The first hint that something was going wrong with Zoraida’s pregnancy came on the morning of Thursday, May 20, 2004. I got out of bed early to attend to our eighteen-month-old son, Marcus, who had woken up coughing. A few minutes later, Zoraida emerged from our bedroom. “I’m soaked,” she said, clutching at her pajamas. She called her obstetrician, and I got Marcus, who was still coughing, ready to see the pediatrician. At the time, we were both more concerned about Marcus’s condition than Zoraida’s. She’d just had her five-month checkup, at which she’d been told that everything was fine. We even had a series of smudgy gray closeups of Julius’s head and organs, like photographs of a poltergeist, to prove it. Marcus, on the other hand, had suffered from asthma symptoms for much of April, and the heavy spring pollen was giving him trouble. We hailed a cab and stopped first at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, where Zoraida had been instructed to go. Then Marcus and I went on to the pediatrician’s office, on the East Side.

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Marcus’s ears and lungs were clear, and he was having no difficulty breathing. It was a cold; that was all. The pediatrician gave us a sample of Benadryl and sent us home. However, back at our apartment, in Inwood, there was a voice message from Zoraida telling me to come to the triage area of the Children’s Hospital. “It’s not good news,” she said. “The doctor will explain.” I feared that Zoraida would have to spend the next three months on bed rest. Marcus and I went back downstairs and took our second cab ride to the hospital.

NewYork-Presbyterian is like a city within a city. It occupies a half-dozen blocks around Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue, south of the George Washington Bridge. The streets are full of doctors, medical students, nurses, and E.M.S. workers. The Children’s Hospital, where Zoraida was waiting for me, sits on the corner of 165th Street and Broadway. It is a new building, made of sand-colored stone and shimmering glass. That morning, the ground-floor atrium was hosting a health fair for kids. Flocks of grade-schoolers were being shepherded into the building to join the carnival of noise in the atrium. Marcus and I made our way through the din to the main desk, where I was informed that I could not proceed with a toddler. That was a blow. Why wouldn’t they let Marcus in? Then I remembered the word “triage” in Zoraida’s message. Emergency rooms were no place for children. They were also no place for pregnant women who were doing just fine.

I called Zoraida’s sister, Wilma, who lived nearby, to see if she could look after Marcus, who, by then, had succumbed to the Benadryl and was asleep in his stroller. I told Wilma to meet me at Coogan’s, an Irish saloon on Broadway and 169th Street. While Marcus dozed, I sat at the bar, sipped a pint of Guinness, and ate a sandwich. The place had just opened and, except for the bartender, I was alone with my thoughts. I tried to prepare myself for the worst. I actually said that to myself: “Be prepared for the worst.” But what did that mean? That we’d lose the baby? As long as my sister-in-law didn’t show up, I wouldn’t have to find out.

Eventually, Wilma came to collect Marcus, and I walked back to the hospital and went up to the tenth floor. There I was directed to a wide, windowless door that led to the triage ward, a clean, quiet corridor with a nurse’s station at the end. A nurse looked up from her computer screen and directed me to one of the half-open doors. Behind the door was a sun-filled room where my wife was sitting up in bed.

“I’m three centimetres dilated,” she said. Her face contorted as she tried not to cry. “He’s coming out. I’m sorry, Jon. There’s nothing we can do.”

She explained, and then the obstetrician came in and explained it again. Zoraida’s cervix had started to open. Now that it had begun dilating, there was no going back. The amniotic sac had been exposed, and there was a serious risk of infection to the mother and the fetus. Julius was too premature to survive outside the womb.

For some time, I sat on the bed, holding my wife and absorbing the news. Ridiculously, a scene from the movie “Titanic,” which had been released during our first year together, and which Zoraida had only gone to see with me against her will, kept replaying in my mind. Late in the movie, after the ship has struck the iceberg, Kate Winslet encounters the Titanic’s designer on the stairs. He looks at her and says, “In an hour or so, all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.” I started weeping.

