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5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More
Among the rarities on view at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair are also a 1555 treatise on tennis and Amy Winehouse’s personal library.The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which returns to the Park Avenue Armory this weekend after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is one of the world’s leading gatherings of the rare book tribe. For more casual visitors, it can also be an experience of dizzying information overload.Yes, there are the museum-like displays of fine bindings, illuminated manuscripts and historic documents, with dramatic lighting (and eye-popping prices). But the fair, which runs from Thursday evening to Sunday, also features booths stuffed with pulp paperbacks, old advertisements, zines, board games, maps, photographs and all manner of accessibly priced ephemera that challenges any hidebound notions of “rare books.”Here is a sampling of offerings at the more than 200 booths, from carefully curated libraries to jotted notes that speak to the power of pen and paper to stop time and conjure vanished worlds.Send in the SondheimPart of an archive of 70 letters and postcards written by Stephen Sondheim over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller.via Schubertiade MusicAfter Stephen Sondheim’s death last November, social media was awash with images of the notes he regularly sent to theater colleagues famous and not, offering praise and encouragement. Schubertiade Music is offering range of Sondheimiana, including a collection of 70 letters and postcards ($20,000) written over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller. In one, Sondheim describes a 1969 trip to Europe: “In Vienna we were treated with the doubtful pleasure of one act of ‘West Side Story’ in German. Funnier than the original, anyway, even if it is billed as ‘Bernstein’s West Side Story.’” Also on offer are autographed programs, scores and a mid-1930s class photograph ($1,000) showing a young Sondheim dressed as a clown.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Atomic DawnPapers from the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s.via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps and Boston Rare Maps“Ball or mushroom rose slowly & majestically & ponderously & brilliantly — bright red purple [with] blue rim for a few seconds. So it towered up with streamers falling vertically in the stem & out of the cap.”So wrote a member of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group on July 16, 1945, after watching the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon, in the New Mexican desert, known as the Trinity Test. Boston Rare Maps and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps are jointly offering a trove of 300 pages of little-seen handwritten diagrams, memos, maps and notes generated by the medical group, which was charged with monitoring health and safety. The documents ($1.5 million) — which include what the sellers say is the first written use of the term “mushroom cloud” — were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s, when they were declassified and then sold to a private collector during the base’s decommissioning. The material reflects the tensions between preserving secrecy while protecting populations downwind from nuclear fallout, as well as the tension between dispassionate scientific observation and sheer awe.A Pioneering Black ShakespeareanAn autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello.via Maggs Bros Ltd.The London dealer Maggs Bros is offering an autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello ($13,500). Born in 1807, Aldridge attended the African Free School of New York City and acted in William Brown’s African Theater before emigrating to England to seek better prospects. At first, he played African roles, sometimes written expressly for him. His turn as Othello came in 1832, when he stepped in after the renowned Edmund Kean collapsed onstage and died. Audiences loved it, but the critics were outraged. Management closed the theater after two performances, and Aldridge did not appear on the mainstream London stage again for decades. The portrait, created during one of his triumphant tours of the European continent, “acknowledges his work as an artist rather than a mere curiosity,” according to the listing.Tennis, Anyone?Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis.via Jonathan Hill BooksellerJonathan Hill Bookseller of New York is offering a rare first edition of Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis ($45,000), said to be the first book on the game. By the mid-16th century, tennis was already a popular pastime among kings and commoners alike, though bitter disputes often broke out over the rules (plus ça change?). Scaino, a philosopher, apparently wrote the book after a debate with his patron, the duke of Ferrara (and the owner of as many as six courts), over how to award a point. It’s not clear who won that one, but scholars today still debate the validity of Scaino’s arcane theory of the origins of the game’s odd scoring system.This Girl’s LifeTwo volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by the precocious 11-year-old Emily Shore, a contemporary of Charlotte Brontë.via Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of LondonOne of the stars of the fair is a miniature book created in 1829 by 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë ($1.25 million), which recently surfaced after being considered lost for nearly a century. But Brontë and her siblings were hardly the only word-mad British children of the era. Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of London is offering two volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by 11-year-old Emily Shore. The precocious Emily, who died at age 19, wrote three volumes of poetry, three novels and several histories, which went unpublished. She is known today through her diaries, which were published by her sisters in 1891 in heavily edited form. Today, only a handful of the dozen notebooks she filled her with tiny, meticulous handwriting are known to survive. The two on sale here offer an unfiltered window into the domestic life of a period where children, especially girls, were seen but rarely heard.End-of-the-World Library?A 1554 first edition in Italian of Aristotle’s “Meteorology,” the oldest comprehensive treatise on the subject.via Peter HarringtonThe London dealer Peter Harrington spent a decade building One Hundred Seconds to Midnight, a collection of 800 works tracking more than 2,000 years of climate science and environmentalism, from Aristotle’s “Meteorology” and 19th-century weather records to NASA’s iconic “Earthrise” photograph and contemporary “cli-fi” novels. The dealer’s booth will feature highlights from the collection ($2.5 million), which tracks “both our recording of data and also our emotional response to it,” as a video tour of the collection puts it. