Plates of oysters, prawns and sushi sat on Ashwin Reynolds’s table. A singer performed soothing R&B, bartenders poured sparkling wine, and the guests in this suite at a horse racing track wore fitted suits and fancy floral headpieces.

As a child who used to record horse racing bets for his grandfather, Mr. Reynolds, who is 52 and owns a construction company, never could have imagined enjoying such opulence at a racetrack in Durban. Until South Africa’s apartheid system was dismantled in the early 1990s, people of color like him were barred from such elite spaces.

But there he was on Saturday, alongside a racially diverse crowd at Durban July, the most lucrative horse racing event in Africa. In 2021, he became the first person of color to own the horse that won the main race.

This year is the 130th running of the Durban July horse races, in this sprawling city on South Africa’s south coast. The daylong event has become about much more than racing. The music, fashion, food and ostentatious displays of wealth make it possible to briefly forget the economic and social hardship that continues to define life for many South Africans.

More than a dozen V.I.P. tents, known as marquees, sprawl across the grassy infield of the 2,800-meter, pear-shaped track. The marquees charge hundreds of dollars to book a table offering sleek banquettes, bottle service and buffets. Some marquees become hubs for networking, gathering people from particular industries like fashion, music and politics. Up-and-coming artists may rub elbows with an established producer; entrepreneurs seeking government contracts may try to butter up politicians.

Each year, attendees are encouraged to dress to a theme. This year’s was “country allure.”

Many Black attendees see Durban July as a celebration of their place in high society in a country where, for hundreds of years, they were robbed of resources and prevented from building wealth.

This is no longer “just a white man’s event,” said Teddy Geldart, a South African television producer, sporting a white feathery top as he lounged on a sofa in a marquee where the American R&B singer Bryson Tiller was the headline act.

“It’s now ours,” Mr. Geldart, 40, added. “That’s a great feeling, that we can enjoy luxury in our own country.”

During apartheid, nonwhite spectators were allowed to attend Durban July, but they were confined to a small section of the grandstand known as the silver ring, said Anita Akal, 83, who was in her 55th year photographing the event. White guests sat in the gold ring, near the finish line.

But spectators at that time could still move around and mingle across racial lines, an uncommon display for the apartheid era, said David Thiselton, a South African horse racing journalist who has been attending since 1990.

Today, the grandstands mostly attract those interested in horse racing, who buy an $18 ticket and don’t necessarily wear the same elaborate outfits as those who come to party. Many in the grandstand crowd are South Africans of Indian descent, a community in which horse racing is wildly popular. Behind the grandstands, inside the ring where the horses parade before races, most people are white; they still own most of the horses. The V.I.P. hospitality areas in the infield tend to be mostly Black.

“It’s an event that everybody leaves everything behind for this day — the racial tension, the bickering, the fights that we have,” said Vishal Ramlakan, a 50-year-old from Durban who works in trucking and was attending for the third time.

Muzi Yeni, 39, said he was pleased that more Black people were attending Durban July than in previous years, but he wished that more of them were interested in the racing. Mr. Yeni, a jockey for 22 years, is one of a handful of Black jockeys at Durban July. Diversification of the ranks of jockeys has been slow, he said, in part because most trainers are white and they may not always give Black jockeys a chance.

Three Black jockeys have won Durban July’s main race, and Mr. Yeni said he hoped to add his name to that list to show other Black riders that they could do it, too. (Mr. Yeni finished seventh in Saturday’s race.)

One Black attendee who came for the racing was Doris Mataboge, 55, attending for the fifth time. She grew up in a rural area and developed a love for horses from seeing them in the fields. Ms. Mataboge, who teaches nursing, said she bet about $1.85 and, for the first time, won, getting just under $10 after the horse she backed was victorious.

Before the races started, the crowd focused its attention on a group of models.

One of them, Karabo Bapela, 18, said the event is helping her gain confidence.

“We’re not that good yet,” she said.

And she does not take the opportunity for granted.

“It’s very freeing to be able to do this,” she said, “knowing that our grandmothers, back in the day, couldn’t go out in public or hang out with people of a different color.”

The filmmakers behind the “Minions” franchise have had one of their greatest fears come true: The most critically lauded film of the series has performed the worst at the box office, at least on its opening weekend.

“Minions and Monsters,” beloved for its ode to old Hollywood, earned a 91 percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes but generated $36.4 million in sales in North America for the three-day holiday weekend and $61.4 million for the five days since its July 1 opening, according to Universal Pictures. That was a 62 percent decline from 2024, the last time a “Minions” movie was in theaters.

The PG-rated animated film from Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment is still No. 1 for the weekend. But its opening ticket sales came in far lower than the earlier movies in the franchise.

