-colored, like pantyhose but thicker and without the sheen, so that they give my legs a corpselike pallor. The top couple of inches have a ribbed pattern, which leaves a deep imprint in the fat deposit between my knee and my calf muscle. The other end has no toes, almost like the tip has been cut off, but with another little ring of material, so you know it’s on purpose.

The toelessness is the ugliest feature of the socks (which have no attractive features) and the most likely to give them away as an assistive garment. But the pleasantness of having your toes free and accessible, to wiggle or splay or examine or scratch, is a revelation, particularly considering how difficult it is to get the socks on or off. They actually come with instructions, and there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube, mostly featuring attractive young women with long, lithe legs who exhibit no sign of venous insufficiency. There are also a number of devices that can help: the Jobst Stocking Donner, the Sigvaris Doff n’ Donner, the Juzo Slippie Gator. But there’s really no dignified way to go about it. There will be contortions and tuggings and bulges of flesh.

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The method I’ve landed on is to scrunch the fabric up into a ring, put your toes in first, then unfurl the sock slowly, until your heel slips into place, and then on up the length of your shin. It’s a lot like putting on pantyhose, if your pantyhose were staging an active rebellion. You don’t want to pull too hard, because they will come up too high and the elastic is uncomfortable if it hits the crease of your knee. If you don’t pull hard enough, there will be bunching and creasing, making the sock too tight in the wrinkled areas. The aim, as you put them on, is to surrender to the tension of the fabric, to encase your leg in it like a caterpillar building its chrysalis. The only way to take them off is to peel them from the top, turning them inside out, like a wetsuit, gradually revealing the good work they have performed.

When I landed in Cape Town and unwrapped my calves, I found them untouched by the ravages of cabin pressure. I wore the heels to the wedding; my ankles looked great. But the socks also seemed to have an all-over salutary effect that I hadn’t anticipated. Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1780, argued that walking was the ideal form of exercise partly because it “occasions a great pressure on the vessels of the foot,” causing the soles of the feet to behave like piston pumps, activating movement throughout your physiology, with the result that “the fluids are shaken, the humors attenuated, the secretions facilitated, and all goes well.” I doubt modern science would fully support Franklin’s theory, but it resonates with my compression-sock experience: there’s something about starting at the bottom of your feet and squeezing all your excess up, as though you were a tube of toothpaste. Your body feels lighter, your head feels clearer, your limbs feel freer, and all goes well.

Or perhaps I’m succumbing to the spiritual effect that the socks have had on me as they’ve become a ritual part of my travel routine. The first time I wore them, I found them deeply embarrassing. I hid in the bathroom to put them on and made sure that they were always covered with real socks. These days, I put them on in the boarding area, for God and everyone to see. I feel a kind of pride in my proactiveness, my adaptiveness, my ability to admit my needs and then meet them. Wearing compression socks has become an act of self-assertion, an acknowledgement that my body is subject to the forces of the universe and a reassurance that, when necessary, I can exert forces of my own.

“Spider-Man: Far from Home,” starring Tom Holland as the Queens teen-ager Peter Parker, rapidly intertwines the big events that capped the “Avengers” cycle—Thanos’s mass obliteration of half of humanity and of half the Avengers, in “Infinity War,” and the return of those victims coupled with the (likely definitive) deaths of other heroes, in “Endgame”—with the conventional high-school life that Peter leads when he’s not Spider-Man. The incorporation of the prior movies’ plot twists into each new work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a formidable screenwriting challenge, and the makers of “Far from Home” meet that challenge with a graceful wit that, unfortunately, isn’t matched by much else in the movie.

Early on in “Far from Home,” there’s a clip from a memorial video tribute to Tony Stark, Black Widow, and others among “Endgame” ’s departed, which is being shown as part of a benefit event for victims of “the Blip”—the catastrophic event, shown in “Infinity War,” that wiped out half the world’s population. Now, five years later, the victims of the Blip have all come back, with results that are somewhat comedic: when those who “blipped out” returned, they nonetheless remained exactly the same age as at the time they left. That’s why one of Peter’s friends, Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), a Blipee, complains that his little brother (who didn’t blip) is now his older brother. (Imagine if Steven Soderbergh had the chance to direct a Marvel movie, and the world-building feast of civic fantasy that he might have made of the comedies, melodramas, and perhaps even tragedies resulting from the sudden return of Blip victims.)