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the World Land Trust.Punk Lit!The safety-pin=pierced dustjacket of Sam Gideon’s “The Punk” (1977), said to be the first punk novel. It was supposedly written by a 14-year-old “closet punk” in London.via Type Punch MatrixType Punch Matrix, a Washington, D.C., bookseller that aims to make collecting more accessible and diverse, is known for edgy stock that pushes the boundaries of the rare books category. Their big-ticket offerings this year include a collection of more than 220 books that once belonged to the singer Amy Winehouse ($135,000), about 50 of which will be on display. (Among the sometimes heavily annotated titles is a marked-up script of “Little Shop of Horrors” from Winehouse’s theater-kid days, and a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” described as looking “like it was dropped in the bath.”) On a tighter budget? The dealers are also offering a pristine copy of Gideon Sams’s “The Punk” (1977), often said to be first punk novel, written, the story goes, by a 14-year-old British “closet punk” as a school assignment, and published after his mother rescued it from the trash. It comes with the original dust jacket, featuring a real safety-pin piercing the nose of the image of Johnny Rotten ($500).New York International Antiquarian Book FairApril 21-24 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; nyantiquarianbookfair.com. More
The actor must complete six more months of treatment with no new arrests under his plea deal.The actor Cuba Gooding Jr., who had been accused by more than 20 women of groping or forcibly kissing them in encounters that dated back more than two decades, pleaded guilty in Manhattan on Wednesday to one count of forcible touching.The count, a misdemeanor, charged that he had forcibly kissed a woman at a nightclub in Manhattan in 2018.Under terms of the plea, Mr. Gooding must continue for six more months in alcohol and behavior modification treatment that he has been undergoing since 2019, and he must have no new arrests, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.If he fulfills the terms of the plea, he can then withdraw the plea and plead to a lesser charge of harassment, a violation, with a sentence of time served, the office said. Also, the record of the plea will not be sealed, the office said.If Mr. Gooding does not comply with the terms of his deal, the misdemeanor guilty plea would stand and he could face up to one year in jail.In a hearing on Wednesday in State Supreme Court, Justice Curtis Farber asked Mr. Gooding if the charge to which he was pleading guilty was true.“Yes, your honor,” Mr. Gooding said. “I kissed the waitress on her lips.”“I apologize for ever making anybody feel inappropriately touched,” Mr. Gooding said in court, adding that he was a “celebrity” and did not want people he met to “feel slighted.”Mr. Gooding had faced a criminal trial on charges of unwanted sexual touching of three women in Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs in 2018 and 2019. The Manhattan district attorney’s office had asked a judge to admit as witnesses 19 other women who it said had come forward to accuse Mr. Gooding of such conduct.Mr. Gooding’s “prior acts demonstrate that his contacts with their intimate parts are intentional, not accidental, and that he is not mistaken about their lack of consent,” the district attorney’s office wrote in a court filing in October 2019.The judge initially ruled that two of the additional accusers could testify against Mr. Gooding at trial, which would have allowed prosecutors to argue in court that Mr. Gooding had exhibited similar conduct for years.But an assistant district attorney, Coleen Balbert, revealed in court on Wednesday that Justice Farber later reversed this ruling, meaning that the additional accusers’ testimony could not be introduced at trial, something that previously had not been made public, she noted.Asked about any such later ruling by the judge, a court spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said, “In the pendency of any criminal case, there are always discussions about what may or may not be introduced.” Mr. Chalfen said Justice Farber’s later ruling still would have allowed the district attorney’s office to call the additional accusers to rebut any defense testimony in the trial.Mr. Gooding was originally charged in connection with an encounter on the night of June 9, 2019, during a party at the Magic Hour Rooftop Bar, an expensive lounge at the Moxy NYC Times Square hotel in Manhattan. The accuser said that Mr. Gooding placed his hand on her breast without her consent and squeezed, according to a criminal complaint.He was later charged with pinching a woman’s bottom at a Manhattan nightclub in October 2018 and with an additional incident at Lavo, an Italian restaurant on East 58th Street, in September 2018 — the episode to which he pleaded guilty.In court, Mr. Gooding’s lawyer, Frank Rothman, said his client was also prepared to apologize to the women in the two other incidents.One of those accusers — the woman in the incident at the hotel in 2019 — addressed the court on Wednesday.“I won’t lie,” the woman, who identified herself as Kelsey Harbert, said. “I’m very disappointed that we are here today discussing a plea deal.”Ms. Harbert said that she wanted to talk about what had happened to her and also to explore some broader issues, which drew an objection from Mr. Rothman, who said she should not be “making a statement for the rest of society.”Ms. Harbert, saying she would limit her comments to her own experience, told the court that she had been “super excited” to see Mr. Gooding and then encounter him while she was out one night with friends. Her excitement turned to dismay, however, when she felt his hand on her breast, she said.“I was mortified,” she said. “My body was being placed under the dominion of someone else without my consent.”Ms. Harbert said it was “very devastating” to her that Mr. Gooding would have the chance to “move on” after six months, while she has experienced continuing feelings of trauma and violation as a result of her contact with him.After Ms. Harbert completed her statement, the defense lawyer, Mr. Rothman, spoke again, saying he had watched a video recording depicting the events at the hotel. “What she said happened here for the last 20 minutes is a product of her imagination in large part,” Mr. Rothman said.After court, Mr. Rothman said in a phone interview, “This case should have been resolved years ago.” He said that he had met with the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, after he took office in January, who “took a harder and more in-depth look at the pros and cons of the prosecution.”“We reached an agreement that all sides could live with,” Mr. Rothman said. “It’s fair and appropriate under all of the circumstances.”Mr. Gooding, a Bronx native, had his first major success playing the lead role in the 1991 film “Boyz n the Hood,” and he won an Academy Award in 1997 for his supporting role in “Jerry Maguire.” He played O.J. Simpson in the 2016 television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” More
