Gerald Herbert/AP

Workers set up lights in the spin room for the upcoming CNN presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in Atlanta, June 26, 2024.

For incumbent presidents, the first debate of the general election campaign is often a flop. 

After four years in a deferential White House bubble, shielded from any real primary competition to hone their debating skills, many incumbents come across as rusty and out of touch. Past examples range from President Ronald Reagan’s rambling first debate performance against former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, to President Barack Obama’s lackluster first outing against former Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012, or even President Donald Trump’s overly aggressive first face-off against former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020. 

What makes Thursday’s debate so unusual is that both candidates may essentially be in the “incumbent” role. President Biden, despite ongoing concerns from some Democrats about his age, faced only nominal opposition this year and had no difficulty amassing enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. And despite losing reelection four years ago, Mr. Trump never lost his status as the Republican Party’s leader. He handily dispatched a field of challengers for the GOP nomination, despite refusing to participate in any of the primary debates and holding relatively few in-person campaign events. 

As a result, when they walk into the CNN studio in Atlanta, both men will arguably be facing their first significant test of the campaign. The debate is notably early by historic standards – and with just one other debate on the schedule before November, the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

“It’s very hard to stay sharp if you’re not constantly being challenged at something like this,” says Spencer Critchley, a communications strategist and media adviser to Mr. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. “You can’t just think about it to stay good at it; you have to practice.”  

Morry Gash/AP/File

President Donald Trump and then-candidate Joe Biden held their first presidential debate at Case Western University, in Cleveland, Sept. 29, 2020. Mr. Trump was panned for an overly aggressive performance in which he repeatedly interrupted Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden has been sequestered at Camp David since last Thursday, preparing with advisers. Mr. Trump’s approach to debate preparation has been less clear. But both campaigns have been trying to raise expectations for the other side, with Mr. Trump even suggesting, with zero evidence, that the president might take drugs to boost his performance.

Although Mr. Trump has held a small lead in most battleground states for much of the year, recent polls show the race has narrowed in the wake of the former president’s felony conviction in the New York hush money case, and is now a dead heat nationally. Indeed, the fact that the Trump campaign so quickly accepted the Biden campaign’s proposed timing and terms for this debate, strategists say, suggests both sides may be hoping for a reset. 

“The fact that this debate is in June tells us how unusual this cycle is,” says Alan Schroeder, author of the book “Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail.” Typically the first presidential debate comes in September or October, whereas this debate is occurring before either candidate has officially secured his party’s nomination. “This first debate has the chance to shake things up and start moving voters in one direction or the other.”

While a plurality of voters identify themselves as independents, polling suggests that the number of true independents who don’t lean one way or the other is actually in the single digits. But as Jordan Tama, a political expert at American University and a national security adviser to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, pointed out in a call with reporters Tuesday, debates can be critical for this small population who “tips our elections.” 

To try to tip this tiny pool of swing voters in their direction, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump will have very different, if not opposite, mandates Thursday evening.

Given that the top issue dogging Mr. Biden’s reelection is his age – a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that more than half of the voters who supported him in 2020 say he is “just too old” now to be an effective president – his priority will be demonstrating that he has the vigor and stamina for four more years. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, who was panned after his first 2020 debate with Mr. Biden for incessantly interrupting, will need to show undecided voters that he can be serious and statesmanlike. 

“The No. 1 question for Biden is, ‘Is he up to the job?’ This debate is the best opportunity he’ll have to show that,” says David Kochel, a Republican who served as senior strategist for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Trump needs to show that he can connect with people who aren’t just rally-goers,” by talking less about stolen elections and more about the price of groceries. “If he can stick to the main theme and repeat Biden’s failures, I think he probably has the easier job of the two of them.”

The 90-minute debate will be a stamina test for both men, the two oldest major-party candidates in U.S. history, who haven’t had to face one another in four years. Unlike in past debates, mics will be muted after a candidate’s allotted response time, preventing interruptions, and there will be no studio audience.  

Given that success in debates often means exceeding expectations, the Trump campaign has pivoted in recent days from mocking Mr. Biden as feeble and incompetent to suggesting he will have a strong night. “I assume he’s going to be somebody that will be a worthy debater,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview on the “All-In” podcast. Similarly, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who is reportedly being considered as running mate for Mr. Trump, said on CNN over the weekend that Mr. Biden is able to “step up” when needed. 

