Aurelia Butler

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘aka Mr. Chow’ and Some Spooky Movies

    A new HBO documentary film premieres about a restaurateur who is also an artist. A couple of scary movies will get you into the Halloween spirit.With network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Oct. 16-Oct. 22. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE AMERICAN BUFFALO 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Ken Burns is back with another documentary — this time, it’s a two-part series on buffaloes and their evolution, reaching back to the early 1800s. Stories from Indigenous people frame the film with accounts of the mutually beneficial relationship their communities had with the animals.FBOY ISLAND 8 p.m. on The CW. Katie Thurston might not have found love during her stint as “The Bachelorette,” but she’ll get another shot on this new reality series. Thurston will be joined by the model Hali Okeowo, and the influencer Daniella Grace as they date 25 men — some of whom are nice guys. It is not entirely clear how someone wins the cash prize on this show (which asks the eternal question: Is it better to be a nice guy or the wilder kind?), but there is no doubt that it’ll be as messy as a car crash you cannot look away from.TuesdayA still from “Navajo Police: Class 57.”Courtesy of HBONAVAJO POLICE: CLASS 57 9 p.m. on HBO. Though being a recruit for the Navajo Nation Police Department doesn’t seem like it would be too different than trying to make the cut in any other department, these law enforcement hopefuls have to contend with rising crime levels and the particular threats that their communities face. This three-part docu-series follows the candidates as they work their way through the Navajo Police Training Academy in Arizona.WednesdayTHE CHALLENGE: BATTLE FOR A NEW CHAMPION 8 p.m. on MTV. Like the original version of the show, this special iteration features a group of reality stars who all formerly appeared on other shows, including “Love Island,” “Big Brother” and “Are You the One?” The twist here is that the contestants not only will be pitted against one another, but they will also compete with a rotating group of former champions of the show in physical challenges for a cash prize and the title.ThursdayHeather O’Rourke’s character, Carol Anne, becomes the target of spirits in “Poltergeist.”MGMPOLTERGEIST (1982) 10 p.m. on AMC. It’s all fun and games when ghosts commune with a Southern California-based family through their television set — until the spirits turn menacing. This story follows Steve (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane (JoBeth Williams) as they consult with a parapsychologist and an exorcist after their daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) goes missing amid spooky and creepy happenings around their house.FridayPRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES (2016) 9:45 p.m. on Syfy. Though in my head Mr. Darcy will always be tall, dark and handsome (see Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen in the role) and silently brooding in various corners — if you love all things supernatural, maybe you would prefer a Mr. Darcy who, along with his other attributes, is an exceptionally skilled zombie-slayer. The title of this movie really says it all: The unmarried Bennet sisters seek out eligible bachelors while simultaneously trying to stay safe amid a growing zombie population. While Elizabeth Bennet is attracted to Mr. Darcy in the Jane Austen book because of his love for her, in this film, she is drawn to his zombie-killing skills.THE UNINVITED (1944) 11:45 p.m. on TCM. This film, staring Ray Milland (Rick) and Ruth Hussey (Pamela), is a classic ghost story. Rick and his sister Pamela decide to buy an abandoned 18th-century house. The owner associates the house with the death of his daughter and sells it over his granddaughter’s objections. Once Rick and Pamela move in, they have to contend with some not-so-happy ghosts. It is “as solemnly intent on raising goose flesh as any ghost story weirdly told to a group of shivering youngsters around a campfire on a dark and windy night,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times. “All of the old standbys are in it — flickering candles, the slowly opening door, supernatural agitations and a scent of mimosa now and then.”SaturdayAndy Samberg and Selena Gomez voice Jonathan and Mavis in “Hotel Transylvania.”Columbia PicturesHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 7:15 p.m. on Freeform. If two nights straight of scary movies has your fight-or-flight response working overtime, this cute, animated take on a spooky movie could give your nervous system a break. Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) owns a hotel where monsters go when they want to relax. On this particular weekend, Dracula plans a party to celebrate the 118th birthday of his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez). Things go awry when a human (Andy Samberg) accidentally crashes the party and subsequently falls in love with Mavis, who is a vampire.SundayAKA MR. CHOW 9 p.m. on HBO. It’s impossible to deny that Michael Chow has had an interesting life: born in Shanghai, Chow moved to London, where he opened a Chinese restaurant with Italian waiters that catered to British diners. His restaurant, Mr. Chow, now has locations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This documentary film focuses on his life and his recently revealed other identity as an artist who goes by the name “M.” More

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    In an Opera About Civil War Spies, Dancers Help Drive the Drama

