With midnight approaching, here are my last three New York Times gift links for October

It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.

“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,” by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.

Jackson’s caustic dissents have moved Kagan closer to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the third liberal. Yet Kagan is despairing over whether her pursuit of compromise and comity still works with this crowd, as even her occasional partial victories have been subsequently overturned. Kantor writes:

Along with the senior liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the two jurists are in what people close to them describe as an existential dilemma over their lack of influence. Badly outnumbered, seated for the long haul of life tenure, Justices Kagan and Jackson in particular are divided on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sentenced to fail.

“50 Years Ago, My Father Wrote the Headline That Refuses to Die,” by Bill Brink. The headline in question is “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” which was blasted across the front page of New York’s Daily News in 1975, when the paper enjoyed the largest circulation in the country and was regarded as the voice of working-class New York. The headline was the handiwork of Brink’s father, William Brink.

The context was that President Gerald Ford had refused a federal bailout for New York, which was then in the midst of an intractable fiscal crisis. Brink, a senior editor for the Times’ opinion section, writes:

“Drop Dead” is generally considered one of the two most memorable headlines of the last half-century, along with The New York Post’s 1983 gem, “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But why is it so enduring? I wouldn’t want to overinterpret its social or cultural significance. After all, the beauty of the headline was in its simplicity. …

But the headline also had the benefit of truth-telling, at a time when truth was easier to discern and less open to argument.

“I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind.,” by Michelle Goldberg. Along with Jamelle Bouie and, yes, that old warhorse David Brooks, Goldberg is my favorite Times columnist. I remain skeptical that Platner — he of the Nazi tattoo and the just-asking-questions about whether Black people are bad tippers — can or should be the Democrats’ choice in the U.S. Senate contest next year.

For that matter, Goldberg remains skeptical, too. But after attending a Platner rally in Maine, she’s decided that there is something authentic about him that could very well translate into an election victory for the Democrats, who otherwise seem old, tired and out of ideas. She writes:

I have no idea whether Platner will win the primary, or if he can beat the incumbent senator, Susan Collins. But he’s nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online. And the crowds he’s bringing out — some of the largest in Maine, I heard repeatedly, since Barack Obama ran for president — are testament to a roiling discontent among Democrats that seems bound, one way or another, to transform the party.