Delcia Lopez/The Monitor/AP

McAllen, Texas, police chief Victor Rodriguez, flanked by several police officers from the around the Rio Grande Valley, talk about the new SB4 law during a press conference held on May 11 at the McAllen Convention Center.

From his 844-square mile territory of Texas cordgrass marshes and mesquite prairies, Jackson County Sheriff Andy Louderback responded to a ban on "sanctuary cities" in his state with a virtual tip of the Stetson.

A number of Texas sheriffs and most major city police chiefs opposed the groundbreaking law signed on Sunday by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. They say it coerces local cops to do federal immigration enforcement and would have a “chilling” effect on the state’s massive immigrant community. Sanctuary cities bar police from cooperating with federal immigration agents without a warrant.

But Mr. Louderback and more than 200 other Texas sheriffs say the new law is fine by them.

The rural sheriff says the state law – which bars the sanctuary cities and is the first in the nation to threaten non-complying officials with jail time and fines – is part of rebuilding a national rule of law that, in his opinion, lagged in the Obama era.

The controversial law, which could be a model for other GOP-led states mulling similar action, is already headed to court. But it raises important questions about whether enforcing a federal law should always trump enforcement of local laws, and whether local officers ultimately will take their orders from their chief – or the president.

“What we’re seeing here is fair-weather federalism from both Democrats and Republicans [on policing], but at the end of the day, constitutionally speaking, state coercion of localities raises different kinds of issues than federal coercion of states,” says Ilya Somin, a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, in Alexandria, Va.

It also marks a 180-degree turn for the fiercely independent Lone Star State, which during the Obama administration stood against Washington on principle on issues ranging from labor law to the environment and from voting rights to education.

“The idea that you would threaten law enforcement officers, mayors, and city council people with jail time for not complying with federal regulations, that’s extraordinary in Texas,” says Cal Jillson, an expert in Texas politics at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas.

The law’s passage is seen as a breakthrough for tea party Republicans eager to advance President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

“Texans’ jealousy of their prerogatives as a state has always been influenced by politics,” writes Henry Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, in Austin, in an email. “In this case, Republicanism has trumped Texanism.”

Testing ground for policing

For people on both sides of the issue, Texas will represent a testing ground for policing in the Trump era.

On the one hand, “To tell a police officer that the law is being broken as a matter of course but then say, ‘We don’t want you to worry about that,’ it sort of grates on who they are and what they do,” says Professor Jillson of Obama administration regulations that called for the release of unauthorized immigrants who hadn't committed felonies.

On the other, police chiefs in Bexas, Travis, and El Paso Counties testified last week that the law would cause unauthorized immigrants to fear contact with police, potentially undermining criminal investigations that need witnesses.

Moreover, given that Texas already detains more unauthorized immigrants for Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) annually than any state, and that studies show immigrants pose less risk to public safety than native-born Americans do, the necessity for the law becomes a question for people like Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo.

“If all a sudden I have a police officer who decides, ‘I’m going to play ICE agent all day and harass day laborers at Home Depot,’ explain to me, when I lose my authority to tell my officers they can’t do that, how does that enhance public safety?” Chief Acevedo said at a press conference last week. “Tell me that with a straight face.”

Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman/AP

University Of Texas Student Vanessa Rodriguez speaks during a protest of Texas's new law banning sanctuary cities outside of the Texas Governor's Mansion in Austin May 8. The new law allows police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they detain, including during routine traffic stops. It is the first law in the nation to threaten jail time for officials who do not comply.

El Cenizo stands defiant

Opposition to the new law was strongest in large cities and border towns. Another factor is that historically and culturally, deep ties bind Texas (originally Tejas) and Mexico.

Lawsuits already have been filed in the law’s first week. The border town of El Cenizo, population 4,000, has joined a lawsuit filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens. In 1999, El Cenizo, which has five volunteer police officers and eight city employees, passed a “safe haven” ordinance that prohibits city employees from asking about a person’s immigration status. It argues that the state of Texas "may not commandeer" local officials to enforce federal law. Mayor Raul Reyes told National Public Radio that he will not rescind the safe haven law. "If they want to throw me in jail, go ahead," he said. "I strongly believe in what we're doing." 

Even the law’s supporters are uncertain of its future in court. “I think it’s going to be a bit of an adventure in a court room somewhere,” says Liz Theiss, founder of the Houston-based Stop the Magnet, which lobbies in Austin for tougher immigration laws. Nevertheless, she adds, “The mood of the country is shifting.”