The obstetrician returned some time later to explain our options. Each was worse than the one before. The first option was to wait, to see if Julius might stay inside Zoraida until he reached a more viable age. He was twenty-two weeks and three days old. At that time, the earliest a premature baby could be born with some expectation of survival was twenty-four weeks. Even then, Julius’s chances would be slim, and there was the likelihood of severe brain damage. It wasn’t until twenty-six weeks that a premature child might be expected to live with a good chance of normal development. We’d fallen a month short. The doctor cautioned us again that waiting might result in infection to the mother and the child, and, given that Zoraida was three centimetres dilated, the possibility that we would make it through the weekend—never mind the next eleven days—was small, indeed.

The second option was not to wait but to induce labor. Zoraida would deliver Julius with the knowledge that he likely wouldn’t survive.

The third option was a late, second-trimester abortion. The doctor, sensing our mood, did not give us a description of this procedure. We questioned her at length about the details of the first two options. She answered every question and then left us, saying we could take as long as we needed. We could stay in the hospital overnight if we didn’t want to decide until the morning.

We agreed, without much discussion, that the only course of action we wanted was to induce labor. “You know what’s killing me?” Zoraida said, touching her belly. “As long as he’s in here, he’s safe. Why can’t he just stay in there?”

When informed of our decision, the obstetrician said that she would need to speak to hospital administrators to be sure that this would not pose a problem. Our son was on the cusp of being viable outside the womb. If he came out breathing, would the hospital be compelled to attempt to resuscitate him when he died? An hour later, the obstetrician returned. “I’ve spoken to just about everyone in this building,” she said. “Your decision is fine.” She told us that we would be taken to a delivery room and that Zoraida would be given a drug to accelerate labor.

It was late afternoon. I went downstairs to get something to eat and to make some calls to our families. Then I went back up. Zoraida’s delivery room was like the studio apartment that everyone in New York dreams of having: high ceilings, honey-colored wood flooring, and a wide picture window overlooking Washington Heights, the Hudson River, and the midtown skyline.

Our decision made, we entered a brief state of blissful denial. We were feeling relieved about having made this terrible bargain, without yet having to face the consequences. It still seemed, somehow, that everything might be all right. There was time yet for a miracle. Perhaps Julius was more advanced than we thought. Perhaps he would survive and thrive, against all odds. We did not speak these thoughts, but, as I sat beside my wife on the bed, we talked, even making a few jokes. It was during these moments that Zoraida and I placed our hands on her belly and felt Julius kick for the last time.

A nurse came in and talked to us about what to expect. She told us what the baby would look like at this age, warned us that his eyes would be closed and that he might not take a breath. She asked us what we wanted to do with the body. She took our address and other information and then left us alone. Beyond the window, the sun was setting, and the lights of the city were coming on.

And so we waited for the drugs to take effect, waited for the contractions to begin. Perhaps the most disquieting part of the experience was that it was exactly like Marcus’s delivery, except that we knew from the start that Julius would not survive. I held my wife’s hand, held her leg, told her to breathe. I told her she was doing great, because she was doing great. She was being incredibly brave. I watched the monitor and called out the contractions as they began and faded. The only difference was that, during Marcus’s birth, the amplified heartbeat was with us through the entire labor, a goad, and solace. This time, we could not hear the fetal heartbeat.

I kept coaching Zoraida through the contractions, but my attention was increasingly drawn to Julius. I’d forgotten that he was breech, and I tried to discern his head; soon enough, I realized my mistake and saw that he was coming out ass first and bent double. On the next contraction, his legs were released, and, on the following, his head. His umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck, and the obstetrician unwound it like a sailor working a rope. His body could be held comfortably in her hand, with his legs and head flopping slightly with the gentle movement of her unwinding. On the downstroke, I thought I saw his mouth open, as if he were trying to breathe. Then the umbilical was cut and he was gone, taken to a nearby cart, with no word from the doctor. There followed the second part of the labor, in which the placenta was expelled. A moment later, the doctor told us that Julius had shown no sign of life, that he had died either during delivery or immediately after.

Some time passed before we got to hold him. We must have been talking to the doctor or the nurse, because I remember that I kept looking over at the little cart where he lay, covered by a swaddling cloth. He was so small that I could not see the outline of his body among the folds of the cloth. The nurse wrapped him the same way Marcus had been wrapped and brought him to us, with only his face showing. His skin, mottled purple and red, felt recognizably like skin, though cooler. He looked like Marcus. They had the same face shape, the same small nose, the same cleft chin. His head was bald, except for a few stray curls near the eyebrows. As we had been told, his eyes were closed. Zoraida cradled him in her arms, talking to him very much as if he were alive.

