I can’t tell you how often Donald Trump and Kamala Harris came to North Carolina in the homestretch of the 2024 presidential campaign. I mean, I could tell you, but to fetch the data would be to relive the memories, and enduring that high tension and horrid traffic once was enough. Trump would be here and then Harris would be here and then Trump would lumber in anew, to a point where I might have suspected them of exchanging some baton if I’d believed for a nanosecond that they could stand to be within baton distance of each other.
The reason for all that North Carolina visitation and adoration? We are a ripe, juicy purple state.
Our current governor, Josh Stein, is a Democrat. Same goes for his predecessor, Roy Cooper. But both of our U.S. senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, are Republican. That would be incoherent — all four politicians ran statewide, in the same era — but for a simple, inarguable truth: We are not blue. We are not red. We are where blue and red meet and mingle. Yes, purple.
And yet our House delegation is 10 Republicans and four Democrats. Not so purplish. It’s the nuttily lopsided result of a shamefully aggressive gerrymander that is somehow not nutty, lopsided, shameful or aggressive enough for President Trump. He harangued the Republicans who control both chambers of the North Carolina legislature into redrawing the state’s congressional districts yet again.
Last week: voilà! A new map, intended to produce a delegation of 11 Republicans and just three Democrats. State law does not give Stein the opportunity to veto it. There will probably be court challenges, but the map will most likely be in effect for the 2026 midterms. And it’s a disgrace.
I know that in some senses, our story here in North Carolina is the Texas story, the Missouri story, the story of states across the country whose Republican leaders are prostrating themselves before Trump and rigging (or trying to rig) the midterms, to use one of the president’s favorite verbs, so that his party doesn’t lose its majority in the House and nothing kills his authoritarian buzz.
But the anti-democratic essence of all of this comes into sharper relief here, because we aren’t Texas, aren’t Missouri, aren’t a place whose fundamental redness is being stretched out statewide, like paint spread wider over a canvas. We’re a state whose essential hue is being erased. Trump won North Carolina by less than two percentage points in 2020 and just over three in 2024, when Stein won the governor’s race by a commanding margin of almost 15 percentage points. There’s a color for those conflicting signals. It’s purple.
I also know that the composition of a state’s House delegation seldom mirrors precisely — and often doesn’t mirror at all — the percentages of its voters who favor one party versus another. As Nate Cohn and Eve Washington explained in this excellent analysis in The Times, the delegation of nine Democrats and no Republicans from Massachusetts, where Trump received 36 percent of the votes in 2024, isn’t a conspiracy to sideline those voters. It’s more or less what you’d expect: While Democrats’ edge in the state is certainly greater in urban centers than in rural areas, it’s geographically pervasive enough that Massachusetts would have a hard time producing a map that set Republicans up for victory anywhere.
Finally, I know that gerrymanders are nothing new. Both parties have taken cynical, selfish advantage of them.
But the boldness of Trump’s demands for next year’s midterms and the sweep with which Republicans have answered his summonses are far from the norm and beyond the pale. Texas lawmakers two months ago redrew districts in the hope of adding five Republican seats; that would give the party 30 of the state’s 38 seats in the House instead of its current 25. Missouri lawmakers produced a new map so that seven instead of six of its eight House seats would potentially be held by Republicans.
Indiana lawmakers couldn’t muster the necessary support for a new map that might improve on its seven-to-two split of Republican to Democratic members of the House, even though JD Vance twice visited the state to plead the president’s case. When Trump says “Jump!” Vance says, “How high — and would you like to see how many air kisses I can blow you as I lift off?”
Republicans in some states have claimed to be acting in reaction to California Democrats’ attempts, through a pending ballot initiative, to create a map that would give as many as five additional House seats to their party, which currently holds 43 seats to Republicans’ nine. But that’s disingenuous bunk. This current arms race started with Texas and with Trump’s unabashed message that he wanted as many additional Republican seats as he could get in as many states around the country that could give them to him. And here we are, on ugly new terrain.
“Midcycle redistricting efforts like the ones in Texas and California have, up to now, been extremely uncommon,” Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center wrote in August. “Since 1970, only two states — Texas in 2003 and this year, and Georgia in 2005 — have voluntarily redrawn their congressional maps between censuses for partisan advantage, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.”