While the law is likely to pass constitutional muster on its face, “I suspect that SB 4 would increase the risk of civil liberties violations, ethnic and racial profiling, which all presents potential harm both to immigrants and native-born Americans who may look like they are of the same ethnicity as undocumented immigrants,” says George Mason's Professor Somin.

In the meantime, most law-enforcement officers say they will, as always, uphold the law. “While I hate seeing a state law like this come to pass, I have always followed the law and that will not change,” Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez said.

Louderback says that, at least for him, the new law won’t require significant changes in day-to-day operations, given his county’s high levels of cooperation with ICE. The real shift, he says, is in how state government prioritizes public safety.

“In Texas, we’re still not immigration officers, since we don’t have the authority to engage in immigration violations,” the Edna, Tex.-based sheriff says. “But a city can no longer [tell police that], ‘You will never, ever engage ICE on any matter in law enforcement,’ because that’s [now recognized as] a public safety concern.”

When a fleet of bright red-roofed and turquoise-roofed streetcars begins service tonight along three miles of this battered city’s central spine, a lot will be riding on the outcome.

The privately run QLINE is Detroit’s first streetcar service since the 1950s, when it tore up its rails in favor of highways. It comes as the Motor City emerges from bankruptcy and blight, amid a pickup in investment in downtown property and the construction of new sports stadiums and waterfront parks. The city’s population has stabilized; the young and curious keep coming.

To succeed, the streetcar line needs to attract regular riders to demonstrate the efficacy of modern mass transit in Detroit after decades of false starts. Its backers frame it as a first step to rethinking how residents get to work and play and how to spread development into low-income districts. One in four households don’t own cars and struggle to reach job-rich suburbs by bus.  

But the story of this $180 million project, spearheaded by nonprofits and tycoons, also raises political and economic questions that resonate beyond Detroit. Can philanthropy play a key role in solving big-city infrastructure problems like transit? Should it?

“When private entities step forward to support public projects they have influence, and we need to think about whether that’s OK,” says David Callahan, who runs the website Inside Philanthropy. 

He says foundations are supposed to do what governments can’t do; a Ford Foundation official once described philanthropy as society’s “passing gear.” But this line has blurred both in Detroit and in nearby Flint, where residents turned to charities to truck in safe water after municipal supplies were contaminated.

“We don’t want to see foundations take over the mundane tasks of government,” says Callahan, author of “The Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age.”

Funders here say this project and others like it represent catalysts for a city that is finally emerging from years of near-paralysis, hobbled by financial crises and political dysfunction.

“Great communities are made by connective tissue, and this becomes one part of that membrane,” says Rip Rapson, president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation, which helped fund the QLINE.

Deep needs, big philanthropy

As elected government retreated amid the global recession and Detroit’s financial collapse, private players stepped into the vacuum. Philanthropists have paid for streetlights, neighborhood safety patrols, park maintenance, and city planning.

In 2013, after Detroit became the largest ever municipal bankruptcy, Kresge, Ford, Skillman and other foundations hatched a “Grand Bargain” to stop creditors from seizing the city’s world-class art collection and allow for an equitable payout to pensioners. The final package, including matching state funds, amounted to more than $800 million spread over 20 years, and led to a bankruptcy settlement in December 2014.

Now, Kresge is the new rail project’s largest single funder, joined by other local foundations with large endowments and by prominent businessmen like Dan Gilbert and Roger Penske.

But the generosity brings a moral hazard, says Tonya Allen, who heads the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation. She worries that it creates a precedent for philanthropy in an era of budget austerity. “I think that you will see more people leaning on private dollars that will be used to replace public spending,” she says.

The good news is that this rail line exists, unlike past city-led transit blueprints here that never got built. Detroit’s need for greater mobility as a path out of poverty were acute even before the recession that began in 2007. Desperate parents put their kids on long bus rides to better schools; workers trudged miles to low-wage jobs that their neighborhoods lacked. A city that occupies 139 square miles – the size of Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco combined – had been whittled down to a population of just 700,000.

For residents, mixed reactions

North of downtown, the streetcar ends at Grand Boulevard, an east-west road that bisects Woodward at New Center, a modernist office complex built for, and later sold off by, GM. It has an Amtrak station, offering intercity rail connections. Two blocks from the newly painted streetcar terminus are abandoned single-family houses on weedy lots, part of the city’s huge backlog of blight. But other houses are being renovated in expectation of better days ahead.

