Russia placed ICC boss Karim Khan on a wanted list, after he issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.

Playing in her first real WNBA game in 579 days, Brittney Griner did something Friday night in Los Angeles that national television audiences hadn’t seen her do in a long time: The Phoenix Mercury center stood for the national anthem.

She stopped doing so in 2020 but has resumed the practice after returning from 10 months of imprisonment in Russia. “One thing that’s good about this country is our right to protest,” Griner said after the game when I asked her about the issue. “You have a right to be able to speak out, question, to challenge, and do all these things. [After] what I went through, it just means a little bit more to me now. I was literally in a cage and could not stand the way I wanted to … and a lot of other situations. Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely wanted to stand.”

[Tom Nichols: To Putin, Brittney Griner is a pawn. To the U.S., she’s a person.]

Although she stood for “The Star Spangled Banner” during the preseason, her team’s regular-season opener on Friday night against the Los Angeles Sparks attracted far more media attention. No opposing player this season is likely to get the reception that Griner did from L.A. fans. The exuberant crowd wore pro-Griner T-shirts, gave her a lengthy standing ovation, and held up signs that further showed their support. A number of sports superstars were there to witness the joyous occasion, including the Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson, the tennis champion Billie Jean King, and the Basketball Hall of Famer Dawn Staley, who coaches the University of South Carolina women’s basketball team.

But what brought the moment full circle and speaks to the significance of Griner’s return was Vice President Kamala Harris meeting with both the Sparks and the Mercury before the game, praising the players for making sure that Griner’s plight was never forgotten. “Thank you for all that you did in supporting Brittney,” Harris told them, “because I know that was rough and that was so difficult for you. Team is family.”

While on her way to play for a Russian team during the WNBA offseason, Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in February 2022, and accused of carrying cannabis oil in her luggage. She was later convicted of drug smuggling. Her ordeal was widely viewed as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to gain diplomatic leverage against the United States. The U.S. government negotiated her release in December in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout.

[Read: How politics compounded a hostage family’s grief]

Harris has taken some heat for advocating for Griner’s return. As San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, she oversaw prosecutions for marijuana offenses and opposed marijuana legalization. But people are allowed to change their positions. As a senator, Harris co-authored a comprehensive marijuana bill that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level and resentence or expunge the records of those who received marijuana convictions.

Griner’s perspective on the national anthem has evolved too.

In 2020, after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor and the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, Griner vowed then she wasn’t going to stand for the national anthem, and even suggested that it shouldn’t be played at any sporting event. “I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season,” Griner declared. “I think we should take that much of a stand.”

Like a lot of athletes during that time, Griner wanted to use the anthem to prove a larger point: that the country’s national symbols mean nothing if the human rights of its Black citizens are routinely being violated by the people in charge of protecting them.

This is a tricky dance for an openly gay Black woman who stands at 6 foot 9—balancing love of her country and an appreciation for its freedoms with wanting the U.S. to have a better record of equality and social justice. Like Black soldiers who fought for America overseas but were denied basic rights at home, Griner—who twice represented the U.S. in the Olympics—understands that you can love a country while knowing it doesn’t treat your community fairly.

Some critics believed that Griner didn’t deserve support from the U.S. government because of what she had said about the anthem, and many people on the right criticized the Biden administration for coming to her rescue. When Griner was released, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, his social-media site, “What kind of a deal is it to swap Brittney Griner, a basketball player who openly hates our country for the man known as ‘The Merchant of Death.’” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., called Griner an “awful America Hating WNBA player.”

[Danté Stewart: The right’s Brittney Griner obsession]

Despite these desperate attempts to paint Griner as anti-American, nothing is more American than Griner’s initial dissent or her decision to stand for the national anthem now.

Some will surely delight in her receiving her comeuppance through the horrors she experienced in Russia, or will use her 180-degree turn to minimize the problem that prompted her negative feelings toward the national anthem and flag in the first place. “Sometimes when it doesn’t go the way other people want it to go, you get labeled un-American or something like that,” Griner said on Friday. “I think it makes you more American.” She said she still supports players who decline to stand for the anthem.

Griner’s dissent was always a poor excuse to question her patriotism. If she didn’t love this country, she never would have criticized it. If she didn’t love this country, she wouldn’t have helped Team USA win two gold medals. And if she didn’t love this country, she certainly wouldn’t be standing up for its anthem now, even as she believes America has much more work to do.

Ukraine rejects claim, says heavy fighting continues in the city and describes the situation there as 'critical'.

Ukraine leader's visit to Hiroshima thrust the G7's efforts to choke Russia's economy to the top of a busy agenda.

Western nations 'still adhering to escalation scenario' that risks widening the Ukraine war in Europe, official says.

A final communique released by G7 leaders a day ahead of the summit’s conclusion called on Beijing to adhere to international norms, including addressing “nonmarket ...

At the same time, the group emphasized the need to step up cooperation with emerging economies in the areas of infrastructure, digitization and trade.

Brittney Griner was released from a Russian penal colony in a high-profile prisoner exchange with the US late last year.

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan is wanted for arrest in Russia over war crimes charges against Putin.

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Quiet luxury, stealth wealth, Succession core. In recent months, these terms have been applied to a fashion phenomenon that’s captured the attention of TikTok and mainstream-media outlets alike. The trend ostensibly describes the style proclivities of America’s 1 percent—but it’s really more of a message about the anxieties of everyone else.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

ChatGPT is already obsolete. Did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug? It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.

