President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was convicted Tuesday on federal gun charges stemming from his purchase and possession of a firearm while being an active user of illegal drugs.

After deliberating for three hours, the jury in the Biden hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, convicted the president’s son on all three felony counts. Two were for making knowingly false statements about drug use on a 2018 firearms application at a Wilmington gun shop, and the other was for possessing the gun for 11 days. 

Sentencing will take place on a future date. According to the statutes under which he was convicted, the younger Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison, but with no prior felonies and having acknowledged his past drug addiction, he would probably face a far lesser sentence, potentially including probation, fines, and other conditions. 

The verdict ends Part 1 of a unique episode in American history: the criminal prosecution and conviction of a sitting president’s son. Part 2 begins Sept. 5, when Mr. Biden is slated to go on trial in California for federal tax evasion. The two cases flow from a plea deal, now defunct, that Mr. Biden struck last year with the Justice Department. The agreement would have ended his legal jeopardy over the gun and tax charges – and, in the eyes of his defense team, potential prosecution over his foreign business dealings. 

That deal fell apart last July after two investigators from the IRS accused the Justice Department of hindering their investigation. Mr. Biden has lived under a legal cloud ever since. 

The conviction in Wilmington – where the Biden family is considered political royalty – seemed to allay some concerns that the jury might treat Mr. Biden deferentially and acquit him, at least in part because of his family’s prominence. 

Why these gun law charges are unusual in Hunter Biden’s case

But another issue arises: Is Mr. Biden facing multiple trials because of his last name? This question brings up rough parallels with former President Donald Trump, who was found guilty of 34 felonies related to a hush money deal to silence a porn star before the 2016 election. For both individuals, supporters argue the defendants are being targeted for political reasons. 

Mr. Biden’s case holds much less national import – after all, he’s not running for president, as Mr. Trump is (again) – but Mr. Biden’s prominence still matters. 

Evan Vucci/AP

A monitor is seen showing the Hunter Biden verdict in the White House Press Briefing Room June 11, 2024, in Washington.

“What makes this complicated ... is that it leaves outsiders wondering whether Hunter Biden was selected out or whether this is just the inevitable result of a process that put him in the spotlight,” says Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Prosecutors, he says, generally pursue convicted felons who lie on gun forms, but cases like that of Mr. Biden, who had no prior convictions, are pursued less frequently. 

But in Mr. Biden’s case, the prosecution’s case was helped by the defendant himself. The president’s son had documented his drug use in a 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” passages of which were played in the courtroom, with Mr. Biden himself having recorded the audio version. 

Mr. Biden’s infamous laptop also made an appearance at the trial. According to a report last week from inside the courtroom, a prosecutor waved the defendant’s silver Apple MacBook Pro while reminding an FBI special agent of the data that had been seized during the federal investigation of Mr. Biden. 

The politics swirling around the case are unavoidable. President Biden stated flatly last week in an ABC News interview that he would not pardon his son, and that he believed the trial was fair. (Mr. Trump, by contrast, has claimed the jury verdict in his recent trial was “rigged.”) After the verdict, the president released a statement of support for his son, and said he “will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”

Ironically, just hours after the verdict, President Biden made a long-scheduled appearance at a forum on gun safety in Washington, but he did not mention his son. 

For political families, “a glaring, unforgiving spotlight”

As the president gears up for the November election, there’s no denying that his only surviving son’s legal problems will weigh heavily. The president has been known to call Mr. Biden daily to check in, especially after he fell into an addiction to crack following the 2015 death of Beau Biden, the president’s other son. 

Whether Americans will feel sympathy for the president’s son, especially those who don’t support his father politically, is open to debate. Mr. Biden is, after all, the son of privilege – a Yale Law School graduate whose father has walked the corridors of power in Washington for more than 50 years. 

But as Patti Davis, the younger daughter of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in Monday’s New York Times, living as the child of a famous father, under “a glaring, unforgiving spotlight,” isn’t easy. Ms. Davis knows whereof she speaks, having struggled with drug addiction herself as a young woman. 

“There are a lot of Hunter Bidens in this world, people who fell in way over their heads, who long for someone to believe they can recover and construct their lives differently,” she wrote. “You just don’t hear about them on the evening news.”

Patrik Jonsson reported from Tybee Island, Georgia.

The results for European Parliament elections are mostly in, and the projected hard-right surge turned out to be more of an inching.