That the QLINE will only serve the central corridor where Detroit’s business elite works and plays irks some. Critics in this predominantly African-American city ask why so much investment is going to districts where young white Millennials have moved in droves since the recession, and where backer Mr. Gilbert (owner of Quicken Loans) has bought up scores of commercial buildings.

Matt Cullen, CEO of M-1 Rail, the nonprofit that built the QLINE, says the streetcar was always envisioned as a starting point for a more comprehensive system. “We never said this was the answer to transit,” he says. He adds that streetcars only make sense in densely settled areas and that rapid buses and commuter rail can serve other districts.

At a stop near the streetcar terminus, Deborah Williamson waits for her bus home, a one-hour ride. A sleek snub-nosed streetcar passes by, on its way downtown. Ms. Williamson, an African-American retiree, says she doesn’t plan to ride the streetcar. “It’s not for me,” she says. Her son, who won’t give his name, is more dismissive, calling it a waste of money.

In a May 6 column, Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press pushed back against QLINE critics, pointing to the litany of failures and the impossibility of satisfying everyone. “We've been losing so long on this [mass transit] issue, licking our wounds from disappointment so often, that I fear we don't really know what a win looks like, feels like, or means to us. This is it, folks. At least for us. At least for now.”

Part of a larger dream

The project isn’t devoid of government funding. M-1 Rail received $27 million in federal grants, as well as state and county contributions. Executives say they have raised enough money to operate it for up to 10 years or until it can be absorbed into a public transit authority that could stitch it into a regional network of trains and buses.

Ballot referenda held last November in Detroit and three neighboring counties to raise tax revenue for a regional authority narrowly failed to pass. The proposal would have created rapid bus lines to the suburbs and Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and a commuter rail line to Ann Arbor.

Mr. Cullen of M-1 Rail, who is now one of Gilbert’s top executives, says the voters’ rejection was a setback but that he expects it will eventually pass once the new streetcars become a fixture in the city. “It takes time to get people to understand the value,” he says.

A century ago, Detroit had one of the nation’s largest streetcar networks, which carried commuters from the suburbs into the city and along radial boulevards. The postwar growth of federally funded highways, backed by a resurgent auto industry, hastened the network’s decline, and in 1956, the last streetcars rolled along Woodward Avenue, before being sold to Mexico City.

Five decades later, Detroit faced a different dilemma: How to revive a depleted city that had become a byword for urban decay. Could public transit be part of the answer?

Mr. Rapson thought so. In 2006 he moved to Detroit to head Kresge, a foundation set up in 1924 by Sebastian Kresge, the founder of a retail chain that later became K Mart. Rapson is a former deputy mayor of Minneapolis and a veteran of urban policy and nonprofit work in that city, which opened a successful downtown light rail in 2004.

As the Twin Cities grew, Detroit shrank. By the time Rapson arrived, it had shed people, public services, and jobs. Its sole attempt at light rail – an elevated driverless monorail that loops around downtown – was a money-sucking eyesore.

How a plan was hatched

The year after Rapson’s arrival, he was invited to a lunch at a country club in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb. There he found himself extolling the benefits of rail to Roger Penske, the founder of transportation firm Penske Corp., and a civic leader who had brought the Super Bowl and Grand Prix to Detroit. Mr. Cullen, then a GM executive, was also at the lunch.  

Several months later, Mr. Penske met again with Rapson and told him that he had costed out a privately funded streetcar line on Woodward Avenue as the backbone of a mass transit network.

“He turned to me and said the price tag is $100m. I smiled and said that doesn’t seem too bad. He said: Well, the question is whether you’ll put in the first $35 million,” recalls Rapson.

The project quickly ran into interference from then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was pushing a rival rail line that would run to the city limits and cost more than $500 million. Then came the Great Recession that threatened to torpedo both projects as the city and its automakers, whom Cullen had tapped for contributions, teetered on the brink of ruin. Mr. Kilpatrick was later convicted by federal prosecutors of perjury and corruption, another blow to the city’s reputation.

As the economy recovered, M-1 Rail managed to secure other funders, including by offering naming rights to 20 stations and to the line itself, named for Quicken Loans, a major downtown employer.

A 'new equilibrium' for cities?

Ms. Allen praises the resolve of M-1’s backers in steering it to completion (Skillman Foundation, which she heads, didn’t contribute). But where it runs – and doesn’t run – sends a message to the community, whether intended or not, she says.