    Houston Grand Opera, known for innovation, unveils Jake Heggie’s “Intelligence,” directed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and featuring Urban Bush Women.In a theater at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan one recent afternoon, a rehearsal for the coming opera “Intelligence,” about Civil War-era spies, was about to begin.But as the stage lights came on and the music blared, there were no singers in sight. Instead, six dancers from Urban Bush Women, a dance troupe in Brooklyn, were front and center, locking arms, jumping into the air and improvising movements inspired by African traditions.“I want to see if we can find that physical charge,” Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women, who is directing and choreographing the opera, told the dancers. “Let it breathe. Let it flow.”“Intelligence,” which opens the season at Houston Grand Opera on Friday, tells the story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a member of an elite Confederate family, who operates a pro-Union spy ring with the help of Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved woman in her household. The opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer, offers a meditation on the legacy of slavery and the overlooked role of women in the war.“Intelligence,” more than eight years in the making, stands out for another reason. While dance is an afterthought or an embellishment in many operas, it drives this drama, with eight performers from Urban Bush Women sharing the stage with seven singers, including the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Van Lew and the soprano Janai Brugger as Bowser. The dancers serve as a Greek chorus, falling like soldiers on a battlefield or passing secrets along a chain.“It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” Zollar said. “They’re not just coming in for their number or routine.”The dance-centered approach may be unusual, but it is a natural fit at Houston Grand Opera. For decades the company has been known for innovation, helping birth important 20th-century works like Leonard Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” (1983) and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” (1987).Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is directing and choreographing “Intelligence” for Houston Grand Opera. “It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” she said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesUnder David Gockley, Houston Grand Opera’s general director from 1972 to 2005, the company embarked on an ambitious effort to commission dozens of new works and garnered an international reputation for risk-taking. “Intelligence” is the company’s 75th premiere — and the fourth opera by Heggie to debut in Houston.Khori Dastoor, Houston’s general director and chief executive since 2021, said the company aimed to build on its legacy.“We can be an important opera company, but also maintain our nimbleness and spirit of innovation,” she said. “We aren’t having debates about whether change is good. We’re always thinking about what’s next.”Houston Grand Opera’s agility served it well during the pandemic. While many cultural organizations are still struggling to win back audiences, Houston is in a relatively strong position, with a budget this fiscal year of about $33 million, compared with about $24 million before the pandemic. Ticket sales were up about 8 percent last season, compared with the 2018-19 season, even as subscriptions fell. Donations have been robust; earlier this year, the company secured a $22 million gift, the largest in its history.And audiences remain enthusiastic. The company has been working to draw more Black, Latino and Asian residents by venturing outside the opera house more often. Last season, it partnered with 140 community groups and presented operas at 32 locations across Houston. On a night in late October, “Intelligence” will be performed before an audience of nearly 2,000 primarily low-income high school students.“Most of our audience at Houston Grand Opera does not experience us in the opera house; they experience us in their neighborhood or at a school,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director. “We let people in our own community tell us their stories.”The artistic focus is also shifting, even as classics like Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” remain staples of the repertoire.Last season the company premiered “Another City,” a chamber opera about homelessness in Houston that is based on interviews with residents, inside a nondenominational Christian church and service organization. And in 2021, the company staged the premiere of “The Snowy Day,” an opera based on the 1962 children’s book known as one of the first to prominently feature a Black protagonist.“Every opera company is really a reflection and expression of their city,” said Dastoor, the first woman to serve as general director. “I want our operas to look and feel and sound like Houston.”“Intelligence,” which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2021 but was delayed by the pandemic, highlights neglected voices, with themes that connect to modern-day social issues.Zollar rehearsing with Vincent Thomas, left, Johnson and Medina.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesHeggie got the idea from a docent who approached him during an event at the Smithsonian in Washington and suggested that he look into Van Lew and Bowser for his next opera.“I started Googling their names, and my jaw was just on the floor,” he said. “I had been looking for what the next story would be, and I knew it was right because I felt this fire and this shiver.”Heggie turned to Scheer, a frequent collaborator, for the libretto, and he approached Houston Grand Opera about commissioning the work, encouraged by its history of championing new music.“You can’t guarantee success with a new piece,” he said. “But Houston is willing to give it a chance.”Heggie said he was given a choice early on, based on budget considerations, to feature a dance company or a chorus. He had already written operas with prominent choruses and said he thought that the seven singers of “Intelligence” could together sound like a chorus.He thought dance would be a better fit, he said, a way to fill in some of the “question marks in the storytelling” arising from the limited records of Van Lew and Bowser’s intelligence-gathering operation.“Dancers can explore the emotional world of this — really where there aren’t words but there can be movement that might give us clues,” he said. He wrote a percussive score to match.Heggie reached out to Zollar, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021, who founded Urban Bush Women in 1984 as a way to elevate the stories of women in the African diaspora. She was hesitant at first — she had never directed an opera — but started to see connections between opera and dance. It helped that she was a fan of Heggie’s first opera, “Dead Man Walking,” which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2000 and opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall.Heggie and Scheer visited Zollar in Tallahassee, Fla., where she teaches at Florida State University.“They were really interested in the points of view that I would bring to the story, not just as a name attached,” she said. “And the dance. They definitely wanted the dance.”The creative team for “Intelligence” includes the conductor Kwamé Ryan, the set designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Carlos Soto.In preparation for the opera, Zollar and other members of the team visited the South for research. They toured the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., visited the former site of the Van Lew mansion and walked the Richmond Slave Trail.Zollar said those visits offered a “spiritual grounding” for the opera and a reminder that the country was still grappling with the legacy of slavery. “It’s still vibrating,” she said. “It’s still with us in the air.”In choreographing the opera, she drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including the African writing system called Nsibidi, as well as the Kongo cosmogram, a symbol from the BaKongo belief system in West Central Africa.Zollar said she wanted her dancers to be a spiritual force in the opera: “They are what’s whispering in your ear, what’s around us that we cannot see.” From left, Cook, Gaskins, Medina, Johnson, Ware and Earle.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesZollar said she wanted the dancers of Urban Bush Women to be a spiritual force in the opera; she calls them the “is, was and will,” referring to their ability to speak to the present, past and future. They play with notions of entanglement and secrecy, echoing the themes of the opera.“They are what’s whispering in your ear,” she said, “what’s around us that we cannot see.”At the Guggenheim rehearsal, she encouraged the dancers to draw on their own influences — club dancing, jazz, Cuban music. She worked with Mikaila Ware, a member of Urban Bush Women, to refine a sequence of jumps and falls.“It’s so beautiful,” Zollar said. “Can you give me a little bit more suspension? Can you give me a little bit more air?”A central challenge for Zollar was adjusting to the scale of opera. She has been fine-tuning the dancers’ movements so they resonate at the Brown Theater in Houston, which has more than 2,400 seats.Having the backing of a prominent opera company, she said, allowed her to spend the time necessary to immerse herself in the work. She added she was feeling a mix of “sheer terror and excitement” ahead of the premiere.“Usually, I operate on prayers, spit and gaffer’s tape,” she said. “Now we can fully realize our vision. Now we can create something new.” More

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    Piper Laurie, Reluctant Starlet Turned Respected Actress, Dies at 91

