Aurelia Butler

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    Ye Is Sued for Hostile Work Environment at Donda Academy and Yeezy

    A former employee sued the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, claiming a hostile work environment at Yeezy, his fashion brand, and Donda Academy, his private school.Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, was sued Tuesday by a former employee who accused him of discrimination and creating a hostile work environment by calling Adolf Hitler “great,” disparaging Jews and saying that “gay people are not true Christians.”The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Trevor Phillips, who says he was hired in November 2022, around the time a series of antisemitic remarks publicly made by Ye lost the artist his major-label record deal and put his businesses in jeopardy.Phillips was initially hired to oversee “projects related to growing cotton” and other plants in an effort to make Yeezy, Ye’s fashion brand, “self-sustainable,” the lawsuit said, and then went on to work for Donda Academy, Ye’s private school in Southern California.Phillips’s lawsuit claims that Ye made antisemitic comments in front of staff members at Donda Academy, including, “the Jews are out to get me” and “the Jews are stealing all my money.” After Adidas ended its decade-long partnership with Ye over his public remarks, the lawsuit claimed, the rapper told Phillips: “The Jews are working with Adidas to freeze up my money to try and make me broke!”The lawsuit claims that Ye treated Black employees at Donda Academy, including Phillips, “considerably worse than white employees.”Representatives for Ye and Donda Academy did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in April

    “Fallout,” “Girls State” and a “Bluey” special are streaming.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Fallout’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 11This sardonic postapocalyptic action-adventure series combines elements from different games within the larger “Fallout” video game franchise, which since its debut in 1997 has delighted gamers with a mix of rich storytelling and wry wit. The series has Ella Purnell playing Lucy, an exemplary citizen in an underground bunker colony on an Earth ravaged by nuclear warfare. When circumstances force Lucy to the surface, the sunny optimism she learned from her father (Kyle MacLachlan) is tested by her encounters with scavengers, mutants and heavily armed soldiers in robotic armor. Developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (the team behind “Westworld”) with the showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (the co-writer of “Captain Marvel”) and Graham Wagner (a “Portlandia” writer), “Fallout” aims to be the rollicking, irreverent counter to all the dour end-of-the-world TV shows.Also arriving:April 1“House” Season 1April 4“Música”April 5“How to Date Billy Walsh”“Alex Rider” Season 3April 12“Apartment 404”April 18“Dinner With the Parents” Season 1“Going Home With Tyler Cameron” Season 1April 25“Them: The Scare” Season 2Cecilia Bartin in “Girls State,” a documentary directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss on Apple TV+.Whitney Curtis/Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Girls State’Starts streaming: April 5The 2020 documentary “Boys State” followed a group of Texas high schoolers at a politics-themed summer camp. For this sequel, the directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine cover a similar camp from a different perspective, embedding with Missouri high school girls as they run for office, draft resolutions and hear court cases, emulating the functions of a state government. This particular edition of Missouri’s Girls State was held on the same campus as Boys State, inviting direct comparison between the programs (which differ in their levels of rigor). It also happened not long after the draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision was leaked. As with the earlier film, Moss and McBaine avoid turning their subjects into simplistic heroes or villains. Instead, “Girls State” honors these bright, concerned young ladies’ earnest interest in making friends and becoming better leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Klaus Mäkelä to Lead Chicago Symphony Orchestra

    He will be the youngest music director in the orchestra’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top American ensemble.The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has been led for decades by conducting titans including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti, announced Tuesday that its next music director would be Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old Finnish conductor whose charisma and clarity have fueled his rapid rise in classical music.When he begins a five-year contract in 2027 at 31, Mäkelä will be the youngest maestro in the ensemble’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top orchestra in the United States.Mäkelä, who will become music director designate immediately, said in an interview that he did not think his age was relevant, noting that he had been conducting for more than half his life, beginning when he was 12.“I don’t think about it,” he said. “Music doesn’t really have any age.”Mäkelä, who will also take over as chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2027, said he was joining the Chicago Symphony because it has “that intensity — that same sound from the past.”“You felt as if anything you would ask, they could actually improve and do more,” he said, recalling his recent guest appearances there. “For a conductor, that is a very, very special feeling because you see that there really are no limits to what you can achieve.”Mäkelä making his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic in December 2022.Chris LeeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jazz at Lincoln Center’s New Season Includes Tribute to Bayard Rustin