This is the latest of the “Despicable Me/Minions” films to be released around the July 4 holiday, with “Minions: The Rise of Gru” from 2022 hitting a high point with a $123 million in domestic ticket sales on its opening weekend.

This year, the film was contending with the holiday landing on a Saturday, which often leads to a depression in the box office as moviegoers choose fireworks and barbecues over movie theaters. Another factor may have been the World Cup, which Universal used as a significant promotional vehicle for the movie with a television spot featuring the French soccer star Kylian Mbappé facing off against the Minions villains on the soccer pitch. And then there is “Toy Story 5,” which in its third week, continues to perform well, clearly siphoning off some of the family audience with an additional $31 million. Its total gross is now $764 million worldwide.

Still, “Minions and Monsters” brought in $85 million internationally, putting its total gross at $160 million. And with a CinemaScore of an A- and a budget of $85 million, the movie is still likely to be a moneymaker for the studio.

Overall, the “Despicable Me/Minions” franchise has grossed over $5.6 billion, making it the most successful animated series in history.

Hollywood has been having its best summer at the box office since the Covid-19 pandemic, despite softer than expected numbers from “Minions” this weekend and “Supergirl” last weekend. Theaters in the United States and Canada were expected to sell about $119 million in tickets in total this weekend, according to Rentrak, which compiles box office data, down around 24 percent from the same weekend last year when Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” dominated the market with a $92 million three-day opening. Still, according to Rentrak, the summer is on track to cross $4 billion in ticket sales.

The marketing campaign for “Minions” had 75 promotional partners, including Wendy’s, King’s Hawaiian bread and Built protein bars, which created a mystery flavor bar inspired by the film’s villain Goomi.

This is the first “Minions” movie to be solely directed by Pierre Coffin, the voice of the “Minions” and a co-director of three of the movies in the series.

The film centers on one Minion in particular, James, an artist with a passion for filmmaking. Much of the usual “Minion” mayhem still exists in the film but the movie has been lauded for its original creative voice. The New York Times called it “the best of the bunch,” describing it as “surprisingly uncynical, while allowing room for more real jokes and imagination.”

In an earlier interview, Mr. Coffin voiced his concern that the high praise might not result in strong box office performance. “I’m scared that it’s going to be the opposite, because we’re getting really good reviews,” he said. “And I’m thinking, what does that mean? Does that mean the movie is not going to be successful?”

Next weekend, Disney will unveil the live-action version of “Moana,” another family title, which could again eat into the “Minions” box office potential.

“Young Washington,” a patriotic war drama from Angel Studios that depicts the early years of George Washington, earned $20.8 million for a third-place finish this weekend, according to Rentrak.

Warner Bros.’ “Supergirl,” from its DC Studios, dropped a staggering 74 percent in its second weekend of release, earning $9.6 million for a fourth-place finish. Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” rounded out the top five with $6 million in its fourth weekend of release. Its total gross stands at $105 million.

Wikipedia is in peril.

In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site’s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia’s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.

In Wikipedia’s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.

The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.

For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive — diplomatically, of course.

So it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia’s chief executive in January, after stints as the U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, at the State Department, at the National Security Council and on Wall Street.

In a career full of high-wire acts — helping to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba — being the custodian of one of the world’s 10 most visited websites could be Ms. Meehan’s trickiest task. The trilingual former public servant is the first with her background in the Wikimedia job, succeeding mostly women from fields like law, journalism and Planned Parenthood.

Ms. Meehan will not say Wikipedia is at war — not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq, in an actual war zone where she witnessed “the supreme cruelty of human beings.”

But she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence.

“Wikipedia underpins everything that we have on the internet,” she said in her first interview in the role. “It is beloved, it is credible; in increasingly polarized times, it is seen as a trustworthy source.”

It is also, she said, at an inflection point.

“How do we keep this project alive?” she asked.

A fight with the right

Mr. Musk has railed against Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” and “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” He has protested his entry and urged his followers to withhold donations over the foundation’s diversity initiatives.

The tech mogul is one in a chorus of conservatives calling the reference site a hotbed of liberal bias. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, expressed “alarm” about both Wikipedia’s purported ideological lean and claims that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives. David Sacks, recently the Trump administration’s A.I. czar, weighed in. So did Tucker Carlson, a popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.

Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.

Last year, a Trump administration official made inquiries into the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status. A Republican-led congressional oversight committee initiated an investigation in August, demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and produce any evidence of influence from foreign operatives or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquests last year and had no updates.

To de-escalate the antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team are addressing misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, with independent contributors distilling facts through open debate and agreement. Elected arbitration committees handle dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but steers clear of content decisions.

There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation. Just the Wikipedians — nearly 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like “Dr. Blofeld” and “WooHooKitty.”

“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s messy, it’s loud, it often works.”

