During the 2015 Women’s World Cup, Marco Aurélio Cunha, then the women’s coördinator for the Confederation of Brazilian Football, gave an astonishing interview to Canada’s Globe and Mail. As the lead-up explained, soccer in Brazil remains a man’s game. And, despite the illustrious history of the men’s team at the World Cup, the closest that the women had ever got to the title was as runners-up, in 2007. Brazil has always had a surfeit of gifted players, but the women’s team’s scant success on the world stage is unsurprising, given its lack of resources and support. Women’s soccer had been illegal in Brazil until 1981. In 2015, schoolgirls were still discouraged from playing, there were no good development programs, professional opportunities were scarce, and the pay was pathetic. Few fans paid attention to the women’s national team, despite following the men with an almost religious devotion. Still, Cunha was optimistic. “Now the women are getting more beautiful, putting on make-up,” he said. Their shorts, he added, were now shorter.

Four years later, at the 2019 World Cup, the Brazilian captain Marta Vieira da Silva, commonly known as Marta, took the field against Italy wearing lipstick. It was perhaps not what Cunha had in mind. The dark purple hue made her angular face look intense and gothic. The Internet had many opinions about what the lipstick meant for Marta, for soccer, for female athletes, for women in general, and for mankind. After the game, during which she scored her seventeenth goal in five World Cups—the most of any man or woman, ever—Marta offered her own explanation. “I always wear lipstick,” she said. “Not that color, but today I said ‘I’m going to dare.’ I tried it and I think it was good. The colour is of blood, because we had to leave blood on the pitch. Now I’m going to use it in every game.” Marta, who is thirty-three, has won FIFA’s player-of-the-year award six times—five of them consecutively, from 2006 to 2010, and the sixth only last year. She is, in fact, the most beautiful woman ever to play, and the beautiful way she plays has changed the women’s game.

That has nothing to do with lipstick, of course—though it does have something to do with the casual sexism that Marta has faced throughout her career. Growing up playing in the streets in a small rural town in Brazil, she had to be quicker, more nimble, and more imaginative than the boys who would do anything to beat her. And so she was. Pele’s beautiful game—o jogo bonito—was Brazil’s game, and wasn’t Marta Brazilian? She understood her body’s full potential, how every surface and edge could be used to gather and control the ball. She knew how a still head, dancing feet, and swaying hips could misdirect a defender. She had—no, still has—an intimacy with the ball. It never leaves her feet—not in traffic, not at a sprint—unless she compels it to, and, when she does, it bends the way she wants it.

Take the goal that announced her greatness to international audiences, at the 2007 World Cup, when she was twenty-one. The United States came into the match against Brazil as the heavy favorite, on a fifty-one-game winning streak. But Brazil was in control, and Marta was the best on the field. In the seventy-ninth minute of the match, outside the box, Marta received the ball with her back to the defender, Tina Ellertson. With a quick single touch, she flicked it into the air, and then, with a second touch, lifted it over Ellertson’s left shoulder while she spun around Ellertson to the right. Ellertson lunged to grab her shirt—anything to stop her—but Marta was already past her. Then she cut by another defender, who feebly kicked out her leg and stumbled, and nailed a shot past the goalkeeper. Marta did that kind of thing routinely. This year is the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. women’s national team’s 1999 World Cup championship, which inspired countless young women to believe that girls could become powerful athletes. But Marta did something else: she gave girls permission to dream about becoming something no one had ever seen.

Coming into this year’s tournament, not much was expected of Brazil. The team’s form had been terrible, with nine straight losses, and Marta was struggling with a thigh injury. She missed the first game, against Jamaica, and has been clearly limited ever since, her normal range restricted. Still, Brazil’s offense depends on her, and it was her goal, on a penalty kick, that let Brazil sneak out of the group stage and into the knockout rounds.

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On Sunday, they took on the host nation, France, one of the teams in the running to win the tournament. Marta wore a bright-fuchsia shade of lipstick. It was a physical, scrappy match, and both teams had missed opportunities. At the end of regulation, the score was 1–1. But, in overtime, it was quickly clear that the Brazilians, including Marta, were exhausted. She had run about eight miles on the pitch at that point, and had shown flashes of her usual magic: slipping her wiry frame through crowded spaces, dancing with the ball. But France was clearly the superior team, and, in the extra period, they won. It may well have been Marta’s last game on soccer’s biggest stage.

