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      How One Man’s Tale of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sex Tapes Landed Him in Court

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      Courtney Burgess, a one-time music industry bit player, said he had videos showing encounters involving celebrities. Prosecutors recently subpoenaed him.In federal court, the music mogul Sean Combs is facing a sweeping indictment that accuses him of running a criminal enterprise that engaged in sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Online, a cottage industry of amateur sleuths, speculators and self-described past associates have accused him, often with little grounding, of far worse.After Mr. Combs was charged in September, the social media theorizing about rampant celebrity debauchery and additional victims only grew more feverish and conspiratorial. Soon, a man began showing up on true crime podcasts claiming he had been given videos that showed sexual encounters involving Mr. Combs and a variety of other stars, including some he said looked to be inebriated and underage.Media outlets have received anonymous emails offering to negotiate deals to provide the supposed footage, but none have published any images and it remains unclear whether such videos even exist.Yet in a startling twist that brought the internet rumor mill into the U.S. court system, prosecutors recently subpoenaed Courtney Burgess, the man who said he had the explosive videos, to testify in front of a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.The surfacing of Mr. Burgess, a one-time music industry bit player, has only amped up the circuslike frenzy surrounding the case. With much of the investigation shrouded in secrecy, it is unclear whether the prosecutors view Mr. Burgess as a possible new witness — the keeper of a smoking gun — or simply wanted to test the online bluster of someone seeking to be part of the action.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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      A Stroke Paralyzed Jesse Malin. Next Month, He’ll Stand Onstage Again.

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      The New York rock stalwart suffered a rare spinal stroke at a dinner party last year. His journey back to music has been filled with painful challenges and hope.On a September afternoon in his East Village apartment, Jesse Malin was learning to stand up in front of a microphone. He pressed his right hand on his knee and grabbed a mic stand with his left. A physical therapist stood behind him in case he started to fall. He wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a Lion of Judah, a Rasta symbol that gave him inspiration.At the count of three, he lurched forward and up, clinging to the stand for balance.“Let’s get me down,” he said. “I’m scared.”Listen to this article with reporter commentaryMalin, 57, has been standing at microphones for 45 years, first as a 12-year-old punk pioneer, later as leader of the ’90s glam-rock band D Generation and for the last two decades as a touring singer-songwriter.But on this day, he was preparing for a concert like no other in his career. On Dec. 1 and 2, he will perform in public for the first time in a year and a half, following a rare spinal stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down.Joining him at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan will be some of the friends he has made over his career: Lucinda Williams, Rickie Lee Jones, the Hold Steady, J Mascis, Fred Armisen and a host of others. Proceeds go to pay his medical bills and expenses.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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      Peter Sinfield, Lyricist for King Crimson, Dies at 80

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      His swirls of poetic imagery helped define progressive rock in the 1970s. He later turned his focus to pop acts like Celine Dion.Peter Sinfield, whose mystical and at times politically pointed lyrics for the British band King Crimson became emblematic of the progressive rock movement of the 1970s, died on Nov. 14 in London. He was 80.His death was announced on the website of DGM, the record label founded by the King Crimson mastermind and virtuoso guitarist Robert Fripp, along with David Singleton. The statement did not say where Mr. Sinfield died or cite a cause, but it noted that he “had been suffering from declining health for several years.”Mr. Sinfield, who once referred to himself as the band’s “pet hippie,” linked up with Mr. Fripp in 1968 after living an itinerant life in Spain and Morocco. He was the lyricist on the first four King Crimson albums, starting with “In the Court of the Crimson King” in 1969, which is widely regarded as the first album in the genre that came to be known as prog rock.But his role was varied. He also helped produce King Crimson’s albums and worked as a roadie, lighting operator and sound engineer and, as art director, oversaw the band’s album covers. He even came up with the name of the band, plucked from his lyrics for the song “The Court of the Crimson King.”“I was looking at things like Led Zeppelin, the Who — I could see that it had to be something powerful,” Mr. Sinfield recalled in a 2012 video interview. “And I thought, actually, if we just take it from the song and just call it King Crimson, that’s pretty powerful. And it isn’t the Devil. It isn’t Beelzebub, but it’s arrogant, and it’s got a feeling of darkness about it.”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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      Morgan Wallen Wins CMA’s Entertainer of the Year Award