Unfortunately, the director of “Far from Home,” Jon Watts, and the film’s screenwriters, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, stick only briefly with the dislocation caused by the Blip before quickly leveraging it into far more conventional heroics and a far simpler dramatic dilemma. The victims’ benefit is a public event featuring May Parker (Marisa Tomei), Peter’s aunt and guardian, as m.c.; it also features Spider-Man, the local hero of Queens, who’s there to sign autographs—and who, of course, remains silent, to avoid being identified with the sixteen-year-old Peter. That secrecy is carried over from the previous Spider-Man movie, “Homecoming,” which hinted at a future romance between Peter and his classmate M.J. (played in both movies by Zendaya), and suggested the complications inherent in keeping his superheroic identity hidden from her. (Only his best friend, Ned, played by Jacob Batalon, is aware of Peter’s double life.) Peter’s romantic dreams—and their conflict with his Avenging responsibilities—are the dramatic mainspring of “Far from Home.”

From the start of the film, strange things are happening—the small Mexican town of Ixtenco has been reduced to ruins by what residents call a cyclone with a face. Other towns elsewhere have been similarly ravaged by crude colossi, and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has shown up and taken note. He dispatches the late Tony Stark’s friend and factotum, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), to go backstage at the benefit and let Peter know that his Spider services will be required. But Peter has other plans: the school year is nearing its end, and he and a handful of classmates—including M.J. and Ned—are heading to Europe, under teachers’ supervision, for a so-called science trip, where Peter plans to ingratiate himself with M.J. and bump their relationship out of the friend zone.

The first stop is Venice, where the cyclone-like monster makes another appearance—a huge humanoid made of churning water that threatens the city’s architectural treasures, its population, and Peter’s friends. Peter’s Spider-Man suit is up in his hotel room and he can’t get to it in time—but another superhero, Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), a greenish man with a green globe head and a trail of green smoke, makes an appearance and fends off the monster, earning himself, from his appearance on local news, the quasi-Italian moniker of Mysterio.

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Then Nick Fury arrives and cajoles Peter into sacrificing the trip in order to save the world—and guilts Peter, too, with the delivery of a gift and a legacy: Tony Stark’s distinctive sunglasses, which the dying hero had expressly willed to Peter. But those glasses turn out to be something more: the command center of Tony’s interactive system of surveillance and weaponry, called Edith—an acronym for “Even dead, I’m the hero.” Nick gets Peter into a meeting with Mysterio, who explains the danger they face: the monster is one of the four so-called Elementals—of earth, air, fire, and water. The fire monster is about to lay waste to Prague, where Peter and Beck must go in order to stop it and thwart its plans to destroy the world.

But—avoiding spoilers—another villain appears, and his weapon of choice is distinctively cinematic: he commands a device called Illusion-Tech, by means of which he produces three-dimensional images and sounds of an extraordinary realism that occupy vast city spaces and persuade both the general public and the Avengers of their menace. In effect, this dastardly illusionist is a maker of persuasive computer-graphic action scenes akin to those that Marvel movies are based on, and these effects serve two purposes for their master villain. First, they delude Peter, Nick, and any other superheroes in the vicinity into combatting chimeras and rendering themselves vulnerable to the villain’s actual, physical weaponry. Second, they do exactly what the movies themselves do: they create illusions that are taken for realities, which are reported on by the media as authentic news, and which, in the process, allow the villain to craft a public image to his own advantage.

The villain in “Far from Home” is a malevolent director who takes advantage of what he considers the general gullibility of the public. He’s a manipulative cynic who declares, “It’s easy to fool people when they’re already fooling themselves”; he asserts that “people believe, and nowadays they’ll believe anything”; he boasts, “They’ll see what I want them to see,” and he explains that he created his illusions “to give the world something to believe in,” adding—with his own arrogant self-delusion—that his trickery “is the truth.” What Peter has to do, in order to save himself, his friends, and the world, is—as he puts it—“to get on the inside of the illusion,” to penetrate it to find and defeat the villain who’s creating it.