“It’s an important symbolic step for the progress of the city. But I also think it’s symbolic in the sense that it ends at Grand Boulevard,” she says. “It feels like it’s for the business core and for visitors, and not for Detroiters.”

A deeper question, she adds, is whether this type of “workaround” for providing public goods can give way to a democratic process that is inevitably messier than going it alone using private dollars. “I think that if Detroit is going to have scaleable change then it’s going to require more than a workaround,” she says.

Rapson calls the concern legitimate. “You don’t want four guys at the country club directing the course of the community, but it never was that. It was an idea that… we took to the community.”

He says the rail project should be viewed in the context of Detroit’s meltdown. The role of foundations like Kresge was “to create a kind of scaffolding that would be sufficiently durable to hold until the public sector resumed its rightful role and the private sector began feeling comfortable again,” he says.

But the question remains of what role philanthropy should play, Rapson says, noting that two new, well-endowed foundations have been created since 2013 with a focus on Detroit. “I think what you’re seeing in resource-strained communities is a new equilibrium between the private and the public and the nonprofit.”

Nadège Mazars

On April 9, 2017, La Cachada Theatre gives a performance at the Marbin community in La Paz department, El Salvador. Marbin's residents are people who were displaced by an earthquake in 2001.

The first sessions in the theatre workshop produced a feeling of restlessness in Magdalena Henríquez.

The teacher asked the students to stir up painful memories about growing up female and poor in El Salvador. When she turned 30, the single mother of three children, whom she could barely feed, spent the day crying in despair. Two years later, she didn’t want to be reminded that nothing had changed.

Still, she kept going to the workshops. One day Ms. Henríquez realized her middle child had stopped giving her the glass of water that both greeted and soothed her at the end of every day. He didn’t see the point of doing it, he said, since she wasn’t yelling at him and his two brothers anymore. “Mommy, I’m proud of you,” she remembers him saying. “You’re no longer violent with us.”

That was when Henríquez first realized something was changing. Fast forward six years, and she has left her tenuous job as a vendor to take up a better-paid, less exhausting job as a housemaid. And she became an actress.

“I’m 38, but I feel younger and more alive now. I have this desire to change things,” she says.

Henríquez is one of the five actresses of La Cachada Teatro, a theatre group that originated in workshops offered to impoverished single mothers in San Salvador by an NGO that works with children from the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods. She and her sister, Ruth Vega, along with Magalí Lemus, Wendy Hernández, and Evelyn Chileno, directed together by the actress and director Egly Larreynaga, created plays that incorporate their painful stories of domestic violence and sexual abuse into broader pictures of a deeply unequal, sexist, and violent country.

In El Salvador, cachada is slang for a unique opportunity, a bargain. These women say that theatre is the cachada of their lives.

'Fear is part of every woman's life'

Gang violence has turned the small Central American country of El Salvador into one of the world's most violent, with the highest murder rate for any peacetime country in 2015. While men are more likely to be murdered, women experience violence in different ways. El Salvador has the world’s highest rate of femicide, and domestic violence is prevalent, as well; more than half of all Salvadoran women say they have suffered some form of violence in their lives. In more than half of rape cases in recent years, the alleged victim is under the age of 15, and only 10 percent end with a conviction.

Corruption and social acceptance help explain why violence often goes unpunished, women's advocates say.

“El Salvador has deeply ingrained values that severely restrain women’s freedom,” says Zulma Méndez, a doctor at Hospital Nacional San Rafael in San Salvador. “It’s a structural problem affecting women at home, but it also informs the way institutions work.”

In such a context, “fear is part of every women’s life,” says Dr. Méndez. That applies to a broad range of experiences Salvadoran women endure, she says, while particularly highlighting pregnant women's concern that a miscarriage could lead to years in jail. El Salvador has some of the most comprehensive anti-abortion laws in the world – the procedure is banned even in cases of rape, an unviable pregnancy, or when the mother’s life is at risk – although a bill introduced in its parliament late last year would loosen those restrictions. Miscarriages are sometimes treated as suspected abortions and prosecuted as murder, which can carry a 40-year sentence.

Right at the end of the play “Si vos no hubieras nacido” – “If you hadn’t been born,” in English – Ms. Chileno addresses her daughter, after the character playing her confronts her mother about their stressful relationship.

“Why did you have me?” the daughter asks.

“I gave birth to you because I was raped and I was afraid to terminate the pregnancy and go to jail for 30 years,” Chileno says, the audience rapt in silence.

