Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

The most recent round of polls suggests that Josh Stein, the Democratic nominee for governor in North Carolina, is ahead of his Republican adversary, Mark Robinson, by nearly 16 points. That surprises exactly no one. Robinson has always been a ridiculous candidate for the highest office in the country's ninth most populous state, and since he won the Republican nomination in March, he has been rocked by revelations about his past statements and behavior. The only people who have fled his sinking ship faster than voters are his own campaign staff, which, to go by some reports, is down to a doomed crew that could fit into a dinghy.

But his spectacularly turbulent voyage casts Stein's smooth sailing as a matter of extraordinary luck when, in fact, Stein and his aides have consistently demonstrated the kind of smarts that might have given them an edge even if Robinson weren't such a disaster. I've been especially impressed with their ad campaign. It should be remembered and emulated long after Nov. 5.

Not that most or even many future candidates will have opponents who give them a feast of material to rival the buffet that Robinson spread out for Stein. Before Robinson emerged as a possible contender for governor, he had a habit -- actually, more a vocation -- of using social media and public appearances to stake out extreme right-wing positions in the brashest, meanest way possible. There's video of him -- on social media, on various stages -- ranting about all the evil in America and all the evildoers to be vanquished. It's strangely mesmerizing to watch.

And the people working with the Stein campaign clearly watched all of it. But while that's Politics 101, they also did something less obvious: In a disciplined fashion, they decided to get as far out of Robinson's way as possible.

In many of the 14 television commercials that the Stein campaign has produced since its ad campaign began in June, Robinson is the star, with Stein refraining from even a fleeting voice-over cameo to denounce whatever ugliness Robinson is shown uttering.

That's what's so effective. Any political consultant with any acumen and experience will tell you how jaded voters are. They've seen attack ads galore and regard most politicians as sharks; Candidate A's screed about Candidate B is ipso facto untrustworthy. And suspiciously short, disjointed, context-free snippets of Candidate B seeming to say something untoward during an unguarded moment also emit the stench of political trickery. Viewer beware.

But Candidate B shouting his cruelest message when he means to be seen and heard? That's what the Stein campaign had on Robinson. And they recognized what treasure it was.

The 16-point spread in the polls is undoubtedly misleading in a purple state where Donald Trump only barely edged out Joe Biden in 2020, and the manager of Stein's campaign, Jeff Allen, was reluctant to look back on Stein's ads and their impact because, he said, he's focused on the remaining days until Nov. 5. "This race will be close," he said, "so we're not taking anything for granted."

But he said that in putting together the Stein ads, a collaboration between the campaign and Ralston Lapp Guinn Media, "It really came down to a question of -- are we going to run just clips or put a little bit more spin on the ball and editorialize a bit? We came down on: Show Mark Robinson in his own words."

Perhaps the most devastating of those words are from a Facebook video, posted by Robinson, in which he thunders that abortion is "about killing a child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up -- and not get pregnant by your own choice -- because you felt like getting your groove thing on."

The Stein campaign used at least a portion of that tirade in ad after ad, including one of its first two, which were released on June 4. Soon after, polls showed Stein moving ahead of Robinson in what had seemed to be an essentially even race. Throughout that month, I saw the ad, titled "Listen," again and again. My neighbors in North Carolina brought it up in conversation.

And political analysts said that it felt like a turning point. Paul Shumaker, a veteran Republican strategist in North Carolina, explained why: "The skirt ad is not about abortion," he told me, adding that it's about a lack of respect for women. Shumaker recounted that a Republican woman, after seeing the ad, told him: "I spent most of my professional career trying to keep men from pulling my skirt down."

The ad released in tandem with "Listen," titled "Keep," doesn't include Robinson but, like "Listen," omits Stein's voice and words in favor of having other people vouch for his law-and-order bona fides as North Carolina's attorney general. That's another way of getting around voters' cynicism, and the portrait of Stein implicitly acknowledges (and attempts to refute) many voters' perceptions of Democrats as soft on crime. So while "Listen" fingers Robinson as an extremist, "Keep" frames Stein as anything but.

And it does so in large part by showing him talking and looking comfortable with men and women in law-enforcement uniforms. In politics, images are often more persuasive than words. That's another bit of wisdom that Stein and his impressive campaign have embraced.

For the Love of Sentences

The Times's critics have been on a roll. In "What Good Is Great Literature," A.O. Scott observed: "Every great artist is a potential art monster; every canonization is a cancellation waiting to happen." Also: "The great books are the ones you're supposed to feel bad about not having read. Great writers are the ones who matter whether you read them or not." (Thanks to Scott Williams of Salt Lake City and David O'Connor of Bozeman, Mont., for drawing attention to those sentences.)

Priya Krishna poked fun at the crustacean pretensions of the restaurant Carbone in Manhattan: "Servers boasted about how the langoustines -- dressed in garlic, parsley, lemon and butter, with a subtle, briny undertow -- had flown first-class from Norway that morning. The less exciting shrimp cocktail may have gotten stuck in economy." (Craig Kuehl, Manhattan, and Corrie Sias, San Rafael, Calif.)

Dwight Garner, appraising "Paper of Wreckage," a new oral history of The New York Post, explained the slender, easy-to-carry tabloid's niche, vis-à-vis multisection broadsheets, in the Big Apple in decades past: "It was what you devoured on the subway, if you were not a Daily News reader, before you had a cellphone. You read The Times on the subway only if you knew origami." (Rabbi Jonathan Gerard, Durham, N.C.)

