More than any American President, Donald Trump strains credulity. Of the ten-thousand-plus false or misleading statements he has made during his Presidency that fact-checkers have documented so far, one of the baldest claims came on March 24th. That was when the Attorney General, William Barr, stepped into the vacuum left by the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and announced that he had cleared Trump of any obstruction-of-justice charges.

Trump then crowed on Twitter, writing, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. . . .” That statement was false on all three counts. Mueller’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, and it cited at least ten possible instances of Trump’s obstruction of justice, while noting that Justice Department policy prevented the filing of criminal charges against a sitting President. Mueller made no judgment on collusion, meanwhile, because that isn’t a crime.

In the political and popular vernacular, collusion has been incorrectly conflated with its legal equivalent: criminal conspiracy. Mueller said that he found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—a finding that Trump keeps insisting means there was “no collusion.”

But the special counsel noted in his report that there were “numerous links (i.e., contacts) between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” The report also found that affiliates of the Trump campaign repeatedly promoted the work of Russia’s innocuously named Internet Research Agency (I.R.A.), which carried out Moscow’s election-interference operations through a social-media campaign and used various means to communicate directly with the campaign.

The report notes that “on multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted—typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting—pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts.” Both sides then lied about the meetings and other contacts, which were designed to help Trump win the election.

Collusion is defined by Merriam-Webster’s as a “secret agreement or cooperation, especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose,” such as “acting in collusion with the enemy.” Under that definition, the contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, an avowed enemy of the United States, at least amounted to coöperation with a deceitful purpose.

The political significance of collusion depends not on whether the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia reached the level of a criminal conspiracy but, instead, on whether it can be proved that the campaign worked hand-in-glove with the Russians to help Trump get elected—or, to choose two less ambiguous words than collusion, whether it collaborated or consorted with the Russians.

Most Americans would doubtless consider it unacceptable for a Presidential candidate to collaborate with a foreign enemy to win an election. But Trump, by endlessly repeating his “no collusion” mantra, has been strikingly successful in inoculating himself—especially with his fervent base—against the politically explosive charge that he was in cahoots with the Russians.

“I’m not a political analyst and I don’t know what it would take to shake confidence with the base, but I have been surprised at how resilient Trump has been on this,” Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, who has written extensively about the Russia investigation, said. “Part of the problem may be the information they get. But it also may be that they don’t give a shit. I mean, people know Trump is crude and uncouth . . . but they voted for him anyway. So maybe the problem is not that they don’t understand. Maybe it’s that they don’t care.”

Indeed, so far, the Mueller report hasn’t dramatically shifted public opinion about Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the release of the report found that fully eight in ten Americans had followed coverage of the report, but virtually none changed their minds about the President after its release. But, surprisingly, Democrats and many members of the media also seem to have accepted the conflation of conspiracy with collusion, and have failed to make much of an issue of the latter.

The New York Times documented at least a hundred and forty contacts by Trump and eighteen of his associates with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign. But that story, which appeared in April, after the release of Mueller’s report, failed to get traction, as did the four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report itself, which only a tiny fraction of the country seems to have read, thereby helping the White House, and Barr, to frame it as a vindication of Trump.

But the report—from its sweeping confirmation of the depth of Russian interference in the election (a conclusion that Trump still refuses to fully accept), to its ten examples of possible obstruction of justice, to its documentation of the extensive contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign—actually amounts to a searing indictment of the President.

The examples of collusion it cites are extensive. While still running for President, Trump secretly tried to set up a lucrative business deal to build a skyscraper in Moscow and then lied about it, thereby exposing himself to Russian blackmail. He publicly called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—and Russian trolls connected to the government responded immediately with an attempt.

Other examples involved Trump’s associates. His former personal lawyer Michael Cohen met repeatedly with Russians about the Trump Moscow skyscraper project. Cohen later admitted that he lied to Congress about how late in the campaign those discussions were taking place. George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, had several contacts with Russian agents who wanted to arrange meetings between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and he reported back to the campaign about those discussions.

