The legendary singer songwriter is said to be recuperating at home in Nice after a hospital visit in nearby Monaco.

The singer visited hospital "as a precautionary measure", a spokesman confirmed to BBC News.

John Tinniswood recommended "exercising the mind" as he was presented with a card from the King.

The price of the garments will fall by the current rate of VAT at John Lewis and Waitrose next week.

American John Isner, who has served a record 14,411 aces, announces he will retire after the US Open following a 17-year career.

The teen, it seems, wanted to ask the Florida governor an earnest question. “I can’t legally vote,” the 15-year-old said to Ron DeSantis at an Iowa coffee shop recently.

“It’s never stopped the other party from not letting you vote,” DeSantis interjected.

I think he was trying to say “from letting you vote,” meaning that Democrats supposedly allow 15-year-olds to vote illegally. (DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) But he bungled his words, and either way, this is not a good joke. It’s especially not a good joke when you consider the second half of the teen’s sentence: “But I struggle with major depressive disorder.” Oof.

[Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis]

This wasn’t an isolated moment of interpersonal clumsiness. On the campaign trail, DeSantis frequently behaves like he’s been dragged to a house party and is counting the seconds until he can look at his phone. He dryly remarked to an Icee-slurping kid, “That’s probably a lot of sugar,” and to a crowd of gathered fans that it was past his bedtime. When a reporter asked why he wasn’t taking questions, he snapped, “Are you blind?” He has a strange laugh that transforms abruptly into an okay-what’s-next industriousness. He passes up even obvious opportunities to show empathy, like when an 81-year-old veteran struggled to read the Pledge of Allegiance at his inauguration as Florida governor. Rather than take the man’s arm and offer help, my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, “DeSantis stood rigid and stern.”

I may not like DeSantis’s policies, but I deeply identify with his affect: Annoyed! Tactless! Maladroit! The New Yorker described him as “at his best on paper” and “a man so aloof that he sometimes finds it difficult to carry on a conversation.” He reportedly, and relatably, likes to keep his earbuds in so that people don’t talk to him. During debate prep years ago, an adviser told DeSantis to write a reminder on his legal pad: “LIKABLE.”

It’s somewhat of a given that DeSantis’s awkwardness undermines him, as it does for similarly stilted candidates. But the fact that voters care so much about a candidate’s smoothness is odd; awkwardness is not, per se, a bad thing. Most of us are a little awkward sometimes, or at least were a little awkward at one time. Some of the country’s most successful business leaders—Bill Gates, say, or Mark Zuckerberg—have a robotic quality, but that hasn’t stopped them. Social dexterity is something we expect of our presidential candidates, but of practically no one else.

It’s not just Democrats who find DeSantis socially awkward. “Ron DeSantis’s problem is that he finds it very difficult to work with people, or make people feel appreciated,” says Whit Ayres, the president of North Star Opinion Research, which polled for DeSantis in 2018.

Sarah Longwell, a pollster who runs focus groups of former Trump voters, told me that one group participant recently described DeSantis as “wooden.” Another, who actually liked DeSantis, called him “fine.” Longwell often asks people whom they would want if Trump isn’t the nominee. “In the last two groups, nobody has brought up DeSantis as the alternative,” Longwell told me.

DeSantis is the latest in a long line of candidates thwarted by awkwardness. It’s a problem some presidential hopefuls bring on themselves. When Jeb Bush, scion and supposed shoo-in, begged people to “please clap” at his carefully written applause line, he revealed a sheen of sweaty desperation. Onetime Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s attempts to connect with the common man resulted in him praising the “right heights” of trees and asking a crowd of Black voters, “Who let the dogs out?” At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Vice President Al Gore tried to warm up his chilly image by giving his wife a big kiss—too big, it turned out. Hillary Clinton faced repulsive sexism and unfair treatment throughout her political life, but she also struggled to break out of white-paper speak. When she did—and here again I sympathize!—she could come off as haughty and superior, à la the “basket of deplorables.”