She handed him to me and I started weeping a quiet but unstoppable stream of tears. I felt the weight of all that we had lost with him.

Zoraida said, “Don’t you want to take him to the window?” I did, very much. I walked him across the room and held him up before the panorama of the midtown skyline at night. “This is New York City,” I said. “This is where you were born.”

For a quick lesson in how political insults are born, look no further than Fredo. On Monday night, the name was trending on Twitter, thanks to a viral video showing an altercation between the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and a guy at a bar in Shelter Island, New York. The man had called Cuomo “Fredo,” having apparently picked up the nickname from “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “Punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo,” Cuomo retorts, getting in the man’s grill. “My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from ‘The Godfather.’ He was the weak brother.” Cuomo goes on, “They’re using it as an Italian aspersion. Any of you Italian? Are you Italian? It’s a fucking insult to your people. It’s an insult to your people. It’s like the N-word for us. Is that a cool fucking thing?” The man stammers, claiming that he thought it was Cuomo’s actual name, and Cuomo explains, “You call me Fredo, it’s like I call you ‘punk bitch.’ You like that?”

Cuomo’s detractors were soon posting videos of CNN commentators using “Fredo” to diss Representative Devin Nunes and Donald Trump, Jr., as proof of Cuomo’s hypocrisy. Sean Hannity offered an unlikely defense, saying that Cuomo “has zero to apologize for.” CNN backed up Cuomo, too, stating that he had been “verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur,” which prompted Trump, Jr., to call Cuomo’s self-justification an “excuse just as fake as his news.” Conservatives gleefully decried the false equivalency between “Fredo” and the N-word. The gun-rights advocate Dana Loesch tweeted, “Is Fredo a pejorative? Yes. It refers to the dumbest Corleone. Is it racist? No. . . . This is all so mind-numbingly idiotic.” Just when you thought things couldn’t get more mind-numbingly idiotic, the President of the United States, aroused on Tuesday morning by the smell of a fresh taunt, weighed in. “I thought Chris was Fredo also,” he tweeted. “The truth hurts.”

Political metaphor tends to flatten all cultural references. Kabuki theatre, a rich and venerable art form dating back to seventeenth-century Japan, has become Washington speak for “empty spectacle.” “Groundhog Day,” the genius existential Bill Murray comedy, is code for “mindless repetition.” It’s dismaying to see Fredo Corleone, brilliantly played by John Cazale in “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II,” reduced to a political weapon, deployed in a disingenuous spat over what constitutes racist hate speech. Trump, Jr., was likely embracing the chance to fling the nickname at someone else and make it stick, having been dubbed the Fredo of the Trump family since his father rose to political power. (For my money, I get more of a Fredo vibe from Eric Trump. Don, Jr., is more like the hot-headed Sonny, with Ivanka as the stealthy, power-hungry Michael, and Tiffany as Connie, the little sister who mostly sits on the sidelines.)

The implication of calling someone Fredo, like that of the alt-right insult “cuck,” is of weakness, specifically a failure to live up to the masculine ideal. But Fredo is more of a complex, tragic figure than political mudslinging would allow. In Mario Puzo’s original novel, Vito Corleone’s second son is described as “a child every Italian prayed to the saints for. Dutiful, loyal, always at the service of his father, living with his parents at age thirty. He was short and burly, not handsome but with the same Cupid head of the family, the curly helmet of hair over the round face and sensual bow-shaped lips.” Cazale, whom Francis Ford Coppola and his casting director, Fred Roos, spotted in the Off Broadway play “Line,” looked nothing like that: he was drawn out and pale, with a forehead notably lacking in curls. And yet he fit the character perfectly. Cazale, one of the great (and undersung) character actors of the nineteen-seventies, excelled at showing weakness, cowardice, and pettiness. He was usually cast alongside a more robust leading man, whether it be Al Pacino (in the “Godfather” movies and “Dog Day Afternoon”), Gene Hackman (in Coppola’s “The Conversation”), or Robert De Niro (in “The Deer Hunter”). But he never reduced his characters to their most mockable flaws, infusing his performances with understated humor, sweetness, and melancholy. Think of him as the slow-witted accomplice to Pacino’s bank robber in “Dog Day Afternoon.” When Pacino asks him if there’s any special country he wants to escape to, Cazale whispers, “Wyoming.” The line—both funny and heartbreakingly innocent—was Cazale’s ad lib.