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      The singer, who is among the most popular artists in music, won country’s top prize in absentia, three years after being rebuked by the genre’s gatekeepers.The pop-country superstar Morgan Wallen won entertainer of the year, the top honor at the 58th annual Country Music Association Awards in Nashville on Wednesday night. The award recognized Wallen’s status atop the genre three years after the association banned him from performing at the 2021 show.That year, Wallen was rebuked by many of the industry’s gatekeepers after video surfaced of him using a racial slur. This year, the singer did not attend the show, but was the most nominated artist with seven nods, including male vocalist of the year. Wallen’s lone win came after his 2023 album “One Thing at a Time,” hit No. 1 for the 19th time a year after its release, breaking Billboard’s record for most weeks at the top for a country album.“Last Night,” a single from the LP, went platinum seven times and was 2023’s most-streamed song of any genre in the United States.Wallen was also nominated for single of the year for his work on Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help,” one of the most popular songs of this summer, which spent six weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100.The CMAs have not always recognized Wallen’s achievements and contributions to the genre. In 2023, when Wallen was considered one of the favorites, he walked away empty-handed after losing album of the year, male vocalist of the year, and the top category, entertainer of the year. In response to completely being shut out, Wallen said on Instagram that he, “Walked in tonight a winner, didn’t leave no different.”The entertainer of the year award last night was presented by Jeff Bridges, who announced Wallen’s win to a resounding round of applause and cheers.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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      In Praise of Adele and the Long Black Dress

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      As the artist brings her Las Vegas residency to an end, she leaves behind a major fashion legacy. Just call her Madame A.This weekend, Adele’s Las Vegas residency comes to an end and with it what may have been the most striking series of LBDs since Audrey Hepburn stepped out of a cab in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” wearing Givenchy. Those initials don’t just stand for little black dress anymore.By the time the artist takes her last bow, she will have worn more than 50 long black dresses in Vegas (to say nothing of her concerts in Munich and London, where she also wore LBDs) — a different one every weekend. She started in an off-the-shoulder velvet Schiaparelli, with a long satin sash caught up by a gold buckle speckled with nipples (you read that right). She wore David Koma with crystal roses on Valentine’s Day 2023. She channeled Morticia Addams on Halloween that fall in Arturo Obegero. She got Loro Piana to make its first va-va-voom gown this month.She has worn, in no particular order, LBDs from Stella McCartney, Dior, Carolina Herrera, Harris Reed, Prada, Vivienne Westwood, Robert Wun, Proenza Schouler, Armani, JW Anderson and Ralph Lauren, to name but a few. All were custom-made. She has worked with names from across the industry and rarely repeated a designer twice.The only guidelines, according to Fernando Garcia, the co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta, who made the glittery sunburst number she wore for her Christmas 2022 performance, were that they be black, long, cut on the curve to show off her waist and needed to have enough give to let her lungs go.Adele has fancied the LBD for almost as long as she has been in the public eye (see the night-sky Armani LBD she wore to the Grammys in 2012). But the sheer number of black gowns she has worn during her residency, the variety and the consistency of her presentation, marks a new milestone in what may be the most timeless garment in the fashion pantheon.At the start of her Las Vegas residency, Adele wore a velvet Schiaparelli with a satin sash and gold buckle speckled with nipples.Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesIn October. she wore a Gaurav Gupta LGD with an off-the-shoulder neckline that resembled wings.Raven B. VaronaWe 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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      How Will Popular Culture Change in Trump’s Second Term?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump appeared on several podcasts with young male audiences. Whether or not they tilted the outcome, they helped increase Trump’s visibility and appeal with a notoriously hard-to-reach demographic. And following his victory, Trump culture moved out of these comfort spaces and began seeping out in unexpected places: Trump danced in N.F.L. end zones, there were TikTok videos of people wearing MAGA hats in New York City.In many ways the cultural legacy of the first Trump administration was more visible in backlash and protest. But it’s possible the second time around, the impact will be an affirmative one.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the long tail of cultural response to political change, the de-monopolization of centrist broadcast and cable television and the different directions pop culture might take in Trump’s second term.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      The Berlin Philharmonic Is the Best in the Business