Class divide

Ms. Larreynaga, the group's director, is the daughter of two former guerrillas who fought the military-led government in El Salvador's civil war, which  in the 1980s claimed approximately 80,000 lives. Although she has never endured poverty the way her actresses do, she says she was raised to oppose the sort of inequality and classism that plague El Salvador, still polarized along civil-war-era lines of haves and have-nots.

So when she first contemplated the idea of presenting La Cachada's plays before upper-class audiences, she was afraid of people's reactions – until one night a “very right-wing woman” approached the director at the end of the show.

She was uncomfortable with that last scene, when one of the women admits she was raped. “It makes me profoundly sad that a baby is brought to this world out of fear,” the woman told her, “but I imagine that must be true.” Those reactions make Larreynaga and the other actresses hopeful that their stories can inspire change.

“Maybe the wealthy will start looking at the maids cleaning their houses differently, or maybe they’ll stop harassing street vendors,” says Ms. Hernández, a vendor and La Cachada actress. Today, several of the actresses work as housemaids – and some of those jobs have come from well-off people in the audience. 

“In this country the lower class and the upper class have always fought each other. Theatre allows the two groups to come together,” Henríquez says.

La Cachada Teatro has performed in schools, streets, jails, and theaters all over El Salvador, in front of the poorest and the richest audiences. In earlier, less intense scenes, audiences often burst into laughter at caricatures of abusive parents and boyfriends, or the degrading treatment characters receive – including at the hands of doctors and nurses at public hospitals. “Another C-section? Shouldn’t you have been sterilized?” one nurse yells rudely.

“That happens all the time in public hospitals, but it’s not something richer women would recognize. Gender violence affects women differently based on their class and La Cachada is a great showcase for that,” says Laura Aguirre, a Salvadoran doctoral student at the Free University of Berlin who researches sexual violence. “That’s why the richest people in the audience laugh. For them is like watching fiction on TV – there might be some resemblances to reality, but not their reality, so they laugh.”

Breaking the cycle

Over the last six years, the actresses say, life has gotten better: They've found better jobs, stopped hitting their children, left abusive partners, and confronted and forgiven worn-out parents. Yet they still live in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, where a shooting broke out just as a journalist was interviewing Henríquez at her home last year.

“We all give what we get. I’ve been spanked, yelled at and abused since I could think – it would have been surprising if I had acted in any other way,” Henríquez says. “Theatre taught me to unlearn every bad habit I developed in my past. It made me brave enough to accept I was perpetuating a cycle of violence I inherited from my family, and it made me brave enough to decide to put an end it, stop regretting it, and start over.”

What's particularly striking about these women's transformations, Ms. Aguirre says, is that they did it themselves. “Society doesn’t expect these types of women to take life in their own hands and empower themselves; we expect them to become dependent on charity,” she says. “I hope others can follow their example.”

One may be Gabi Hernández, who usually helps her mother by selling pupusas – filled tortillas – outside the shows. She’s only 10, but says she has seen her mother change in the last six years.

“She spends more time playing with us. Sometimes she’s frustrated because she didn’t make enough money, but I understand her now,” she says.

Looking ahead, Gabi says she dreams of being a doctor, because she wants to change some things: “Doctors yell at patients,” she says, and can scare people away from seeking care. “I don’t think that should happen. I want to be a doctor because I want to be a different type of doctor,” she says.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation as part of its Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative.

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP/File

Late Show host Stephen Colbert says he has no regrets about insulting President Donald Trump in a monologue that included a crude sexual reference and prompted calls to fire him and boycott 'Late Show' advertisers.

When late-night comedian Stephen Colbert hurled a string of crude insults at President Trump on “The Late Show” last week, it didn’t take long for the leader of the free world, a former reality-TV star, to respond.

Conservative critics and others were calling for Mr. Colbert’s ouster this week after the nation’s most-watched late-night host used a lewd metaphor to close out his litany of scornful president-dissing puns. An insult of the “locker-room banter” variety, Colbert’s final quip was criticized by LGBT advocates, some of whom said his joke was a symptom of a wider culture of still-accepted homophobia and joined the #FireColbert furor.

“There’s nothing funny about what he says,” the president told Time magazine, calling the host a “no-talent guy.” “And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching. And it only builds up my base. It only helps me, people like him.”