Coppola had a soft spot for Fredo, who reminded him of his less accomplished uncles. “I think Italians that come from that little-town mentality are very hard on their own, and very cruel unto those who don’t quite cut the mustard at the same level that the star brothers or the star uncles do,” the director once said. In “The Godfather,” Cazale gave Fredo that sense of well-meaning haplessness, as when he fails to protect his father from an assassination attempt at the market. The second “Godfather” film brought Fredo into the foreground (not his natural place in the family portrait) and deepened him. Fredo’s involvement in a bungled attempt on Michael’s life (“I know it was you”), which leads Michael to succumb to his darkest instincts and commit fratricide, is at the movie’s tragic core, and it gives Cazale the most beautifully acted scenes of his career. The most iconic is the brothers’ conversation in the boathouse, when Fredo pitifully pleads for respect: “Send Fredo off to do this. Send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse night club somewhere. . . . I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says!” Cazale delivers this feckless rant with wide-eyed rage and self-pity, flopping up and down in his lounge chair like a beached guppy.

But my favorite moment comes just before he’s whacked, as he sits with his young nephew Anthony by the lake with their fishing gear. Fredo recalls the time when he was a kid and went fishing with his father and brothers, and he was the only one to catch a fish—the secret, he tells Anthony, is to say a Hail Mary every time you put your line down. It’s probably the only time Fredo ever outshone his brothers, and you get the sense that he would have led a perfectly content life if he’d been born into a clan of, say, mild-mannered dentists. Fredo’s death is as wrenching as it is only because we care so deeply about him—he’s pathetic, sure, but he has reserves of humanity that he never got to express, holding himself to an impossible yardstick of power and violence when all he wanted to do was go fishing.

Like the character he became famous for, Cazale had a knack for getting passed over. He made only five films, but each was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Cazale never got a nomination. He died, from cancer, in 1978, at the age of forty-two, with his girlfriend, Meryl Streep, at his bedside. If there’s any solace in seeing Fredo become a political slingshot ball, it’s that Cazale’s portrayal is indelible enough to merit the attention. More than four decades later, Fredo’s still not getting any respect, but at least he’s getting noticed.

For a quick lesson in how political insults are born, look no further than Fredo. On Monday night, the name was trending on Twitter, thanks to a viral video showing an altercation between the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and a guy at a bar in Shelter Island, New York. The man had called Cuomo “Fredo,” having apparently picked up the nickname from “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “Punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo,” Cuomo retorts, getting in the man’s grill. “My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from ‘The Godfather.’ He was the weak brother.” Cuomo goes on, “They’re using it as an Italian aspersion. Any of you Italian? Are you Italian? It’s a fucking insult to your people. It’s an insult to your people. It’s like the N-word for us. Is that a cool fucking thing?” The man stammers, claiming that he thought it was Cuomo’s actual name, and Cuomo explains, “You call me Fredo, it’s like I call you ‘punk bitch.’ You like that?”

Cuomo’s detractors were soon posting videos of CNN commentators using “Fredo” to diss Representative Devin Nunes and Donald Trump, Jr., as proof of Cuomo’s hypocrisy. Sean Hannity offered an unlikely defense, saying that Cuomo “has zero to apologize for.” CNN backed up Cuomo, too, stating that he had been “verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur,” which prompted Trump, Jr., to call Cuomo’s self-justification an “excuse just as fake as his news.” Conservatives gleefully decried the false equivalency between “Fredo” and the N-word. The gun-rights advocate Dana Loesch tweeted, “Is Fredo a pejorative? Yes. It refers to the dumbest Corleone. Is it racist? No. . . . This is all so mind-numbingly idiotic.” Just when you thought things couldn’t get more mind-numbingly idiotic, the President of the United States, aroused on Tuesday morning by the smell of a fresh taunt, weighed in. “I thought Chris was Fredo also,” he tweeted. “The truth hurts.”