Afterward, she gave an interview, which turned into an impassioned speech. She had her own thoughts about the future. She faced the camera directly, her red lips punctuating her words, to address young women directly. “It’s wanting more,” she said, in Portuguese. “It’s training more. It’s taking care of yourself more. It’s being ready to play ninety plus thirty minutes. This is what I ask of the girls. There’s not going to be a Formiga forever. There’s not going to be a Marta forever. There’s not going to be a Cristiane. The women’s game depends on you to survive.”

“Old Town Road,” a rap-influenced country song—or a country-influenced rap song, depending on your particular tilt—is presently en route to becoming the most significant commercial release of the decade. Written and self-released by Lil Nas X, a heretofore unknown and unemployed twenty-year-old from Atlanta, a remix of the track has spent eleven weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of only twenty-five songs to ever linger that long at No. 1—staving off new singles from such established pop veterans as Taylor Swift and from such beloved, Zeitgeist-friendly upstarts as Billie Eilish. For jaded fans of pop music, there is perhaps no joy more pure than when an odd, exuberant, and vaguely nonsensical song seizes the national imagination, despite not ever having been strategically decanted in a glass-panelled conference room by a team of tanned producers. The slog of glossy, market-optimized major-label pap can get a girl down. It’s a relief to remember that surprises, fuelled by luck, savvy, and youthful acumen, can still best the charts.

Last week, Lil Nas X released “7,” his début seven-song EP. It was inevitable that Nas X would produce more music, and fast—he was signed to Columbia Records almost immediately after “Old Town Road” hit—but it was an open question whether he was at the beginning or the end of his music career. The immediate critical response to “7” has been underwhelming (“It’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music,” Pitchfork noted). The second single, “Panini,” credits Kurt Cobain as a composer and borrows an explosive melody from the chorus of Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” Nas X clarified on Twitter that the song is not about a pressed sandwich, but a character from the late-two-thousands-era cartoon “Chowder.”

“Panini” is a serviceable song, if uninspiring. The crudeness and lack of sophistication of the tracks on “7” are essential to their appeal, much in the way that a goofy eight-bit graphic is often funnier and more charming than an elaborate animation, and not simply for reasons of nostalgia. There’s something warm and human about being so proudly amateur; Nas X seems to dismiss virtuosity itself as old-fashioned or even bourgeois. Accordingly, critical evaluations of his work—especially the ones that approach the music with some historical breadth—don’t really figure into his gestalt. His art is not so much about a mastery of sound as it is about the curious (yet highly precise) ways in which we cultivate intimacy and community online.

The success of “Old Town Road” is indebted to a confluence of cultural events, some spontaneous and irreverent, and some in keeping with the progressive, canon-cracking energy of our times. The beat that Nas X used for “Old Town Road” was built by a nineteen-year-old Dutch producer named YoungKio, who works from a desk in his bedroom and posts his work to YouTube for free. YoungKio, in turn, used a public commons sample of “34 Ghosts IV”—a track by Nine Inch Nails that originally appeared on the band’s sixth album, “Ghosts I–IV,” a collection of sparse ambient songs (it briefly features a morosely plucked banjo). In the context of YoungKio’s production, the sample becomes masculine and iconic, as if it’s meant to accompany two duelling outlaws as they square off outside a saloon.

In September, 2018, a few months before Nas X first posted “Old Town Road” online, a Texas-based Twitter user named Bri Malandro coined the phrase “yeehaw agenda” to describe the pop singer Ciara’s appearance on the cover of the fashion magazine King Kong, where she is wearing a magnificent white cowboy hat. A few months later, the art critic Antwaun Sargent compiled a string of images of black artists and models dressed as cowboys and posted it to Twitter: “I need a fashion piece about how the black yeehaw agenda is chic and thriving,” he wrote. Cultural critics hastened to point out that black cowboy culture was neither an anomaly nor a novelty, and that country music itself is firmly and unambiguously rooted in black musical traditions.