“Far from Home” is a work of crude and trendy distinctions between material realities and fabricated media images. Made as if in response to the prevalence of fake news and insidious propaganda, the movie relies on a sort of informational virtue signalling that vaunts its own cynical self-promotion: the idea that Marvel’s own audiovisual illusions, unlike those made by the villain, come clearly labelled as fantasies and aren’t meant to override the ability of viewers to distinguish them from reality. This false modesty conceals the colossal success of the Marvel series in the pretense that an image, however fabricated or illusory, doesn’t itself constitute a reality for some subset of its viewers. (The details of this very movie, after all, are more widely reported and discussed than those of any recent documentary.) Lest the Marvel moguls doubt the reality of their own illusions, they should imagine the outcry that would result from their repudiation of the details of previous Marvel movies or of the canonical characters.

Rather, “Far from Home” follows the dictates of the series with a solemn and pharisaical rigidity, pursuing the didactic simplicity of its bland heroics with little other than a few snappy comebacks to distract from the lockstep drama. In the process, the movie doesn’t bother to establish its own ground rules of reality or truth. There are not any clear premises for the fighting, nor any sense of what may prove lethal or disabling. Peter takes part in plenty of rock-’em-sock-’em action scenes, in the course of which he takes crashing falls that would mean broken bones and ruptured organs for mere mortals. Though, beneath his suit, he, too, is a vulnerable human, whose vulnerability always takes second place to a bit of jokey imagery, as when he is hit by a speeding train and, though knocked out, awakens mildly bruised in a small-town jail cell in the Netherlands, taken there, as if to a drunk tank, instead of to a hospital bed. There’s no sense of physical danger to the movie’s characters—and yet, appallingly, the mighty scenes of grand-scale urban destruction, in such places as Venice, Prague, and London, imply a gory trail of bodies that the movie doesn’t dare to deliver or even hint at. Its stakes remain theoretical; its superheroic violence remains fun.

The ostensible virtuousness of the computer-generated fantasies of “Spider-Man: Far from Home” is foregrounded in the mild earnestness with which it views high-school life and teen-age characters. As malevolent illusions go, the movie’s sanitized emptying-out of childhood and adolescence is of a piece with a general infantilization of imagination through the rigid and narrow superspectacles that superhero movies have become. There’s one sharp moment of comedic flair, when the jealous Peter tells Edith to launch a drone strike against a muscled and debonair classmate named Brad (Remy Hii), who’s also courting M.J., but it’s the only time when any semblance of loose emotion breaks through, and it’s quickly suppressed.

The cast of actors offers a welcome ethnic diversity that, however, is no better developed than that of erstwhile Benetton ads; the movie’s characters have little life beyond what advances the action, little personality beyond the traits that lead to the few and simple strands of the sentimental happy ending. Beside the superheroic overlay, the movie’s depth of characterization and imaginative amplitude of social relations (as well as its placing of American characters in European settings) could have been borrowed straight from the Disney playbook of decades past—in particular, from “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” which got more fun out of its European settings and reflected the authentic modesty of its goofy and self-deprecatingly adolescent humor.

As for the all-important July 4th-tentpole-movie action scenes—the ostensible C.G.I. highlights—they could have used the help of a diabolical illusionist, because the benevolent ones, who made the film, created fight scenes of a fungible churning, without much visual wit, texture, or compositional thought. As for the evil illusions themselves, they’re in accordance with the entire movie’s cinema-by-numbers approach. I’m reminded of Norman Mailer’s remark that the only characters that novelists cannot create are novelists better than themselves.

The show goes on. On Sunday, in a bizarre bit of diplomacy that had been proposed on Twitter just a day before, President Trump met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, at the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula. Beyond the D.M.Z., which is four kilometres wide, the two Koreas are technically at war, which is why some twenty-eight thousand American military personnel are still based in South Korea; soldiers, including Americans, have died in flashes of violence in and around the heavily fortified strip of land. Trump nevertheless became the first sitting U.S. President to step into North Korea, the most authoritarian state on earth, which is led by a third-generation tyrant.

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“Good to see you again,” a beaming Kim said, as he greeted the President. “I never expected to meet you in this place.” Trump’s overture to Kim in a tweet on Saturday was, he said, a “very courageous and determined act.”

Trump responded, “Big moment, big moment.” He boasted that “tremendous things” are happening, even though no tangible progress has been made on North Korea’s denuclearization since the leaders’ first summit, a year ago, in Singapore. The second summit, in Hanoi, which took place in February, was a debacle. Trump walked out of those talks. The North Koreans grew cold on diplomacy. The D.M.Z. photo op appears to have been designed to help Kim save face. With cameras rolling, Trump told Kim, “We met and we liked each other from day one, and that was very important.”