    She began as just another product of the studio system, but she went on to receive three Oscar nominations, win an Emmy and appear on Broadway.Piper Laurie, who escaped the 1950s Hollywood starlet-making machinery to become a respected actress with three Oscar nominations and an Emmy Award, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.Her manager, Marion Rosenberg, confirmed the death, The Associated Press reported.Ms. Laurie’s first Academy Award nomination was for best actress in “The Hustler” (1961), in which she played a lonely alcoholic who hooks up with a dissolute pool player played by Paul Newman. After a 15-year break from making movies, she earned a comeback nomination for her performance as the deranged religious mother of a telekinetic teenager (Sissy Spacek) in “Carrie” (1976). She received her third nomination for her role as the estranged mother of a young deaf woman (Marlee Matlin) in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986).Piper Laurie with Paul Newman in a scene from “The Hustler” in 1961. Her role in the film as a lonely alcoholic brought her an Oscar nomination as best actress.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesJust before that, she had won an Emmy for “Promise” (1986), an acclaimed CBS movie about schizophrenia in which she played James Garner’s helpful ex-girlfriend. She received eight other Emmy nominations, including for her roles as the vengeful paper-mill manager on the original “Twin Peaks,” Rachel Ward’s sympathetic married friend in “The Thorn Birds” and the comically vicious mother of a coldhearted psychiatrist on the NBC sitcom “Frasier.”Ms. Laurie, whose birth name was Rosetta Jacobs, was 17 when Universal-International signed her as a contract player and gave her the screen name Piper Laurie — a change about which she had mixed feelings. It was the era of publicity gimmicks, an attempt to brand new performers, especially starlets, with fabricated, sometimes outrageous histories or habits. The studio was looking for an angle that had not been used before. A publicist on the set of a movie she was shooting observed a scene that involved putting flowers in a salad. The publicist decided to position her as the girl who ate flowers — orchids, rose petals, marigolds. And so she did, dutifully, for photographs and interviews. (“They didn’t taste so bad,” she told a United Press International reporter in 1991.)Publicity tours and stunts were so much a part of her career that in 1953, Collier’s magazine ran an article about how many she did — happily, the writer observed — and how much money her pictures were making for her employer.Behind her smile, however, Ms. Laurie was growing disillusioned.“Every role I played was the same girl, no matter whether my co-star was Rock Hudson or Tony Curtis or Rory Calhoun,” she told The New York Times in 1977, referring to the movies she had made while under contract with Universal. “She was innocent, sexual, simple — the less intelligent, the better, and complexity was forbidden.” She rebelled and broke her contract in 1956.As early as 1959, Ms. Laurie was brazenly frank in interviews about her experience. In one, published in The Tribune of Columbus in Indiana, she said, “If I’d continued in Hollywood, doing those old, insipid parts, I think by now I would have killed myself.”Piper Laurie in the movie “Carrie” in 1976 playing the deranged religious mother of a telekinetic teenager.United Artists/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesShe decided to hold out for better movie roles, doing television and stage work for four years or so until eventually the right thing came along: “The Hustler.”Rosetta Jacobs was born in Detroit on Jan. 22, 1932, the younger of two daughters of Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer, and Charlotte Sadie (Alperin) Jacobs. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Poland on her father’s side and from Russia on her mother’s.When Rosetta was 6, she was sent to accompany her older sister, who was asthmatic, to a sanitarium in Southern California. Ms. Laurie wrote in her 2011 memoir, “Learning to Live Out Loud,” that she never understood why she had to go too. Her parents told her it was to “keep your sister company,” but in hindsight, she wrote, “They must have been suffering in ways they believed we couldn’t understand” and just couldn’t deal with parenthood at the time. Three years later, their parents moved to Los Angeles and had them released.Although Ms. Laurie hated those years in the sanitarium, she eventually saw them as having benefited her. “My exile had cultivated an imagination that grew like a giant, sheltering flower,” she wrote in her memoir. “It was a lifetime gift.”Rosetta was unusually anxious about public speaking, so she was given elocution lessons. Those led to small acting roles, and with her mother’s encouragement she found a part in a play presented by a low-profile theater company in Los Angeles, won a screen test in a local contest (but did badly on the test itself), took part in comedy sketches at a resort and eventually found an agent. She and another newcomer, Rock Hudson, signed seven-year movie contracts on the same day.Piper Laurie and Ronald Reagan at a Hollywood party in 1950. They dated for a time. Associated Press/Associated PressUniversal cast her in “Louisa” (1950), a romantic comedy in which she played Ronald Reagan’s teenage daughter. (They dated after filming was over.) Over the next four years, she appeared in a dozen films, including “The Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951), “Son of Ali Baba” (1952), “The Mississippi Gambler” (1953) and “Francis Goes to the Races” (1951), in which one co-star was a talking mule.After moving to New York in the mid-1950s, Ms. Laurie acted in Off Broadway stage productions and television dramas. But she did not make her Broadway debut until 1965, when she starred as the fragile teenage heroine, Laura, in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” with Maureen Stapleton and Pat Hingle. She returned to Broadway only once, in 2002, as part of the ensemble cast of “Morning’s at Seven.”Her later film career included “Tim” (1979), in which she played an older woman who has a relationship with a younger man who is mentally disabled (Mel Gibson, then 23, in one of his first films); Sean Penn’s drama “The Crossing Guard” (1995), starring Jack Nicholson; and “The Grass Harp” (1995), based on a Truman Capote novel.She also appeared in two horror movies, “The Faculty” (1998) and “Bad Blood” (2012); in both, she played a cult matriarch. In 2018, she appeared in two movies: “Snapshots,” a drama in which she played a grandmother with a secret past, and “White Boy Rick,” a crime drama starring Matthew McConaughey.Ms. Laurie had a long romantic relationship with the director John Frankenheimer, who directed her in the original live television version of “Days of Wine and Roses” in New York, but they never married. While promoting “The Hustler,” Ms. Laurie was interviewed by Joe Morgenstern, then an entertainment reporter for The New York Herald Tribune and later a film critic for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. They began dating and married in 1962.Piper Laurie and Joe Morgenstern, then an entertainment reporter, at his desk at The Herald Tribune in New York shortly after their engagement in 1961.John Lent/Associated PressThey stayed together for two decades and lived in Woodstock, in upstate New York, for much of that time. She did a handful of guest roles on television in the first years of their marriage, then disappeared from the screen altogether in 1966 until “Carrie” — which she originally thought was meant to be a comedy — came along a decade later. In between, she focused on her marriage; sculpture, which she studied at the Art Students League in New York; and a new daughter, Anna.“Being a mother and a stone carver really helped me to find my voice,” she told The Hollywood Interview, an entertainment blog, decades later. She and Mr. Morgenstern divorced in 1982. There was no immediate information on her survivors.When asked in a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television what acting advice she would offer, Ms. Laurie said, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything.” But she acknowledged that her childhood shyness may have helped her “learn to listen, really, deeply, fully.”Later, she told The Hollywood Interview, she learned the relationship between focus and fear by doing live television. “The moment we went live, suddenly the air changed in the room and I was totally focused,” she recalled. “The panic, the terror, the preference to have a truck hit me was gone.”It was even better than stage acting, she said: “Live TV had the intensity of three or four opening nights on Broadway all smacked together.” More

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    Jada Pinkett Smith on Will Smith, Chris Rock and Her New Book, ‘Worthy’

