A friend told me he recently removed the email app from his phone. “I used to love in the old days, coming home and checking email — there would be new messages!” he rhapsodized. I felt the pang. Not only would there be new messages, but often, in those early days of email, they were actual electronic letters from friends, replete with emotional life updates and unspooling narratives. Before texting, email was an efficient way to communicate, and the way we communicated was in sentences, paragraphs, fully developed thoughts. We hadn’t yet glimpsed the future where “k” or a thumbs-up emoji was considered communication.

I’m always excited when people tell me they’ve deleted an app: another tiny reduction in the amount of time those in my orbit will be spending on their phones. Infinitesimal, perhaps, but moving in the right direction. We’re tinkering with these devices that own our attention, we’re taking back a little bit of control.

But I’m particularly interested in modifications that can bring back some of the magic of pre-smartphone communication, when letter writing wasn’t quaint and voice mails were miracles. I’ve written about my nostalgia for phone booths, recommending we borrow some of the parameters they provided and bring them into this century (say, containing our private conversations to private spaces).

Even if we’re nostalgic for the olden days, it’s hard to reinstitute the old habits. Deleting email from your phone may release you from the compulsion to check it all the time, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to come home to an inbox full of satisfying missives from your friends. Chances are, they’ve been texting you all day, and your inbox is actually full of spam and bills.

In an attempt to reduce my phone’s grip on my life, I once suggested to a friend that each time we wanted to send a text to each other, we send a postcard instead. I think we tried this for a week before admitting that it was an inefficient way to chat. I was aware of the art-project nature of the proposition from the outset and didn’t figure our experiment would replace texting, but I hoped that the postcards would be so delightful we’d at least keep a parallel stream of slow communication going. It didn’t happen.

A few weeks ago, I placed a phone call to a friend without warning, someone I’d never spoken on the phone with before. It felt a little reckless, a little rude, which made me want to do it even more, because it seems ridiculous that calling someone should be in any way controversial. It should feel wonderful that someone wants to hear your voice, that they were thinking of you and wanted to connect.

While I have a few people that I speak to on the phone regularly, most people I consulted view an unbidden phone call as hostile. They assume there’s an emergency if they get a call from someone with whom they don’t have a regular phone relationship.

My recent surprise phone call was awkward, as I suspected it might be. People used to have the bandwidth to receive phone calls from anyone at any time, even without caller ID. That skill set has vanished, replaced perhaps by the ability to process multiple group texts blowing up at once. Now, even if it’s someone you are happy to hear from, a surprise call feels a little like someone popping by unannounced in the middle of the night.

There are lots of ideas for how to break phone addiction, but not as many for how to regain the romance of what I’m coming to think of as the slow-comms era, the second half of the 20th century when the phone and the mail were our main means of long-distance communication. The ache at the sight of an empty mailbox was, in my memory, more than balanced out by the ecstasy at the letter that finally arrived.

It isn’t just the sane cadence of correspondence that we’re missing now, though; it’s the care and attention we gave to it. We sat down and wrote letters and emails. We may have been cooking dinner or folding laundry while we talked on the phone, but we were literally on the hook for the length of the call. Our communication required presence and continued focus on the other person.

We can certainly re-establish this kind of concentration with some people — I have a close friend who detests texting, and he’d be thrilled if I dispensed with it in favor of phone calls — but it’s just too efficient to abandon altogether. A more conceivable option is to try to bring the kind of steady presence and full attention I miss to in-person conversations.

If the bulk of our remote communication is destined to be mediated by technology, then let’s see how irrelevant we can make our phones when we’re actually together. Turn off alerts, turn off the damn things altogether, and practice really being there. We think we’re naturals at eye contact, at listening before formulating a response, at sitting together in silence. But like phone-call readiness and entertaining voice mail delivery, those skills atrophy too.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Film and TV

• The lead prosecutor on Adams’s investigation wrote in his resignation letter to Bove: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

• Prominent New York Democrats, including the lieutenant governor and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called on Adams to resign. They accused him of adopting President Trump’s policies to escape legal trouble.

Trump Administration

Other Big Stories

CULTURE CALENDAR

📺 “The White Lotus”: Another beautiful location. Another collection of wealthy guests and weary employees. Another mysterious crime. Season 3 of this dark comedy from the writer-director Mike White, which begins Sunday on HBO and Max, takes place at a wellness resort on a gem of an island in the Gulf of Thailand. There will be guns, monkeys and beautiful sunsets. This season’s cast includes Walton Goggins, Parker Posey and Lisa of the K-pop group Blackpink.

Oatmeal Cookies With Chocolate Chips

If you adore the nubby chewiness of oatmeal raisin cookies but don’t think that anything qualifies as dessert if it doesn’t have chocolate, Genevieve Ko has the treat for you: oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips. Made with just enough batter to bind the oats, they’re a perfect showcase for the real star of the show, that generous handful of chocolate chips. Bake these over the weekend so you can nibble them all week long — stashed into lunchboxes, savored as a midafternoon snack, or for dessert, naturally, with a big glass of milk.