The single, modest agreement that emerged from the encounter, which lasted fifty-three minutes, was to resume working group talks next month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in South Korea. Asked if the hastily organized rendezvous (which must have driven the Secret Service nuts) was a gamble, Pompeo responded, “It worked,” and then laughed. But he also conceded that the two sides had not yet made any progress on the issue at the heart of the negotiations—defining what “denuclearization” means. The term was the centerpiece of a modest agreement in Singapore. The United States wants North Korea to surrender all of its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, along with its ballistic missiles, and end all research-and-development programs. In the past, North Korea has called for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Peninsula and a pledge that no nuclear weapons will ever threaten the North.

The resumption of talks was widely welcomed. But analysts with long experience in dealing with North Korea were skeptical about the prospects. “This is diplomacy as a reality show—devoid of substance, purely driven by the pursuit of faux-historic photo ops,” Abraham Denmark, a former East Asia specialist at the Pentagon who now directs the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told me. “By casting a potential summit meeting in the D.M.Z. as a last-minute opportunity to just say ‘Hi,’ President Trump can minimize any expectations of tangible progress but maintain the sense that diplomacy with Kim Jong Un continues.”

At the D.M.Z., Kim agreed to do only what he had already promised in Singapore last year: allow more talks between their teams. “Some will see that as success, others as merely another iteration in the ‘Waiting for Godot’ scenario that represents negotiations with North Korea,” Bruce Klingner, a former C.I.A. deputy division chief for Korea who is now at the Heritage Foundation, told me. “Trump has reaped the fruits of diplomacy without having tilled the soil of making actual progress.” The President has touted progress in the return of American servicemen’s remains from the war, the release of American detainees, and a moratorium on both nuclear and long-range missile tests. “Each of those is good but none is unique, and every one was achieved in greater number or significance during previous U.S. Administrations,” Klingner said.

The impending talks will buy both leaders more time. Trump can counter criticism that he has made little progress in foreign policy, notably in North Korea, his biggest gamble, as the U.S. election cycle begins. Kim “can claim a similar public-relations and propaganda victory,” Frank Aum, a former senior Pentagon adviser, who is now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said. “Each meeting he has with the U.S. President legitimizes the North Korean leader.”

Trump’s embrace of Kim has helped improve the profile of North Korea, which for decades has been an international pariah, among the world’s major powers. Since the President’s second meeting with Kim, in Hanoi, other world leaders have held their own summits with the leader. On June 21st, President Xi Jinping made the first visit to North Korea by a Chinese leader in fourteen years—ever since North Korea began testing nuclear weapons. In May, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, hosted Kim at their first-ever summit, in Vladivostok. “The international coalition to ‘maximize pressure’ on North Korea has dissipated, and Kim today has built significant diplomatic relations with Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow,” Denmark said.

A lot of work remains to get beyond the gamesmanship that has typified the first year of the Trump-Kim flirtation. “If they address the core issues of denuclearization and sanctions relief, rather than just summit logistics or other lower-hanging fruit, then we have the real chance of reaching a breakthrough agreement,” Aum said.

After the talks, Trump said that he was in no hurry. “Speed is not the object,” he told reporters. He described the challenges as “very big stuff—pretty complicated, but not as complicated as people think.” He used similar language in pledging to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, an initiative that stalled after the rollout of an economic plan during a conference in Bahrain this month.

Letting diplomacy drag out carries dangers. “North Korea has presumably used the past twelve months, since Singapore, to continue building its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missiles programs,” Denmark told me. The one bit of progress often cited by Trump is that North Korea has not tested the weaponry that it is building. Many experts believe that Kim will never completely surrender the programs that effectively guarantee the dynasty’s survival. The most viable outcome, some analysts suggest, may be North Korea surrendering some of its bombs and missiles and then freezing its programs, with extensive international verification.

But North Korea’s commitment to diplomacy even on simple issues, such as returning the remains of American service personnel who died during the Korean War, has been put in doubt. More than five thousand are still missing in action in North Korea. (Others are still missing in South Korea). In July, 2018, shortly after the Singapore summit, North Korea returned fifty-five boxes of American remains, then abruptly stopped, despite repeated requests from Washington to fulfill its promise. Over the years, the United States has paid millions of dollars to fund North Korean teams to find American bodies. The boxes returned do not necessarily even represent one body. “Until all are identified, we will not know how commingled the boxes are,” a Pentagon spokesman told me, on Sunday. “Of those, we have identified six service members.” In the past, forensic experts have found animal bones included among returned remains.