    For decades, Jada Pinkett Smith has been plagued by misconceptions: about the dynamics of her marriage to Will Smith, about her bond with Tupac Shakur and, most recently, about the Slap at last year’s Oscars. But in her revelation-heavy 400-page memoir, “Worthy,” these discordant threads, and others, will be pinned to the ground in no uncertain terms.Even devotees of her hugely popular web series “Red Table Talk” — where she and her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, delved into all manner of personal, social and cultural issues — will realize how little they know of Pinkett Smith. The book, out Tuesday from Dey Street, offered her a chance to provide context for a layered, complex journey that can’t be mined in 45 minutes at the Red Table, she told me in September at the headquarters of Westbrook, the entertainment company she founded with Will Smith in 2019.“How do you captivate people, people who think they already know your story?” said Pinkett Smith, who turned 52 a few days after we sat there sunk into couches, looking out over an atypically drizzly Southern California sky.In the book’s second to last chapter, titled “The Holy Joke, The Holy Slap, and Holy Lessons,” Pinkett Smith chronicles that infamous Oscars night, one of the most surreal of her life — when Smith stunned the world by marching onstage and slapping Chris Rock after Rock made an unscripted joke about Pinkett Smith’s closely cropped hair. She has alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which Rock has said he was unaware of. (It was not his first joke at her expense from the Oscars stage.) After returning to his seat, Smith yelled up to Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out of your [expletive] mouth!” Minutes later, Smith won the best actor Oscar for his role in “King Richard.”She, like millions of TV viewers, scrambled to grasp what had happened. But part of her surprise came from a different place than those who’d tuned into Hollywood’s big night — it was at hearing Smith call her his wife. “Even though we hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We in this.’ That’s just who I am,” she told me, adding: “That’s the gift I have to offer, like, ‘Hey, I’m riding with you.’”Smith and Rock had decades of disrespect between them, starting in the late 1980s, before either of them knew her, Pinkett Smith points out. “I didn’t judge Chris, I didn’t judge Will,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a spiritual clash.’”“It didn’t have anything to do with Jada,” Banfield Norris told me during a video interview. “That was really Will’s pain.”And he was in tremendous pain, and fragile, Pinkett Smith said. He had recently finished filming “Emancipation,” a hellish Civil War-era drama that was psychologically tormenting for Smith, who plays an enslaved man. (Smith has said that he “got twisted up” in the role, and “lost track of how far I went.”) “I knew in my heart that he needed me by his side more than ever,” Pinkett Smith said.Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith at the Oscars ceremony in 2022. In her book, she writes, “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife.”Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesAs for Rock’s Netflix special earlier this year in which he mocks Smith and Pinkett Smith, she said she isn’t bitter, but she was hurt. “I remember my heart piercing, my heart cracking, and I remember my feelings being so hurt,” she told me. “And then I remember being able to smile and wish him well at the same time.” (Among the many tidbits shared by Pinkett Smith in her book was that Rock had asked her on a date when he thought she and Smith had split. She corrected him, and they shared a laugh, she writes. Rock’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)Pinkett Smith also unpacks the vitriol she received for rolling her eyes at Rock’s joke — a reaction that some suggested spurred Smith to storm the stage — to illustrate how women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,” she writes. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and culpable at the same time?” she asks. “I had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative’s existence. I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!”By adulterous, Pinkett Smith is referring to her relationship with August Alsina, which she called an “entanglement” on a 2020 episode of “Red Table Talk” where — after the information surfaced, becoming a public spectacle — she and Smith hashed out the already years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist-bump to their slogan: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”The truth is the Smiths weren’t together in the traditional sense when she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are not in an open marriage, nor are they uncoupled, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else altogether: life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call “a relationship of transparency.” In recent years, they’ve lived separately. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound.In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, closes the loop on a dream that started before they dated, when she was renovating an “old-world tiny” farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that sat on an expanse of land that she envisioned filling with rescue dogs and cats, and a horse for her mother. During that time, she’d gotten a phone call from Will Smith, who’d recently split from his first wife. “You seeing anybody?” he’d asked her. “Uhm, no,” she replied. “Good,” he said. “You seeing me now.”Ultimately, it’s family that anchors their union. It’s the reason they married in 1997, while she was pregnant with their son, Jaden. “We wanted to create a family we never had, and we did that. And we enjoy our family,” she said. “For us, our marriage is like a cornerstone of that for now. Who knows in 10 years.”“We’ve tried everything to get away from each other, and we just don’t,” she added, laughing.From left, Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, Trey Smith, Will Smith and Jaden Smith in a family portrait from the early 2000s.via The Jada Pinkett Smith ArchiveShortly after that 2020 episode, Pinkett Smith, in pursuit of “clarity and emotional sobriety,” became what she calls an “urban nun of sorts.” She meditates and reads texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran or the Bible daily, and abstains from sex, alcohol, violent entertainment and unnecessary spending.Pinkett Smith is centered and self-assured, yet being hitched to Smith’s bullet train has made it almost impossible for her trajectory not to be affected by his.“That’s not unique to me,” she stressed. “That’s just a patriarchal construct.” Not to say that it hasn’t irked her, particularly when it’s interfered with her professional identity: Harvey Weinstein, for example, once wouldn’t pursue a project of hers unless Smith attached his name to it, she said. “I’m like, pause, I’ve been doing this before,” she remembered thinking. “That’s when it would bother me. It was like, I’ve been doing stuff before I married this dude.”On that Friday morning last month, Pinkett Smith seemed to be channeling her younger self, when she was a regular at Baltimore clubs like Fantasy and Signals in the 1980s, earning a reputation as a formidable battle dancer — mixing hip-hop and house, the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. With pink hair, Girbaud baggy jeans and fresh white Reebok Princess sneakers, she was “considered tomboy-cute,” she writes. “They didn’t see me coming.” When we met, she was still rocking white Reeboks, though well worn; a hot pink Telfar tracksuit; a cropped blonde pixie and an assortment of earrings framing her makeup-free face. Small in size, with an expansive presence.