An unidentified Trump campaign associate exchanged private messages with Guccifer 2.0, the pseudonym used by Russian military-intelligence officials who hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and gave them to WikiLeaks, which later released them. That associate is reportedly Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidante, who is now awaiting trial on seven counts of lying to Congress about Russia’s attempt to influence the election and other charges. In his indictment of Stone, Mueller disclosed evidence showing that an unnamed top Trump campaign official asked Stone to get information from WikiLeaks about the hacked D.N.C. e-mails.

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, supplied internal polling data to a business associate with ties to Russian intelligence and told the associate that he stood ready to provide briefings on the campaign to a Russian oligarch. And, of course, there was the famed Trump Tower meeting, in June of 2016, between Trump’s son Donald, Jr.; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; Manafort; and a Russian agent who promised dirt on Clinton. In October, 2016, WikiLeaks contacted Don, Jr., and asked him to have his father send out links to their Clinton content on Twitter. The elder Trump did so.

In November, following the election, Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador at the time, Sergey Kislyak, and discussed setting up a secret back channel between the Kremlin and Trump’s transition team. The Times reported that Kushner also met with a Russian banker who had close ties to Putin in an attempt to establish a direct line of communication to the Russian President. During the transition, Trump’s choice to be his national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had several conversations with Kislyak about eliminating the sanctions against Russia that had been imposed by the Obama Administration and about blocking an impending United Nations vote critical of Israeli settlements.

There were numerous other contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign which, in addition to meetings, took the form of e-mails, text messages, phone calls, and private messages on social media. Now, in the wake of the report’s release, there are indications that the collusion issue is being seen in a different light.

Joshua Geltzer, a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, has written that the Mueller report, by detailing the significant intermingling of Russia’s election-interference actions with the Trump campaign’s activities, materially advances the public understanding of the Russia affair.

“Among the Mueller Report’s significant contributions to our understanding of the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign is its thorough documentation of how intertwined that campaign became with the online messaging of the Trump team itself,” Geltzer wrote recently in Just Security, an online forum hosted by New York University’s Reiss Center on Law and Security. “This is a finding of importance regardless of the level of direct coordination between the Trump team and Russian actors.”

Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told me that the report lays out a “wealth of evidence” of collusion—Trump’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding. “By any reasonable interpretation, for example, accepting an offer of help from Russia for dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help Trump, setting up a secret meeting to obtain it, and lying about it, would constitute collusion,” Schiff wrote in an e-mail. “Mueller sets out a wealth of evidence of collusion even if it was not sufficient to prove every element of the crime of conspiracy. Even on the crime itself, Mueller makes clear that the failure to establish a crime like conspiracy does not mean the absence of evidence. The standard which he had to meet under Justice Department policy was whether he could ultimately prove to a jury each element of the crime of conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Schiff said that Trump’s behavior was unacceptable. “By conflating Mueller’s actual finding—that he could not establish each element of criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt—with the false claim that this means there was no evidence of the broader corrupt conduct we know as collusion, the President has attempted to deflect attention from the wealth of deeply unethical, immoral, and unpatriotic behavior that he and his campaign were engaged in.”

Wittes, of Lawfare, argues that the confusion about collusion comes, in part, from the various interpretations of the term’s meaning. “One of the things about a word like collusion is you can define it any way you want, so that’s the fundamental divide,” he said. “One group of people looks at the fact pattern and sees Mueller found no prosecutable crime, and therefore there’s no critical judgment to draw. The other group, which includes me, looks at the same set of facts and sees something very untoward and unpatriotic.”

By documenting the extensive contact between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, the Mueller report at the very least establishes that the campaign “cheerfully and knowingly benefited from the efforts of a hostile intelligence service,” Wittes said. “They knew when they were lying about Trump Tower Moscow that they were trying to solicit favors from the Russian government. To me the relevant thing is to just describe what they did. People can call it a pink elephant if they want.”