    The civil rights activist’s life and legacy will be honored in a 2024-25 lineup that will also include spotlights on jazz history, and a rising star to warm up November.Jazz at Lincoln Center announced its 2024-25 concert season on Tuesday, which will include performances that celebrate the 20th anniversary of the center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, a tribute to the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and concerts by Grammy Award-winning artists.The season will run from Sept. 19, 2024, to June 14, 2025, and will begin with Hot Jazz and Swing, in which the music director Loren Schoenberg will guide the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra through revitalized arrangements of 1920s and ’30s tunes.On Oct. 18-19, Bryan Carter, a drummer and composer, will lead the Jazz at Pride Orchestra in honoring the life and legacy of Rustin.Other nods to the past will focus on the history of jazz. Led by Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the center’s orchestra will perform 10 concerts that will each pay homage to a decade of jazz history, from the 1920s to the present.Performances in February will honor the early years of jazz and its many inspirations by incorporating cuts from blues, gospel, country and bluegrass, as well as from recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. On Nov. 8-9, a pair of concerts will focus on the jazz pioneers Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and others.From Jan. 16-18, Cool School & Hard Bop concerts will explore midcentury jazz, featuring works from Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Max Roach and others. And May 29-31, the saxophonist Ted Nash will lead the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in performances of new arrangements of music associated with the 1970s.The season will also include more modern performances, including concerts that will feature music from Joanne Brackeen, Charlie Haden, Terence Blanchard and others.Several concerts will also spotlight specific musicians. On Nov. 15-16, Joshua Redman will return to the Rose Theater in a collaboration with Gabrielle Cavassa, a rising star from New Orleans. Later in the season, on Feb. 14-15, Dianne Reeves will perform in a Valentine’s Day celebration filled with songs about romance and heartbreak. The pianist and composer Monty Alexander will celebrate his 80th birthday by performing on Jan. 24-25, while Anat Cohen and her brothers will celebrate her 50th birthday with performances of early swing, post-bop and Brazilian choro on March 14-15.The final performances of the season, June 13-14, will feature music directed by Marsalis and will showcase works by the veteran band members Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner and others. More

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    Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation

    The history and curiosity behind these operas, both set in Asia, complicate often simplistic criticisms of borrowing and stereotyping.A key relic of the genesis of Giacomo Puccini’s two operas set in Asia can be found not in Italy, where both works premiered, nor in China or Japan, where they are set, but — of all places — in Morristown, N.J.There, in the Morris Museum’s collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata, is a music box from around 1877. During a visit to the museum in 2012, the musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard happened upon the box and, listening to it, was surprised to find that it contained melodies present in those Puccini operas, “Madama Butterfly” (1904) and “Turandot” (left unfinished at his death in 1924).Sheppard and other scholars came to believe that the box — made in Switzerland, exported to China, returned to Europe and owned in Italy before it was acquired by the brewing heir and prodigious collector Murtogh D. Guinness and donated to the Morris Museum — may have been the exact one that Puccini encountered at a friend’s home and quoted in his classic works.This plain brown music box is therefore central to the ambivalence that lately surrounds Puccini, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot,” and the amorphous label of appropriation that has been applied to both. It reminds us that Puccini, who was always searching to endow his scores with “local color,” didn’t just compose exotic-seeming, faux-Asian tunes for his operas, but also sought out actual Asian examples. These works are tributes to the curiosity about other cultures — the desire to blend your traditions with others’ and tell stories about more than just yourself — that has animated art for as long as humans have been making it.“When the heart speaks, whether in China or Holland,” Puccini wrote to one of his “Turandot” librettists, “it says only one thing, and the outcome is the same for everyone.”A music box, from around 1877, containing Chinese melodies that Puccini quoted.Morris MuseumWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Future and Metro Boomin’s First Joint Album Opens Big at No. 1

    The Atlanta rapper and star producer topped Ariana Grande’s first-week total for “Eternal Sunshine,” but Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” may beat them all next week.Future and Metro Boomin, two of the biggest stars of Atlanta hip-hop, have scored the best opening of the year so far with their joint album “We Don’t Trust You,” though Beyoncé is on deck for next week’s chart with potentially even bigger numbers.“We Don’t Trust You” opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 251,000 sales in the United States, a better opening than Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” had two weeks ago (with 227,000). According to the tracking service Luminate, the vast majority of fans’ consumption of “We Don’t Trust You” was through streaming platforms, with 324 million clicks in its opening week — more than any album since Taylor Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which arrived with 375 million in November.“We Don’t Trust You,” featuring guest spots by the Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott, among others, is the first of two announced LPs by the rapper Future and Metro Boomin, a star producer who has been behind dozens of hit songs over the last decade, and who has gone to No. 1 on the album chart three times before in his own right. The next joint album by Future and Metro Boomin is expected April 12.Beyoncé’s 27-track “Cowboy Carter” seized headlines even before its release last Friday, and fans started clicking as soon as they could. Spotify announced that “Cowboy Carter” became the service’s most-streamed album in a single day so far this year. It is expected to arrive with big numbers on next week’s chart, helped by sales on vinyl and CD — though fans complained that a number of tracks on the digital version were absent from the physical editions, including “Ya Ya,” one of the album’s most-streamed songs.Also this week, Olivia Rodrigo’s seven-month-old “Guts” jumps 16 spots to No. 2, thanks to the release of a deluxe version with five added tracks. Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