Centrist parties will continue to hold a vast majority of the 720 seats in Parliament – at least 400, or 450 including Green parties. And the far right will take barely more than a dozen new seats, says Jacob Kirkegaard, political economist and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

“This was really a continuity election at the European level,” Dr. Kirkegaard says. “But what will be different, is that it’s clear these elections have caused significant shifts in a number of the national political systems in member states.”

EU elections notoriously gather little interest, with voter turnout at about 50% across the bloc. But they matter immensely at the national level, producing repercussions that have only begun. While hard-right nationalists showed major gains in France, Italy, and Germany, they petered out in many countries.

In Poland, the center-to-center-right coalition led by Donald Tusk cemented the turn away from the hard-line conservatives they’d triumphed over in October’s parliamentary elections.

Notably, in Hungary, authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party still drew the largest share of votes, but close behind was a center-right party that garnered 30%, representing the first “really serious domestic political challenge to Orbán in over a decade,” says Dr. Kirkegaard.

Denes Erdos/AP

A woman casts her ballot for the European Parliamentary election at a polling station in Budapest, Hungary.

The hard right also didn’t do as well as expected in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Belgium.

The relative status quo means that Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, will likely be reelected by the new EU Parliament to another term. Her EU political group, made up of center-right parties from across Europe, easily topped all competitors.

And Greens and liberals lost seats across the bloc, though the Greens were coming down from an unusually strong showing in 2019. Even so, the environmentally friendly policy gains of the last few years shouldn’t be easy to water down, says Dr. Kirkegaard.

“The European Union’s climate response in the last five years has been extraordinarily strong, and now it is legislated, in the law,” he says. “The [far right] is not a coherent group of political parties that can get together and set the agenda.”

Domestic effects to come?

Still, there will be significant domestic ramifications from the far right’s gains in the biggest EU countries.

France’s far right under Marine Le Pen did so well – double the share of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party – that Mr. Macron has called risky snap elections for June 30 which could effectively end the centrist, EU-loving president’s ability to take any governmental action.

Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Marine Le Pen, president of the French far-right National Rally party parliamentary group, is surrounded by journalists as she arrives at party headquarters in Paris, June 10, 2024.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany thumped the three parties that make up the ruling coalition under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, moving from 11% to 16% of the vote, foreboding trouble for Mr. Scholz ahead of next year’s federal elections.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party won almost 29%, even though the center left was only a step behind. That gives Ms. Meloni – one of the clear winners of the election – a strong negotiating position going into the G7 relative to France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz, says Arturo Varvelli, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Rome.

“In the next few weeks she will be able to play, if she wants to, a decisive role in shaping the new arrangements in Brussels,” says Mr. Varvelli.

And the overall boost in presence that the nationalist parties will enjoy in Brussels will have some repercussions, as centrist parties may need to make concessions on issues such as migration policy and funding for Ukraine.

For example, in Germany, parties that don’t support the country’s current level of funding for Ukraine won almost 25% of the domestic EU vote.

“This has no direct impact on Germany’s foreign policy course,” says Jana Puglierin, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, “but increases the pressure on politicians” to pay attention to apparent public desire to decrease funding for Ukraine.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters/File

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan, shown speaking with Reuters in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2023, was convicted in three separate cases ahead of Pakistan’s general election, but a path to release is beginning to open up.

Four months after Pakistan’s most controversial election in recent history, the question on everybody’s lips remains the same: How long before former Prime Minister Imran Khan is released from prison?

The cricketer-turned-politician, whose supporters defied all odds to emerge as the victors of the Feb. 8 poll, was convicted in three separate court cases in the run up to the general election – the first to do with selling state gifts while prime minister, the second for mishandling a diplomatic cable, and the third for marrying his wife without satisfying the requirements of Islamic law.

But recent rulings by the superior judiciary have given his supporters cause for optimism. In April, the Islamabad High Court suspended Mr. Khan’s sentence in the first case, and just last week, that same body overturned Mr. Khan’s conviction in the second.

This means that of the major court cases keeping Mr. Khan behind bars, only the one experts consider the flimsiest remains active pending an appeal. It also highlights a widening chasm between the country’s superior judiciary and its powerful military establishment.

It has become something of an open secret in Pakistan that the legal cases against Mr. Khan are being driven by army leadership, long considered the puppeteers of Pakistan politics who historically found a willing partner in the senior judiciary. Yet that relationship has become increasingly fraught in recent months as the judiciary has sought to assert its independence. 