Other candidates, though, get struck by awkwardness through little fault of their own. They suffer the consequences nonetheless. At a loud rally in Iowa in 2004, Howard Dean hollered over the background noise into a unidirectional mic, and thus produced the first political meme to go viral (in a bad way). Later that year, the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, fatefully went windsurfing, which is supposed to make you look cool, but instead made him look like a highfalutin flip-flopper when George W. Bush used the footage in an attack ad. Ted Cruz has somehow acquired a permanent pall of creepiness, helped along by a Twitter meme that he might be the Zodiac killer. (He’s not.) “His expression unsettles me,” one neurologist said when analyzing the senator’s tight little smile.

Awkward candidates have triumphed in the past: Richard Nixon, not exactly a people person, got elected twice. And it seems to be less of a burden for non-presidential offices: As Florida governor, DeSantis won reelection handily in 2022. Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and is now a senator from Utah. Hillary Clinton was a senator and the secretary of state, as was John Kerry.

But awkwardness proves fatal for many presidential candidates. Michael Dukakis, a perfectly competent Massachusetts governor, lost the election to George H. W. Bush after he was photographed riding in a tank while wearing a helmet. (In this case, too, the elder Bush looped the tank ride in an attack ad.) The governor’s advance team knew that the headgear would make him look “goofy,” but they failed to persuade him not to wear it. The aftershocks of that one rippled through politics for decades: Years later, President Barack Obama would decline to don a football helmet for a photo op. “You don’t put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he said. It just looks awkward.

[Mark Leibovich: Ron DeSantis’s joyless ride]

Like that other thing, you know awkwardness when you see it, and voters can see it over and over, anytime they come across a screen. Political news largely travels through TV and social media, two visual platforms that highlight every fake smile and weird comment. “The candidate who is most comfortable in the dominant medium of the time is most likely to be the candidate who is going to gain popular support,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political-communication expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Reporters like me also play a role, highlighting narratives that (sometimes) take off among voters. President Joe Biden’s many gaffes could be seen as awkward, and I could just as easily have written this article about him, after all.

It’s surprising, though, that voters care about awkwardness, a benign and universal human quality. Who hasn’t accidentally responded to a “Happy birthday!” with “You too”? Being a white-paper-oriented, small-talk-averse introvert can have its upsides. The presidency is a hard job, requiring intricate knowledge of the world’s largest economy and strongest military, plus a few dozen ever-evolving terror groups and simmering crises. It involves a fair amount of glad-handing, but also a lot of reading and thinking. Research has shown that introverts can sometimes be more effective leaders, because they’re more likely to listen to their subordinates. “They can capture information that some extroverts might overlook,” write the researchers Karl Moore and Willing Li. Awkwardness is associated with a sharp focus on details and an enthusiasm for interests, both helpful qualities in a leader. Meanwhile, confidence can sometimes steer you wrong: George W. Bush, with whom everyone wanted to have a beer, made some disastrous decisions on the basis of pluck.

So why do we care if the president is awkward? Partly, it’s because the presidency is also performative, and we want to be sure our pick can perform well. “The American presidency combines the role of head of government, a role that requires policy chops and managerial smarts, with the role of head of state, a role where you are expected to channel the hopes and dreams of everyday Americans and represent those people on the world stage,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, told me via email. We expect presidential candidates to handle the Middle East but also a pork on a stick. “While in other countries, being a bit dry or awkward might not be such a problem on the path to being Prime Minister, we in the U.S. expect our president to both understand what average people are going through while also expecting them to be anything but average themselves,” Soltis said.

Voters prefer candidates who have personality traits they value in themselves. We want someone who just is like us, but “more of a leader,” to quote one study. Hip, compassionate liberals gravitated toward Obama, a cool empath. Trump’s supporters often say the famous billionaire is somehow “just like them.” Most people are sometimes awkward, but awkwardness is not a state that’s valued. To be awkward is human, but we want our politicians to be superhuman.