“Worthy” documents an eventful life, which she recounts chronologically, book-ended by a harrowing story. “This isn’t going to be a fluffy journey,” she wants readers to know. “I’m going to drop you right into one of the darkest moments of my life, and then we’ll backtrack.” In despair after her 40th birthday, in 2011, she began scouting California cliffs that might be suitable to drive off, something higher and steeper than what she’d seen on Mulholland Drive. Somewhere that would appear accidental. She’d tried to adhere to the rules of life but was empty: “Those boxes I’d been checking had not delivered the gifts that had been promised.”“There’s been so much that has gone on in Jada’s life that she kept close to the chest,” Banfield Norris said. “Most people just had no idea what was going on and the pain that she was suffering. I had no idea.”“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that,” Pinkett Smith said. “So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesA conversation with the father of two of Jaden’s friends presented Pinkett Smith with a potential new way to heal. He told her of his life-changing experience on ayahuasca, and she’d soon set out on a four-night trip. The potent psychedelic presented her with a vision of a panther that would lead her deep into the jungles of her mind. At a critical juncture, she was plunged into a pit of sneering snakes who taunted her. “Mother Aya,” she writes, “is showing me all the unloved parts of myself needing light and love.” After that experience, she’d never again contemplate suicide, she writes. Pinkett Smith continues to integrate ayahuasca into her life. About a year after the 2022 Oscars, she held a friends-and-family session — Smith included. “You’ll have to cut off your spirit’s wrist to break free of our Divine handcuffs,” he told her as it wound down.The memoir, Smith said in an email, kind of woke him up. She had lived a life more on the edge than he’d realized, and she is more resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life,” he wrote, “a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”The situation seems ripe for a vulnerability hangover, I suggested to Pinkett Smith.“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that. So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true,” she said.“What people think of me as putting myself out there, I don’t think of it that way,” she added, after some contemplation. “After you’ve had two [9] millimeters to your head, and you survive that, your capacity totally just …” she paused to make an explosion sound.Pinkett Smith writes of a few brushes with death early in her life when, as a teenager in Baltimore, she found success selling drugs, with aspirations to become a “queenpin.” It was a “distorted reality,” she writes.Pinkett Smith eventually moved away from dealing and her hometown. She attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to Hollywood, where she’d become best known as an actress, starring in the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World” (a role Debbie Allen wrote for her) and in movies like “Set It Off,” “Menace II Society” and “Scream 2,” then later “Collateral,” the “Matrix” sequels and “Girls Trip.”The memoir introduces people who populated her world along the way: her grandmother Marion, a world traveler and freethinker who significantly shaped young Jada; her absentee father, Robsol Pinkett, a poet and addict who zigzagged through her life; Banfield Norris, a nurse who had Jada as a teenager and would struggle with heroin addiction; and a bevy of friends, especially Tupac Shakur, whom she met at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Their friendship would be the deepest of her life, and his murder in 1996 was one in a string of sudden losses that would contribute to Pinkett Smith’s depression.She has never talked extensively about her relationship with Shakur before. People have long assumed that it was romantic, but it wasn’t. In “Worthy,” she playfully recollects a time when they’d tried to kiss as teenagers: They’d both recoiled in disgust and dissolved into laughter.A 16-year-old Jada Pinkett, right, with her friends Keesha Bond and Tupac Shakur. “We were both orphans in a certain manner,” she said of Shakur.via The Jada Pinkett Smith Archive“We were both orphans in a certain manner, and we really tried to compensate for that with one another in our relationship and really take care of each other the best we knew how,” she told me, just weeks before an arrest was made in his death. “We just had a deep loyalty.”“Pac’s whole thing was because I knew him when — when he wasn’t Tupac,” she added. “The guy who was poor, the conditions that he lived in. And I was rocking with him anyway.”In “Worthy,” she reveals that he’d proposed to her in a letter while incarcerated at Rikers in the mid-1990s for groping a fan. “Did Pac love me?” she asked. “Yeah he loved me! But I promise you, had we got married, he’d have divorced my ass as soon as he walked through them damn gates and got out.”He just needed someone to do time with him, she said, and Pinkett Smith’s ride-or-die mentality is carved in her bones. It’s the same instinct that kicked in during the Oscars debacle.Threads of loyalty, protection and safety wind their way throughout the memoir, and Pinkett Smith implores readers to learn from her hard-fought lessons. Each chapter ends with what I started to call “guidance pages.” Look inward, she urges, and ask yourself questions like: “Can you recognize patterns in your life and relationships that stem from inherited trauma cycles?” Each of these pages opens with a quote meaningful to Pinkett Smith, whether it be from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” a defining book for her; the poet Ntozake Shange; the psychoanalyst Carl Jung; or the actor Steve Martin.“My biggest hope for the book is that it’ll just be oxygen for people who need it,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in, because it’s intense stuff.”“I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in,” Pinkett Smith said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAs we prepared to say goodbye, the sun broke though, transforming the gray vista below into a California postcard. She was reminded of perhaps the wisest words passed to her, about 15 years ago, from the actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee: “Laugh now, because you are going to laugh later.”“When she said it to me, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “I was like, laugh now? This [expletive] ain’t funny.”But lately, the meaning of those words hits hard. “Ruby was right,” Pinkett Smith said. “A lot of dark times that I can look at and smile at.”“At the end of the day, when you’re on your deathbed — or Chris is on his deathbed or Will is on his deathbed or whoever — all this doesn’t matter,” she said, gesturing to something beyond what was in the room. “And so just learning how to exist in that pocket right now. Not waiting until I’m on my deathbed. Let’s just do it right now.” More