“This is a power struggle in which the establishment’s power is shifting toward the judiciary, and in which Imran Khan has emerged as a key player,” says journalist Asma Shirazi, who has covered Pakistani politics for more than 20 years.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan distribute sweets as they celebrate a high court's decision to overturn Mr. Khan's conviction on charges of leaking state secrets, in Karachi, Pakistan, June 3, 2024.

Mr. Khan’s release is not guaranteed. Indeed, members of his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), say that hearings in this case are being deliberately postponed. But should the court succeed in overturning this final case, it would be a win for judicial independence – and could also unleash a populist firecracker back into Pakistan’s slowly stabilizing political sphere.

Path to release?

Earlier this year, six justices of the Islamabad High Court – the same body that overturned Mr. Khan’s conviction in the diplomatic cable case last week – accused the country’s military-controlled intelligence agencies of using intimidation to force justices to hear a frivolous case against Mr. Khan. That case, which alleged that Mr. Khan hid the existence of a child born out of wedlock, has been dismissed.

The marriage case, experts argue, was another attempt to sully Mr. Khan’s reputation in the conservative Islamic country. 

“The … conviction against him waiting to be overturned is for getting married to his consenting wife too soon after she was supposedly divorced,” says legal expert and political commentator Abdul Moiz Jaferii. “It is a tired and desperate charge, which was tried in a low and desperate manner.” 

Despite what many see as a total lack of legal merit, few are holding their breath for Mr. Khan’s release. 

Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, says the military still retains enough leverage over the courts to ensure that Mr. Khan “doesn’t see freedom anytime in the near future.”

It is a view shared by Mr. Jaferii. “I don’t see how they are going to continue to keep him imprisoned as these sham trials are exposed on appeal, but I’m sure they will come up with more and more desperate ways to do so.”

Eduardo Munoz/AP

An aircraft tows a banner reading "Release Imran Khan" as it flies over the ICC Men's T20 World Cup cricket match between India and Pakistan at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in Westbury, New York, June 9, 2024.

Case for restraint

A large part of this doubt is the perception that Mr. Khan’s release would prove catastrophic not just for the incumbent administration of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, but also for the high command of the Pakistan army, whose members Mr. Khan has made a habit of humiliating. 

The personal animus between Mr. Khan and the chief of the Pakistan army, Gen. Syed Asim Munir, dates back to the former’s time in office, when he sacked General Munir unceremoniously from his position as head of Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s premier spy agency. There are other senior generals whom Mr. Khan has variously accused of brutalizing his supporters, dismantling his government, and, in the case of Gen. Faisal Naseer, of planning his assassination. 

The stakes are so high for so many powerful people that the thought of a liberated Mr. Khan is, for some, inconceivable. And among those who do see it as possible, some fear a new kind of autocracy. While serving as prime minister, Mr. Khan governed in a way that was increasingly presidential. He seldom went to parliament and relied on ordinances to conduct government business. During his tenure, a number of opposition leaders were also imprisoned. 

“If Imran Khan comes out with the backing of the judiciary, there is really no one who can stop him,” says Ms. Shirazi, the journalist. “It is even possible that he could challenge and take control of the entire state apparatus as an individual.”   

But Sayed Zulfikar Bukhari, a PTI stalwart and former special assistant to Mr. Khan, has urged the former premier to show restraint in the event of his release.

“We must be very mature about this,” he says. “Imran Khan coming out with all this public support … has an added responsibility to maturely navigate the political system: 1) by taking us to free and fair elections in the most political manner possible; and 2) by concentrating on how we bring political stability.”

When the banks of the Ural River in eastern Russia overflowed early this spring, creating catastrophic flooding unseen in a generation across the city of Orenburg and driving thousands from their homes, Antonina Golysheva, a local kindergarten teacher, sprang into action.

“Parts of my settlement were flooded, and some of my own neighbors were in dire conditions,” she said by phone from her village, Yuzhny Ural. “I have a small car, so I went out and found people who needed help. I carried their belongings, their pets, their children, and transported them to local shelters.”

After a Ural River dam burst in mid-April, almost completely submerging the city of Orsk, the Kremlin declared a state of emergency in the region. The massive floods swept across 36 regions of central Russia and Siberia this spring and are still ongoing in the far-northeastern Russian Republic of Sakha, aka Yakutia, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.