Missouri hopped on the gerrymander bandwagon after DeSilver’s article. Then my state joined the party. I guess we’re all trailblazers of a sort. Under Trump, Americans are not only exploring new frontiers of drug interdiction, new summits of presidential grift, new nadirs of architectural ostentation. We are pursuing newly ambitious — and peerlessly depressing — adventures in partisan cartography.
And here I sit, purple with rage, not just because the voters of North Carolina are being betrayed, but also because citizens across our embattled country are being given more and more reason to believe that this whole democracy thing is a sham.
For the Love of Sentences
In this section this week, we’ll take one of our occasional — and sorely needed — breaks from political content.
In The Washington Post, Chelsea Janes paid fitting — no, obligatory — tribute to the masterpiece of a baseball game that Shohei Ohtani played on the cusp of the World Series: “This is Beethoven at a piano. This is Shakespeare with a quill. This is Michael Jordan in the Finals. This is Tiger Woods in Sunday red. This is too good to be true with no reason to doubt it. This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of the debate: Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player who has ever played the game, the most talented hitter and pitcher of an era in which data and nutrition have made an everyman’s sport a game for superhumans.” (Thanks to Jonathan Weker of Montpelier, Vt., and Todd Lowe of Anchorage, Ky., for nominating this.)
In The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas recognized Ohtani as another stroke of good fortune for a team with a surfeit of it: “The Dodgers have had 15 consecutive winning seasons and 13 consecutive playoff appearances, and have already won two World Series this decade. They need another championship like Taylor Swift needs a Grammy.” (Detrik Hohenegger, Los Angeles)
Also in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik examined the charms and challenges of a child actor. Jennette McCurdy from the Nickelodeon show “iCarly” “was a standout in the sassy-sidekick sweepstakes, though to note sassy precocity in a Nickelodeon star is a little like noting moody melancholia in a Bergman actor: It’s less a feature of the performer than a prerequisite of the enterprise,” Gopnik wrote. (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)
In The San Jose Mercury News, Dieter Kurtenbach emphasized the importance of the “human flamethrower” Stephen Curry to the success of the Golden State Warriors this basketball season: “At 37, he looks like he’s aging backward, which is both a miracle of modern sports science and a testament to subsisting on a diet solely of opposing coaches’ tears.” (Geoffrey Burr, Cupertino, Calif.)
In Vanity Fair, Byron Houdayer saw red over so-called orange wine. “What began as an earnest flirtation with low-intervention winemaking has curdled into something faintly cultish: oxidized, seditious liquids sloshed from reclaimed carafes in Bushwick, Kreuzberg, or in Hackney, praised in reverent tones by men in harem pants and cycling caps,” he wrote, adding, “Orange wine is a low-sulfite con — a prolonged student prank passed off as enlightenment, and like many student pranks, it smells of manure and failure.” (Richard Lasota, Boynton Beach, Fla.)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes recalled his openness to a nostalgia-primed program of live music from performers popular decades ago. “And then I saw the event’s name, bright red and flaming, in a font that I imagine is called Tractor Pull: DIVORCED DAD ROCK NIGHT,” he wrote. “A shiver went down my spine, as cold as a Blue Razz Four Loko pulled straight out of the garage mini fridge.” (Lee Thomas, Minneapolis)
In The Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah sounded a hopeful note for movie scripts created by flesh-and-blood humans rather than A.I.: “There will always be an audience for work that spurns the template — for writers who, shall we say, think outside the bot.” (Alfred Sainato, Metuchen, N.J.)
Also in The Times, Tejal Rao questioned the company that the caviar “cannoli” at the Beverly Hills restaurant Spago was keeping: “The plate was cluttered with garnish, including a quenelle of scallion mousse that tasted muffled and indistinct, as if the volume on its flavors had been turned down for background eating.” (Ted Coladarci, Bangor, Maine)
Chris Colin explained why he conducted a sensory-deprivation experiment to declutter his thoughts: “I once heard that Sacramento’s early levees had been cobbled together from whatever was at hand — old bicycles, scrap lumber, trash. That’s pretty much how I think of my mind: a bulwark of random crud, holding back the full torrent.” (Mary Sievert, Santa Fe, N.M.)