From political cartoons a century ago to the conventions of parody and satire on late-night TV, insults hurled are hardly anything new in American politics. Yet critics from the right and left are both expressing concern about a new edginess to the humor – an edginess that may thrill each side’s base, but also deepens cultural divides.

And many say Trump is right about one thing: The comedy of Colbert and other liberal-leaning late-night comics has only helped the president. Both Trump's supporters and other conservatives say they see an infuriatingly smug, know-it-all style on the American left – and especially among the liberal comedians who cater to them.

“We’re all familiar with the style,” wrote David French in The National Review, critiquing the likes of HBO’s John Oliver and TBS’s Samantha Bee, both alums of Comedy Central’s genre-changing news parody, “The Daily Show.” “The basic theme is always the same: Look at how corrupt, evil, and stupid our opponents are, look how obviously correct we are, and laugh at my marvelous and clever explanatory talent.”

Yet many social critics see more than hectoring and propaganda behind the changing traditions of America's political satire. From the niche audiences of digital media and cable news to the varying comedic sensibilities of urban and rural viewers, a new media landscape has begun to evolve, scholars say.

“For the guy who goes and works 50 hours a week just trying to make ends meet for his family, and he just wants to sit down and watch the 11 o’clock news and laugh a few times before going to bed, there’s this feeling now that everything is political,” says Heather LaMarre, an associate professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. “People just don’t have an escape, and they’re frustrated that they don’t have an escape.”

Indeed, for those who would “make America great again,” the current dominance of aggressively liberal comedy feels like another culture loss. And late-night comics are seen as “Hollywood elites,” as powerful as the people they are mocking, many believe. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote before the election that late-night comics had abandoned the witty, winking satire of a Johnny Carson or David Letterman, in favor of hosts who are “less comics than propagandists – liberal ‘explanatory journalists’ with laugh lines.”

Make no mistake, former late-night comics like Mr. Carson and Mr. Letterman tossed plenty of insults at politicians. But Professor LaMarre points out that their dominant rhetorical style of was what scholars call “Horatian satire,” named after the 1st-century Roman satirist Horace, and characterized by a wit that criticized human folly in a tolerant way.

Today, however, most of the late-night comics have begun to employ a more “Juvenalian” style of satire, named after the 2nd-century Roman satirist Juvenal, and characterized by a more angry, personal, and indignant exposure of vice and folly. Comics such as George Carlin, Lewis Black, and the conservative Dennis Miller employ this style.

“Each of the current late-night satirists are competing for viewers and for the sort of relevance that only comes from being GIFfed, memed, retweeted, or posted to Facebook,” says Steven Benko, an assistant professor of religious and ethical studies at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., who studies the ethics of humor. “They have to be louder, more pointed, and they have to find a niche that distinguishes them from the others. Being loud, being biting is how they attract viewers, and they are up against cable where the rules on language and content are looser.”

Among comedians, one of the most biting forms of humor remains the genre of schoolyard-style disses – rhetorical battles of wit and humor that up the ante for often lewd, personal taunts.

It’s a genre Mr. Trump knows well, too, having been the witting subject of a Comedy Central roast, where most jokes bring as many bleeps as laughs. And the president himself employs name-calling, including crude and profane insults, as no American leader ever has before. Colbert’s rhetorical litany of insults, in fact, was meant to be a response to the president’s quip to CBS’s Face the Nation host John Dickerson – or, “Deface the Nation,” Trump said during an interview last Sunday.

“When you insult one member of the CBS family, you insult us all!” Colbert began. “Mr. President, I love your presidency, I call it ‘Disgrace The Nation.’ You’re not the POTUS, you’re the ‘gloat-us.’ You’re the glutton with the button. You’re a regular ‘Gorge Washington,’’ he said, before becoming more biting and lewd.

Critics note that before Trump was elected president, Colbert struggled to find his comedic voice as Mr. Letterman’s replacement on “The Late Show.” When he played a parody of a conservative Bill O’Reilly-like host in his Emmy-winning “The Colbert Report,” he had a more Horatian style of satire.

But as he and others became more aggressive toward the new president, their ratings shot up.

The number of politically liberal viewers tuning in to Colbert doubled since the election, researchers say. Samantha Bee’s “Full Frontal,” too, has become the most-watched late-night show among viewers 18 to 34 years old – just one year after its launch.

