There are politicians who traffic in impassioned oratory or contagious fervor or ingenious catchphrases. Then there’s Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee in the crucial U.S. Senate contest in North Carolina. His campaign slogan is so prosaic, so blunt, so gruff that every time I see it, I do a double take, wondering if it’s some parody or I’m hallucinating.
Make Stuff Cost Less. That’s it. He even calls his campaign schedule the Make Stuff Cost Less tour, as if he’s Bon Jovi or Bad Bunny, poised to perform his greatest hits. Except he’s going to talk about, you know, stuff. And making it cost less. Because who’s not in favor of that?
I actually love what Cooper, a former two-term governor of North Carolina, is doing. And I love that while there was or still is so much Democratic drama in Maine and Michigan and Texas and other states with midterm races on which control of the Senate hinges, we here in purple, swing-y, all-important North Carolina are shuffling through a relative snoozefest. No big scandals. No six genders. No visits from Hasan Piker. Just an unquestionably decent, deeply familiar Democratic nominee with a folksy affect, a focused message and, maybe, a lesson about the effectiveness of politicians who don’t fashion themselves as revolutionaries, don’t dance along the culture’s fault lines and don’t have any big surprises in store.
“What’s most interesting about this race is how boring it is,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. (He’s unrelated to the candidate.) Although statewide contests in North Carolina tend to be close and this one could become a nail-biter, Roy Cooper took an early lead in polls over the Republican nominee, Michael Whatley, and has steadily held on to it, prompting many professional oddsmakers to put the race in the “leans Democratic” category.
The most recent survey, released a week ago, showed Whatley only 4 points behind, a margin that’s smaller than previous ones and not so commanding in the context of Cooper’s superior name recognition: He was governor from 2017 through 2024 and has been in state politics for decades, while Whatley, a former Washington lobbyist who spent about a year and a half as the chair of the Republican National Committee, has never held public office. I’d wager that most North Carolinians couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.
That will change at least somewhat over the next few months, as the candidates and their parties trade more pointed attacks and as national groups — possibly including President Trump’s well-funded super PAC, MAGA Inc. — pour what is expected to be many tens of millions of dollars into the race. Already, Democrats are painting Whatley as a slick plutocrat utterly beholden to Trump, whose support is indeed the main force propelling Whatley’s candidacy. Meantime, Republicans are selectively alluding to various measures and developments during Cooper’s years as governor to charge him with being soft on crime, a reflexive accusation hurled at almost every Democrat. It doesn’t quite square with Cooper’s moderate record and centrist image.
By nature and by design, he isn’t an easy target — he’s so assiduously affable, so determinedly reasonable, so emphatically low-key, to coin an oxymoron. He grew up working on a North Carolina farm, which he mentions more than a little. The first of three campaign ads that he has released so far begins with images of those bucolic acres. “Mom was a teacher, Dad a small-town lawyer and farmer,” Cooper says as black-and-white pictures of his parents from the olden days flash on the screen. “Fridays were football. Sunday was church.” That’s from the ad’s first 10 seconds. In the remaining 20, Cooper mentions insurance rates and other working-class worries, but not, say, ICE raids or the Iran war.
I listened to two Make Stuff Cost Less speeches that he gave over the past week and a half. In neither did he utter Trump’s name. He did refer to the “chaos and horror” in Washington and accused Whatley of being poised to do “whatever this president tells him to do and say, regardless of whether it’s good for the people of North Carolina.” But Cooper quickly pivoted from that dig to a vow to “work with this president when I can,” adding: “I’m going to put the people before power, the people before party, the people before politics.”
Such alliteration is about as fancy and sexy as any of Cooper’s remarks. He indulges in a favorite refrain that falls groaningly short of being a rallying cry: “For so many North Carolina families, there’s just too much month at the end of the money.”
The policy section of the Cooper campaign’s website is devoted entirely to dozens of measures that he proposes for bringing down prices. He wants to repeal many tariffs, strengthen enforcement of antitrust laws, ban algorithmic grocery pricing. The list goes on and on, and above it, in large type, hover four words you’ll never guess: Make Stuff Cost Less.
That crude cri de coeur calls to mind the slogan that a similarly practical-minded Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, used in the first of her two successful campaigns for Michigan governor: Fix the Damn Roads. Such approaches don’t generate especially entertaining social media posts, provide grist for cable-television panels or have pundits like me blathering about innate charisma and nascent movements, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point.
“Democrats should spend more time asking themselves what a guy like Roy Cooper — currently poll-mogging his Republican opponent in North Carolina — is doing right than marveling at D.S.A. candidates in extremely blue districts,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark, wrote in a column early this month.
Amen. And what Cooper is doing is keeping his head down, his words measured and his message simple. In a battleground state in a bonkers era, that’s the right stuff.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz recalled the seductive power of proper punctuation: “I was a novice editor, he was an experienced writer, and the first article he turned in revealed a virtuosic command of comma placement. He opened with long, slow clauses; picked up speed with shorter ones; withheld all commas for a gloriously terse thesis statement; and then, crash! A mass-casualty pileup of appositive phrases. Grammarians, I married him.” (Thanks to Jess Collins of New Haven, Conn., and Jodie Wohl of Seattle, among others, for nominating this.)