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    Shakira’s Former Nanny Spotlights Domestic Work in Music Video Cameo

    Liliana Melgar made a cameo appearance in Shakira’s latest music video, putting a spotlight on domestic workers and their struggles.The story of Liliana Melgar, a Bolivian migrant who left for Spain 15 years ago, mirrors the trajectory of millions of domestic workers like her who clean, wash, cook and take care of children in households around the world.Except that Ms. Melgar happens to work in the home of Shakira, the Colombian superstar.Shakira’s latest music video, “El Jefe” (“The Boss”), featuring the Mexican band Fuerza Regida, portrays the life of poor immigrants with big dreams, who are stuck working for bad employers who make lots of money that never trickles down. Toward the end of the three-minute clip, Ms. Melgar makes a cameo appearance as Shakira sings, “Lili Melgar, this song is for you because you were never paid severance.”The video has thrust Ms. Melgar — who was reportedly fired by Shakira’s former partner Gerard Pique, a Spanish soccer player, before being rehired by Shakira — into an unexpected spotlight and raised the profile of the roughly 76 million domestic workers around the world.The New York Times tried to reach Shakira, who now lives in South Florida, and Ms. Melgar, but received no response. An agent who represents Mr. Pique did not respond to a request for a comment.Liliana Melgar, who works as a nanny for Shakira, makes a brief appearance in the singer’s most recent music video.Domestic workers play a particularly crucial role in households across Latin America and the Caribbean, where about 1 in 5 employed women are domestic workers, according to the International Labor Organization, the second highest rate in the world after the Middle East.Ms. Melgar’s cameo in the video, which has been streamed more than 57 million times on YouTube, is a sort of vindication following the loss of her job — lifted up by a famous and wealthy female boss. But her case is an exception to how domestic worker have fared in recent years.Before the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, domestic workers in most Latin American and Caribbean countries had gained new rights that set caps on weekly work hours, established minimum wages, created incentives for employers to sign labor contracts and imposed age limits.But the pandemic, which cratered economies across the region, pummeled domestic workers, causing many of them to lose their jobs. The industry has not fully recovered.“To us, it feels like we’re still living through Covid-19,” said Ernestina Ochoa, 53, a domestic worker in Lima, Peru, who helped found the National Union for Domestic Workers, an advocacy group. “If you had your salary reduced, you never had it increased again.”Ernestina Ochoa, who helped found a group in Peru that advocates for domestic workers, at her home in Lima.Angela Ponce for The New York TimesMany of the rights that domestic workers had won before the pandemic were rooted in an early wave of legislation in Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia that was spearheaded by workers who organized labor unions.“​​Fundamentally, paid domestic work is a job that exists in societies with high economic inequality,” said Merike Blofield, a political science professor at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, and an expert on domestic workers in Latin America.Access to domestic work is a given “if you’re born into a better-off class,” she added.While most governments in the region have ratified international agreements ensuring labor rights for domestic workers, advocates say the pandemic weakened accountability for employers who violated laws. In some cases, housekeepers were prevented from leaving homes they worked in over fears that they would catch Covid and spread it to their employers’ families.The rates of employees who work under a signed contract and are eligible for government benefits and protection — a process known as formalization — is uneven across the region.A 2020 study by the International Labor Organization found that while Uruguay had a 70 percent formalization rate among domestic workers, the rate in many Central American and Caribbean countries was less than 10 percent.Ms. Ochoa, who has worked as a nanny, an adult caretaker and a housekeeper, has been a domestic worker in Lima, the Peruvian capital, since she was 11. Ms. Ochoa’s mother, following a familiar path for many domestic workers, moved to Lima from a rural area to work as a wet nurse for a wealthy white family, as well as to clean other homes.“To us, it feels like we’re still living through Covid-19,” Ms. Ochoa said.Angela Ponce for The New York Times“Back then, we were young girls,” Ms. Ochoa said, “but we would do the work of adults.”In 2020, a law passed in Peru that requires domestic workers to be at least 18, but Ms. Ochoa said the government had shown little interest in enforcing the statute.“Right now, we still have girls working, we still have teens working,” she said. “The government doesn’t see what’s happening. There’s no alternative for parents to say, ‘OK, my daughters won’t have to work because the government will help them.’”The complicated relationship between Latin American families and the workers they depend on has become more openly discussed in recent years, in part because depictions in popular culture, including in music and films, have helped focus attention on a largely invisible work force.The Oscar-winning movie “Roma,” set in Mexico in the 1970s, featured an Indigenous nanny who took care of a white family in Mexico City and became enmeshed in their daily dramas. The movie, which was released in late 2018, spurred conversations about how Latin Americans consider domestic workers part of their families, even as they are underpaid, exploited or abused.And in 2011, a photograph was published in a Colombian magazine that featured a wealthy white family sitting on an opulent terrace while two Black maids held silver trays in the background, setting off an uproar and highlighting the racial divisions that exist among many domestic workers and their employers.Still, history was made last year in Colombia when the country elected its first Black vice president, Francia Márquez, who had worked as a housekeeper.Santiago Canevaro, an Argentine sociologist who has written about the relationships between domestic workers and their employers, said domestic work was so common in Latin America because there was less access to private or government-funded services, like child care centers or nursing homes, than in more developed regions.As more women have entered the work force, families have become more dependent on nannies and housekeepers, many of whom are not necessarily aware of their legal rights.“The employee is treated as a sort of object,” Dr. Canevaro said. “In fact, when marriages fall apart, one of the decisions they make is what to do with the domestic employee.”And because discrimination against marginalized groups is still prevalent in Latin America, many Indigenous and Black women turn to domestic work as the only viable way to support themselves and their families and are often abused, advocates said.“It’s a constant battle to advocate for yourself in your workplace,” Ms. Ochoa said, “and say things like: ‘No, ma’am. My ethnicity and my skin color are Black, but I have a name. My name is Ernestina.’” More

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    Taylor Swift ‘Eras Tour’ Movie Review: Look What We Made Her Do