From the Democratic side, former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfield suggested on CNN last week that the muted mic rule may help Mr. Trump, who turned some voters off with the “angry, uncivil way” he conducted himself in past debates, talking over moderators and opponents. “I think the Donald Trump [who] is going to show up next week is going to be the most disciplined version of Donald Trump,” said Ms. Bedingfield. “He knows this is a big stage.”

Still, between the two men, it’s Mr. Biden who may have the most to lose, says Mr. Kochel, the Republican strategist. If the president has a bad moment, such as freezing up or mumbling something incomprehensible, the panic among Democrats will be “white hot,” he says. 

“These debates are often a test of overcoming the negative perceptions that exist about you,” Mr. Schroeder adds. ”And let’s face it, they are both elderly men, and it’s hard to change how people perceive you. But that’s what they both have to do.”

Martin Meissner/AP/File

Social media apps are displayed on an iPhone. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dismissed an online free speech case, saying the plaintiffs had not shown they had been harmed.

Nearing what is likely to be an eventful end to its term, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a claim that the federal government had coerced social media companies into suppressing posts from certain individuals related to public health and election issues.

The narrow, procedural ruling held that two states and five individual plaintiffs don’t have standing, or the right to sue. The plaintiffs had claimed the federal government pressured social media companies into censoring users who voiced criticisms of the 2020 presidential election and the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 6-3 decision – which split the court’s conservative justices – came in a case with profound free speech concerns, striking at the country’s yearslong efforts to police misinformation online without trampling First Amendment rights. In sending the case back to a federal appeals court, the justices have done little to help clarify those concerns ahead of what is expected to be a contentious 2024 election season.

“Based on the court’s account of the facts, it seems right that it reversed” the lower court, says Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

But “it’s really crucial that the Supreme Court clarify what the line is between permissible attempts to persuade and impermissible attempts to coerce,” she adds. “It’s unfortunate that we didn’t get that out of this decision.”

Is misinformation protected under the First Amendment?

In 2021, the federal government became concerned about the spread of misinformation on social media amid the pandemic and unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Officials in several federal agencies talked with senior figures at Facebook and Twitter (now called X) about their content moderation processes generally, and specifically about posts from certain users.

Those efforts raised concerns, and lawsuits alleging government censorship. After five individuals had social media posts critical of the pandemic response and the 2020 election removed, they sued the Biden administration. The plaintiffs alleged the federal government had pressured the social media companies into censoring their First Amendment-protected speech. They argued that, when it came to the pandemic, some things the government claimed were misinformation turned out to be true, or at least arguably so. The states of Missouri and Louisiana also joined the lawsuit, which reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri.

The case raised several thorny constitutional issues. How do you crack down on misinformation without curtailing free speech? If the government asks a company to do something, is that inherently coercive? Doesn’t the government have an interest in communicating with social media companies – private businesses that now manage some of the biggest public forums of America’s political and social debate – during a national crisis?

But the Supreme Court never reached those constitutional issues. Instead, it determined the plaintiffs didn’t draw a strong enough connection between the government’s communications with the social media companies and the actions those companies took against the plaintiffs’ posts.

The plaintiffs “must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one Government defendant,” wrote Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the majority opinion.

“On this record, that is a tall order.”

The platforms, she added, “had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”

Indeed, the ruling represents the latest of several repudiations of decisions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Justice Barrett wrote that the appeals court “glossed over complexities in the evidence,” relied on “clearly erroneous” factual findings by the District Court, and “erred by treating the defendants, plaintiffs, and platforms each as a unified whole.”

Rather than allege a broad conspiracy, plaintiffs needed to show that they were injured with regard to each platform and each defendant.

“The decision really shows that claims alleging sort of vast, nebulous conspiracy theories won’t be allowed to move forward,” says Ms. Jones. “Hopefully, moving forward, these investigations and discussions will focus where they should be focused, which is on concrete instances of government pressure that are intended to suppress content, instead of these sort of broader allegations of government coercion,” she adds.

Greg Magarian, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, notes that the ruling means it will be difficult “to find any good plaintiff” to bring this kind of case. But the courts have only just begun to wrestle with online speech issues.