Political metaphor tends to flatten all cultural references. Kabuki theatre, a rich and venerable art form dating back to seventeenth-century Japan, has become Washington speak for “empty spectacle.” “Groundhog Day,” the genius existential Bill Murray comedy, is code for “mindless repetition.” It’s dismaying to see Fredo Corleone, brilliantly played by John Cazale in “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II,” reduced to a political weapon, deployed in a disingenuous spat over what constitutes racist hate speech. Trump, Jr., was likely embracing the chance to fling the nickname at someone else and make it stick, having been dubbed the Fredo of the Trump family since his father rose to political power. (For my money, I get more of a Fredo vibe from Eric Trump. Don, Jr., is more like the hot-headed Sonny, with Ivanka as the stealthy, power-hungry Michael, and Tiffany as Connie, the little sister who mostly sits on the sidelines.)

The implication of calling someone Fredo, like that of the alt-right insult “cuck,” is of weakness, specifically a failure to live up to the masculine ideal. But Fredo is more of a complex, tragic figure than political mudslinging would allow. In Mario Puzo’s original novel, Vito Corleone’s second son is described as “a child every Italian prayed to the saints for. Dutiful, loyal, always at the service of his father, living with his parents at age thirty. He was short and burly, not handsome but with the same Cupid head of the family, the curly helmet of hair over the round face and sensual bow-shaped lips.” Cazale, whom Francis Ford Coppola and his casting director, Fred Roos, spotted in the Off Broadway play “Line,” looked nothing like that: he was drawn out and pale, with a forehead notably lacking in curls. And yet he fit the character perfectly. Cazale, one of the great (and undersung) character actors of the nineteen-seventies, excelled at showing weakness, cowardice, and pettiness. He was usually cast alongside a more robust leading man, whether it be Al Pacino (in the “Godfather” movies and “Dog Day Afternoon”), Gene Hackman (in Coppola’s “The Conversation”), or Robert De Niro (in “The Deer Hunter”). But he never reduced his characters to their most mockable flaws, infusing his performances with understated humor, sweetness, and melancholy. Think of him as the slow-witted accomplice to Pacino’s bank robber in “Dog Day Afternoon.” When Pacino asks him if there’s any special country he wants to escape to, Cazale whispers, “Wyoming.” The line—both funny and heartbreakingly innocent—was Cazale’s ad lib.

Coppola had a soft spot for Fredo, who reminded him of his less accomplished uncles. “I think Italians that come from that little-town mentality are very hard on their own, and very cruel unto those who don’t quite cut the mustard at the same level that the star brothers or the star uncles do,” the director once said. In “The Godfather,” Cazale gave Fredo that sense of well-meaning haplessness, as when he fails to protect his father from an assassination attempt at the market. The second “Godfather” film brought Fredo into the foreground (not his natural place in the family portrait) and deepened him. Fredo’s involvement in a bungled attempt on Michael’s life (“I know it was you”), which leads Michael to succumb to his darkest instincts and commit fratricide, is at the movie’s tragic core, and it gives Cazale the most beautifully acted scenes of his career. The most iconic is the brothers’ conversation in the boathouse, when Fredo pitifully pleads for respect: “Send Fredo off to do this. Send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse night club somewhere. . . . I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says!” Cazale delivers this feckless rant with wide-eyed rage and self-pity, flopping up and down in his lounge chair like a beached guppy.

But my favorite moment comes just before he’s whacked, as he sits with his young nephew Anthony by the lake with their fishing gear. Fredo recalls the time when he was a kid and went fishing with his father and brothers, and he was the only one to catch a fish—the secret, he tells Anthony, is to say a Hail Mary every time you put your line down. It’s probably the only time Fredo ever outshone his brothers, and you get the sense that he would have led a perfectly content life if he’d been born into a clan of, say, mild-mannered dentists. Fredo’s death is as wrenching as it is only because we care so deeply about him—he’s pathetic, sure, but he has reserves of humanity that he never got to express, holding himself to an impossible yardstick of power and violence when all he wanted to do was go fishing.