Yet not too long ago, some observers note, the angry style of political humor was the realm of conservatives. Rush Limbaugh, in fact, uses aggressive parody and satire in his long-running radio show. And with advertising lines such as “talent on loan from God,” Limbaugh has been a leading conservative voice grounded in a comic style. The pundits Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck, too, have used a mocking schtick in their personality-driven takes on politics.   

“Jokes, commentary, or satirical bits that absolutely enrage one side leaves the other side laughing so hard that people's ribs hurt,” says Brian Rosenwald, a media scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “My line to lots of conservatives complaining about Stephen Colbert last week, and calling on CBS to sanction him, was to question whether they thought Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh should be sanctioned by their bosses for some of the outrageous and inflammatory things they say.”  

But as political satire and late-night comedy becomes more aggressive and Juvenalian, it risks becoming less effective, says LaMarre.

“People will pay more attention to satire that is dark and edgy, but they will also argue against it more,” she says. “So although more people will pay attention to it, it will have much less of a persuasive impact.”

But as long as Trump remains the insulter-in-chief, few see this shift in political satire changing soon.

“The whole game has changed now – there’s a new dealer at the table, and it’s not any kind of dealer that we’ve ever had before,” says Christopher Irving, who teaches English and the humanities at Beacon College in Leesburg, Fla. “If Donald Trump were a seasoned politician, a statesman, and not a successful billionaire who likes to Tweet all the time, we would still be having the same arguments, but in a very different way.”

Alexander Polegenko/AP

Russian singer Julia Samoilova, who was chosen to represent Russia in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, performs while sitting in a wheelchair during a concert in Sevastopol, Crimea, Tuesday.

For most Americans, Eurovision is not of much interest. And that's if they even know what it is.

But in Europe, the televised song contest, in which competitors representing their nations sing to win the continent-wide viewing audience's votes, is must-see TV. The 61-year-old song competition, a forebear of shows like American Idol, was originally started to underline a common sense of cultural identity among Europeans. Today, it is one of the most popular TV events on the continent, with the contest finals airing Saturday night.

In recent years, it has also become mired in the political squabbles of Ukraine and Russia – one of the few ways it might have crept into the consciousness of the American news reader. Most recently Ukraine, the 2017 host, announced it would arrest Russia's contestant if she tried to enter the country – a move prompting Russia to withdraw from this year's contest entirely and Russia's state-run Channel One to cancel plans to broadcast the contest at all.

The Russian public is firmly behind the government's decision to withdraw from the contest.

But the decision to not show the contest at all? Not so popular.

Despite the current tensions between Russia and the West, Russians are one of Eurovision's most enthusiastic audiences. A mid-April poll by the independent Levada Center found that, even despite the likelihood that the Russian contestant would not be allowed to participate in Eurovision, more opposed the official decision not to televise the contest than supported it, 41 percent to 40 percent.

And in fact, while the Russian public has endured quite a lot of enforced – and heavily politicized – separation from cultural and sports events as of late, it remains reliably in love with those events. And it suggests that once the geopolitical storms of the past few years die down, Russia will probably get on with integrating itself with the wider world, rather than trying to go its own way, as the USSR once did.

"The overwhelming majority of Russians expect our country to be a player in big world events, be it Eurovision or the Olympics, and find it an abnormal situation when we are not," says Vladimir Pozner, a leading Russian TV commentator. "In Soviet times the authorities would set up our own alternative events, but today people will not accept substitutes."

'No substitutes'

The Eurovision spat between Ukraine and Russia started last year, when Jamala, the Ukrainian entry and a Crimean Tatar, won with a song about the Stalin-era expulsion of her people, which Russia denounced as blatantly political.

The victory made Ukraine the host for this year's competition – and set Kiev on a collision course with the Kremlin over Russia's 2017 contestant, Julia Samoilova, a wheelchair-bound singer who had earlier performed in Crimea after its 2014 annexation by Russia. Ukrainian authorities view that as a crime, and promised to arrest Ms. Samoilova if she entered Ukrainian-controlled territory, effectively barring her from the competition.

Such exclusions, whether de facto or literal, have become more common as Russia has butted heads with the West. Last year much of the Russian Olympic team was blocked from taking part in the Rio Summer Games amid a doping scandal, its Paralympic team was banned altogether, and there are persistent rumors that the 2018 FIFA World Cup, to be hosted by Russia, might face a boycott by Western countries.

Polls suggest that Russian majorities tend to politically support their government's position in each case. For example, about 60 percent of Russians support Samoilova as their national contestant, despite being declared persona non grata in Ukraine. (She has already been announced as next year's Russian entry into the contest.) Yet there is no sign that Russians are turning against the belief that their country should be a full participant in such international events.

