Jessie writes: This dispute arose during a game of 20 Questions: Does Legolas from “The Lord of the Rings” use magic? I say no. He has inherent elfin capabilities, such as a keen sense of sight and agility — like how birds have hollow bones for flight. My partners believe all elves are magical. One fancies themself an expert because they read “The Silmarillion.”

Your partner may know their “L.O.T.R.” lore, but can they conjure the fantasy author George R.R. Martin for comment? Well, I can, thanks to my natural ability of shamelessness. Martin writes: “Legolas is a skilled archer, but I don’t think it’s magic. If all elves had magical abilities, all of them would be able to do the sorts of sorcery we see Galadriel and Glorfindel perform.” He notes that Legolas can walk on the surface of snow, but this may speak more to your hollow-bone theory. We just won’t know until we kill and dissect him. Which we won’t, for that would destroy the small-“m” magic — the beguiling ambiguity — that makes fiction so fascinating.

Mr. Williams, found guilty of murder 21 years ago, has been fighting his conviction for decades, and this year he won the support of the prosecutor’s office that brought the original case. But the state attorney general maintained that Mr. Williams, now 55, was guilty, and the legal battle between the state and the county has been playing out for months in Missouri’s courts.

Combined with the effort by Congress to force TikTok to cut its ties with its Chinese ownersrich 888, the initiative is a major addition to the administration’s efforts to seal off what it views as major cybervulnerabilities for the United States. But the effort has, in effect, begun to drop a digital iron curtain between the world’s two largest economies, which only two decades ago were declaring that the internet would bind them together.