Around the same time, Michael Pelchat, who runs a popular account on TikTok, came upon “Old Town Road” on Nas X’s Soundcloud page. Pelchat, who is twenty-one, lanky, and appears pre-programmed to grin, danced around his carpeted bedroom to “Old Town Road,” wearing a plaid shirt and bluejeans, for fifteen seconds. The clip went unexpectedly viral. The video was silly, and sort of innocent, and effortlessly paired two traditions—country and western and hip-hop—that many people had long presumed, however erroneously, were mutually and constitutionally exclusive.

By then, the whole trajectory of “Old Town Road” was becoming so nonsensical that it was impossible not to be delighted by it. (“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” Albert Einstein once wrote.) On March 16th, “Old Town Road” appeared on Billboard’s country chart, but the company eventually pulled it, claiming that it had been misclassified. Later, when Nas X was asked by Joe Coscarelli, of the Times, if he thought that Billboard’s dismissal of the single was racist (Billboard claimed it wasn’t country music), he demurred, suggesting, instead, that it might have been the song’s ingenuity that intimidated them. Soon the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus recorded a remix. Chris Rock appeared in the “official movie,” announcing, “When you see a black man on a horse going that fast, you just gotta let him fly!” It was curtains for every other pop star with a summer single and dreams of mass airplay.

Nas X’s childhood unwittingly prepared for him for his moment in the pop spotlight. He was born Montero Lamar Hill, in 1999, and was raised by his mother and grandmother in Bankhead Courts, a public housing project situated in a grim and industrial corner of west Atlanta (it was demolished in 2011). In the mid-nineties, Bankhead became briefly famous after a dance called the Bankhead Bounce took hold in hip-hop clubs; Michael Jackson did a version of the move—a kind of incremental, upper-body shimmy, like a robot gently powering down—at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1995, and it’s featured heavily in the video for TLC’s single “Waterfalls.” Like many black neighborhoods in Atlanta, Bankhead has been a rich incubator of hip-hop talent, including the rappers T.I., Young Dro, and D4L.

When he was nine, Nas X left Bankhead to move in with his father, in suburban Cobb County. He has said that he spent large amounts of his adolescence online, tinkering with ideas of persona creation, trying to figure out how to establish (and monetize) a kind of virtual celebrity. Nas X’s Internet fluency has, so far, been crucial to his success. The culture that births and circulates memes can feel preposterous to people who are too old, too busy, or too disinterested to take the time to absorb the cadence and flow of life online, which operates by its own internal logic and is engineered, in a way, to be inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t spend their waking hours drifting through it. Trying to make sense of it all sometimes reminds me of a scene in “Mad Men” in which Don Draper asks a young woman backstage at a Rolling Stones concert why she likes the band—what it makes her feel. “What are you, a psychiatrist?” she asks.

Still, for me, the entire philosophy of the Internet seems to be contained in the purposeful way that Nas X raps the phrase “I got the horses in the back,” at the very start of “Old Town Road.” He knows that it’s a weird and funny and possibly absurd thing to say, and his voice is so flat and full of self-awareness that the line itself almost curls into a smirk—yet it is delivered earnestly! It’s impossible to explain why the phrase is funny, beyond what it suggests about the fluidity of cultural boundaries, but Nas X is preternaturally confident in its pitch, its import, and his unassailable right to say whatever he wants about horses. This gets at something about the modern condition—that we have arrived at a moment in which self-definition trumps any other kind of categorization. Or perhaps it merely encapsulates the ballooning absurdity of our times, and our increasing desperation to laugh at anything.

Last Monday, when President Trump tweeted that his Administration would stage nationwide immigration raids the following week, with the goal of deporting “millions of illegal aliens,” agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were suddenly forced to scramble. The agency was not ready to carry out such a large operation. Preparations that would typically take field officers six to eight weeks were compressed into a few days, and, because of Trump’s tweet, the officers would be entering communities that now knew they were coming. “It was a dumb-shit political move that will only hurt the agents,” John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff at ICE, told me. On Saturday, hours before the operation was supposed to start in ten major cities across the country, the President changed course, delaying it for another two weeks.