And Melissa Kirsch confessed her self-consciousness about her gratitude ritual: “I’ve seen the same hashtags and semi-smug social media posts that you have, the same living-room art with cursive script on distressed wood about the ‘attitude of gratitude.’ The concept has been so commodified, overprocessed, merched-up, that it seems as if there’s little else to say about it — call it the platitude of gratitude.” (Nicholas Motemarano, Lancaster, Pa., and Barbara Sloan, Conway, S.C.)
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, Listening To, Reading and Doing
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“The Diplomat” continues to be completely preposterous, and I continue to binge it. Netflix released the third season of the show — which charts the political and domestic turmoil confronting an American ambassador to Britain — about two weeks ago. I vowed to pace myself, especially in light of the many deadlines before me, the various commitments stacked up. Then I scarfed down all eight episodes in three nights. When “The Diplomat” is at its talky best, it offers the pleasures of excellent actors delivering rapid-fire dialogue that contains just the right measure of jargon — it feels at once campy and in the know. Keri Russell, as the ambassador, remains superb. Rufus Sewell, as her perpetually scheming husband, is put to better use this season than in the previous two. And Allison Janney ascends to series regular, as a deliciously caustic — and profoundly stressed-out — American president. The first episode of the season, “Emperor Dead,” and the sixth, “Amagansett,” are peak “Diplomat” and stupidly enjoyable.
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Just as I’m a fool for frothy political thrillers, I’m a sucker for brooding songs, and one in heavy rotation on my playlists is “Waiting Game,” by the singer-songwriter Banks, which came out back in 2013. It’s a small wonder of cunning production flourishes — echoey background grunts, a lugubrious drum beat — that turn a humdrum torch song into a humdinger of a techno dirge. And it suits Banks’s breathytremble of a voice.
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Eric Johnson’s article in The Assembly about one western North Carolina town’s recovery from Hurricane Helene is emotionally wise and rich with insights about what’s missing in America today, which is a sense of mission that transcends our divisions. The denizens of Lansing, N.C., and the area around it have been different since Helene hit — and the floodwaters rose — in September 2024, he writes: “They’ve formed intense, tightly bonded communities. They’ve felt a clarity and shared purpose that is all too rare in the fragmented hustle of regular life. And along the patchy road back to normalcy, there’s a bittersweet nostalgia for the urgency and unity of those early days.”
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Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, is an increasingly prominent figure in the Democratic Party, and he has been bullish on — and articulate about — ways it might broaden its tent and reach out successfully to Americans who voted for Trump in 2024. I’ll be talking with him at Duke University on the evening of Monday, Nov. 10. The in-person-only event is free and open to the public; here is more information, including registration details.
On a Personal Note
A recent article in The Times by Emma Bubola and Motoko Rich described the way many neighborhoods in storied Italian cities have become food frenzies, with hordes of tourists clamoring for carbonara, jostling for tiramisù or trampling one another en route to something else hyped on their social media feeds. They want what a bunch of diners before them ate, just as a bunch of diners after them will follow their leads.
I get it. We have only so much time and money for travel. Only so much space in our stomachs. Aren’t we wisest to consume the safest bets?
Yes. And no. That strategy minimizes the chances of disappointment. But it eliminates altogether the opportunity for surprise.
Most of my sweetest travel and restaurant experiences have been the ones I didn’t plan for or count on. I can still taste a plate of roasted lamb I ate more than 20 years ago in Diyarbakir, Turkey, where I was doing some reporting for The Times. A Turkish colleague took me there, but without any gaudy promises or extensive drum roll. It wasn’t previewed for me by Instagram stories, mentioned in any blog post I’d seen, built up and then built up some more. I approached it with hope, not expectations; those are very different things. So when I say the lamb astonished me, I mean that in the truest sense of the verb.
No bar has charmed me more than one in a tiny seaside village in Ireland that wasn’t part of my itinerary until I drove into it. O’Lochlainn was the establishment’s name. I wrote about it in this travel article in The Times, which was in part a tribute to my mother, so I’d be touched if you read it. O’Lochlainn stocked more than 400 whiskeys from around the world, in a room that was a quiet riot of antiques and bric-a-brac. It was part cliché, part movie set and all delight, largely because my unscripted route to it made me feel that it belonged to me, not to some internet tribe I was dutifully joining.
I worry that we’re Instagram-ing such moments out of our lives, as the internet slowly writes a eulogy for serendipity.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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