But one aspect of the crisis that hasn’t received much coverage, even in the Russian media, is the outpouring of public efforts to help those affected by the floods – a relatively new and unexpected phenomenon in Russia. Telegram channels are full of accounts of people raising money, collecting warm clothes and food, and, in the regions themselves, rushing to the scene with cars, boats, and even diving equipment.

“Most people in my circle, if they didn’t need assistance themselves, were out there trying to help,” says Ms. Golysheva. “We coordinated among ourselves. There were representatives of the state working there as well, but we were just ordinary people doing what we could.”

Reuters

A drone view shows a truck driving along the flooded street in the settlement of Zarechnoye, Orenburg region, Russia, April 11, 2024.

“Our volunteers pulled people and pets out of flooded buildings, found temporary accommodation and hot meals for people in a difficult situation,” says Yelena Suchsheva, regional coordinator of the private charity Golden Hands of an Angel, reached by telephone in Orenburg. “We work side by side with state organizations, such as the ministry of emergency services, local police, and medical services. They do their jobs, and we help them by doing ours. Sometimes we take part of their work on ourselves.”

Restoring a charitable mindset

The rapid growth of popular volunteerism, whether independent or in league with the state, runs counter to Soviet history. The former system ran all kinds of compulsory “volunteer” activities, under tight Communist Party control, and would never tolerate any sort of independent or spontaneous initiatives.

Instead, it was common to see people laboring in regular subbotnik events, basically weekend days of unpaid volunteer work. Residents would come out to clean up their apartment grounds or repair facilities under the watchful eye of the local party secretary, or students would provide free labor on construction sites as part of their studies. The Soviet experience left a legacy of resentment and cynicism that was rather inimical to genuine public spirited involvement.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Kremlin began cultivating the potential for volunteer activity to supplement state endeavors around the time of the Sochi Olympics a decade ago. It spent vast sums not only on preparing for the Games, but also on remaking Sochi’s infrastructure and on implementing various forms of social engineering designed to involve the public more closely with the state’s objectives.

Around 25,000 young people from around the country were recruited to perform a wide variety of auxiliary functions at the Games that might normally be filled by paid staff. The same formula was repeated for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in several cities across Russia.

The state has since encouraged the growth of a permanent volunteer movement, #MyVmeste (meaning “we are together”), whose activities track closely with official patriotic and national goals. But unlike in Soviet times, the volunteer energy appears real, and the spontaneous involvement of citizens like Ms. Golysheva is easily accepted.

According to Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent public opinion agency, the participation rate in private charity activities has been steadily rising, and has tripled among young people from around 3% to almost 10% in the past few years. As many as 50% of Russians regularly donate money or clothing for people in need, bringing their contributions to collection points that are usually run by the Russian Orthodox Church. Over the past two years, the government has actively encouraged the population to participate in collecting aid for front-line troops fighting in the Ukraine war.

Yu Evsjukov/Sputnik/AP/File

A subbotnik takes place in the park at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan, a hill in the former Stalingrad, now Volgograd, April 20, 1969.

“The state offered incentives, and sometimes a kind of coerced volunteering in state institutions and educational establishments. The state created its own network to collect aid,” he says. “Statistical data shows a considerable growth in citizens’ participation.”

The limits of the system

When it comes to natural disasters such as floods and wildfires, volunteers are now an integral part of all stages of relief efforts.

“In an emergency situation, these volunteers cannot work in an absolutely autonomous way, separate from state institutions,” says Olga Basheva, an expert with the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow. “There is a synergy in play, a kind of civil-state partnership.” She says these efforts started as free civil initiatives from the grassroots but have evolved into an integrated system that supplements, and sometimes improves on, state responses.

Experts agree that the expanding list of formerly state-run services that now feature major volunteer involvement only includes activities of which the Kremlin approves. Given the degree to which the state has co-opted the movement – albeit with lavish support, praise, and rewards – there seems little danger of volunteer energies veering into officially unwelcome political directions.

Critics say the growth of volunteerism in Russia is all very well, but it cannot be seen as a substitute for strong and independent civil society organizations that can actually influence state policies and behavior.

Most big, internationally connected groups have been labeled “foreign agents” and forced to shut down in Russia over the past decade. Their absence amid the current flooding crisis is glaring, say experts, as Russian media describe the emergency as a wake-up call about the creeping threat of global warming and the inadequacy of local flood-control infrastructure.