Wittes also argues that the relationship between the collusion and obstruction components of the Mueller investigation should be revisited. “Specifically, I now believe they are far more integrated with one another than I previously understood,” he wrote at Lawfare, before the partially redacted version of the Mueller report was released—words that he said he stands by today. “Obstruction was not a problem distinct from collusion, as has been generally imagined. Rather . . . obstruction was the collusion, or at least part of it . . . specifically, the risk of a person on the U.S. side coordinating with or supporting Russian activity by shutting down the investigation.”

In the end, it’s impossible to quantify how much Moscow’s extensive election interference helped Trump win in 2016. But in a race that was decided by a total of just 77,744 votes in the three critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Russian effort certainly had to have had some impact—perhaps at least enough to sway seventy-seven-thousand-odd votes.

That is the verdict of history that Trump plainly fears most when he makes his constant cries of “no collusion.” But with the record now replete with evidence of scores of contacts between his campaign and Russia, it appears more and more likely that history will conclude the President did collude, collaborate, or consort with the enemy, and that his election was, in fact, tainted.

The Achilles tendon is a thick, elastic band of tissue that stretches from the heel to the calf, connecting muscle to bone. It lets a foot flex off the floor and onto the toes; it lets a body walk, run, and jump. It’s named after the mythological Greek warrior who was invulnerable everywhere except his heel, where, according to the Iliad, at least—there are multiple versions of his story—he was shot with a poisoned arrow. His mother, Thetis, who was immortal, had told him that he had two possible fates: he could go to war, and be killed, in which case his glory would last forever, or he could live a long, quiet, uncelebrated life. He chose to fight and die.

When Kevin Durant took the floor on Monday for Game 5 of the N.B.A. Finals, between the Golden State Warriors and the Toronto Raptors, it was a welcome sight—and not only for the Warriors, who were facing a 3–1 deficit. The series hadn’t seemed right without him. The Warriors were clearly depleted and in disarray. Durant creates shots, warps defenses, and frees the other Warriors to wreak maximum havoc. His appearance on the floor also laid to rest irritating debates over whether he was really committed to the team, whether he was sufficiently “tough,” and whether the injury was more serious than had been reported. (This last bit of speculation was largely based on the low placement of ice packs on Durant’s leg.) Finally, with Durant on the court, the focus of all discussion was the game itself. The two best players in the world for the past few months, Durant and the Toronto Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard, were facing off, fighting for immortality.

Leonard defended Durant at the start. Durant moved smoothly, blocked a shot, and showed his elegant range from deep. In eleven minutes, he had twelve points. Then, with not quite ten minutes remaining in the second quarter, Durant, squaring off against the Raptors’ Serge Ibaka, just above the three-point line, took the ball low, dribbled between his long legs, and started a sharp drive with his left hand. His leg buckled; he threw away the ball; he hopped to the sideline, sat down, and felt his heel. Afterward, replay after replay (after replay) showed his calf rippling in slow motion.

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Durant was gone from the arena before the game was over, on crutches and in a large boot. Golden State won without him, 106–105, surrendering a fourth-quarter lead, improbably regaining it, and surviving when the Warriors forward Draymond Green nicked a last-second three-point attempt by the Raptors’ Kyle Lowry. After the game, the Warriors’ general manager, Bob Myers, sat in front of the media. He did not speak for a few moments, looking down and twisting his mouth, trying to compose himself. “Um,” he began, uttering what sounded like a cross between a throat-clearing and a strangled cry. He adjusted the microphone, buying time. “Um,” he said again, and took a breath. “Kevin had a—it’s an Achilles injury.” They didn’t know the extent of it, he went on to say. And then he emphatically defended the team’s decision to let Durant play.