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody appraised the title character in the 1946 novel “Élisabeth,” by the renowned French movie director Éric Rohmer, which was just translated into English for the first time: “She isn’t the novel’s central consciousness but, rather, its central lack of consciousness, something like a living hyphen who brings the story’s main characters together while remaining painfully unaware of their personalities or activities.” (Mary Martin, Prevessin, France)
In The Times, Jacob Gallagher treated the slopes of Sun Valley, Idaho, as a fashion runway for the titans who gather there annually to validate one another: “If you’re searching for some takeaway about how rich men dress these days, look at their sleeves. From Jeff Bezos down, the short-sleeved T-shirts and polos a lot of attendees wear are as tight around the upper arm as a blood pressure cuff. At certain angles Sun Valley seems to exist just so billionaires can eyeball who has the biggest biceps. Sun Valley has become gun valley.” (Joy Anderson, Paris, and Lee Ann Summers, Westfield, N.J., among others)
Also in The Times, Deborah Solomon recognized the chessboard’s nimblest monarch: “Of all the pieces, the queen is the only figure permitted to whisk across multiple spaces in every direction in a single move. The king, by contrast, is limited to crossing one square at a time, as if hampered by a case of plantar fasciitis.” (Peter J. Comerford, Providence, R.I.)
And Glenn Thrush flashed back to one Trump enabler’s collision with another: “Todd Blanche, then the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, had been on the job only for a couple of months in May 2025, when he was handed a migraine in a Detective Columbo trench coat by the name of Edward J. Martin Jr.” (Rich Delmar, Arlington, Va., and John Murtagh, Bronxville, N.Y., among others)
In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.)
Given the heights of hoopla to which the World Cup ascended, it seems fitting to present a contrary view. In Quillette, Robert Lynch offered one, arguing that soccer “just drones on — pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again — for ninety minutes.” He added: “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston )
And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Watching and Writing
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With its gorgeous landscapes, powerful imagery and grandly scaled action sequences, the director Christopher Nolan’s rendition of “The Odyssey” is often breathtaking. But some of those sequences are choreographed and shot in a hectic, confusing fashion, and I never cared as much about the characters as Nolan surely wants his audience to. They’re hastily drawn, broadly portrayed servants to the spectacle.
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As of Friday, the horror movie “Obsession,” made for $750,000 and released in mid-May, had grossed more than $425 million worldwide. Even more impressive, it’s the first movie since “E.T.” back in 1982 to make more money in its second weekend than its first and more in its third weekend than its second, an indication of hugely positive word of mouth. It’s about a young man who makes a wish that the object of his affection love him more than she does anyone else in the world; when that wish comes true, she turns into a jealous, zealous, murderous monster. Glenn Close’s character in “Fatal Attraction” — to which “Obsession” overtly pays homage — is Little Bo Peep in comparison. “Obsession” is now streaming, I belatedly caught up with it, and apart from a star-making performance by Inde Navarrette as Close’s deranged descendant, nothing about it wowed me. I have to believe its success, apparently powered by moviegoers in their 20s and 30s, speaks to the widely chronicled difficulties that young men and young women have relating to one another right now. “Obsession” gives blood-soaked expression to that.
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In our ongoing interchanges about American politics and world events, my Times colleague Bret Stephens and I discussed the demise of Graham Platner’s candidacy, the Michigan Senate race and the political risks of support from AIPAC a week and half ago. Last week, we lamented the Iran debacle and Trump’s incessant lies about rigged elections.
On a Personal Note
When I moved to North Carolina from New York five years ago, I made many observations and posed many questions that my real estate broker found curious. The hunt for a home is a deeply personal venture; it brings out a man’s neuroses and nonsense.
But my broker never looked at me with more bafflement and concern than when I asked her, in regard to a promising house we were about to see: “It has air-conditioning, right?”
We were in a relatively affluent neighborhood. In 2021. In the sweltering South. Of course the house had air-conditioning, because every house she had shown and would show me had air- conditioning. Humankind had progressed enough and I had done well enough to control indoor temperatures. If I wanted to shiver in August and sweat in December, that was my inheritance and that was my right.
My question to her was born not of idiocy — though I can be plenty dense — but of something closer to shame. I don’t want to love and depend on air-conditioning as much as I do. For many generations — many millenniums — people managed reasonably well without it. People like me: There was no central air-conditioning, and there were only a few staggered window units, in the houses in the Northeast where I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, though there were some scorching days every summer. I perspired and persevered. When had I transformed into such a delicate, heat-averse flower?
Americans and Europeans are once again in the midst of an unusually hot summer, and I’m once again reminded of how polarizing and politicized air conditioning is, how complicated a person’s relationship to it can be and how many people itch to assign air-conditioning the designation of luxury or necessity — one or the other — when it’s neither and both.
People die for lack of air-conditioning, so there’s a powerful humanitarian case for cooling more and more of the world. There’s a powerful environmental case against that, because air- conditioning is an energy suck for which we’re paying a steep price, and I don’t mean just financially.
There’s no one position or attitude to have about air-conditioning, and that irresolution seems to addle some people, who develop pet theories and peculiar phobias as a result. Europeans in general and Italians in particular excel in such rococo thinking, as I learned when I lived in Rome a little more than two decades ago. A fellow American expat with whom I socialized told me about arriving to work one morning with bruises on her cheek and explaining to her Italian colleagues that she’d awakened in the middle of the night and, disoriented, smacked herself in the face with a cabinet door she opened.
One of those colleagues, suspecting a culprit other than clumsiness, asked, “Was the air- conditioning on?”
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