    Swift’s cultural phenomenon arrives on the big screen with lots of little revelations, along with some what-could-have-beens.We could talk, I suppose, about all Taylor Swift’s done for the economy, friendship bracelets, seismology and Travis Kelce. But her greatest nonmusical achievement is the innocuous art she’s made of the gape. On a 50-foot screen, the various apertures of her mouth constitute a spectacle. There’s the “Who? Me?,” the “yeah I said it,” the “ouch,” the “ooooo,” the “gosh golly” and the “Sally Field wins another Oscar.” Hers is the story of “oh.”That glee is a reason to be happy about the movie that’s been assembled from her live show — “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which was shot at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, the final stop on the tour’s first leg. “Happy” because it’s recorded what a gladdening agent Swift can be on a stage and the stamina summoned to power that agency for the better part of three hours. The movie’s about 165 minutes long, and she’s as ebullient descending into the stage, for her farewell, as she is in the opening minutes magically materializing upon it. The first words she speaks to the 70,000 people hooting for her are, “Oh, hi!,” as if SoFi were a shower we’d caught her singing in.In June, when Swift landed at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., the pushing and screaming — by five high schoolers — to my immediate rear ceased at about the two-hour mark. I turned to check on the state of their ecstasy and found a pile of fatigue — the human version of that crumpled face emoji. Her glee had outlasted theirs, her zing had them zung. If nothing else, this movie’s a monument to that: Swift’s illusion of ease. She doesn’t work as physically hard or as loosely or hydraulically as her dancers. She’s not a Jackson. And she doesn’t sing as enormously or as exquisitely as a Streisand, Carey, Dion or Knowles-Carter. Nor is her show — produced as discrete segments devoted to nine of Swift’s 10 albums — the cultural gymnasium Madonna requires. Swift plays to her enhanced strengths: candied pitch, arresting stature, toothsome songwriting, winking, the very idea of play. Not far into things, right around “Cruel Summer,” she announces that we’ve encountered “the very first bridge of the evening.” There are more to come, because not since Lionel Richie has a major pop star so enjoyed the pleasure in the might of her bridgecraft.It wasn’t until this movie that Swift’s 10-minute breakup ballad “All Too Well,” which she performs alone downstage in a glittering robe and an acoustic guitar, struck me as an achievement of genuine theater. Rapt in a movie theater, I felt the song’s heart-wrung pique in a new way. Some of that comes from watching Swift’s face register the ache, tsking recrimination. The rest comes from the song pooling outward into anthem territory. Live, it’s like watching someone woodwork “American Pie” until it resembles “Purple Rain.”“Eras” is studded with little revelations like that. Another: the “Reputation” section of the show contains her freest, most ambitious singing and movement. That album is the first in which she approximates the mischievous, cunning, swaggy music that Beyoncé or Rihanna could make. But the kick of its first six songs is that Swift invites the dare. She spends this part of the show dressed in a serpentine unitard. She knows.One more aha: Swift can command a stage. I’d never thought of her as someone a camera has to take in. But anytime she’s in one of those glittering bathing suits and a pair of spangled knee-high boots, the length of her demands in-taking. She can strike a formidable pose. But early, when she points to different spots in SoFi and those sections start to roar, she jokes that that kind of power is “dangerous” before kissing her biceps, except I don’t think she’s joking. She understands her power and she’s skilled at performing the accident of having so much of it, like she can’t also believe how the country would react if she, say, started going to football games and chest-bumping folks and being associated with a thing of nearby chicken fingers. Her embodiment of lightness and blitheness and insouciance constitutes a talent. Another gape: Did I do that?The show confirmed my sense that Swift can’t be serious — doesn’t want to be — for long, lest she be labeled self-serious. She’s fine with attention but less so with her own monumentality. That discomfort strikes me as the source of the Taylor-as-Godzilla imagery of “Anti-Hero,” a dirge in jam’s clothing. In concert, Swift is as committed to skipping like a cartoon first grader along the stage as she is to sashaying and skulking around it. She’d rather be running than standing still, accruing meaning. She’d rather use her body for screwball comedy than for totemism. She knows what a holy object we’ve made and seems to be trying to undercut that. These are thoughts that could occur to you live in the moment of the show itself. But now the camera permits you to savor it.So it’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could. For one thing, his camera operators and editors have to compete with the jumbo monitors that project what’s at the center of the stadium to its farthest reaches. Few movie screens can hold a candle to one of those — the screen at my theater wasn’t one of them, anyway. The projected image delivers a Swift who seems to be in higher resolution than the woman onstage. The breakthroughs in screen imaging have changed the concert-going experience for better and worse. They’ve democratized it, and that’s great.You can actually experience Swift more clearly in the upper decks than in the inner circles. The concert screens literalize her cultural magnitude. But they seem like hell on good filmmaking. Unless, no one prioritized attempting to shoot around them so that Swift isn’t being upstaged by herself. Of course, that inner-circle seat is, if not priceless (there was definitely a price tag), then certainly far more valuable since, whenever Swift makes her way to the stage’s lip, we can shove a phone in her face. That introduces a modern eyesore for a concert film: other people’s movies. The “Eras” crew has clearly aimed to keep the amateur films mostly out of the shots. But they’re there, nonetheless, as intrusive in a movie as they are at the show itself.Concertgoers can actually experience Swift more clearly in the upper decks than the inner circles, our critic writes, but the screens that enable that at a live show are an obstacle for filmmakers.TAS Rights Management/Variance FilmsWhat is it we should expect from a concert movie? Cinema or fax? “Eras” is proof that an event took place and that the event was fun. There’s more it could have been, of course. “More” just opened a few weeks ago — well, reopened in the form of “Stop Making Sense,” the 1984 concert movie Jonathan Demme made from a few Talking Heads shows, also in Los Angeles. The film predates the camera phone but not the audience. You barely hear one, and he rarely cuts away to it. The film captures one man expanding into a family and the family into a kind of small choir. Maybe Swift is too big for that movie’s living-room approach. But surely there’s a more imaginative strategy to bring her to us than point-and-shoot.I know. “Eras” wasn’t made to be art. It was made to be an index of art that got made. It was made for posterity. Oh — and for the hundreds of people in the parking lot at every Eras show who could sort of hear Swift and had to make do with seeing only each other. The movie is for them. And they’re gonna gape their faces off. More

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    Academy Museum Postpones Gala, Citing Israel-Hamas War

    The star-studded Hollywood fund-raiser, which had already been complicated by the actors’ strike, was to have honored Meryl Streep and others on Saturday.It’s hard not to see the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’s attempt to put on this year’s gala — a glamorous party that raises more than $10 million for the museum and burnishes its image by drawing Hollywood A-listers — as anything but ill-fated.First the Hollywood strikes complicated efforts to hold the party, since striking actors are barred from promoting films and few would want to rub elbows socially with executives from the big studios that they are on strike against. That difficulty was ironed out after studio executives, who are among the museum’s biggest financial supporters, agreed not to come and union officials said actors could attend as long as they did not promote films.Then the Israel-Hamas war cast a shadow over the festivities, which had been scheduled for Saturday night. First the museum announced that the red carpet — where stars parade in their finery for photographers before going in — would be canceled. Then, on Thursday, the museum announced that the gala would be postponed.“Out of respect for the devastating conflict and loss of life happening overseas, we have made the decision to postpone the Academy Museum gala this Saturday,” the museum said in a statement on Thursday evening. “We look forward to rescheduling at a later date. We thank everybody deeply for their support.”The gala was to have honored Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.The museum through a spokeswoman said it had no further comment. More

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    Readers Pick the Ultimate Fall Playlist