Ludicrously Capacious

“Stealth wealth”—both the concept and the conversation around it—isn’t new. But one week in late March, two capstone events kicked the chatter into overdrive: the start of Gwyneth Paltrow’s trial over a 2016 skiing incident, and the premiere of the fourth and final season of Succession. In a near instant, savvy sartorialists spotted parallels between the actor and Goop founder’s “courtcore” and the subdued opulence of the billionaire Roy family at the center of HBO’s hit series.

“Much has been made of Kendall Roy’s baseball cap,” my colleague Amanda Mull mused in her recent Atlantic article dissecting the so-called trend. Indeed, the $625 Loro Piana cap donned by the troubled second son of the fictional dynastic clan has become an oft-cited exemplar of the discreetly-status-signaling fashion of the wealthiest Americans. As Amanda sums it up, “The textiles and cuts are impeccable, the colors are neutral, and the finishes are subtle and logo-free.”

In other words: If you know, you know. And being in-the-know, while also telegraphing that knowledge, is how elites uphold (and protect) their social codes. Proponents of the stealth-wealth concept insist that toting around a battered, five-figure handbag or swathing oneself in staid cashmere affirms membership to the rarefied class aptly described, by Amanda, as “the genuinely, generationally wealthy.” Quiet luxury—or so the theory goes—says I belong here. And, by extension: You don’t.

The anxiety surrounding the unspoken rules of elite-class membership makes for great entertainment, whether it’s the Gilded Age grandeur depicted in Edith Wharton novels or the “ludicrously capacious bag” that all but guest-starred in a recent Succession episode. But stealth-wealth style—as either a unified aesthetic or a universally understood upper-class membership card—is a myth, Amanda writes. Instead, she notes, the people most preoccupied with the so-called trend’s associated signifiers appear to be those furthest from its reach: the teens and 20-somethings who disproportionately make and consume content on TikTok, and who “[dissect] these looks and [devour] the lessons they seemingly teach.”

She writes:

In one popular type of video, a young woman walks viewers through the tricks to getting the stealth-wealth look—high-quality basics, neutral colors, no logos—or demonstrates how to turn a regular outfit into a signifier of stealth wealth. TikTok’s dominant user base is at exactly the point in life where learning how status functions in the broader adult world becomes very important. They’re thinking about heading off to college or into the professional world, and presenting themselves to new groups of people in these scenarios is a very high-stakes game of dress-up. The Roys are not stylish or well dressed, but they are a pretty good guide for what to look for in a Zara knockoff if you want to blend in at an internship.

As Amanda points out, it makes sense that the covert messaging of quiet-luxury style would resonate with the fledgling adults of TikTok, who are actively figuring out how to self-present for the professional world. But insecurities around status, class, and access aren’t the sole purview of the young. They may, in fact, be symptoms of a more widespread sense of precarity—and an ever-greater distance between most Americans and the hallmarks of ultra wealth.

The timing of today’s stealth-wealth fixation is hardly coincidental. During the pandemic, the income gap between the highest and lowest U.S. earners widened for the first time in a decade. The wealthiest Americans are richer now than ever before. Yet, as the fashion critic Rachel Tashjian recently wrote in The Washington Post, somehow, the uber-monied class seems to have become less visible as its economic power has grown. “Other than the dysfunctional family we see on television every Sunday night, the one percent is almost out of view, especially for those who have spent the past few years learning about clothing (and status) through social media,” Tashjian observed.

As social-media fashion detectives continue their efforts to crack the code of superrich style, they underscore the chasm between one-percenters and everyone else. Because, as Amanda points out, the stealth-wealth rulebook was never really a thing to begin with: The mega-wealthy dress in all sorts of ways, occupying the spectrum from “understated” to “Paris Hilton circa 2007.” It’s not their status anxiety being reflected in the trend, but the fretful ruminations of a have-not majority, straining to hold their grip on much-lower rungs of the ladder.

Related:

There’s no secret to how wealthy people dress. Something odd is happening with handbags.

Today’s News

Debt-ceiling talks between the White House and House Republicans resumed a few hours after they were put on pause. President Joe Biden approved a plan to train Ukrainian pilots on U.S. F-16s, potentially paving the way for sending advanced fighter jets to Ukraine.

Republican Senator Tim Scott quietly filed paperwork to run in the 2024 presidential election.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Turning history into a juicy story is a risky endeavor, Nicole Acheampong writes. Can we really know the figures of the past?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Trent Parke/ Magnum

Growing My Faith in the Face of Death

By Timothy Keller

Note: The pastor Timothy Keller, author of the below essay from 2021, died today at age 72.

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.

On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire. The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa Suga of BTS’s world tour is pop subversion at its finest. How the right and the left switched sides on Big Business

Culture Break

Illustration by Ángel Hernández

Read. Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Holding Pattern, focuses on a mother-daughter relationship with resonances of the author’s own. It’s a love letter that her mother won’t be able to read.

Watch. The film Master Gardener (in theaters) takes on neo-Nazism and white supremacy—and is Paul Schrader’s most hopeful work yet.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Years ago, I ran a feminist book club out of the wonderful Type bookstore in Toronto, the city where I spent my peak-TikTok-demographic years and started my journalism career. If memory serves, our first selection was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—an interesting novel to encounter at that formative phase of my life, amid the city’s rapid transformation from a cosmopolitan patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods into a playground for the rich. Of course, not everyone is able to replicate my experience of discovering Wharton as a youngish-adult woman facing the imminent threat of being unable to pay rent. But even though those conditions certainly heightened the novel’s effect, it’s worth a read at any age (or economic bracket). If you haven’t read it, you must.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.