REAL ESTATE

No. 1 Auburn vs. No. 2 Alabama, men’s college basketball: Before today, the football-obsessed Southeastern Conference had never had a top-two matchup in basketball. How exciting, then, that the conference’s first is this showdown between in-state rivals. Auburn and Alabama have the two best offenses in the country, The Athletic’s Brendan Marks writes, which means this game isn’t just historic — it should also be really exciting. Today at 4 p.m. Eastern on ESPN

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Six months after the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke up to find his Moscow apartment under siege.

After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating everything to do with Mr. Navalny, down to a campaign button from the activist’s 2018 presidential run and a book written by his brother. Then, they arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.

His alleged crime: donating approximately $30 three years earlier to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, which the Kremlin considers an extremist group.

The death one year ago of Mr. Navalny, who once led tens of thousands of Russians against the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, dealt a serious blow to Russia’s already beleaguered opposition. Much of that movement has fled abroad amid a crackdown on dissent that began before President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but escalated with the war.

Even with Mr. Navalny dead and his movement in tatters, the authorities have been going after people with links to him and his organization inside Russia. Some see the continued prosecutions as a repressive Russian machine operating on autopilot. Others see a Moscow that views the opposition figure’s legacy as an enduring threat.

“They seem to be doing it more out of habit, rather than as a new campaign,” said Sergei S. Smirnov, the editor in chief of the exiled media outlet Mediazona.

But there are also senior officers in the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence service, who see themselves as strangling a political underground that presents the same risk to the Kremlin that the Bolsheviks posed before Russia’s monarchy was toppled in 1917, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian author and expert on the security establishment.

“The comparison to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in those people’s heads,” Mr. Soldatov said by phone from London. “Czarist Russia crumbled because of a big war and a major political party operating underground.”

The authorities have focused on a wide range of targets.

Last year, they went after journalists who remained in Russia and continued to cover Mr. Navalny’s ordeal, accusing them of cooperating with his organization.

Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Vision media outlet, was arrested last March on charges of “participating in an extremist organization.” She was accused of filming footage later used by Mr. Navalny’s associates on their media platforms.

A rare reporter to attend court hearings for Mr. Navalny shortly before his death, Ms. Favorskaya shot the last known video of him addressing the court via a video link from his Arctic prison colony the day before he died.

Russian authorities later arrested three more journalists and put them all on trial together. Artyom Kriger, one of the defendants, said he and others stood accused of filming interviews on the street in Russia for Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel.

There has yet to be a verdict.

Moscow also pursued charges against Mr. Navalny’s lawyers.

A court some 80 miles east of Moscow last month sentenced three lawyers for Mr. Navalny to as much as five and a half years in prison for passing correspondence from the incarcerated politician to his allies. The court ruled that it was tantamount to “participating” in Mr. Navalny’s illegal movement.

Mr. Navalny’s lawyers insisted they were being tried for routine legal work that includes passing on communications on behalf of imprisoned clients.

Cases seeking to punish ordinary Russians for making donations to Mr. Navalny’s team, some of them as paltry as $3, have also cropped up in courts.

Russian authorities have prosecuted at least 15 people on charges of funding an extremist organization for sending donations to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund. In the past few months, local media reported such charges against a physician from Biysk, an IT engineer from a St. Petersburg suburb and a political activist from Ufa.

“These are simply people who maybe just transferred 500 rubles a long time ago to the Anti-Corruption Fund,” Mr. Kotov, a wiry 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights organization, said, referring to a sum that is a little over $5.

By the time a donation case was opened against him, Mr. Kotov had long been on the radar of Russian authorities for rallying against Kremlin abuses.

In 2019, he was one of the first people to be arrested under a new Russian law restricting freedom of assembly at “unsanctioned protests.” (The law laid the groundwork for a near total protest ban that later helped pacify wartime Russia.)

He spent 18 months in prison, most of it at a harsh facility in Russia’s Vladimir region, about 60 miles east of Moscow.

Shortly after Mr. Kotov’s release, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, having recovered abroad in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. Within weeks, Mr. Navalny would end up in the same prison where Mr. Kotov had been jailed.

That year, a Russian court outlawed and liquidated Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, labeling it extremist. The ruling criminalized fund-raising from ordinary Russians that for years had kept the group afloat.

Mr. Navalny’s top aides took to YouTube and made an urgent plea for donations to keep the organization alive, saying they had worked out a secure system for supporters to transfer funds to a bank account outside Russia.

Mr. Kotov saw how Mr. Navalny had landed in the same prison where he had suffered, and felt a personal connection. He signed up to give a 500 ruble donation per month, believing the new platform was secure.

“It was my gesture to show that I didn’t agree with the liquidation of the Anti-Corruption Fund and that I supported Aleksei Navalny, who was in prison,” Mr. Kotov said. “I wanted his activities to continue.”

Half a year later, in January 2022, Mr. Kotov got nervous and stopped the donations. But by then, it was too late. Some of the transactions had revealed the Anti-Corruption Fund’s foreign bank information to Russian authorities by including a reference to the group’s name in the transfer data. The donations had not been secure.