Ms. Meehan has been hauling her message to Capitol Hill, where she’s distributed personally meaningful printouts of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, nearly doubling its spending to $174,300 in the most recent fiscal year and retaining the Holland & Knight firm last spring for $150,000 a quarter.

“We are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “These are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.”

To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.

“More dialogue, frankly, is what’s needed in this moment,” she said. “So the door is open.”

Gorging on a data buffet

For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site’s most acute threat, but its most existential one is artificial intelligence. They have resisted the idea of integrating the technology, calling it “truly ghastly” (or, simply, “yuck”).

The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.

Exhibit A: Grokipedia, a rival built by Mr. Musk and edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. It has no public edit history and lifts liberally from Wikipedia while also inventing errors (including several in its profile of Ms. Meehan).

A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia’s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan — whose favorite entry describes “tsundoku,” the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread — is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.

Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year’s revenue.

This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end — which accounts for nearly a third of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests — about 1.5 billion daily.

“Our infrastructure is not free, and when scrapers come in and bulk-download, it really takes a toll,” Ms. Meehan said. “There is a literal dollar cost to that behavior.”

A global challenge

Wikipedia sprawls across 345 different editions. The English one is by far the most active, with nearly 115,000 contributors, while others, in languages like the western African Kusaal and the Taiwanese Seediq, have smaller reach.

In countries like China, Myanmar and North Korea, Wikipedia is blocked entirely. Turkey banned the site for nearly three years until 2020. Wikimedia negotiated with the Indonesian government this year over blackout threats.

Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened. A pediatrician in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 14 years in prison after editing pages about government surveillance and a women’s rights activist. Belarus has detained several editors, sending one to a penal colony for more than a year after he edited a post about murdered journalists. Curbs in free expression have been rising globally, affecting Wikipedia and its volunteers, a foundation spokesman wrote in an email.

Governments are also targeting Wikipedia content specifically. Of the 934 requests the foundation received last year to take down or alter content (it granted two), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.

Most were from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow has repeatedly accused the site of violating a sweeping censorship law that criminalized content deemed to “discredit” Russia’s military (Wikimedia refuses to pay the associated fines). A Russian clone of Wikipedia called Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals managed to infiltrate some Wikipedia citations.

Wikimedia is expanding its human rights team, a division of the legal department that safeguards volunteers from digital and physical threats. The foundation recently deployed an anti-doxxing initiative offering contributors more anonymity; it has also connected Wikipedians to local evacuation and extraction services.

Defending volunteers and projects consumes 32 percent of the foundation’s budget. Wikimedia’s litigation costs have doubled since 2020, in part because there are more cases, which new privacy and speech regulations are making more complex.

“A core component of what we do is preserving freedom to information,” Ms. Meehan said. “That will never change, that commitment to advocating for those rights, and to helping to protect within our limited means editors who engage in that project and are persecuted for that very reason.”

A search for new recruits

Wikipedia’s future has often seemed precarious — its entry titled “Predictions of the end of Wikipedia” is nearly nine years old. But especially now, with so many dangers at its gate and fewer people joining its ranks, the site cannot afford to grow stale.

The foundation wants to entice a new generation of contributors that is not predominantly white, male and graying. Training sessions to demystify editing, for example, drew one 25-year-old Vietnamese American volunteer who has created hundreds of pages in two years about zeitgeisty topics like the “swag gap” and the “performative male.”

In five months, Ms. Meehan has met more than 1,100 such Wikipedians across four continents. Unlike most modern content creators, they “aren’t out there looking to be the next influencer or famous person,” she said. When they congregate, as on a recent rainy weekend in San Francisco, they want to discuss the finer points of A.I. detection and disappearing databases.

Wikipedians aren’t flashy, but they are tough. Two of them tackled a gunman at a conference last fall. Ms. Meehan fits in, always wearing a simple black Ironman watch, after the fancy Baume & Mercier timepiece she purchased when she first joined the foreign service was stolen 20 years ago in Colombia by armed assailants.

Seeing the depravity of war and the worst of humanity fundamentally changed her, she said, compelling her to “run toward the light” and seek out “the antithesis of the bad.” That’s Wikipedia, she said — an experiment that will keep fighting to push society toward conciliation over conflict.

“In the world right now, where politicization is on the rise, where there’s disagreement on facts, where people can’t even engage civilly in a conversation, it’s OK to disagree,” she said. “But let’s come together and have a conversation based on fact and see where that takes us.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s slain supreme leader, had seemed immovable for decades, a man whose authority had become so deeply woven into Iran’s political and religious life that imagining the country without him felt almost impossible.

Now Tehran — the capital from which he ruled, where he was killed and which had shaped his life — is the center of his final journey, filled with mourners for funeral ceremonies taking place across several days, which are part farewell, part spectacle and part turning point.

In the days leading up to the first public mourning, the city changed. First gradually, and then all at once, in the way cities often change before moments of consequence.