On Sunday, I spoke to an ICE officer about the week’s events. “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation,” the officer said. “It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.” Even on the eve of the operation, many of the most important details remained unresolved. “This was a family op. So where are we going to put the families? There’s no room to detain them, so are we going to put them in hotels?” the officer said. On Friday, an answer came down from ICE leadership: the families would be placed in hotels while ICE figured out what to do with them. That, in turn, raised other questions. “So the families are in hotels, but who’s going to watch them?” the officer continued. “What happens if the person we arrest has a U.S.-citizen child? What do we do with the children? Do we need to get booster seats for the vans? Should we get the kids toys to play with?” Trump’s tweet broadcasting the operation had also created a safety issue for the officers involved. “No police agency goes out and says, ‘Tomorrow, between four and eight, we’re going to be in these neighborhoods,’ ” the officer said.

The idea for the operation took hold in the White House last September, two months after a federal judge had ordered the government to stop separating parents and children at the border. At the time, the number of families seeking asylum was rising steadily, and Administration officials were determined to toughen enforcement. A D.H.S. official told me that, in the months before the operation was proposed, “a major focus” of department meetings “was concern about the fact that people on the non-detained docket”—asylum seekers released into the U.S. with a future court date—“are almost never deported.” By January, a tentative plan had materialized. The Department of Justice developed a “rocket docket” to prioritize the cases of asylum seekers who’d just arrived in the country and missed a court date—in their absence, the government could swiftly secure deportation orders against them. D.H.S. then created a “target list” of roughly twenty-five hundred immigrant family members across the country for deportation; eventually, the Administration aimed to arrest ten thousand people using these methods.

From the start, however, the plan faced resistance. The Secretary of D.H.S., Kirstjen Nielsen, argued that the arrests would be complicated to carry out, in part, because American children would be involved. (Many were born in the U.S. to parents on the “target list.”) Resources were already limited, and an operation on this scale would divert attention from the border, where a humanitarian crisis was worsening by the day. The acting head of ICE, Ron Vitiello, a tough-minded former Border Patrol officer, shared Nielsen’s concerns. According to the Washington Post, these reservations weren’t “ethical” so much as logistical: executing such a vast operation would be extremely difficult, with multiple moving pieces, and the optics could be devastating. Four months later, Trump effectively fired them. Vitiello’s replacement at ICE, an official named Mark Morgan—who’s already been fired once by Trump and regained the President’s support after making a series of appearances on Fox News—subsequently announced that ICE would proceed with the operation.

Late last week, factions within the Administration clashed over what to do. The acting secretary of D.H.S., Kevin McAleenan, urged caution, claiming that the operation was a distraction and a waste of manpower. Among other things, a $4.5 billion funding bill to supply further humanitarian aid at the border has been held up because Democrats worried that the Administration would use the money for enforcement operations. McAleenan had been meeting with members of both parties on the Hill, and there appeared to be signs of progress, before the President announced the ICE crackdown. According to an Administration official, McAleenan argued that the operation would also threaten a string of recent gains made by the President. The Trump Administration had just secured a deal with the Mexican government to increase enforcement at the Guatemalan border, and it expanded a massive new program called Remain in Mexico, which has forced some ten thousand asylum seekers to wait indefinitely in northern Mexico. “Momentum was moving in the right direction,” the official said.

On the other side of the argument were Stephen Miller, at the White House, and Mark Morgan, at ICE. In the days before and after Trump’s Twitter announcement, Morgan spoke regularly with the President, who was circumventing McAleenan, Morgan’s boss. In meetings with staff, Morgan boasted that he had a direct line to the President, according to the ICE officer, who told me it was highly unusual for there to be such direct contact between the agency head and the White House. “It should be going to the Secretary, which I find hilarious, actually, because Morgan was already fired once by this Administration,” the officer said.