“With the intentional disabling by the Russian government of large [nongovernmental organizations] such as the WWF [World Wildlife Fund] and Greenpeace, there are no longer any actors who would examine and lobby for better flood management practices between catastrophic events,” says Yevgeny Simonov, a Russian environmental activist now living in exile.

“Civil society needs to push for reform of outdated flood management policies before disasters happen, but in present-day wartime Russia, there is little capacity for that.”

Editor’s note: The story was updated to correct the description of Mr. Simonov’s background as an activist.

Editor’s note: The official roster for the U.S. women’s national team was released June 11.  

What does it take to make an Olympic basketball team? The formula, it turns out, has little to do with popularity. Although the roster for the U.S. women’s team has not been officially announced, NCAA star and WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark has confirmed that she was not invited to play in Paris. She has set her sights on making the team in the future. Those who are expected to make the cut: WNBA All-Stars and MVPs – and gold medal winners, including Brittney Griner.

On the men’s side, where the lineup has been known for months, perennial NBA All-Stars and future Hall of Famers LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant have all signed on. On paper, they make the possibility of winning gold more imaginable.  

If they do win, it will be the eighth gold medal for men’s basketball in the previous 10 Olympic games. The women’s team has fared even better. They have won gold nine times, in all but two Olympic outings since they started competing in 1976.

Selection for both teams is based on a number of factors. Here’s more on what it takes to make a U.S. Olympic basketball team. 

How are the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic basketball teams chosen? 

NBA Hall of Famer and gold-medal Olympian Grant Hill is the managing director for the men’s national team. At a media event in April, Mr. Hill said he couldn’t just choose the top two or three players at every position in the NBA – including point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. More factors are in play. 

“Everyone is on this team because they provided something that is needed. Like the versatility that’s needed,” says Mr. Hill, whose choices were approved by the USA Basketball board of directors. “You’ll get a lot of different playing styles that you’ll go against, so we feel like we checked a lot of boxes,” he adds.

Mr. Hill says that when he chose the team, he took into consideration how good the players are on both sides of the ball, defense and offense. He also considered how he thought they might jell with each other, and who had been in big moments like the international stage that the Olympics will be.

“We’re grateful to have all of them,” Mr. Hill says of the 12 players who signed up to play. 

Cheryl Reeve, the Minnesota Lynx head coach, will coach the U.S. women’s team. Ms. Reeve appeared alongside reigning WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart at the spring media event and addressed team selection. Like Mr. Hill, she says versatility, playing styles, and chemistry are all considered when choosing a roster. Ms. Reeve had held a camp for prospective members at the beginning of April and had input on the players selected for the team.

“I think USA Basketball is exceptional at balancing this roster of four- or five-time Olympians and other players,” she says. “They have the ability, and I think that’s a large reason why we have been so successful.”

Charlie Neibergall/AP/File

The United States' Brittney Griner (center) takes a selfie with teammates posing with their gold medals during the medal ceremony for women's basketball at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Aug. 8, 2021, in Saitama, Japan.

The selection committee consists of former Olympian and U.S. women’s coach Dawn Staley, who is now the coach at South Carolina; Dan Padover, general manager of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Dream; WNBA Connecticut Sun President Jennifer Rizzotti; former WNBA players Seimone Augustus and DeLisha Milton-Jones; and WNBA head of league operations, Bethany Donaphin.

Ms. Reeve, who has known for years that she would coach this year’s team, says she has been preparing for just as long.

“We have an identity,” she says. “We’re going to hit hard. We’re going to defend. We’re going to rebound. We’re going to play with pace. We’re going to hit the ground running,” she promises.

Why would someone as high-profile as Caitlin Clark not make the team? 

Ms. Clark missed the camp for prospective squad members in April because she was playing in the NCAA Final Four. This left her WNBA play as a factor for how she would fare against 11 other teams from around the world. Her short rookie season with the Indiana Fever means she is still getting the hang of the WNBA’s more physical game. She is leading the league in turnovers, but also tied a rookie record for 3-pointers in a game. All that is happening in front of sellout crowds.

Although no reason has yet been officially given, some sources told the media over the June 8 weekend that, had she been chosen, Ms. Clark’s fans might have been dismayed by seeing the rookie not get much playing time. 

Still, No. 1 WNBA draft picks have been selected for the Olympic squad before. Diana Taurasi and Candace Parker played in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Ms. Stewart also played when she was a rookie in 2016. 

