On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
It stands to reason that in the Summer of the Sequel, what passes for the standout cinematic release of the season is a trailer. For a sequel.
But when the promo is for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (which will arrive in two parts, in November and next July) the click frenzy is understandable: For people who were 10 or 11 in 2001, when the first "Harry Potter" movie came out, the trailer arrives as bittersweet confirmation of the inevitable end of their youth.
"Harry Potter, the boy who lived -- come to die," Voldemort intones as the just-released trailer opens. That shiver you feel is an era passing. The Potter kids may not be facing death, but as young adults they confront a confounding and uncertain future. By next summer, when the series finally ends after eight installments, just maybe they will have begun to discover some of their own powers.
The trailer bills "Deathly Hallows" as "The Motion Picture Event of a Generation." For once, we believe the hype.
But when the promo is for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (which will arrive in two parts, in November and next July) the click frenzy is understandable: For people who were 10 or 11 in 2001, when the first "Harry Potter" movie came out, the trailer arrives as bittersweet confirmation of the inevitable end of their youth.
"Harry Potter, the boy who lived -- come to die," Voldemort intones as the just-released trailer opens. That shiver you feel is an era passing. The Potter kids may not be facing death, but as young adults they confront a confounding and uncertain future. By next summer, when the series finally ends after eight installments, just maybe they will have begun to discover some of their own powers.
The trailer bills "Deathly Hallows" as "The Motion Picture Event of a Generation." For once, we believe the hype.
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