En route back to Washington, Trump tweeted, “Leaving South Korea after a wonderful meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un. Stood on the soil of North Korea, an important statement for all, and a great honor!” But, still, no concrete progress on wresting the world’s deadliest weapons from the world’s most brutal regime.

In the fifth minute of the United States’ World Cup quarter-final game against France, the French defender Griedge Mbock Bathy pulled down the American striker Alex Morgan outside the penalty area and was shown a yellow card. Megan Rapinoe took the ensuing free kick and delivered a low, hard shot that bent around a small wall of French defenders, dipped through a sea of legs, and slipped past the goalkeeper, who appeared not even to have seen the ball. Rapinoe turned, trotted toward a corner of the field, and presented herself to the crowd. As her teammates leapt on her back, she held the pose: arms outstretched, chest out, chin up. She looked like an opera diva, about to drop into a curtsy during a curtain call. It would be an understatement to say that Rapinoe has a flair for the dramatic. No athlete I can think of right now has such a perfect sense of herself on a stage—nor such a command of it.

Rapinoe, the captain of the U.S. women’s national team, is accustomed to the spotlight, on and off the field. At the 2011 quarter-finals, Rapinoe sent up a perfect high cross that Abby Wambach headed home during stoppage time, one of the most memorable goals in World Cup history. Rapinoe became the first white professional athlete to take a knee during the national anthem in support of the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest of systemic racism and police brutality, risking her spot on the national team. (U.S. Soccer later instituted a rule requiring all players to stand.) Rapinoe has posed with her wife, the W.N.B.A. player Sue Bird, nude in ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue. Her freewheeling play, precise footwork, and uncanny vision facilitate the flow of the United States’ offense. Rapinoe has become the most consistent and articulate spokesperson for the women’s national team in the players’ battle for equal pay. And Rapinoe has scored every goal for the United States during the knockout rounds: two on Tuesday, against Spain, and two on Friday, against France.

That, of course, is not all that Rapinoe has got attention for lately. Earlier this week, the soccer magazine Eight by Eight released a video in which Rapinoe was asked whether she was excited about visiting the White House after the World Cup. “I’m not going to the fucking White House,” she said. She’d said this before. “I am not going to fake it, hobnob with the President, who is clearly against so many of the things that I am [for] and so many of the things that I actually am,” Rapinoe told Sports Illustrated. “I have no interest in extending our platform to him.” But, this time, the world was paying attention (11.5 million views as of Saturday morning)—and Donald Trump eventually weighed in on Twitter, criticizing her lack of patriotism, throwing in dog whistles about black unemployment and the N.B.A. “owner” controversy, and inviting the U.S. women’s national team to the White House, win or lose.

This did not go over well; first, Trump tweeted at the wrong handle, and then some of Rapinoe’s teammates backed her up. “In regards to the ‘President’s’ tweet today, I know women who you cannot control or grope anger you, but I stand by [Rapinoe],” Ali Krieger wrote in one response. (Bonus points for her ironic quote marks around the word “President.”) “I think we all support Megan,” Jill Ellis, the team’s coach, said more diplomatically. “She knows that.”

By now, the U.S. players and coaches are used to speaking frankly about issues that other teams, in other sports, played by another gender, would consider a “distraction” before a big game—and the quarter-final against France was the biggest game of all. It is not an exaggeration to say that the match between the host nation and the United States was the most anticipated contest in the history of women’s soccer, a showcase of how far the game has come. Record-setting television audiences were expected; tickets were reselling for thousands of dollars. France, like several other countries, had banned women’s soccer in the middle of the twentieth century, but, in recent years, participation has exploded on every level, and its club teams have become models of professionalism and excellence. The United States had not beaten France in the teams’ last three meetings. But France has never won a major international title, and, as the host nation, it was under enormous pressure to match the success of the men’s team, which won the 2018 World Cup—but with the added need to validate France’s investment in the women’s game. Like most women’s teams, it was tasked not only with winning but justifying its own existence.

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For the United States, the stakes were just as high. Anything less than a title for the defending champions would be considered a failure—at least in one sense. But Rapinoe, who turns thirty-four next week, has proved that the game isn’t limited to what happens on the field, and what happens on the field isn’t merely a game. No matter the outcome for the U.S. team, her virtuoso performance will reverberate.