Over the weekend, the President agreed to halt the operation. But it’s far from certain whether McAleenan actually got the upper hand. Officials in the White House authorized ICE to issue a press release insinuating that someone had leaked important details about the operation and therefore compromised it. “Any leak telegraphing sensitive law-enforcement operations is egregious and puts our officers’ safety in danger,” an ICE spokesperson said late Saturday afternoon. This was a puzzling statement given that it was Trump who first publicized the information about the operation. But the White House’s line followed a different script: some members of the Administration, as well as the former head of ICE, Thomas Homan, were publicly accusing McAleenan of sharing information with reporters in an attempt to undermine the operation.

For Homan, his involvement in the Administration’s internal fight marked an unexpected return to the main stage. Last year, he resigned as acting head of ICE after the Senate refused to confirm him to the post. Earlier this month, Trump announced, on Fox News, that Homan would be returning to the Administration as the President’s new border tsar, but Homan, who hadn’t been informed of the decision, has remained noncommittal. Still, according to the Administration official, Homan and the President talk by phone regularly. Over the weekend, Homan, who has since become an on-air contributor to Fox News, appeared on television to attack McAleenan personally. “You’ve got the acting Secretary of Homeland Security resisting what ICE is trying to do,” he said.

Meanwhile, the President spent the weekend trying to leverage the delayed operation to pressure congressional Democrats. If they did not agree to a complete overhaul of the asylum system at the border, Trump said, he’d greenlight the ICE operation once more. “Two weeks,” he tweeted, “and big Deportation begins.” At the same time, his Administration was under fire for holding immigrant children at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas. Two hundred and fifty infants, children, and teen-agers have spent weeks, and in some cases months, in squalid conditions; they have been denied food, water, soap, and toothbrushes, and there’s limited access to medicine in the wake of flu and lice outbreaks. “If the Democrats would change the asylum laws and the loopholes,” Trump said, “everything would be solved immediately.” And yet, last week, when an Administration lawyer appeared before the Ninth Circuit to answer for the conditions at the facility, which were in clear violation of a federal agreement on the treatment of children in detention, she said that addressing them was not the government’s responsibility. Michelle Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, told me, “The Administration is intentionally creating chaos at the border and detaining children in abusive conditions for political gain.” (On Monday, Customs and Border Protection transferred all but thirty children from the Clint facility; it isn’t yet clear where, exactly, they’ll go.)

President Obama was never popular among ICE’s rank and file, but the detailed list of enforcement priorities he instituted, in 2014, which many in the agency initially resented as micromanagement, now seemed more sensible—and even preferable to the current state of affairs. The ICE officer said, “One person told me, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the Obama rules. We removed more people with the rules we had in place than with all this. It was much easier when we had the priorities. It was cleaner.’ ” Since the creation of ICE, in 2003, enforcement was premised on the idea that officers would primarily go after criminals for deportation; Trump, who views ICE as a political tool to showcase his toughness, has abandoned that framework entirely. “I don’t even know what we’re doing now,” the officer said. “A lot of us see the photos of the kids at the border, and we’re wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” The influx of Central American migrants, the officer noted, has been an issue for more than a decade now, spanning three Presidential administrations. “No one built up the infrastructure to handle this, and now people are suffering at the border for it. They keep saying they were caught flat footed. That’s a bald-faced fucking lie.”

On an evening in December, 1980, the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi gate-crashed the party of the year: the gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the opening night of “The Manchu Dragon,” an exhibition (organized by Diana Vreeland) of Chinese costume from the Qing dynasty. Tseng used a medium-format camera to photograph the arriving guests. An era’s tony milieu pauses, flash-lit: an amused Yves Saint-Laurent, Halston in high spirits, a quizzical William F. Buckley. Nancy Kissinger turns up in the same Adolfo dress as two other women—but nobody looks embarrassed. Tseng himself is also in the pictures, grinning away beside his subjects, with a cable release in his hand. And he is dressed, as he frequently is in his dandy-conceptualist art, in a plain gray “Mao suit,” which reads here as a laconic visual rejoinder to the exhibit’s lavish Orientalism.