“I don’t believe there’s anybody to blame, but I understand this world, and, if you have to, you can blame me,” Myers said. For weeks, he said, Durant had been closely evaluated, having “multiple MRIs” and being seen by “multiple doctors.” “The people that worked with him and cleared him are good people,” Myers added. It might have seemed an odd thing to say—not an account of events so much as a plea. But it was understandable given the circumstances. Myers looked haunted. He was concerned for Durant as a key member of the team he runs, and also, presumably, as a person whom he cares about and who had got hurt. But there was something else—something he could see in the faces of the media members, who were his real audience in that moment. The point wasn’t to explain what had happened. The narrative was not fully in his control.

Before, the chorus had second-guessed why Durant wasn’t on the floor. Now, the criticism would run the other way. Of course, they would say, Durant should not have played. Of course his Achilles was vulnerable. He hadn’t been healthy enough to fully practice, let alone play, let alone play at full speed, with the burden of carrying his team, facing elimination, without any restriction on his minutes or what he might attempt to do. Injuries, like wins and losses, are the result of many decisions—some difficult, some unconscious—and a lot of luck, and they look, in retrospect, foreordained. If Durant had made it through the game and led the Warriors to victory, that would have seemed predestined, too. But fate is for myths. Much as we may talk about athletes as gods, they are mortals, and they live by their choices.

Suddenly, Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign is getting a lot of attention. When nineteen Democratic candidates converged on Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sunday, for a dinner and a speakers’ forum, the Massachusetts senator and former Harvard Law School professor was one of the standouts, Politico reported. A poll of Democratic voters in the Hawkeye State for the Des Moines Register, Mediacom, and CNN showed Warren moving into third place, just one percentage point behind Bernie Sanders. “Warren is experiencing something unusual in the crowded Democratic field: momentum,” Michael Scherer wrote, in the Washington Post.

To explain Warren’s surge in the polls, the obvious place to start is the plethora of policy proposals she has unveiled. In the past six weeks alone, her campaign has published plans to promote green manufacturing and tackle climate change, end the opioid crisis, provide debt relief to Puerto Rico, insure that sitting Presidents can be indicted for criminal wrongdoing, reduce corporate influence at the Pentagon, and guarantee women access to abortion. These are on top of Warren’s earlier proposals to provide universal childcare, cancel student debt and abolish tuition fees at public colleges, invest five hundred billion dollars in affordable housing over ten years, break up the tech giants, eliminate the Electoral College, insure that major corporations pay taxes on their profits, and introduce a new tax on the ultra-wealthy.

At a time when many of the Democratic candidates are still settling on their campaign themes and at best unveiling one or two big policy proposals, the ambition and level of detail in Warren’s plans have put her at an advantage. Her Web site now features two calculators that people can use to figure out how much money the student-debt and childcare proposals would save them. (For example, a person with a hundred thousand dollars in debt who earns seventy-five thousand dollars a year would save fifty thousand dollars from the loan-cancellation plan.) The slew of wonky ideas from Warren’s policy shop has even spawned a campaign slogan that the candidate uses in her stump speeches which is emblazoned on T-shirts and bags for sale on her Web site: “Warren Has a Plan for That.”

Clear policy ideas are an essential part of any campaign, but they don’t guarantee success. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton put forward dozens of them, including universal preschool, a Medicare “buy-in” for those fifty-five and older, a public option inside Obamacare, the abolishment of tuition fees at public colleges for students from families with middle incomes, and a substantial tax hike on the richest 0.1 per cent. For whatever reason, Clinton struggled to tie them all together in a comprehensive message that resonated outside Democratic strongholds.

This isn’t the place to rehash the 2016 campaign. But one takeaway from that searing experience is that running a Presidential campaign isn’t like operating a store, where people come in and buy the goods they want. It’s more like being a prosecutor in a complicated trial: you have to provide an over-all theory of the case that ties things together and wins over the jury. From the beginning, Warren has been attempting to do this.

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In February, she kicked off her campaign in the former textile town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where, in 1912, female millworkers walked off the job to protest low wages and harsh working conditions. Warren opened her speech with an account of the strike. Then she shifted focus, saying, “Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are also struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected. Hardworking people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy but also in our democracy. Like the women of Lawrence, we are here to say enough is enough!”