The opposite of awkward is something like “charismatic,” which political psychologists tend to define as someone who speaks in stories and metaphors, and who can successfully transmit values that voters want to hear. John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, has found that charismatic candidates do especially well in situations of “attributional ambiguity,” when it’s unclear whether their policy performance is strong or weak. (This may explain the remarkable rise of the charismatic, record-free Trump.) In the absence of better information, “voters will turn to see Who more resembles my prototype of ‘what is a good leader’?” Antonakis told me. He’s also found that smarter people are better able to produce charismatic rhetoric when prompted, so perhaps voters assume that charismatic candidates know their stuff.

Charisma is important not just because voters like smooth talkers, but because it makes candidates seem more authentic—which is what many voters, especially Republicans, look for. “That’s what happens with the woodenness, or the inability to have a comfortable smile, or a normal conversation with a human, is that you don’t seem like an authentic kind of person,” Longwell said. Voters tend to find Trump very authentic, but toward DeSantis, they use phrases like “unable to trust him,” she noted. The Dukakis tank moment was so hilarious precisely because it made the governor seem like “something he wasn’t,” as Josh King put it in Politico.

Awkwardness, then, might be a sign of a candidate’s unease in his role, a subtle clue that he’s only pretending to get it. “Awkwardness is the feeling we get when someone’s presentation of themselves … is shown to be incompatible with reality in a way that can’t be smoothed over with a little white lie,” writes Melissa Dahl in Cringeworthy, her book on awkwardness. Voters had trouble buying Dukakis as a macho tank gunner; they don’t believe that DeSantis would genuinely enjoy small talk. If a candidate looks out of place among presidential contenders, we think, maybe that’s because he is.

Photographs by Danny Wilcox Frazier

Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.

Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.

That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:

God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”

Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”

“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”

This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)

Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’'s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.

Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.

Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.

A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.

During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.

Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.

[Read: A bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism]

All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.

The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.

“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.

He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.

Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.

“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”

When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.

Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.

Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.

Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.

After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.

Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.

[Read: What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump]

Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.

Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)

Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.

I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”

He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.

The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.

Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.

The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”

Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”

I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.

“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.

“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”

The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.

“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”

I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.

“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”

He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.

While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”

“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”

He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.

For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.

The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).

“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.

Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”

He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”

At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

[Read: The bow-tied bard of populism]

Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”

“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.

He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.

Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.

The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)

Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”

During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?

“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”

Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.

“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”

I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”

[Read: A star reporter’s break from reality]

But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)

Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”

Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.

“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.

If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”

During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.

“Mostly misunderstood.”

What do you think people misunderstand about you?

“My motivations,” he said.

“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”

The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.

Manchester City and England defender John Stones is ruled out of action until after the international break with a muscle injury.

Any time I try to recommend How to With John Wilson to someone who has never heard of the show, I struggle to figure out where to begin. HBO markets it as a docuseries by the filmmaker John Wilson in which he explores the idiosyncratic behavior of New York City’s wackiest residents. But calling it a “docuseries” feels wrong; yes, the program relies on footage and interviews Wilson has collected from wandering through the city, but the material is also presented comedically. And it’s not quite “about” anything: Sometimes an episode will meander from one topic to another so much so that by the end of the half hour, you barely remember where you started.

Describing Wilson himself can be difficult too. He’s ostensibly the show’s star, yet he rarely appears on camera. Instead, he narrates everything the audience sees, using the second-person perspective to refer to his own experiences. (When the building he lives in went through a gut renovation, for instance, he observed that the construction “quickly turned your apartment into one of the noisiest places you’ve ever lived.”) With his Muppet-y voice and awkward throat-clearing, he often sounds nervous to be out and about at all. The camera, it seems, is his shield, his way of making eye contact with a subject without having to look at them directly. In the first season, an interior designer he interviewed gently called him out for the habit. “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation,’” she said. “‘I should just be John.’”

In the show’s final season, Wilson seems to have absorbed her advice. The filmmaker has offered glimmers of his personal life before by mentioning relationships and his friends, and by incorporating archival footage from his younger days. But Season 3 takes significant strides toward dismantling the layers Wilson has constructed between himself and his show. Friday’s episode, “How to Work Out,” is the first in a string of installments in which Wilson turns the camera to himself and begins regularly venturing outside of the New York City boroughs he’s long explored. The result is Wilson’s most vulnerable and ambitious work yet. If in previous seasons he was using How To to make sense of the world around him, he’s now purposefully trying to make sense of himself—and, in the process, underscoring the limits of his approach. Chronicling reality, the show suggests, always involves some amount of fabrication.