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      In three concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Kirill Petrenko, this orchestra played with awe-inspiring force and finesse.Around the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Böcklin’s brooding painting “The Isle of the Dead” made for one of the most popular images in Europe. Freud and Lenin owned prints; after seeing a reproduction in 1907, Rachmaninoff was inspired to write a tone poem.Nabokov wrote that copies of the Böcklin hung “in every home in Berlin.” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” which the Berlin Philharmonic played on Sunday at the start of an amazing three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall, was also once ubiquitous, but these days is programmed less frequently and has a whiff of old-fashioned character piece about it.Great orchestras — and no orchestra is greater than this one, which plays with force and finesse under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — of course illuminate the deathless classics of the repertoire, as the Philharmonic did on this trip with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. But the best ensembles also reveal unexpected depths in pieces you might take less seriously.Petrenko conducted “The Isle of the Dead” with the same luminous seriousness he might bring to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” making it taut and ferocious, morose without heaviness. Building in strength near the start, the Philharmonic sounded billowing rather than crushing, like a gathering storm cloud. Solos — like the wind fragments that twist around each other, one by one — were played with poise but never look-at-me self-regard. A violin elegy near the end achieved wrenching intensity in what can sometimes be mere mood music.I’ve often thought that Korngold’s Violin Concerto — which came between the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak on Sunday and again, all three even more potent, on Tuesday — is a lot of shallow showboating. But the Philharmonic and Petrenko made it seem newly sophisticated.These players’ cohesion allowed them to create uncannily evocative atmospheres. The first movement of the concerto had a moonlit glow. In the third, a golden full-orchestra blast, balanced so that no section swamped the others, dissolved into a fairy tiptoe. Small details were moving in their artfulness, down to a tiny diminuendo passage in the violins in the first movement: a short, tender motif played a few times, each time softer. It was a simple effect, executed with utterly unified subtlety.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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      Rebuilding After Fire, Jacob’s Pillow Will Open a New Theater

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      The Doris Duke Theater, more than twice as large as the original and designed for modern technology, will open in July.When the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow, the bucolic dance festival in Becket, Mass., was destroyed by a fire four years ago, the festival’s director, Pamela Tatge, promised that it would be rebuilt.“The theater,” she said at the time, “is an essential component of the ecology of Jacob’s Pillow.”On Wednesday, Jacob’s Pillow announced that its new Doris Duke Theater would reopen on July 9, as part of its coming season. And the initial wave of programming there has been conceived specifically with the space in mind.“We all struggled when we lost the Doris Duke,” Tatge said in an interview. “But we had this moment to think of what we will build and why, and what sort of building we need in the future.”The campus of Jacob’s Pillow has other performances spaces: the large Ted Shawn Theater, and the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage. The old Doris Duke opened in 1990, with 230 seats and the look of a sleek barn.A $10 million gift from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, insurance claims and other gifts paid for the costs of the new theater. Jacob’s Pillow, Tatge said, wanted its new building to be a flexible space with “the ability to support the future of where this field is going.” The organization hired the Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo, and brought on the Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson as a consultant, to design a theater, Tatge added, “that was in dialogue with nature.”The result is a building nearly twice the size of the original theater, with a range of 220-400 seats and the ability to also house residencies and other events, perhaps at the same time. It will be equipped with a spatial audio system and specialized cameras for livestreaming and interactive video performances.Tatge said that next summer’s lineup of artists at the Doris Duke Theater was based on “works that could magnify and amplify the flexibility of the space, as well as works that demonstrate the intersection of dance and technology.”The programming includes the world premiere of Andrew Schneider’s “Here,” Shamel Pitts’s “Touch of Red” and Eun-Me Ahn’s “Dragons.” The Taiwanese choreographer and roboticist Huang Yi will make his Pillow debut, as will the Indigenous Sámi choreographer Elle Sofe. Faye Driscoll will return to the festival with her work “Weathering,” from last year, and Schneider and Pitts will create digital-first pieces.In the future, Tatge said, Jacob’s Pillow hopes to commission works that incorporate augmented reality, technology similar to video conferencing and other forms of mixed reality. And they can be developed year-round in the new building.“It will be a maker space,” Tatge said of the Doris Duke Theater. “At a time where there is a crisis of ambition in our country because a lack of resources, the fact that we’re going to be able to support artists — that is something.” More