Warren went on to detail some of the features of an economic system she said that was “rigged,” including stagnant wages, rising health-care costs, declining rates of intergenerational mobility, corporate tax cuts, and subsidies for corporate polluters. “To protect their economic advantages, the rich and powerful have rigged our political system as well,” she went on. “Today our government works just great for oil companies and defense contractors, great for private prisons, great for Wall Street banks and hedge funds. It’s just not working for anyone else.”

To those unfamiliar with Warren, it may seem like she borrowed some phrases from the Sanders campaign of 2016, but she’s been using this sort of language for years. Warren made her academic reputation as an expert on how bankruptcy laws affect middle-class families, and, after the great financial crisis, she was the driving force in setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the Trump Administration has been busy downsizing. Tearing into big businesses and feckless bankers comes naturally to the former schoolteacher from Oklahoma. As I noted in January, “in many ways she is a modern version of a prairie populist, inveighing against the trusts, the plutocrats, and their corrupt political allies.”

In the midwest last week, Warren criticized General Electric, Levi’s, and other companies for shifting production abroad and shuttering American factories. After unveiling yet another plan—“A Plan for Economic Patriotism”—she attended a town-hall meeting with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, where she said that the people of Fort Wayne, Indiana, “understand that leaving it to a handful of giant multinational corporations to build our economy just isn’t working. You know, those big corporations, they don’t have any loyalty to America. They don’t have any loyalty to American workers. They have loyalty to exactly one thing, and that is their own profits. And what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to have a government that doesn’t say, hey, whatever it is that the giant multinational corporations want, let us help you. . . .we need this country to work for working people. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

The lambasting of footloose corporations echoed some of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and it earned Warren praise from an unexpected source: Tucker Carlson, of Fox News. But the policy prescriptions that Warren unveiled are very different from the tariffs and other protectionist measures that Trump has introduced. They include expanding worker-training programs and providing more apprenticeships, giving more financial support to exporters, beefing up subsidies for research and development, and using the federal procurement budget to promote key U.S. industries. Warren would also consolidate the Commerce Department and other federal agencies, such as the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, in a new Department of Economic Development, whose mission would be “to promote sustainable, middle-class American jobs.”

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary, pointed out that these proposals, together with Warren’s $1.5 trillion plan to boost green manufacturing, amount to an effort to create an industrial policy based on the German model. You can argue about whether this type of approach would work in this country, but to simply dismiss it as un-American would be a mistake. For many decades now, the Pentagon has effectively been operating an industrial policy through its vast outlays on armaments and its substantial research budget. Perhaps not coincidentally, American companies now dominate a number of industries that do a lot of business with the Pentagon, such as aerospace, defense, and telecommunications.

In any case, Warren’s latest plan is another illustration of how her campaign is trying to fashion a coherent response, not just to Trump but to the deep-seated problems that helped give him his opening. Having been on the receiving end of the President’s jibes often, Warren shows indisputable contempt for Trump and an eagerness to get rid of him. After a redacted version of the Mueller report was released, she was one of the first Democratic candidates to call for impeachment. But, in addition to positioning herself as someone with the toughness to confront and beat Trump, Warren is asking Democratic voters to keep an eye on the broader picture. As she explained back in February, “the man in the White House is not the cause of what’s broken, he’s just the latest — and most extreme — symptom of what’s gone wrong in America.”

Many classic children’s books beg for philosophical readings: the likes of “Charlotte’s Web” or “Are You My Mother?” are well known as complex and subterranean ruminations on death and identity and community. Had you asked me a couple of years ago, I would not have classified Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia series with this loftier group—my children delighted in the wordplay, but I found the books a bit one-note.