Ms. Clark is not the only notable WNBA player who appears to have been left off the team. Her Fever teammate, last season’s Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston, and Dallas Wings guard Arike Ogunbowale, currently the No. 2 scorer in the WNBA, also didn’t make the cut.

OK, but who is likely to make the roster?

In addition to Ms. Griner, who is expected to represent the United States after her ordeal in a Russian prison, Ms. Taurasi is a WNBA all-time leading scorer. The deep bench of talent is likely to include 2022 WNBA Finals MVP Chelsea Gray and gold medal winner Jewell Loyd.

Ms. Stewart, a two-time Olympic champion, celebrated the fact that Team USA has always selected players who demonstrate camaraderie.

“It’s something that as an athlete, as a basketball player, you’re representing your country and it’s a different level of thought,” she says. “We’re trying to take home gold medals and everyone else is trying to beat us.”

For more of the Monitor’s Olympic coverage:
As NCAA and Olympics start paying athletes, what happens to the amateur ideal?
As Paris preps for Olympics, safety of the iconic River Seine remains in question
The Paralympics are coming to Paris. Will Paralympians be able to get around?

Emily April Allen

NPR music critic Ann Powers is the author of the new book “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.”

Early on, Ann Powers wasn’t a fan of Joni Mitchell. The music critic for NPR is renowned for writing about female artists such as Kate Bush and Tori Amos. Their songs had given voice to her feminist awakening. But due to a generational gap, Ms. Powers had resisted the iconic songwriter who once called Bob Dylan her pace runner. That all changed when a publisher commissioned her to write a biography.

“I didn’t know that I needed Joni,” Ms. Powers says during a video call. “She really did set the bar and set the template for what so many others have done.” 

Ms. Powers’ book “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell,” available June 11, is about as conventional as her subject’s alternate guitar tunings. It not only retraces the seldom-explored paths of the musician’s travelogue, but also detours into Ms. Powers’ own experiences. In a conversation with the Monitor, the author explains that music takes on additional meaning when we filter it through our own subjective perspectives. Ms. Powers’ autobiographical stories illustrate the universality of Ms. Mitchell’s songs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What makes Joni Mitchell extraordinary?

It’s not that often that you have the combination of this restless mind that endlessly wants to move to a new place and this hyperbrilliant sui generis talent. She is both. Oftentimes, when you look at long careers, whether they’re musicians or painters or filmmakers, many great artists kind of do one thing or maybe two things very well and offer variations on that. But with Joni, there’s these distinct loops within loops within loops. As I say in the book, quoting Dan Wilson the songwriter, there’s just this way she moves and changes and it’s never unrecognizable, but is always requiring us to go somewhere maybe we don’t want to go with her. 

I think another thing that’s very rare about Joni Mitchell is that her musicality and her skill at writing lyrics and her physical vocal talent are all at this pinnacle. Here’s someone who’s the whole package.

What’s your pitch for why “Traveling” isn’t a run-of-the-mill biography?

I really tried to confront the edifice of biography, in a sense. Now is a great time for people experimenting with biography. You see books like “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” [by Jenn Shapland], which won the National Book Award. So it’s not like it was unprecedented, what I was doing. But I welcomed the chance to challenge the idea that there’s any definitive story of a life.

I had great help in that from my subject. Joni Mitchell is an artist who has told us her life story in many ways, from many perspectives, and ... constantly challenged her fans’ perceptions of what she can be as an artist and what her life means. I realized she’s the perfect subject to make this argument that biography needs to be even more fluid. That we need to look in surprising places for parts of the story. That we do need to recount the official story, but we also have to recognize both the kind of minor moments in people’s lives and the way that our lives as listeners intersect with and kind of help build the meaning of the story of the artist’s work.  

Chris Pizzello/AP

Joni Mitchell performs “Both Sides Now” during the Grammy Awards Feb. 4, 2024, in Los Angeles.

“Traveling” isn’t just about Joni Mitchell. It’s also about you. Does that exemplify how Ms. Mitchell’s music perhaps invites listeners to see themselves in her songs?

One of her most famous early quotes is her saying, Don’t look for me in my songs. Look for yourself. 

I guess my reflecting on how I interact with her work and life are wanting to be open about that. Yeah, it’s a little maverick as far as doing a biography. But I think we’re living in a time when the idea of objectivity has been exposed as an idea, as an ideal, and not an achievable goal. So in my writing, I try to always acknowledge my own presence and hopefully without having that be overweening.