Andy Warhol was among the celebrities Tseng importuned at the Met, and there is something of Warhol’s nineteen-sixties self-invention in Tseng’s cultivation of an unvarying image, a mask that made the most of his outsider station. But Tseng’s art is emphatically of the eighties. He is best known for—that is, a little obscured by—his documenting, in more than twenty-five thousand photographs, the work of his friend Keith Haring. (One such photo, and more of Tseng’s work, is currently on view as part of the exhibit “Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989,” at the Grey Art Gallery, at N.Y.U.) As a prolific magazine photographer, he took portraits of Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was frequently found among the gaudy noctiluca of New York club life—the likes of Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnuson, John Sex, and Madonna. At venues such as the Mudd Club, where he had his first solo exhibition, Tseng was not always dressed in his estranging costume. But, when he wore it, the suit was a reminder that since the late nineteen-seventies he had been amassing a work of sober wit and coherence—and also, it seems, deepening ambivalence about life in America.

Tseng was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver by Chinese parents. His father had fought against Mao in the Nationalist Army; he and Tseng’s mother fled China in 1949, a year before Tseng was born. For college, Tseng studied photography in Paris; among his student projects was an artist’s book filled with passages from Gertrude Stein and street photographs (more accurately, park photographs) that owe much to Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson. He appears to have hit upon the rigors of the suited self-portraits—if that is what they are—soon after he moved to New York, in 1978. In a collection of Tseng’s work from 2015, his sister, Muna, describes how their parents organized dinner at the Windows on the World restaurant, at the World Trade Center. But her brother owned no formal attire other than a Zhongshan suit (as it’s more precisely called) that he had bought in a Montreal thrift store. His parents were aghast when he showed up wearing it, but the maître d’ treated him like a visiting dignitary; from there, Tseng began to assume the austere, mischievous persona that would dominate his art.

He called this character “an ambiguous ambassador,” and, in a series he called “East Meets West,” posed him—posed himself—in front of various icons of touristic America. He leaps into the air in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, stands impassive beside Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, gazes off into the distance with Niagara Falls behind him. All the early pictures were taken, square format, with his father’s nineteen-forties Rolleiflex; as in the photos from the Met in 1980, you can usually see the cable release in the photographer’s fist. To the top-left pocket of the suit, Tseng attached an I.D. badge—it said “visitor,” or sometimes “slutforart”—and so in many of the photographs there’s a sly reflexive quality: the artist is wearing a small portrait of the artist, mirrored sunglasses and all. In the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, Tseng also took the ambiguous ambassador to Europe, where he appears heroic before the Arc de Triomphe, and diminutive between two policemen at the Tower of London.

In a short film about him, made by Christine Lombard, in 1984, Tseng claims that the “East Meets West” series was partly inspired by Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The photographs, in other words, stage imaginary scenes of cultural friction, craving, and interpretation. Considering that he was a young gay Asian artist in New York in the nineteen-eighties, Tseng’s responses to resurgent conservatism were notably playful. In the series “It’s a Reagan World!,” he cast his downtown artist friends as straight, preppy, suburban couples; exuberant in their new cultural-political consequence, they recall Chinese propaganda of the nineteen-fifties as much as American. And in the “Moral Majority” photographs he invited certain princelings of the New Right (Jerry Falwell, Daniel Fore, and others) to pose before a rumpled American flag. Tseng told them it would look as if it were billowing in the wind, but the flag just looks abused, and the men in front of it appear puffed with vainglory. Once again, Tseng insinuated himself into some of the pictures, passing as an ally in seersucker and a smirk.

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Tseng died, of AIDS, in 1990, less than a month after Haring did. He was thirty-nine years old. In the final years of his life, he acquired a new camera, enlisted his partner, Robert-Kristoffer Haynes, as his assistant, and took his uniformed alter ego further afield, into the vasts of American landscape. He found a land no less fraught with politics than the sights and monuments of New York and Washington, D.C. Here, the “inquisitive traveller” (as he also referred to the character) mimics Caspar David Friedrich’s Rückenfigur, whose back is turned to us while gazing upon the natural sublime. Or, in Tseng’s case, the ideological sublime: Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley. In these late photographs, he is dwarfed by the scenery, but his suited silhouette is no less insistent a reminder that belonging is always also performing. Romantic and wry, no longer willing to turn even his mirrored gaze in our direction, Tseng gets smaller and more distant, until he disappears.