Yet the more I read Amelia Bedelia the more unsettled I felt; I began to suspect that I wasn’t hearing all the notes. The books depict a young woman who sows domestic chaos in and around the home of her wealthy employers, a snooty older couple who have outsourced the labor of keeping their household, family, and community relations running smoothly. Each book follows a simple formula: Amelia Bedelia, a housemaid replete with apron and frilled cap, encounters various domestic imperatives: clean the house, host a party, babysit, substitute-teach. But, rather than keeping order, Amelia Bedelia creates disarray. She takes each instruction she is given with an absurd literalism. “Draw the drapes,” Mrs. Rogers tells her; Amelia Bedelia reaches for pen and paper. She “dresses the chicken,” but in overalls. When asked to “dust the furniture,” she sprinkles powder all over the living room; asked to “change the towels,” she takes scissors to them. She dirties and destroys her employer’s possessions, in other words, breaking one of the primary taboos of domestic employment. She’s a figure of rebellion: against the work that women do in the home, against the work that lower-class women do for upper-class women. Her one undeniable talent—the reason that the Rogerses keep her around—is as a pastry chef: cream puffs, tea cakes, pies, tarts. Every time the Rogerses are about to cast her aside, every time they are “angry, very angry,” she entices them back by appealing to their appetites.

As an employee who produces turmoil at work and is overseen by amiable jerks, Amelia Bedelia reminds me of Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” from 1853. “I would prefer not to” is Bartleby’s famous refrain; if he took Amelia’s job, Bartleby would neither pull the drapes from the windows nor sketch them with pen and paper but sit and stare at them with stoic despondence. Melville’s story is one of American literature’s great tales of workplace degradation, and, though it takes place in an office, it is in some ways as domestic, as intimate, as a story about a household servant—Bartleby, increasingly depressed, begins sleeping and living at his workplace. But, where Bartleby responds to degradation by withdrawing, reducing, starving himself, Amelia Bedelia produces sugary excess. Throughout her daily grind, she cheerfully acquiesces to her lot even as she subverts almost every task assigned to her. Bartleby teaches us to look for resistance in forms of ascetic refusal; Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.

Parish was born into a poor family in small-town South Carolina in 1927; her mother died when she was young, and her father had no formal education beyond the fourth grade. Parish’s biography is murky—few scholars or writers have taken her as a subject, despite what seems to be a fascinating life path. Both she and her brother graduated from college, and Peggy eventually found her way to teaching the third grade at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s toniest private schools. The story she and her publisher have always told about the series is that it stemmed from the charming things that her students said in class; Parish dedicates “Teach Us, Amelia Bedelia” to “Miss Rose, my first-grade teacher, who introduced me to the magic of words.” And children do love how the books represent linguistic misunderstandings, which makes sense. The words we assign to so many elements of the world are complex and often confounding to children, and they need time and space to explore this confusion. (“What does ‘forgive’ mean?” “What is a truce?” “What’s a soft lockdown?” These are just the questions I got from my kids yesterday.)

The first Amelia Bedelia book was published in 1963, the same year as Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”; the series’ interest in wordplay, literalism, and figurative language is of a piece with its interest in the repetitive, devalued, yet highly intimate quality of women’s work. Perhaps more than other forms of work, domestic labor is often misnamed as love, duty, or some kind of irresistible biological calling. And that’s when it’s named at all; women’s work—the cooking, appointment-keeping, party-planning, soap-dispenser-refilling—is so often invisible. Parish’s books spotlight this labor, and refuse the sentimental fuzziness that usually attends it (especially when it is attached to a mother figure). In “Come Back, Amelia Bedelia” (my favorite), Mrs. Rogers is pushed to her limit when, having asked for coffee and cereal for breakfast, Amelia brings her a cup of coffee with cereal mixed into it. “Oh, you are impossible!” Mrs. Rogers exclaims. “You’re fired!” Not immediately understanding, Amelia Bedelia asks, “You mean you don’t want me anymore?” The storybook lines then break into something like verse: “Amelia Bedelia / got her bag. / And she went away.” (The white space around the lines provides room for children to feel the uncomfortable feelings.) Discarded and unmoored, Amelia Bedelia wanders around town responding to various “Help Wanted” signs. They’re all for pink-collar gigs—hairdresser, secretary, nurse—but she finds that she is no more wanted by these bosses than her own. She returns, as she always does, to the Rogerses, and readers learn, once again, about the messy entanglements of domestic labor, love, and power.