    Listen to reader-submitted songs that capture the moodiness of fall.Charlie Brown and the gang set the tone.via Everett CollectionDear listeners,Last week, I asked you to submit a song that feels like fall. So many of you responded with such evocatively autumnal suggestions that it became quite a daunting task to whittle them down to a relatively compact and cohesive listening experience — but I somehow managed, and I have that playlist for you today.Autumn, according to many of you, seems like a time of coexisting opposites. It’s about the warmth sought during the season’s first chill. It’s about endings and beginnings, deaths and rebirths, longtime traditions enlivened by new circumstances. Autumn’s signature cocktail is a strange brew of anticipation and nostalgia, like the new-school-year stress dreams that visit so many of us even when we’ve long (long) since graduated.In a word — and one that aptly serves as the title of one of the songs on this playlist — it’s a season that signals change.Your song submissions ranged across genres, generations and moods. But there were also quite a few consensus picks: the Kinks’ “Autumn Almanac,” Tom Rush’s version of “Urge for Going,” and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” were among the most popular suggestions, and they all make appearances here. (What is it about fall and mandolin solos?) There were plenty of surprising selections too, from the likes of Slowdive, Sade and Warren Zevon.Many thanks to anyone who submitted a song! It’s always such a joy to read your comments and to hear directly from the Amplifier community. As I said, it was difficult to choose from so many great selections, but I think this particular playlist captures something fundamental about the spirit of the season.So throw on some flannel, grab a steaming mug of something and press play.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Vince Guaraldi: “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”It doesn’t truly feel like autumn until my family watches Charlie Brown together. Now that I’m in high school it’s a bit harder to find a time where everyone is available, but we’ll make it work! — Caroline Didizian, Pennsylvania (Listen on YouTube)2. Rod Stewart: “Maggie May”Fall makes me think of change, melancholy, approaching the end. All encapsulated in Rod Stewart’s most famous song as his summer fling comes to an end and he has to “get on back to school.” The reflection in the song feels sad but not spiteful, final but fair. — Matt Zacek, Minnesota (Listen on YouTube)3. The Kinks: “Autumn Almanac”This one covers all the bases — brisk weather, falling leaves and fall colors, cozy times with your people, and the exacerbation of rheumatism. I mean, I’m guessing that the Brits weren’t doing the pumpkin-spice thing in the ’60s, but barring that, it’s pretty darned autumnal. — Sarah Engeler-Young, Location withheld (Listen on YouTube)4. Lucinda Williams: “Fruits of My Labor”Nature plays a game of roulette every fall. After months of growth, some trees turn crimson, some fade to muddy brown. Williams reveals that relationships face a similar moment of reckoning. “Lemon trees don’t make a sound, ’til branches bend and fruit falls to the ground,” she sings, alongside a drawling harmonica that is both warm and heartbreaking. — Alex Skidmore, San Francisco (Listen on YouTube)5. Sade: “The Sweetest Gift”I always remember how the writer Alan Hollinghurst called autumn “the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.” This is a song that feels wrapped in that same tug between acceptance of the past and a sense of protection over a quieter future. — Tiernan Bertrand-Essington, Los Angeles (Listen on YouTube)6. Warren Zevon: “Tenderness on the Block”I have three daughters and the youngest is still in college — but I associate fall with them going off to school and not needing my wife and I as much as they used to. Zevon captures how melancholy their leaving makes me feel. — John Peebles, Morris Township, N.J. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Thief: “Change”Fall is a time of transition: the hectic energy of the summer slows, the weather cools, the school year begins. On “Change,” Adrianne Lenker mourns the end of a relationship and recognizes how challenging it can be to adapt to changing circumstances. But she ultimately asks the listener — and herself — to move forward and search for meaning in their new reality: “Would you walk forever in the light to never learn the secret of the quiet night?” — Trammell Saltzgaber, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)8. Slowdive: “When the Sun Hits”Most of their songs feel like fall to me, but this especially. This is evening walk music. — Zac Crain, Dallas (Listen on YouTube)9. Led Zeppelin: “Ramble On”I have a memory of driving back to Florida for the fall semester after spending a delightful summer working on Cape Hatteras, N.C. This song came on and the leaves were actually falling all around. It’s a specific moment from decades ago, and a vivid visual memory every time I hear this song. — Allison McCarthy, St. Petersburg, Fla. (Listen on YouTube)10. Tom Rush: “Urge for Going”Whenever the sky grows a chilly gray, I have to listen (repeatedly) to Tom Rush’s exquisite version of Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going.” The guitar alone sends chills creeping up the spine. Hunker up against the wind and enjoy. — Mick Carlon, Barnstable, Mass. (Listen on YouTube)11. Nick Drake: “Time Has Told Me”Of course, being Nick Drake, it is redolent of loss and fallen leaves and short days with rain and wind. Like all his work, it has a pastoral scent and a sense of English melancholy and peat fire. Devastatingly beautiful, as is the fall. — Paul Cameron Opperman, Location withheld (Listen on YouTube)12. Eva Cassidy: “Autumn Leaves”The ache in her voice as she evokes the melancholy that summer’s end brings never fails to make my breath catch. You can picture the leaves falling like tears. — Bonnie Holliday, Arrington, Va. (Listen on YouTube)13. Billie Holiday: “Autumn in New York”The warmth of Billie Holiday’s voice and the cool notes of Oscar Peterson’s piano put me in a smoky jazz club, away from the chill of the sunset. It’s a sense of transformation. Summer is ending, but what is beginning? — Janet Hartwell, Key West, Fla. (Listen on YouTube)14. Nanci Griffith: “October Reasons”The song begins, “I’m gonna open up the window and let in October,” as if October is a friend waiting to be greeted. It’s how I feel about fall: the cooler temperatures, the changing color of the leaves. It’s a friend I want to let in, and Nanci’s song encompasses this feeling. — David Sponheim, Minnetonka, Minn. (Listen on YouTube)It’s late September and I really should be back at school,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Readers Pick the Ultimate Fall Playlist” track listTrack 1: Vince Guaraldi, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”Track 2: Rod Stewart, “Maggie May”Track 3: The Kinks, “Autumn Almanac”Track 4: Lucinda Williams, “Fruits of My Labor”Track 5: Sade, “The Sweetest Gift”Track 6: Warren Zevon, “Tenderness on the Block”Track 7: Big Thief, “Change”Track 8: Slowdive, “When the Sun Hits”Track 9: Led Zeppelin, “Ramble On”Track 10: Tom Rush, “Urge for Going”Track 11: Nick Drake, “Time Has Told Me”Track 12: Eva Cassidy, “Autumn Leaves”Track 13: Billie Holiday, “Autumn in New York”Track 14: Nanci Griffith, “October Reasons”Bonus TracksMy own personal fall song is a pretty obvious choice: Neil Young’s “Harvest.” It’s right there in the title, sure, but there’s also something so oblique and stirring about the melody of this song and the imagery of its lyrics that continues to haunt me each time I listen. “Harvest” has, to me, that mixture of chill and warmth, of familiarity and strangeness, that make a great fall song. (Plus, you know, it’s literally called “Harvest.” From the album “Harvest.” What more can I say?)Also, on this week’s Playlist, you can hear new music from Bad Bunny, boygenius, Sleater-Kinney, and more. Check it out here. More