You interviewed just about everybody who has worked with Joni Mitchell. But you deliberately avoided interviewing the artist. Why?

Partly because I have read the wonderful books that grow from interviews with her and time spent with her. And I know that once you’re in Joni’s story with Joni, that your perspective is fixed on that telling of the story. I didn’t want to get sucked into the vortex of her charisma. I didn’t want to feel obligated to an official story. 

I treasure the distance between myself and my subject because that’s what all of us who are fans, who are music lovers, experience with artists we love the most. It’s in that distance between their human reality, and our perception of them, that understanding grows and that opinions grow. Many of the people she’s worked with, and people who were sort of on the path near her, did give me insight into who she is.

For someone who owns “Blue” but wants to go deeper into her catalog, what would you recommend?

I would recommend “Hejira” because while “Blue” is the entryway for so many people, for so many generations, I want people to hear Joni with a band. To show the richness of her musical intelligence. The heartbreak journey of “Blue” is really relatable. In some ways, the self-actualization journey or the journey into maturity of “Hejira” is one that speaks to me very deeply and also just speaks to our moment. It’s universal in a different way. 

I’m very attached to “Night Ride Home.” It does have maybe her greatest anthem, “Come in From the Cold,” which is just a song we all need to listen to once a month as a cleanser.

Why is that her greatest song?

It’s the circularity of the song. It’s the tidal force of the song. It’s the way it goes from memories of adolescent or young love and heartbreak to ... a statement on human vulnerability and need. The way she builds it is, I think, what’s beautiful. She does it in other songs, too, like “Shine.” But “Come in From the Cold” has that perfect blend of intimacy and oracular wisdom that Joni can get to. 

AP/file

The sun sets near a coal-fired power plant on the Yangtze River in Nantong, China. Chinese power companies bid for credits to emit carbon dioxide and other climate-changing gases on a national carbon exchange.

In recent years, richer and poorer nations have sought better ways to share the burden of solving climate change. One tool is carbon credits, which enable companies in one part of the world to offset their greenhouse emissions by investing in conservation and renewable energy projects elsewhere.

The market for these investments is growing rapidly, but they contain risks. A recent study published in the journal Science of 18 forest preservation projects in Africa, Asia, and South America, for instance, linked just 6% of the credits bought by foreign corporations to verifiable carbon reductions.

That may now be set to change. Governments and multinational agencies are instituting a raft of new measures to improve the effectiveness of carbon credits through better transparency. So are industry, scientific, and civil society groups. The push for these reforms is coming partly from the companies and investment banks buying them. Long accused of making false environmental claims about their operations – a practice known as greenwashing – many are now demanding greater honesty and accountability in projects they fund.

“I’ve been a regulator in the United States for 21 years, and this is the first time that industry comes in and they ask for more regulation,” Christy Goldsmith Romero, commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Bloomberg.

Carbon credits are financial instruments. They enable large-scale emitters to reduce their carbon footprints by saving forests or funding projects like solar farms. Each credit represents 1 ton of carbon. Companies buy credits from green projects to offset their emissions ton for ton. Most funds flow from the wealthier Global North to the Global South. Uncertainty has undermined demand. Until now, there has been little oversight or consistency in the way credits are valued, issued, or used.

Last month, the Biden administration set new requirements for what U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called “high-integrity” carbon markets. They follow similar plans in recent months from the European Union, the United Nations, and individual governments.

The new rules and guidelines may encourage more robust investment by giving companies more confidence in the credits they buy. More importantly, they are meant to reduce corruption and greenwashing through public scrutiny.

“Transparency is a prerequisite” for solving climate change, wrote researchers at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment in a paper published in Nature Sustainability in March. Accurate information on carbon trading, they note, is crucial for scientific research, honest governance, and equality for ordinary citizens.

As the global push toward a postcarbon future gathers momentum, the demand for carbon credits is growing. Morgan Stanley projects the market to increase from $2 billion in 2020 to $100 billion by 2030. That growth coincides with another trend. A report by the financial firm MCSI last month noted that corporations’ voluntary disclosure of their carbon credit trading is “already higher than is often assumed, and transparency is set to improve further.” Tom Montag, CEO of Rubicon Carbon, which is a carbon credit management firm, explained why. To accelerate financing for projects to mitigate climate change, he told Bloomberg, “you need to build trust.”