Read as a commentary on the complexity of women’s work—its incessant quality, its classed-ness—Amelia Bedelia feels as much a product of mid-twentieth-century feminism as “The Feminine Mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” or Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Maud Martha.” Parish died suddenly in 1988, and the series fell fallow until her nephew Herman Parish revived it, in 1995. Under his authorship, the newer books have somewhat diluted Peggy Parish’s interest in domestic labor, resulting in “Amelia Bedelia 4 Mayor” (1999), “Calling Doctor Amelia Bedelia” (2002), and “Amelia Bedelia, Cub Reporter” (2012). Parish had kept her focus tight across twelve books, revealing all the actual labor that it took to keep home and community running, from hosting wedding showers to decorating for Christmas to making baby food. The later books remystify the domestic labor that Parish took pains to illuminate.

I came of age and entered the workforce steeped in this kind of mystification; it was the era of “girl power” and “having it all.” My youthful faith in those frameworks of intellectual and professional agency has cracked under the pressures of childcare, second and third shifts, glass ceilings, workplace pregnancy discrimination, and all the rest. When I read Amelia Bedelia to my children at night, they relish the silly wordplay and the chaos, while I take pleasure in both the joyful anarchy of her world and in how keenly Parish captures the feeling of women’s work: literal, unceasing, impossible to do perfectly, almost as absurd as dressing a chicken in overalls.

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Too bad there isn’t a Tonys category that could have pitted King Kong against Cher. Biggest Diva? Most Likely to Stop Traffic in Midtown? Although both were represented on Broadway this season, neither made an appearance at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night, where the seventy-third annual Tony Awards were presented. King Kong—or the technical wizards who engineered him onstage—received a special prize, while “The Cher Show” picked up awards for its lead actress (and the best Cher impersonator this side of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”), Stephanie J. Block, and for its costume designer, Bob Mackie, who never met a black-feather headdress he couldn’t make work. Try that on for size, ya big ape!

Hell was a big theme this year, thanks to “Hadestown,” Anaïs Mitchell’s boogie-woogie retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which was nominated for fourteen awards and won eight, including Best Musical. (One of its competitors, “Beetlejuice,” also features a trip to the underworld.) The show supplied the most galvanizing speech of the night, from its furiously innovative director, Rachel Chavkin. “My folks raised me with the understanding that life is a team sport,” Chavkin began. “And so is walking out of Hell.” She was speaking not of the hopeless feeling you get two hours into an awards show, with half a dozen categories and three musical numbers somehow left to go, but of the faith required to fight the “power structures” that trick us into feeling alone. “And this is why I wish I wasn’t the only woman directing a musical on Broadway this season,” she continued, letting loose some fire emojis. “There are so many women who are ready to go. And we need to see that racial diversity and gender diversity reflected in our critical establishment, too. This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.” If you aren’t yet convinced that Rachel Chavkin is hard-core, consider that she was saying this while pregnant as a surrogate for her gay best friend’s child.

The other memorable speech came from someone nearly fifty years Chavkin’s senior: Elaine May, who, at eighty-seven, won Leading Actress in a Play, for “The Waverly Gallery,” by Kenneth Lonergan, her first appearance on Broadway since 1966. May’s performance, as a woman losing a fight with dementia, was a marvel. But so was her speech, which was so full of charm and humility that you felt like she was somehow your new best friend. “At the end of the play, I died,” she told us. (No spoiler alert necessary; the play closed in January.) “Now, my death was described onstage by Lucas Hedges so brilliantly, and he described the death—my death—he described it so heartbreakingly, it was so touching, that, watching from the wings, I thought, I’m going to win this guy’s Tony.” Grinning, she gave a little “see you later” wave. Swoon.