Wilson has cultivated a reputation as a generous documentarian, someone willing to follow his subjects down rabbit holes and spotlight their passions without judgment. Much like The Rehearsal, the similarly unconventional series from the comedian and How To producer Nathan Fielder, Wilson’s work can be somewhat uncomfortable to watch as a result. Both shows mine comedy from how naively open their subjects are about their weirdest obsessions. In Wilson’s case, he deliberately tails people who seem eager to be heard and want to explain their quirks, such as a man he encounters at a grocery store who mentions his fascination with the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon in which people collectively misremember significant events or details. And though Wilson never, in his narration, remarks on the oddness of what he’s filming, the episodes convey his perspective anyway. Earlier this season, he spent time with a man who was trying to move his family into a windowless missile silo; throughout the sequence, Wilson deployed a haunting score that sounded straight out of a conspiracy thriller, as if to underline how ludicrous the man’s compulsion comes off to Wilson.

[Read: You’ve never seen anything quite like The Rehearsal]

Yet in the latest episode, Wilson confronts his impulse to turn people’s eccentricities into entertainment. When he heads to a September 11–themed bodybuilding competition—an event with obvious, if jarring, comic potential—he asks multiple contestants for their memories of the attacks they’re supposedly honoring, but grows silent when he instead receives responses about how mentally grueling bodybuilding can be. And after Wilson meets a trainer who claims he once worked with one of the hijackers, he deliberately cuts away following a short Q&A, and instead plays a homemade superhero film he recorded as a kid on 9/11. It’s as if Wilson himself is too distressed to continue letting others overshare, so he steps in as an alternative, following himself down one of those rabbit holes.

It’s an unexpected technique for Wilson to use—and a revealing one, as he examines why he made a movie, of all things, that afternoon. He considers his role as a filmmaker and contemplates how his platform has changed him—and by extension, the work he does. He splices in clips of himself standing around stiffly on the Emmys red carpet. He inserts footage he captured of Elon Musk, Martha Stewart, and Michael Bloomberg—boldface names he’s shared rooms with at fancy fetes. He draws attention to how, because he has an HBO show with his name in the title, his camera has transformed from being his shield to being his weapon; he zooms in on a billboard of himself looming over Times Square. “You like to think that you are just watching all of this stuff from a distance,” he narrates solemnly, “but maybe this is just who you are now.”

The confession reminded me of something Wilson expressed back in the show’s very first episode. “The more you talk to someone,” he mused then, “the harder it is to hide who you really are.” How To, over three seasons, has never really been a docuseries or a comedy, but an exploration of that fine line between storyteller and subject, and of how impossible it is to objectively record reality. Wilson’s curiosity shaped the show, but as much as he tried to keep himself at a remove from what he surveyed, his own peculiarities influenced every second of what aired. “Everything is such a performance these days,” he once said disdainfully in an interview as he explained why he was drawn to filming everyday people and their mundane lives. In this final season, Wilson sounds like he’s coming to terms with being more than a mere documentarian stumbling upon zany personalities. Instead, he’s a character playing a part.

In my work as a senior editor at a scientific journal, the most challenging arguments I mediate among reviewers, authors, other editors, and readers are not about research methods, empirical data, or subtle points of theory but about which terms describing vulnerable groups are acceptable and which are harmful. My field—addiction and drug policy—has a tradition of savage infighting over language. Are the people whom earlier generations derided as vagrants or bums more appropriately termed homeless people, people who are homeless, unsheltered persons, persons with lived experience of being unhoused, or something else? Similar arguments erupt in politics, in journalism, in the classroom, in the workplace, and between generations at the dinner table. When even sincere, well-intended people cannot agree on which words reinforce social injustice and damage human well-being, the debates can be mutually bruising.