The following month, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, prompting Mr. Kotov to go out in the streets of Moscow and protest the war. He was quickly arrested and spent the next month in jail. Two and a half years later, the authorities came to his apartment and arrested him for the six 500 ruble donations he made to the Mr. Navalny’s fund. He pleaded guilty.

A court released him under house arrest. At first, he thought he would stay in Russia. Other donors charged with the same crime had gotten away with fines.

But then, in December, a court in Moscow found Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old heart surgeon, guilty for sending 3,500 rubles in donations to Mr. Navalny’s foundation. His sentence: four years in prison.

Dr. Tishchenko had subscribed to recurring donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund well before Russian authorities outlawed it as extremist in 2021.

Dr. Tishchenko’s lawyer, Natalya Tikhonova, described the verdict as “too harsh for a person who saved thousands of lives and definitely never intended to cause any harm to Russia’s constitutional order.”

Mr. Kotov, wary of a return to Russian prison, fled to Lithuania this year.

In an interview from there, Mr. Kotov described how Mr. Navalny had represented hope “that Putin isn’t immortal, that at some point this regime will come to an end.”

“Aleksei Navalny was the symbol of a beautiful Russia of the future, a happy Russia of the future,” he said. “When that symbol was gone, I started to feel much worse.”

“But we’re still living,” he added. “We can’t give up.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago.

A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day.

Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday. The chancellor said Germany “would not accept” suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy — or directives to work with such a party.

“That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,” Mr. Scholz said. “Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.”

Attendees at Mr. Vance’s speech had been expecting to hear details of the Trump administration’s plans for Ukraine peace talks and NATO defense policies. On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine himself put the focus on the Ukraine war in his remarks, starkly laying out the threat from Russia’s battle-hardened military and making an impassioned appeal for Europeans to take their security into their own hands, including by forming an “Army of Europe” that would supplement U.S. power on the Continent.

His speech drew standing ovations, in contrast to Mr. Vance’s speech the day before.

Saturday’s sessions of the security conference were dominated by reactions, predominantly negative, to Mr. Vance’s speech.

Mr. Scholz was joined in his criticism by Friedrich Merz, his rival as the chancellor candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, who polls suggest is the favorite to be Germany’s next leader.

Mr. Vance spent much of his speech on Friday scolding Europeans for what he suggested were Soviet-style restrictions on free speech across the continent. On Saturday, Mr. Merz defended Germany’s laws that prohibit particular forms of speech, including hate speech and banned Nazi slogans, including on social media.

He also suggested that Mr. Trump’s administration was suppressing speech in the United States, after it moved on Friday to kick The Associated Press out of reporting pools and off Mr. Trump’s plane because the news agency refuses to go along with Mr. Trump’s directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

“We stick to the rules which are given by our democratic institutions,” Mr. Merz said. “Free speech remains free speech and remains part of our open, democratic society. And fake news, hate speech and offenses remain subject to legal restraints and controlled by independent courts.”

“I think I should say,” he added, “that in front of the events which took place in D.C. yesterday — we would never kick out the news agency, out of the press room of our chancellor.”

The comments were the latest in a series of critiques of Mr. Vance’s speech from German politicians before the election next Sunday. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats are running third or fourth in most polls. The AfD is running second, and its chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, met Mr. Vance on Friday in Munich.

No party in the German Parliament will join with the AfD to form a government. Parts of the AfD have been classified as extremist by German intelligence. Some of its members have been convicted of violating German law against the use of Nazi slogans. Others have been arrested for trying to overthrow the federal government.

That collective shunning of the AfD and other extremist parties is known as the firewall. Mr. Vance took aim at it on Friday, saying the AfD and other hard-right parties across Europe represented legitimate voter concerns about high levels of migration into European countries from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said.

The vice president also called restrictions on free speech a greater threat to Europe than military aggression from Russia or China.

Mr. Scholz chided Mr. Vance for that focus in a question-and-answer session after his speech. He was asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor in chief of The Economist, if Mr. Vance had made any points in his speech worth reflecting on.

“You mean all these very relevant discussions about Ukraine and security in Europe?” Mr. Scholz said, drawing laughter from the audience.

Then he addressed Mr. Vance’s critique of European speech restrictions directly.

“We should be very clear that free speech in Europe means that you are not attacking others in ways that are against legislation and laws we have in our country,” Mr. Scholz said. “And that’s the case. There is no difference between the digital world and the analog world to say it like this. And we have to be very clear that hate and all this, which is so bad for our societies, should be not the reality of public debate.”

Mr. Zelensky, in his remarks, focused on the question of European defense. He reiterated his position that the United States would be pivotal in securing any cease-fire in Ukraine but that it would need Europe to also step up. He pointed to what he said were intelligence warnings of Russian plans to conduct military exercises in Belarus next summer. He noted that Russia had invaded Ukraine after deploying troops to Belarus under the guise of exercises.

“Europe just needs to come together and start acting in a way that no one can say ‘No’ to Europe, boss it around, or treat it like a pushover,” Mr. Zelensky said.

In a conversation with the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour after his speech, Mr. Zelensky also said that Ukraine needed to be at the table at any cease-fire talks, and he asked to meet with President Trump before any meeting that Mr. Trump has with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“It’s up to them, they can discuss anything they want, but not Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said.