Like the character he became famous for, Cazale had a knack for getting passed over. He made only five films, but each was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Cazale never got a nomination. He died, from cancer, in 1978, at the age of forty-two, with his girlfriend, Meryl Streep, at his bedside. If there’s any solace in seeing Fredo become a political slingshot ball, it’s that Cazale’s portrayal is indelible enough to merit the attention. More than four decades later, Fredo’s still not getting any respect, but at least he’s getting noticed.

This past Wednesday, in Burlington, Iowa, Joe Biden gave a speech to address what he and his Presidential campaign are solemnly calling “the Battle for the Soul of Our Nation.” A response to the gun massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the previous weekend, his speech began with the declaration that “the words of a President matter.” This was the Biden that he and his campaign want the country to see: confident, direct, the anti-Donald Trump. “In both clear language and in code, this President has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation,” the former Vice-President said. “His low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week I don’t believe fooled anyone.”

A day later, in Des Moines, Biden addressed a group called the Iowa Asian and Latino Coalition, an organization that was started a few years ago to advocate for minority communities in a state that is ninety per cent white. The event took place at a plumbers-and-steamfitters union hall, in a stuffy room crammed with coalition members, the general public, campaign staff, and press. About twenty minutes into his remarks, Biden turned to the issue of education. “Does anybody here think that twelve years of education is enough for the twenty-first century?” he said. “I don’t know anybody who thinks that.” He called for increased funding to Title I schools, increased teacher pay, and universal pre-K. “We have this notion that, somehow, if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” he said, speaking of academic success, before adding, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” There were groans in the room, and a smattering of hesitant applause. Biden quickly corrected himself. “Wealthy people,” he said. “Black kids. Asian kids.” Within moments, reporters had put the quote on their Twitter feeds. Trump’s campaign, delighted, clipped the video and tweeted about it, too.

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Biden has a history of talking about race in ways that make him look, at best, like an old and out-of-touch white guy. At an Upper East Side fund-raiser, in June, he spoke warmly of his days in the Senate working alongside segregationists. “At least there was some civility,” he said. Those words set off weeks of discussion about whether Biden, despite his lead in the polls and his decades at the heights of power in Washington, was the right person to lead the Democratic Party’s repudiation of a President who has championed racism and nativism. With Biden’s “poor kids” comment getting immediate attention, his campaign tried to get ahead of the story by putting out a statement, saying, “Vice President Biden misspoke and immediately corrected himself during a refrain he often uses to make the point that all children deserve a fair shot.”

But the story was bigger than the single quote. Biden misspoke several times during his trip to Iowa—the state where, in 1987, his first run for the Presidency fell apart, after he plagiarized Neil Kinnock, the former British Labour Party leader, in his stump speech. At the Iowa State Fair, on Thursday, he screwed up one of his new slogans, telling a crowd, “We choose truth over facts!” At the Asian and Latino Coalition, he referred to Margaret Thatcher when he meant Theresa May, and spoke of using biofuels to power “steamships.” (On Monday, the group announced that it had decided to endorse Kamala Harris.) On Saturday, after an appearance at a gun-control forum hosted by Moms Demand Action, Biden told reporters that the students who survived the shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year “came up to see me when I was Vice-President,” even though the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School occurred a year after Biden left the White House. The media narrative soon became, simply, What about those gaffes?

A political gaffe, in a definition once offered by the writer and editor Michael Kinsley, is “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.” In this sense, although Biden has described himself as a “gaffe machine,” his problem isn’t gaffes. When Representative Kevin McCarthy crowed, in 2015, that the Republican Party’s partisan investigations of the Benghazi attack had succeeded in hurting Hillary Clinton’s popularity—that was a gaffe. In contrast, Biden’s misstatements this weekend weren’t “obvious truths.” They were ugly confusions, maybe, or embarrassing flubs—the press, the public, and even Biden’s surrogates spent a few days searching for the right way to describe them. On Friday, Tim Winter, the chairman of the local county Democratic Party, introduced Biden at a fairgrounds event, in a town called Boone. “Let’s talk about Joe Biden’s heart,” Winter said. “The media sometimes calls these gaffes, or slipups. And what they really are is a man with a good heart showing his caring leadership, even when it is politically incorrect to do so.”