Families from provincial towns rolled into Tehran, joining masses who revered Ayatollah Khamenei as patriarch and guardian of the Islamic republic, an order that so many others had long opposed while suffering under its deep repression. Foreign officials, many from authoritarian nations, militia members and religious leaders flew from all over the world, reflecting both Iran’s global reach and its distance from the West.

We traveled there as well, the first visit by New York Times journalists to the country since before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February and the government cracked down brutally on protests that started in December. We found a country trying to project strength and stability but pervaded by uncertainty.

We arrived in Tehran, a dense city of around nine million that spreads outward in a sprawl of apartment blocks, glass towers and tree-lined boulevards, with neighborhoods that shift in character from one district to the next. Beside the pomp and circumstance, war-damaged buildings stood scarred along major roads and daily life was still shaped by water shortages and electricity blackouts. Families who lost loved ones in the crackdown were still living with grief — and hoping for justice.

As more people arrived, Ayatollah Khamenei’s presence seemed to expand with them. Across major highways and narrow alleys, in small cafes and sprawling bookstores, portraits of him began to cover the city.

Some show him young, with a dark beard and a stern expression. Others portray the older man many Iranians had grown used to seeing over decades, his beard turned white with age. In some, Ayatollah Khamenei appears beside Mojtaba, his son and successor, the pairing feeling less like a portrait than the passing of one chapter into the next.

The funeral preparations unfolded with the choreography of a major state event. Security checkpoints, organized transportation, public announcements, carefully arranged ceremonial spaces.

We were granted restricted access to the funeral ceremonies by the Iranian government, which closely controlled our movements, and which required a translator and guide to accompany us. It was a quiet reminder of how closely the story itself was being choreographed, and who was permitted to tell it.

The streets, too, were managed and staged.

Along Valiasr Street, where traffic usually performs its daily ritual of impatience and frustration, movement slowed as the roads gradually surrendered to the funeral preparations. Workers built stations to feed and give water to those arriving to mourn him.

Loudspeakers sent chants and laments through the air, and praised the supreme leader who was killed at the onset of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

A little farther away, at Enghelab Square, another version of Tehran moved beneath a giant mourning billboard.

Young women with uncovered hair and cigarettes in hand, and men with pierced ears, crossed paths with conservative women in black chadors carrying Iranian flags and praying quietly. It was an image that seemed to contain the contradictions of Iran itself: a nation Ayatollah Khamenei had shaped for decades, and one that, in his final years, had increasingly pushed back against the boundaries of his oppressive rule.

We lingered for almost two hours at the square, where most people were unwilling to talk to us, wary of foreign media. We asked to interview a woman with blond hair, a dark blue denim skirt, full makeup and a hijab barely resting at the edge of her hair. She smiled softly and said, “I am afraid I won’t be able to say what’s in my heart.”

At the square, some people stopped to photograph the giant statue of a clenched fist. Others kept walking and driving by. Every evening, life continued beneath the preparations, ordinary rhythms folding themselves into something much larger. Street vendors calling out, motorcycles weaving between cars, tea glasses clinking in small cafes.

Beneath the banners and portraits was another Tehran, a city worn by months of pressure.

A regional war with Israel last year compounded a financial malaise exacerbated by sanctions. Those economic frustrations boiled over into mass protests beginning in late December that the authorities crushed, killing thousands. Then came the war with the United States and Israel, taking the lives of young children at school, damaging historic sites like Golestan Palace and leaving residents checking the skies and refreshing news alerts. The past months had seemed to compress multiple eras of strain into a single season.

And states — especially autocratic ones like Iran’s — often answer uncertainty with scale.

So this exhausted capital has suddenly found itself transformed into the stage for a burial spectacle of extraordinary proportions.

At the Grand Mosalla, a sprawling mosque complex in Tehran, tens of thousands arrived this weekend dressed almost entirely in black to pray for and pay their respects to the Shiite Muslim patriarch. They cried and wailed openly. They struck their chests and heads in ritual mourning. Some sat on the ground, weary and stunned.

“Khamenei was the foundation of our lives,” said Mohamed Soleimani, from Tehran, who sat at the mosque’s grounds, head bowed, holding a photo of Mojtaba Khamenei.

Grief also gave way to anger. Fists rose in the air. Chants of revenge filled the space — directed at Israel, at the United States and, repeatedly, at one man whose name was taken up again and again by the crowd: Donald J. Trump.

The funeral, which will continue in the coming days through Tehran, other Iranian cities and even neighboring Iraq, seems designed to do something larger than simply bury a leader.

It is an effort to project continuity at a moment when the country itself seems caught in a period of transition and uncertainty.

So Iran moves forward for now, beneath commemorative banners and enormous portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei, still trying to understand what exactly is ending — and what is taking shape in its place.