Indeed, while Russia and its Soviet forebear have in the past run their own competitions as at least temporary stand-ins for international competitions, they have not generated as much interest.

Before it joined the Olympic movement in 1952, the USSR sponsored a separate world athletic championship, known as the Spartakiad, which it billed as a full-scale alternative to the bourgeoisie-run Olympiad. But it was abandoned as an international competition in 1936, before being revived as a domestic Soviet contest that ran from 1956 to 1991.

Last summer, the Kremlin hastily organized special track-and-field events for its banned Olympic athletes in a Moscow stadium. But they attracted little notice, even in the Russian media, and there was no grand talk of "alternatives."

"Yes, we had our own competitions last summer, and it was fine," says Andrei Rodionenko, senior trainer for the Russian gymnast team. "But we have always supported, and will support, the Olympic movement. There is no substitute for that."

Mr. Pozner says the message to Russian authorities is clear: fix the doping problem and bring Russia back into the Olympics.

"Our exclusion last year was a big loss of face, a blow to Russian prestige. And Russian leaders have since made it very obvious they will do whatever is necessary to satisfactorily resolve the issue, so that Russia becomes a full participant in the Games again," he says.

Russians' preference

As for Eurovision, the number of Russians who show an interest in the annual contest has lately been on the rise, with 63 percent showing an interest in the event this year, against 55 percent in 2012, says Mikhail Mamonov, a spokesperson for the state-funded VTsIOM public opinion agency. About 20 percent, mainly young and middle-aged Russians, said they intend to watch it, even though it will be accessible only via the internet this year.

"People here might not like Western politics, but they still prefer Western cinema and music. It's only a tiny minority who reject all things Western," says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. He says Russians are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and no longer view the West as a single entity but rather as a menu from which they take things they like, reject what they don't.

"In culture, the general trend is definitely pro-Western," he says.

Reuters

A robot delivering burgers makes its way in Hamburg, Germany May 9.

This spring, a team of agricultural engineers in Britain began to plant barley seeds in a field with what they claim is the world’s first autonomous tractor. In August, the machine, controlled by a computer from afar, will then harvest the crop. Not a single farmer will toil the land.

Rather than fear this latest example of work-replacing robots, many farmers welcome it. The experimental machines, unlike human-driven tractors, will be lighter on the soil. And they will bring other benefits in efficiency and profits.

Such a response runs counter to the drumbeat of fear about the long-range impact of robots and artificial intelligence. In his farewell address, President Barack Obama warned of the “relentless” pace of automation in allegedly eliminating jobs. In February, the European Union took up a proposal to tax companies for any jobs lost to robots. Even techno-optimist Elon Musk of Tesla warns of a “massive social challenge” from future automation.

Such fear is hardly new. Decades ago, famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted mass unemployment from technology. He and others were right to a degree. Workers in areas where factories have switched to robots have been dislocated. Many of them were a major source of votes for Donald Trump. But such a localized impact should not distort the larger picture of progress – and especially the record 86 months of nonfarm job growth in the United States. Two recent studies paint a hopeful picture of automation’s continuing promise.

One study, published this month by the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the probable impact of information technologies. The conclusion from an academy panel: “We expect new job opportunities to emerge as increasingly capable combinations of humans and machines attack problems that previously have been intractable.” In addition, Americans will see a boost in income, wealth, shortened work time, and new goods and services.

The other study, from the Washington-based think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, looked at the dislocation and creation of occupations from 1850 to 2010 using US Census data compiled by the University of Minnesota. It came to a very counterintuitive conclusion about the impact of technology: In the past two decades, the level of occupational churn – or the rate at which some occupations expand while others contract – is at a historic low. The rate is 38 percent of that from 1950 to 2000, and 42 percent of the levels from 1850 to 2000. If anything, the United States is not being innovative enough, a fact reflected in the low rate of worker productivity in recent years.

That historical perspective suggests public leaders should not play to the fear of automation but instead encourage the development of it, even as they also help workers with out-of-date skills adjust to a changing economy. Americans will not support investments in education and research if they are told the worst about technology.

The public may be ahead of the doom-sayers. In a Pew poll last year, two-thirds of people agreed that their own jobs were secure even though they believe robots are taking over much of the work done by humans. Like farmers in Britain looking at the advent of robot tractors, they see the upside and ignore the fear.