“This is by far the most intensely the court has engaged with any kind of online speech since” Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union in the 1990s, says Professor Magarian. While the court has heard cases regarding online speech since then, he adds, he believes this term’s decisions are going to be more consequential.

“When you have any kind of social development that is really rapid, the law is typically going to have a hard time keeping up with that. And this is a classic example,” he adds.

When will we get clarity on social media and free speech?

Justice Samuel Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, took the opposite view. The plaintiffs do have standing to sue, Justice Alito wrote in a dissent. He pointed to several cases in which the court had allowed people with similarly tenuous standing claims to sue.

This debate is not new – the Supreme Court’s standing doctrine is notoriously pliable. But in describing Wednesday’s case as “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years,” Justice Alito warned that the decision could have dire consequences.

In particular, he referenced a May high-court ruling called National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo. In that case, the justices ruled unanimously that a New York official had, for political reasons, coerced state entities into ending business relationships with the NRA.

“What the officials did in [Murthy] was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive,” wrote Justice Alito.

With its ruling, the court has sent the message that “if a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by,” he added. “That is not a message this Court should send.”

As America enters what is expected to be a contentious election season, such warnings carry a bit more heft.

The Supreme Court has one more social media case pending this term. That one concerns state laws that would limit social media companies’ ability to moderate content, and that decision could help clarify free speech protections online. But issues around the regulation of online speech aren’t going away, says David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The weakness of Wednesday’s case, he believes, was the claim that there was a grand conspiracy to censor conservative voices. He says there are serious free speech problems with content moderation that are certainly not limited to conservative voices. 

“I don’t know that this [ruling] turns down the volume on some of the free speech debates going on in the U.S. now,” he adds. “The politics of them have been wrongly mischaracterized.”

With hostilities between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah escalating daily, U.S. and European diplomats are striving to prevent the violence from erupting into a full-scale war that could threaten the region.

The need for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, which has already driven tens of thousands of people from their homes, was a key message conveyed Tuesday by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to visiting Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Washington.

“Another war between Israel and Hezbollah could easily become a regional war with terrible consequences for the Middle East,” Secretary Austin said. “We are urgently seeking a diplomatic agreement that restores lasting calm to Israel’s northern border and enables civilians to return safely to their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.”

Yet for many Israelis – fixated for more than eight months on the war with Hamas in Gaza and a traumatic hostage crisis – the prospect of war on an additional front elicits a blend of fatigue and resignation that conflict is perhaps inevitable. 

Residents of northern Israel cannot live with the threat of Hezbollah rockets or an invasion like the one Hamas carried out Oct. 7, the argument goes, even if the timing is bad.

An all-out war with Hezbollah would be a “disaster,” says Pini Yonatan, a hairdresser at a salon in northern Tel Aviv, as he takes a break.

People are “mentally exhausted” from the war in Gaza, he concedes. “We don’t want a war, but we don’t have a choice. We will get hit, but Lebanon will be destroyed.”

Yet that exhaustion, accompanied by the return of anti-government protests as a fixture of Israeli politics, raises the question of how prepared Israelis are for an additional conflict. 

Shoshanna Solomon

Hairdresser Pini Yonatan, in his salon in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 24, 2024, says Israelis are “mentally exhausted” from the war in Gaza and “don’t want a war” with Hezbollah, but “don’t have a choice.”

Many Israelis express faith in the military to protect them, though experts warn there is a lack of appreciation for what a war with an enemy that is vastly more powerful than Hamas would mean for residents of the center of the country.

Chuck Freilich, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says a war with Hezbollah would be very different.

Iran-backed Hezbollah, he says, has antiaircraft missiles, an estimated 150,000 rockets, and thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, that can reach most of Israel and certainly hit the center of the country, which has the highest population concentration and much of the national security infrastructure.

These central areas, including Tel Aviv, are the beating heart of the nation’s economy. They were targeted at the start of the war in Gaza by Hamas’ rockets, but the damage and impact were limited.

“I don’t think the public fully understands how difficult this is going to be,” says Mr. Freilich, a former national security adviser.

“It is a totally different order of magnitude,” he says. “The level of destruction on Israel’s homefront may be something like we have never, ever experienced.”

Israeli leaders, he adds, have been “downplaying the costs” of such a war. They are talking up the strength of Israel, but not preparing the public for what such a war would mean, and what the options are.