The evening’s host, James Corden, could have used some of May’s casual self-assurance. A practiced vaudevillian, he seemed to pitch every comic bit from a defensive crouch, as if convinced that anyone watching the Tonys was doing it by accident or was hoping to see Neil Patrick Harris instead. His opening number informed us that theatre is live, unlike television, with “actual people in an actual space,” which is both inarguable and a strange thing to hear during a live television broadcast. Halfway through the show, Beetlejuice, played by the human sparkplug Alex Brightman, performed a menacingly funny number laced with drive-by jabs at celebrity audience members. (“Adam Driver, you killed Han Solo. Not cool, bro!”) The message was clear: Beetlejuice wants the hosting gig. And, by God, he deserves it.

Here’s a conundrum: How to represent the nominees for Best Play? The Tonys have never figured it out. You can cut to actors doing scenes, but that rarely translates well onscreen. You can get Whoopi Goldberg to give plot summaries, but that’s also less than ideal. This year, the playwrights themselves gave descriptions of their plays. It may have felt like listening to book reports, but it gave us the chance to see Heidi Schreck, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and, in monster-drag regalia, Taylor Mac. Jez Butterworth, the author of “The Ferryman,” ditched the synopsis on the teleprompter—“You can Google the play”—and took the time to thank Laura Donnelly, one of the play’s stars and the mother of his child. Granted, the play was based on her uncle’s murder during the Troubles, in Northern Ireland, but it felt like a premature acceptance speech. Later on, when Butterworth did win, he said, “I mentioned it earlier, but Laura Donnelly’s uncle was killed by the I.R.A.” Right. Got it. Another odd choice was to include a performance by only one of the Best Play nominees, a spiritual from McCraney’s “Choir Boy.” It was stirring, but Taylor Mac’s “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus” has an entire dance number featuring a chorus line of mechanical corpse penises. What gives?

While I’m grousing, the Tonys should really find a way to include both the awards for Original Score and Book of a Musical in the telecast, instead of relegating one or the other to the pre-show. This year, Robert Horn accepted his prize for the zinger-filled book of “Tootsie” off camera. The viewing audience also missed out on Jessica Paz, one of the sound designers of “Hadestown,” becoming not only the first woman nominated in her category but the first to win, and Sergio Trujillo, the choreographer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” getting a standing ovation when he recalled coming to America as an undocumented immigrant and issued a promise to Dreamers that “change will come.”

Not that the broadcast was short on inspirational moments. André De Shields, the velvet cobra who won for playing Hermes in “Hadestown,” shared wisdom from his “seventy-three years on the Earth plane.” Mart Crowley, who has had eighty-three years on the Earth plane, and who wrote the pre-Stonewall drama “The Boys in the Band,” which won for Revival of a Play, acknowledged the original 1968 cast: “Nine brave men who did not listen to their agents when they were told their careers would be finished.” Bryan Cranston, who won for playing Howard Beale in “Network,” dedicated his award to the press, saying, “The media is not the enemy of the people. Demagoguery is the enemy of the people.” (Thanks!) And Ali Stroker, the incandescent performer in a wheelchair who plays Ado Annie in “Oklahoma!” (which won the award for Revival of a Musical), not only got to sing her sexy, Dolly Parton-esque rendition of “I Cain’t Say No” but then returned to accept a Tony. She said, “This award is for every kid who is watching tonight who has a disability, who has a limitation or a challenge, who has been waiting to see themselves represented in this arena. You are.”

Finally, honorable mention must go to Billy Porter, who is currently both king and queen of the red carpet, having aced the Academy Awards and the Met Gala. He did not disappoint at the Tonys, to which he wore a red and pink gown made from the curtain of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where he gave his Tony-winning performance in “Kinky Boots,” in 2013. Let’s hope this starts a trend in sustainable fashion. Maybe next year Cher will show up wearing King Kong as a stole.