CL Three days before June 4, the courts have made it official: gathering at Victoria Park to mark the anniversary is now unlawful. For many in this city, the vigil was less a political act than a private ritual, the kind of quiet collective grief that a city performs for itself. What changes is not the date on the calendar but what it means to observe it.-- CL

MB Three active military fronts, a presidential resignation in Tehran, and Beijing dispatching warships toward Taiwan in the same news cycle would once have been considered a stress test of the international order. What it actually tests is institutional attention span: Washington is negotiating, striking, and stalling simultaneously across all three theaters, which is less a strategy than a description of overextension. The day's architecture suggests not chaos but a very old pattern of powers doing too much at once and calling it resolve.-- MB