Hussein Malla/AP

Flames and black smoke rise from between homes in the northern Israeli border town of Metula, which was hit by Hezbollah shelling, as seen from across the border in Marjayoun, Lebanon, June 22, 2024.

“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is tired and overstretched; they could use some time to gear up again,” Mr. Freilich says. He adds that maybe instead of the leaders playing up Israel’s strength, what they should be telling the citizens is this: “People, swallow hard, the price is too heavy, and the people in the north are just going to have to go back to their homes [amid] the existing Hezbollah threat because we can’t wage another war at this time.”

Government’s trust deficit

Meanwhile, the prolonged war in Gaza has eroded trust in the government and led to the questioning of its motivations and decisions, says Professor Bruria Adini, head of the department of emergency management and disaster medicine at Tel Aviv University’s School of Public Health. That erosion of trust has led to a substantial decrease of hope for better times ahead, she says, and is wearing down the resilience of the population, which was “very, very high” in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.

Entering an additional war with lowered resilience levels and decreased levels of social cohesion, stemming from the reemergence of the prewar political rifts, would “impact the population’s capacity to effectively cope with emerging threats,” Professor Adini says. 

Adding to the government’s trust deficit this week, an Israeli state commission of inquiry investigating a years-old military acquisition contract cast doubt on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making process, saying it had “endangered the security of the state.”

Amid rising tensions with Hezbollah, “I don’t trust our leadership,” says Eitan Erez, head of sales at a cybersecurity firm, speaking Tuesday at a cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv. Mr. Erez, who lives with his wife and three children in Yehud, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, has equipped his home with water and batteries. He says he trusts the army and believes Israel’s antimissile defenses will protect the nation from the worst of the brunt of an all-out war.

“I think we are ready for everything,” he says. Even so, he hopes for an accord and peace, “even if everything at this time points to an escalation.”

Tel Aviv University

Professor Bruria Adini, head of the department of emergency management and disaster medicine at Tel Aviv University’s School of Public Health, says an erosion of trust in the Israeli government is wearing down the resilience of the population.

Similarly, Koby Perez, a taxi driver who lives outside Tel Aviv in Ramat Gan, says he has no trust in Israel’s leadership, and prefers an agreement over an escalation.

“The state is not ready for all of the dead and the damage that such a war would entail,” he says, steering his taxi through the busy streets of Tel Aviv. “There is no way to prepare for such a war,” he adds, except to go to demonstrations and hope the government will fall.

“Denial ... helps us live”

Talk of escalation and of possible prolonged electricity blackouts caused by Hezbollah attacks on strategic infrastructure has sent some citizens scrambling for generators.

But not so for two sisters from Jerusalem, sitting at a café in Tel Aviv Sunday. They sipped their cappuccinos, resigned for what could be on its way in coming weeks. 

Vardit and Dvora, who declined to give their full names, were waiting for their drinks under the shade of a leafy tree. “We may be in denial, but that helps us live,” Vardit says with a smile.

The levels of stress vary depending on the day, she says. If a war with Hezbollah expands, “We will have to be close to our safe rooms, not sipping coffee as we are doing now. Everything will stop.”

The sisters say they trust the army to protect them, but not the politicians leading the country. Both agree that a political solution would be better than war.

At the Tel Aviv beach Monday, Dr. Carlita Landau, a health lecturer and seawater exercise instructor, was organizing equipment ahead of her class.

She says she is keenly aware that this normalcy could disappear if Tel Aviv is hit by Hezbollah rockets.

“It scares me, constricts my body, and closes my chest,” Dr. Landau says.

Going into the sea with its unexpected waves, and maybe jellyfish, she adds, “is a good way to prepare for the uncertainty of current times.”

Islamist extremists killed at least 21 people in coordinated attacks against minority Christians and Jews in Russia’s southernmost, multiethnic but mainly Muslim republic of Dagestan on Sunday – the third major terrorist incident in Russia in as many months, according to the government.

Sunday’s deadly attacks appear to have been directed equally against the republic’s small communities of Jews and Orthodox Christians. The attackers struck a police station and four places of worship in two Dagestani cities, demonstratively executing an Orthodox priest and burning down the only synagogue in the ancient city of Derbent. Last October, rioters at the airport in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, unsuccessfully tried to storm an airliner that had just arrived from Tel Aviv in what was widely viewed as an antisemitic reaction to the war in Gaza.

