Opinions are ubiquitous. Everyone has one. The New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul is full of them, as her job demands. 

Since joining the Times' Opinion pages in 2022, Paul has received formidable resistance from the trans community for a series of columns that have been called a "long line of … transphobic opinion pieces," said the Human Rights Campaign in a press release. One recent article, published this month, was a sprawling, nearly 5,000-word, two-page spread about youth and gender-affirming care. The trans community responded in force. 

Where gender meets politics
"Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress," said Paul in the article, titled "Gender Dysphoric Kids Deserve Better Care" in the print edition of the Times. 

Paul interviewed experts and drew profiles of individuals who gender-transitioned while young and have since detransitioned, that is, reversed their gender to its previous iteration. Paul highlighted a handful of detransitioners to support the thesis that, done willy-nilly, gender-affirming care is not always the correct answer. One of her Opinion page kin, David French, lauded Paul's story on Threads.

A vociferous reaction
The ripostes to Paul's article and French's upvote were quick and striking. Straight people, queer people, cisgender people and trans people cried foul. It was disingenuous of Paul to trumpet a handful of detransitioners as representative of a root problem with gender-affirming care for youth, critics said. Pooled data from "numerous studies demonstrates a regret rate ranging from 0.3% to 3.8%" for people who have gender-transitioned, said Cornell University.

Trans content creator and activist Erin Reed of the Substack "Erin in the Morning" wrote a detailed retort, fact-checking four of Paul's claims. "More detransitioners are going public with their decisions," said Paul. "They deserve our compassion." Paul's paper, though — the news pages, not the opinion ones — has also noted how rare detransitioned individuals are and how often they are used as political pawns to reduce access to gender-affirming care. The back-and-forth shows no sign of dissipating.

Ginni Van Katwijk, of the Netherlands, competes in the women's final of the 20-meter-high diving event at the World Aquatics Championships in Doha, Qatar.
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"The Taste of Things," the 2023 movie from director Tran Anh Hung, won the best director award at Cannes and was recently released in U.S. theaters. How Tran films not only the movie's food but the cooking itself is a pleasurable relief. 

Love in the kitchen
The movie takes place in the late 1880s and centers on two protagonists: Dodin (Benoit Magimel), a chef, and Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), his kitchen assistant. They have been cooking for guests for 20 years and are lovers. 

Food, of course, occupies a central position in their lives. And, so, "The Taste of Things" opens with an extended sequence of kitchen action. The actors are actually cooking. "The dishes come together like dazzling, sometimes ingeniously surprising set-pieces," said Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. 

Bringing cooking to vivid life
Doing any kind of real-deal cooking proper justice, let alone dishes from two centuries ago, required Tran to bring in the big toques. He hired French chef Pierre Gagnaire who, along with Michel Nave, planned the dishes ahead and set them up for cooking on-set.

Yes, movies are artifice. When they capture the honest stride of real life, though, the echo resounds at a different amplitude. Tran strove to create cooking that "felt distinct from the static overhead 'beauty shots' of food on Instagram and in broadcast TV," wrote Simran Hans in Financial Times. Gagnaire, the movie's consulting chef, concurred. "The sound of pastry cracking," he said, is "the total opposite of Instagram, where it's all shiny but there's no warmth, and no tenderness."