Trump’s supporters made similar arguments in 2016. We take him seriously, they said, not literally. Obviously, Trump and Biden are not comparable, politically or personally, but it is becoming easier to imagine that, if Biden does become the Democratic nominee, the Party and its supporters will be in for months of apologizing and explaining things away. After this weekend, Biden’s campaign criticized national reporters for focussing on Biden’s words at the expense of the issues. But Biden’s the one out there every day saying that “words matter.” Maybe that’s the gaffe. In Boone, the Washington Post reporter Matt Visor took a photograph of Biden standing to the side of the event as he prepared to speak, his arms draped over a fence, his head bowed, his aviators on. It was a look of quiet confidence, a reminder of the Biden of Wednesday. “America is an idea, an idea—it’s bigger than any ocean,” Biden said during his remarks. “The only thing that can take America down is America.” At that moment, a red S.U.V. drove past the event site. “Biden sucks!” the driver yelled out his window.

The last public event of Biden’s Iowa trip was on Saturday afternoon, in Central City, about a half hour north of Cedar Rapids, where he spoke at a fund-raiser for local Democrats. His campaign has been careful with how much time Biden gives to reporters and the unfiltered public, but in Central City Biden stuck around, lingering outside the venue as people came up to him with questions and requests for selfies. A mother and daughter told him about a struggle that the daughter, who might have been in high school or college, was facing. In response, Biden said, “Everybody has something to deal with.” He spoke of a stutter that he lived with in his youth. “It’s the only sort of generic impediment that people still laugh at—when someone does that. But it is debilitating. It makes you feel like you can’t be smart. Like you must be some kind of idiot,” he said. He was standing with his hands on his hips, holding eye contact with the mother and daughter, confiding in them, speaking of how he’d overcome certain challenges, but also of how he still lived with them. “It’s hard to ask a girl to go to p-p-prom,” he said, stuttering for effect. He spoke about his mother. “Even though she was no speech therapist, she’d say, ‘Joey, look at me. Read your studies. You’re so smart,’ ” he said. “But it’s all about confidence. Giving people confidence. Because there’s—everybody has something to deal with. Everybody.”

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Here at Bleedr, we go the extra mile to give your loved ones a little digital heads-up when shit’s about to go down. A complimentary text prompts spouses to respond “EJECT,” at which point Bleedr will automatically book a week of lodging for your partner at least five miles from your home.

Bleedr also asked for access to my full contact list. Why?

During the first few days of your period, Bleedr will send a handful of weird and vague preloaded texts to some of your contacts. Lucky recipients might include your parents, siblings, best friend, or work colleagues. We’ll save you hours of miscommunication that you can instead spend curled into a ball!

Is there a reason Bleedr asks for PDFs of the menus at my local restaurants?

During the peak days of your period, Bleedr will have large orders of heavy food delivered to you at random times, day and night. This food will provide you with the overfull feeling you crave, without you having to wait for dining companions to make up their minds while you actually start crying right now. The food orders will seem excessively large, but it’s important to eat the meal by yourself while watching a show about murder.

Why does Bleedr require access to my Facebook account?

Aside from Mark Zuckerberg legally forcing our hand on this one, the benefit of giving Bleedr access to your Facebook account is that, at 2 A.M., we can like photos that your ex posted more than ten years ago while you have menstrual nightmares about the house you grew up in burning down.

Why was there a field requiring my measurements?

Here at Bleedr, we strive to experience P.M.S. for you. Part of that means ordering clothes that are outside your price range from outlets that do not make clothes for your body type, while temporarily extending the false hope that these clothes will magically look good on you and that you’ll suddenly be transformed into someone who participates in “festival season” (whatever that is).

Are the clothes returnable?

Usually yes, but you’re going to bleed on them, so, no.

Is there a reason the app redirects to the Web site of my local animal shelter after ten minutes?

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Yes! We thought you’d want to peruse some of the cats now available for adoption. A few of them only have one eye.

But I’m allergic to cats.

There are dogs, too. They’re all a hundred-per-cent homeless, and sketchy around the kids your body is punishing you for not having.

I can’t find an option to disable the feature that recites Sylvia Plath in a foreboding voice as I’m trying to fall asleep. Is there a way to make this stop?

Although there’s no way to turn off the recitation completely, there is an option to change the content to Virginia Woolf or Cormac McCarthy, which are read in different, equally foreboding voices.