Jason Farago defended an artistic movement against its detractors: "If you find Monet, Renoir, Degas too pretty and popular -- if you think Impressionism is the artistic equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte -- I want you to taste the espresso beneath the foam." (LeighAnn Howitt, Bluffton, S.C., and Veronica Stinson, Hubley, Nova Scotia)

And Leah Greenblatt traced the trajectory of Victoria's Secret: "Even the most casual observer likely knows by now that the VS brand has fallen, a thonged Icarus, from the precipitous heights of its 1990s and 2000s heyday." (John Sabine, Dallas)

Also in The Times, Victor Mather described the furred and masked mayhem outside the house of a Washington State woman whose next-door critters grew perhaps too accustomed to the food she left out for them. "A video shows a multitude of raccoons milling around, interacting with each other, climbing tree stumps: generally looking like an impatient crowd waiting for a Las Vegas buffet to open up. Except for the climbing of tree stumps, maybe," Victor wrote. (James Kidney, Alexandria, Va., and Marcia Ringel, Ridgewood, N.J., among others)

And Carlos Lozada responded -- at once coolly and viscerally -- to Trump's talk of immigrants: "The wall purported to protect America; deportations are meant to purify it." (Mary Allard, Rutland, Vt.)

In The Toronto Star, Janice Kennedy charted the wages of aging: "There's the physical decline, unimaginable back in younger days. There's the consignment to irrelevance, also inconceivable once. And of course there's that great departure lounge where we've ended up, knowing our flight won't be canceled but hoping for a delay." (Pamela Moura, Toronto)

On the NPR program "Fresh Air," Etgar Keret questioned some virtue signaling: "When you change your Facebook picture to the flag of Ukraine, you're not being part of history. You're taking a selfie with history." (Jim Gasperini, Berkeley, Calif.)

David Rothkopf, the host of the podcast Deep State Radio, beheld Trump's descent this week from "being periodically adrift" to something stranger and more savage: "He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon." (Mary Azoy, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Steven Rauch, Claremont, Calif., among many others)

In The Washington Post, Ron Charles introduced a few recent recruits to extreme MAGA antics: "Just when you think there are no more seats at the Mad Hatter's tea party, these folks scooch over and make room." (Dan Payne, San Francisco)

And Chuck Culpepper reflected on the free-for-all for dominance among college football teams this year: "It's a season loaded with faith, hope and parity." (Jim Kazmierczak, Madison, Wisc.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in "For the Love of Sentences," please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I'm Reading and Listening To

"For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying," Bill Adair, a fellow professor of mine at Duke, wrote in The Atlantic last week. Bill would know: He's the founder of PolitiFact, he teaches a course at Duke called Lying in Politics, and he's the author of a just-published book, "Beyond the Big Lie," from which the Atlantic article was excerpted. I'll interview Bill at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on Thursday, Oct. 24. Please join us if you live nearby; the details are here.

I continue to love The Washington Post's "Who Is Government?" series, in which an all-star cast of writers pays tribute to unsung civil servants. It has been the source of many recent For the Love of Sentences entries, but this week, I thought I'd just direct you to the entirety of Sarah Vowell's profile of Pamela Wright of the National Archives.

The guitar dominates pop rock, but I'm always happiest when the piano gives it a run for its money, as it does in one of my favorite songs of the past decade, "Harmony Hall," by Vampire Weekend, which mines some catchy-sumptuous lode all its own. The ivories tinkle throughout it but also get a dedicated showcase for one discrete stretch. I love it when pop rock songs do that -- carve out a kind of pause in which the keyboards shine. That happens in a minor, beguiling way toward the end of Fleetwood Mac's "Hold Me" (which begins, briefly, with piano alone) and in a major, rollicking manner after the halfway point and again at the end of "Head Over Heels," by The Go-Go's. In the hard-charging, headbanging "Painted by Numbers," by The Sounds, the keyboards are like a moment of belated contemplation before the fury resumes and exhausts itself. Then there's "Uncertain Smile," by The The, a conventional indie rocker that all of a sudden segues, midtune, into a rousing and then lulling piano recital that lasts a few minutes. I highly recommend it.

On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note

Sometimes I'm glad that our dogs can't talk to us -- or, more specifically, that Regan can't tell me what's on her mind -- because I'm not sure I'd want to hear it:

"Filling my bowl with dry kibble while you roast a salmon fillet for yourself? You're a monster."

"I'm not actually kissing you, stupid. There's a bagel crumb on your lower lip."

"What's the point of bringing that damned ball back to you if you're just going to hurl it to the other side of the yard again? I'm not Sisyphus." (I imagine Regan as a lover of Greek mythology who regards the peanut butter I slather around her heartworm tablet as a Trojan horse.)

But over the past week, I've ardently wished that she could explain what she's feeling, where she hurts, what she needs. She started limping. Badly at certain times, barely at others, in a somewhat erratic pattern that deepened the mystery. She never stopped chasing squirrels, but I did have to help her up the stairs one night. There was a newly pronounced asymmetry in her walk. There was a new, heavy weight in my heart.

Was she suffering from a sprain? A pull? Arthritis? The vet has placed a bet on the last, and we've started Regan on monthly injections that should help. They may work so well, the vet said, that I have to keep Regan from running too much and leaping too high and far. They may fail, in which case I have to keep Regan from being too still and getting too stiff.

I shall read the signs, make the adjustments, hope I get it right. I shall continue with Regan's daily glucosamine supplement, coupled with another pill the vet recommends. I shall bear in mind that at 10⅔ years old, Regan is entering a phase of life when things will go wrong. And I shall cling to this: Even though she can't describe her aches and ailments, she can't mistake my concern. My actions, not my words, make that clear.