Leaders of both groups were quick to point to a wider threat to Russia’s social stability.

The attackers’ “undoubted goal is to kindle the flames of hostility, to sow the seeds of hatred and mutual hostility,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill told journalists. “The future of Russia largely depends on suppressing attempts to radicalize religious life and all manifestations of extremism and ethnic hatred.”

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Rabbi Alexander Boroda, similarly warned that singling out places of worship threatens to raise social tensions. “People start to be afraid, stop trusting each other. This generates hatred and aggression, which undermines harmony in society and poisons relations between people.”

Head of the Dagestan region Sergei Melikov via Telegram/Reuters

Derbent's only synagogue shows fire damage after an attack by gunmen, June 24, 2024.

Russian society seems quite stable on the surface. The country is overwhelmingly secular. Almost 80% of Russians are Slavs, most self-identifying as Orthodox Christians, although most say that they seldom go to church. 

There are around 100 other ethnic groups, and three other recognized state religions – Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam – which in some places constitute local majorities in 21 ethnic republics spread across the country. About 18% of Russians are Muslim, but they are mostly concentrated in several republics, including Dagestan, one of the poorest, and Tatarstan, one of the richest.

Some analysts worry that violent Islamist extremism may be reviving after nearly two decades of relative quiescence following Russia’s suppression of Islamist rebellion in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya in the early 2000s. During the previous decade, thousands died in Moscow and other cities across Russia, in airliner bombings, apartment explosions, sieges of a school and a theater, metro bombings, and other attacks by Chechen-linked militants.

Barely three months ago, Islamist extremists struck a Moscow concert venue, killing 130 people. Moscow rhetorically blames the attack on Ukraine and the West but admits it was actually carried out by Tajik citizens linked to the international organization known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), which is based in Afghanistan and has been declared a terrorist group by Moscow. Earlier this month, ISIS-linked prisoners took two guards hostage in a southern Russian jail, leading to a special services assault that killed six.

Grigory Shvedov, editor of The Caucasian Knot, which produces independent reporting from the wider Caucasus region, says that the Ukraine war is one factor in the emerging trend, perhaps because security services are distracted. But the war in Gaza has also seriously riled up populations in heavily Muslim regions, especially more impoverished and tradition-minded places like Dagestan.

“People are watching the news daily and seeing what is happening in the Gaza war, and when these attacks against Jews occur, they approve of it,” he says. “The riot at the airfield last October was unarmed, but the attacks against the synagogues last weekend were with deadly force, and people were killed. This is a new target, and I guess it’s because ISIS and local Islamists perceive that this is a vulnerable issue, and the public mood will support attacks on synagogues.”

Though interethnic strife tends to be rare, hostility toward Russia’s large communities of migrant workers, who tend to be mostly Muslims from former-Soviet Central Asia, has been on the rise since the Moscow attack by Tajik citizens in March.

“In our surveys, we note an increase in public concern about becoming victims of a terrorist attack,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency. “Popular dislike of migrant workers is always high, but the fear of interethnic tensions within Russia is still minor, though growing somewhat.”

My wife and I received a teak tray with raised sides and cutout handles as a wedding gift from a family friend. It was a practical gift for which we had no immediate practical use, and we stashed it with our surfeit of salad bowls (seven).

A few years later, we were wrangling three active boys in a Boston suburb. It felt as though it had been ages since we’d had an adult conversation during daylight hours for longer than three minutes. We were constantly having to break off to intervene, redirect, or serve snacks. When the guys were asleep, we were nearly so ourselves.

One summer Saturday afternoon, we sat on the front porch watching our sons ride bikes on our cul-de-sac. Our role was to referee and yell “Car!” when appropriate. After they’d settled into their play, my wife disappeared inside.

She emerged minutes later bearing the wooden tray, now delightfully transformed. It was spread with a folded kitchen towel – a tea towel! – set with two fine china teacups, a creamer, a pot of tea, and a plate of cookies. It was as refined as it was out of place – a string quartet on a subway car.

My wife set the tray down on the chipped gray wooden porch floor, and we anchored ourselves on either side of the little island of elegance, our feet on the warm brick steps.