Sometimes the arguments resolve themselves over time, and plainly pejorative words such as crackhead and junkie vanish unlamented from the public discourse. To their credit, scholars who study and treat addiction are keenly aware of how negative language can instill negative public attitudes that turn public policy against people with drug- and alcohol-use disorders. That said, any claim that specific terms are actively harmful should be viewed as a hypothesis until it is established as fact. When confronted with claims that term X causes harm to people with a given characteristic, or that term Y is the only way to describe them respectfully, a fair-minded person can reasonably respond, “What evidence suggests that this is true?”

[John McWhorter: Even trigger warning is now off-limits]

To be sure, when someone expresses clear preferences about how he or she wants to be described, that wish requires no evidentiary validation. In some cases, honoring other people’s self-conception may mean tolerating language that well-meaning outsiders view as blunt, impolite, or even destructive. For example, some members of my field think people in recovery shouldn’t burden themselves with the terms addicts and alcoholics—words that could very well stigmatize anyone labeled as such without their consent but that are widely claimed by participants in 12-step programs. Scientists and clinicians must show respect to other people’s humanity, and that includes upholding their right to speak for and define themselves.

To ask for evidence when a term is asserted to be harmful will strike some people as mere resistance to change. In fact, quite a bit of evidence on the effects of terminology is available to guide us, and in some cases, it backs up a linguistic shift. According to one study in my field, seeing an individual described as a substance abuser rather than as having a substance-use disorder makes people more likely to view them as a safety threat and as deserving of punishment. Some terms are called harmful because that is demonstrably what they are.

But many other claims about the harmfulness or virtue of individual terms lack clear evidence, and we should therefore be humble in generalizing. The best evidence for why experts and policy makers should tolerate a broad range of terminology is the demonstrated diversity in what groups of people prefer to be called. One day, a white American colleague chastised me for using the allegedly demeaning term elder when discussing drug overdoses among Medicare participants, shortly before I got on a Zoom call in which Canadian colleagues of Indigenous ancestry repeatedly used the same term as a sign of respect for the longest-lived members of their community. During my clinical training as a psychologist, I was informed (without evidence) that patient was a destructively medicalized term for people seeking mental-health care, and that I should use only client. But surveys of real-life people seeking care show no consensus. In one study, individuals seeing a psychiatrist or a nurse, for example, preferred patients, whereas patients and clients were equally popular among those consulting a social worker or an occupational therapist. Acceptance of other terms—including service users, people who use services, and consumers—varies considerably. In short, there is no single ideal term, and the search for one founders on the reality that individuals with the same condition routinely differ about what they wish to be called.

[From the April 2023 issue: The moral case against equity language]

Ironically, the impulse to promote equity through new terminology fails in some cases to take account of individual and cultural diversity. Many U.S. academics quickly adopted the neologism Latinx as a more inclusive, gender-neutral alternative to Hispanic or Latino, even though the term bemuses or annoys some people of Latin American descent and survey data suggest that few use it to describe themselves. The impact of other language meant to lessen social stigma is not always clear. In the United States, homeless has fallen into disrepute in some quarters, but whether people without reliable shelter benefit from or prefer to use the ostensibly more egalitarian unhoused or houseless remains to be demonstrated. Good intentions sometimes yield bulky terms that are soon collapsed into acronyms. Person with alcohol-use disorder may have some humanizing potential, but whether abbreviating the term as PWAUD, as many academic papers do, has the desired effect is a matter of conjecture.

Denouncing other people’s terminology as harmful, and demanding that others adopt your own, can be intoxicating—to the point that submitting such disputes to empirical tests can feel like a bit of a comedown. But making these judgments in a rigorous, fact-based way would prevent experts, policy makers, and the general public from being distracted by something easy—arguing about words—when we need to focus on doing something much harder: solving massive social problems. A shared commitment to evidence provides a way to resolve upsetting disagreements that can otherwise fester forever, while opening up chances to learn when we have in fact caused harm and genuinely need to treat others better.