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    In ‘Godzilla x Kong,’ Destruction, But Not Much Concern

    The latest sequel in the Monsterverse has plenty of destruction, but little concern about the death toll.This article contains spoilers for “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”By the end of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” the latest in the so-called Monsterverse franchise from Warner Bros., multiple cities around the world have been rendered essentially uninhabitable and treasured monuments have been turned to dust. Godzilla, Kong and their adversaries flatten sections of Rio, ripping buildings in half during their climactic brawl, as a monster that can shoot ice from its mouth coats the coastal setting, presumably freezing a bunch of citizens as well.Earlier, the two big guys punch their way through the pyramids in Cairo as tourists and locals scramble away from falling rocks. On top of that, at one point, Godzilla also takes up temporary residence in the Colosseum in Rome after he stomps through that locale. It’s frankly pretty cute the way he curls up to nap in the ancient amphitheater like a puppy, but the fact that he probably killed thousands of people getting to his makeshift bed isn’t really addressed.Directed by Adam Wingard, the film cares more about the beasties than it does anything else. Given the cartoonish tone Wingard is working in — Godzilla turns pink in this one while he and Kong fight a giant evil ape named the Skar King with a bone whip — it makes sense that there isn’t much dwelling on the human toll. Still, the sheer level of destruction is so outsize it’s almost amusing. Sure, you go into a Godzilla flick expecting for some structures to crumble, but this just feels extreme, especially in how casually it shrugs off the fact that monsters have just toppled thousands of years worth of history and countless lives.Over the years, films starring Godzilla and his pals have varied wildly in how they deal with the creatures’ victims — they have been serious and outright silly. While sometimes Godzilla can be a way to explore very human fears, at other times he’s just an outlet to watch things go boom. “Godzilla x Kong” puts him firmly in this noisy camp, which makes the treatment of death just seem careless.Perhaps one of the reasons “Godzilla x Kong” is so striking in how little it seems to think about damage is that the last “Godzilla” movie to hit theaters was entirely concerned with Godzilla as a representation of trauma.A scene from “Godzilla Minus One.”Toho CompanyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Pedal Steel Noah’s Covers Charm Fans Online. Up Next: His Own Songs.

    This 16-year-old from Austin, Texas, plays New Wave and post-punk hits with his brother and dog beside him. This week, his first EP, “Texas Madness,” comes out.Like many American teenagers, Noah Faulkner, 16, is obsessed with music. He’ll spend hours going down rabbit holes, listening to every note played by his favorite artists and studying new discoveries. He recently came out of a monthslong deep dive on Clarence Ashley, a banjo player who recorded during the Great Depression and “makes me feel like I’m an old man,” Faulkner said. Ashley’s music “feels very spooky, and I imagine it’s like an abandoned place somewhere.”Unlike most teenagers, Faulkner is translating these influences into a dedicated music career. Using the handle Pedal Steel Noah, he posts daily covers of ’80s New Wave and post-punk hits on Instagram and TikTok, interpreting the work of acts like the Smiths and Tears for Fears on one of the hardest instruments to master. Along the way, he’s made fans of Neko Case, Big Thief, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and scores of others drawn to his emotive playing and charming setup: a big Texas flag in the background, his brother, Nate, 13, on bass and a shaggy Aussiedoodle panting along.Faulkner’s interest in pedal steel stems from an early plunge into country music. “I was listening to George Strait when I wanted to listen to something that’s cheerful and faithful,” he said. Eli Durst for The New York TimesIn March, the brothers and their father, Jay, played several showcases during the South by Southwest festival in their hometown and opened for the Black Keys’ keynote address. Dressed in a Western shirt, black cowboy hat and the colorful Crocs that have become his signature footwear, Pedal Steel Noah put a Texas stamp on songs by Duran Duran and the Cocteau Twins.“It was amazing,” he said via video call from the dinner table, his family gathered around him, “but it was exhausting. Hopefully, I can give myself a reward of a party for my friends.” On Monday, he’s taking the next step in his young career, releasing “Texas Madness,” an EP that includes three covers and two original tracks.

    View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah Faulkner (@pedalsteelnoah) We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More