She explained that a friend had told her that loose-leaf tea is best and that it tastes better in thin china cups. She was right. And service on good china urges one to make an effort, in the same way that dressing up makes one behave a bit better. The tray was an event. We pulled up our figurative socks and let the calm of a small luxury embrace us. We sipped. We conversed. We yelled, “Car!”

The moment lasted till the teapot was empty and the cookies consumed – with help, once the kids caught on.

That was the first time. The tea tray was welcomed with more and more frequency. I got home too late from work for tea on weeknights, but we began making time for tea on weekends. We would announce – part warning, part invitation – that Mom and Dad were going to have tea. For the boys this meant that cookies or chocolate (soon the treat of choice) would be on offer, and they could swoop by and have some. But they also knew they could linger. Teatime was a good time to get our attention. We’d be relaxed, comfortable, and available for 45 minutes or so. What’s on your mind, precious bear?

Tea is different from a snack. Snacks can wait, but tea has both an urgent and a leisurely component. “I’ll make tea” means it’s time to store the document or put away the wheelbarrow. Tea is served hot on all but the hottest days in our household, which means you should be in place when the tea tray arrives. Hot tea also means you cannot drink it quickly. You have to slow down to a pace that invites engagement. Whatever you’re doing, you can surely stop doing it for the time it takes to sip tea and savor some chocolate.

Teatime is an invitation to check in, to connect and console, to cheer and celebrate, to make plans for tomorrow – or for postretirement. Tea is something to look forward to. “I have something to tell you. We’ll talk at tea.” Letters are saved for reading aloud. During the pandemic, when I began working from home and we suddenly could enjoy tea every afternoon, we also read books aloud at teatime – comforting books. It helped.

We’ve added refinements over the years. We use a British one-pot tea measure for loose-leaf tea, and put the tea in a basket infuser. We rinse the leaves with boiling water to decaffeinate them, and rinse the pot with hot water too, to warm it first. The infuser is removed when the tea is brewed, to avoid stewing the leaves, and a tea cozy does help keep the pot hot.

Teatime is a moment, a respite, an occasion to review and update. Tea is an opportunity for a directed or nondirected conversation. It’s an open-ended invitation, the response to which is different every time the wedding-present teak tray arrives. Having tea is like staying up all night talking, 45 minutes at a time. I love having tea with my wife for what it is, what it does, and not least for its pleasant association with judicious amounts of chocolate.

And, as my wife showed me on that summer Saturday years ago, the occasion of tea can come to you, wherever you happen to be. All you need is a tray.

AP

Volunteers hand out milk at a food distribution site in Miami in 2022.

Charitable giving by individual Americans took a dip last year, largely because of worries over inflation, according to the latest Giving USA report. Yet the report also notes an unexpected shift. Giving for basic needs such as food or housing has risen for four years despite economic changes. Such giving for “human services” now ranks second to donations for religious institutions, edging out giving for education.

One reason may be that Americans are trying different ways to be generous without relying on established charities. One popular avenue in recent years has been “giving circles.” These are small groups of individuals who gather to seek out local needs and then pool money to meet those needs.

Search almost any local newspaper and you might find a headline like this recent one in Ashland County, Ohio: “County to benefit from EmpowHer Giving Circle.” Donors in that group are asked to give only $75 or less to a cause.

The growth of giving circles has been explosive. Their numbers have risen from roughly 1,600 seven years ago to nearly 4,000 last year. Their total giving has jumped from $1.29 billion to more than $3.1 billion, according to a report in April by Philanthropy Together.

The report found that 77% of people in a collective giving group say their participation gave them a “feeling that their voices mattered on social issues.” The report attributes such results to five “T’s”: time, treasure, talent, ties, and testimony.

This sort of bottom-up philanthropy relies heavily on trust, equality, and selflessness; a virtuous circle that draws in more individuals who see the inherent worth of those in need in a community. Giving circles are also “schools of democracy,” as the report puts it. Participants must often listen to and learn from those who hold opposite views on social problems.

The report predicts that the number of giving circles will double in the next five years. “We are a force, and a joyous force,” Isis Krause, Philanthropy Together’s chief strategy officer, told Inside Philanthropy. New ways of giving are not only creating new ways of gathering. They are also pointing to higher concepts of joy.