Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    ‘Vultures 1’: Where the New Ye Meets the Old Kanye

    “Vultures 1,” the rapper’s album with Ty Dolla Sign, arrived on the 20th anniversary of his debut, “The College Dropout.”The old Kanye, the new Kanye. Kanye then, Kanye now. Few, if any, popular musicians have made as much hay from the tension between their prior selves and their current one. And no famous person perpetually sheds old fans and acquires new ones quite like Kanye West, now known as Ye.He is forever testing loyalty, which is a polite way of saying that he often leans into odiousness, never more so than in the last 16 months, which have been peppered with bursts of antisemitic remarks and revelations about similar past behavior.For a while, these latest provocations seemed to do what few of his past outbursts have done: remove him from the center of the conversation.And yet, “Vultures 1,” his new album, opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and most of the past two weeks have been heavy with Ye news — about his earning a self-reported $19 million in a day from selling items from his clothing line for just $20, about the predictably chaotic release of the album, including ticketed listening sessions in arenas and pushback from artists who were sampled without approval.Hundreds of thousands of fans, or millions, have boarded the train — in part because public opinion can be elastic, but also because even in this era of Ye, glimmers of an older Kanye remain.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

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    How Flight Attendants Fought Back Against Sexism in the Airline Industry

    Decades ago, “stewardesses” earned less than men, couldn’t get married or gain weight, and had to retire at 32. A key figure in a landmark lawsuit looks back at a not-so-golden era.In 1958, when Mary Pat Laffey Inman became a stewardess — as they were then called — for Northwest Airlines, she was 20 years old and the clock was already ticking. At 32, she would be forced to retire. That is, if she didn’t marry, get pregnant or even gain too much weight before that: All were grounds for termination. It was the golden age of aviation for everyone except, perhaps, the women serving in-flight meals to the nattily dressed passengers.Six years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and female flight attendants began to join forces against sexism.In 1970, Ms. Laffey Inman, a union leader and Northwest’s first female purser — the lead attendant on a flight — spearheaded a class-action suit, Laffey v. Northwest Airlines Inc., that resulted in the airline paying more than $30 million in damages and back wages in 1985. It also set the precedent for nondiscriminatory hiring of flight attendants across the industry. But even then, not everything changed: Flight attendants on some airlines were still subjected to “weigh-ins” into the 1990s. (Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008.)Now, decades after the landmark decision, Ms. Laffey Inman, 86, is one of several former flight attendants featured in “Fly With Me,” an “American Experience” documentary that chronicles how women fought to overcome discrimination in the airline industry. It premieres on PBS on Feb. 20. The New York Times spoke to Ms. Laffey Inman about how she made history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ms. Laffey Inman in her Northwest uniform in 1968, around the time she became the airline’s first female purser, or lead attendant on a flight.Courtesy of Mary Pat Laffey InmanWhat inspired your career in the airline industry?I was working at Montefiore Hospital, in Pittsburgh. I always wanted to travel, ever since I was a kid. As a flight attendant, I could travel — all expenses paid. I thought it was wonderful. Other stewardesses and I laugh about how lucky we were to be in the industry at that time. We would bid for three-day layovers in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo. A limo would be there to pick you up and take you to the hotel.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

  • 75 Shares149 Views

    in Movies

    BAFTA Awards 2024 Winners: ‘Oppenheimer’ Sweeps

    “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” were also honored at the British equivalent of the Oscars, while “Saltburn” and “Barbie” left empty-handed.“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie about the development of the atomic bomb, swept the board at the EE British Academy Film Awards in London on Sunday.The movie won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director for Nolan and best leading actor for Cillian Murphy for his portrayal of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.It beat four other nominees to the best film prize, including “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s take on a Frankenstein story and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about a boarding school teacher stuck looking after a student over the holidays. It also beat “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s multilingual courtroom drama about a woman accused of murdering her husband.In the days leading up to the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, most British movie critics predicted that “Oppenheimer” would win big. Tom Shone, writing in The Times of London, said that Nolan’s “magnum opus” was an instant classic. “Sometimes the front-runner is the front-runner for a reason,” he added.Still, the prizes were Nolan’s first director wins at the BAFTAs, despite several previous nominations for his movies “Inception” and “Dunkirk.”At the ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Nolan, who grew up in London, seemed a little overwhelmed by all the accolades. Accepting the best director prize, he called the award “an incredible honor” then reminisced about his parents dragging him to the festival hall, a major classical music venue as a boy. In fact, he said, his younger brother, now also a TV and filmmaker, had beaten him to the hall’s stage “by about 40 years” because he once took part in a performance of “The Nutcracker.”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

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Movies

    Cold Plunges and Cuddling With Cats: Photographing the ‘Great Performers’

    What do celebrities do in their downtime? A new project by The New York Times Magazine captures the awards season’s buzziest actors in their element.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The photographer James Nachtwey showed up at Bradley Cooper’s farmhouse in Pennsylvania one freezing morning in January, armed with a coat and a camera.“Let’s take a walk,” an affable Mr. Cooper suggested, leading Mr. Nachtwey through his 33-acre property until they arrived at an ice-crusted stream.After sharing that he practiced mindfulness by taking cold plunges — immersing himself in freezing water for minutes at a time — Mr. Cooper proceeded to strip down to his black briefs and dive in, flipping over onto his back and closing his eyes.“I thought I’d have 30 seconds to take the picture,” Mr. Nachtwey said in a recent phone conversation from his home in New Hampshire. “But he stayed in for at least 10 minutes.”The resulting photo of Mr. Cooper, which appears on the cover of this month’s Great Performers issue of The New York Times Magazine, is one of 12 portraits of this award season’s buzziest actors. Mr. Nachtwey captured the images over a three-week period in January in Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania and Atlanta.Among them: Mark Ruffalo training his own camera on street pigeons, Paul Giamatti curled up on a couch with cats at his favorite used bookstore and Emma Stone wandering through steamy Manhattan streets.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

  • 138 Shares179 Views

    in Music

    Founder of the New Christy Minstrels Randy Sparks Dies at 90

    With a keen eye for young talent, he helped boost the careers of Steve Martin, John Denver, Kenny Rogers and many other performers.Randy Sparks, a creative impresario whose musical ensemble, the New Christy Minstrels, helped to jump-start the folk revival of the early 1960s and launched the careers of performers like John Denver, Steve Martin and Kenny Rogers, died on Sunday at an assisted-living facility in San Diego. He was 90.His son Kevin confirmed the death. Mr. Sparks had been living on his 168-acre ranch in Jenny Lind, Calif., northeast of San Francisco, until a few days before his death.Mr. Sparks in Los Angeles in 2006. He was well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he formed the New Christy Minstrels.Sherry Rayn Barnett/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBefore Beatlemania and the British invasion revolutionized American popular music, folk music dominated the airwaves — and perhaps no group was more ubiquitous than the New Christy Minstrels. They were a nearly constant presence on television and sold an estimated two million albums in their first three years.Mr. Sparks was already well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he drew together nine other musicians in 1961 to form the group, which took its name from a popular stage show in the 1840s led by Edwin P. Christy. Mr. Sparks was quick to note that his group otherwise shared nothing with its namesake, a white group that had promoted the music of Stephen Foster in blackface.His group was a hit from the start; its debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels” (1962), won the Grammy Award for best performance by a chorus and stayed on the Billboard chart for two years.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

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Movies

    How ‘Madame Web’ Actress Isabela Merced Keeps Herself Off Her Phone

    The “Madame Web” actress unwinds with the help of Sudoku, Legos and the occasional psychology video on YouTube.There is busy, and then there is Isabela Merced.On an afternoon last month in Los Angeles, the actress — who had just returned from Vancouver, where she was learning to ride horses for a role in Season 2 of HBO’s postapocalyptic survival drama “The Last of Us” — was preparing to meet Vice President Kamala Harris that night, while also doing this interview and, as an alarm that went off in the middle of the phone call revealed, laundry.“It’s a work in progress: I know how to get on the horse and not panic, and that’s about it,” said Merced, 22, who made her Broadway debut in “Evita” when she was 10 and is now known for her roles in “Transformers: The Last Knight” and “Dora and the Lost City of Gold.”“The Last of Us” is one of half a dozen film and TV projects she has lined up for the next few years, among them “Madame Web,” the newly released Spider-Man spinoff in which she plays Anya Corazon, better known as Spider-Girl in the Marvel Comics.Also on her film slate: the lead role in the long-awaited adaptation of John Green’s young adult novel “Turtles All the Way Down”; a starring role in “Alien: Romulus” (due out in August); and Hawkgirl in “Superman: Legacy.”How does she balance it all?“I’m going to have to practice meditation a little bit more than I have,” she said.In a conversation from her family’s home, where she lives with her mother and her younger brother, Merced shared how sound baths keep her centered, the secret to her mother’s “unmatched” chicken estofado, and why she always has Legos on hand. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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

  • 125 Shares139 Views

    in Movies

    The Documentary Aleksei Navalny Knew We’d Watch After His Death

    The Oscar-winning film followed the dissident after an attempt on his life. It played like a thriller at the time; today it feels even more chilling.In the opening moments of “Navalny,” the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary about the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, the director Daniel Roher asks his subject a dark question.“If you are killed — if this does happen — what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?” the voice asks from behind the camera.Navalny’s ice-blue eyes narrow just a little, and he sighs. “Oh, come on, Daniel,” he says in heavily accented English. “No. No way. It’s like you’re making a movie for the case of my death.” He pauses, then continues. “I’m ready to answer your question, but please let it be another movie, Movie No. 2. Let’s make a thriller out of this movie.”“And in the case I would be killed,” he concludes with a wry smile, “let’s make a boring movie of memory.”On Friday, according to Russian authorities, Navalny, one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s harshest critics, died in a federal penitentiary in the Arctic Circle. The official story released Friday morning was that he had lost consciousness while taking a walk in the yard. Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, publicly doubted the reports, writing on X, “If this is true, then it’s not ‘Navalny died,’ but ‘Putin killed Navalny,’ and only that. But I don’t trust them one penny.”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