A new production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga resumed performances on Tuesday night, 11 days after it shut down because of positive coronavirus tests among company members.The resumption comes as four Broadway shows, as well as several Off Broadway productions, that have canceled performances as coronavirus cases rise in New York City are all attempting to get back on their feet, in some cases after those who test positive recover, and in some cases even sooner by deploying understudies.“Macbeth” got through just three preview performances before shutting down on April 1, citing a positive test in the company; the next day, it said Craig too had tested positive. But on Tuesday, “Macbeth” returned; the production suggested earlier in the day that both principals were healthy, posting on Twitter that “Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga return to their throne.”Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga return to their throne. Performances resume tonight. pic.twitter.com/llcjZAf7rh— Macbeth on Broadway (@macbethbway) April 12, 2022
Meanwhile, a revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Plaza Suite” starring the married couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick planned to resume performances Thursday, with Broderick performing opposite Parker’s standby, Erin Dilly, while Parker continues to isolate. (Both she and Broderick tested positive for the virus, and the show has been canceled since April 7.) The production said Wednesday that it expected Parker to rejoin the cast on Saturday.A new musical called “A Strange Loop,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 after an Off Broadway production, hopes to begin performances Thursday, according to the production. The show had been scheduled to start previews April 6, but postponed the start of its run, citing positive virus tests in its company.“Paradise Square,” a new musical that opened April 3 but then canceled performances starting April 7, citing virus cases, is now planning to resume April 19.“Macbeth” and “A Strange Loop” face particular pressure because they have not yet officially opened, and must do so by April 28 to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. But the cancellations are costly to all shows, which must continue to pay running costs without box office revenue and which are losing opportunities for Tony nominators and voters to attend.Off Broadway, the new musical “Suffs,” about the American women’s suffrage movement, also resumed performances Tuesday, after canceling performances starting April 5 because of virus cases. The show’s author and lead performer, Shaina Taub, is still recuperating, so the central role of Alice Paul is being played by Taub’s standby, Holly Gould.Both “Plaza Suite” and “Suffs,” which had been selling very strongly, have extended their limited runs to accommodate ticket holders affected by the cancellations. More
Researchers debunked a long-repeated yarn that the common birds owe their North American beginnings to a 19th-century lover of the Bard. Maybe this ubiquitous bird’s story is ready for a reboot.In 1890, a mustachioed eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin released a few dozen European starlings into New York City. His supposed goal? Introduce all the bird species mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays to America.More than a century later, the European starling is one of the most plentiful bird species in North America. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit this continent, from Alaska and Newfoundland all the way to Mexico. The animals are gorgeous, with polka-dot feather patterns and a purply-green sheen. They fill the skies in great numbers, flying in synchronized patterns called murmurations.But they are also considered a pest, said to spread disease to livestock and cause $800 million worth of agricultural damage each year. The species is believed to take over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Add it all up, and it makes one heck of a story about how even the tiniest of actions can trigger profound consequences. The butterfly effect, there for all to see in every roadside murmuration. A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and around 130 years later, a woodpecker loses its nest and a dairy farmer loses their livelihood.“If true, it would suggest that a long-dead dramatist totally reshaped the ecosystem of a foreign continent, which is a fascinating connection between literature and science,” said John MacNeill Miller, an assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.However, Dr. MacNeill and a Lauren Fugate, a student who worked with him, recently concluded that crucial parts of the story are not true. And that made them wonder: What else have scientists and naturalists gotten wrong about the European starling’s narrative? Is there more to this bird known mostly as an invasive pest?The Bird and the Bard-LoverThree starlings collected in Central Park, including, from left, two juveniles collected in 1892 and an adult collected in 1890, in the American Museum of Natural History’s historical collection.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeathers of one of the European starling study skins from 1890. The museum’s starling collection includes specimens from their native, as well as introduced, range.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller has long been fascinated by the tale of Eugene Schieffelin. But there was a problem with the narrative.“In all the places that I had seen this story before,” he said, “I never saw a single reliable source from the time period when this supposedly happened.”So he and Ms. Fugate, started digging through archives and databases for any link between the Bard-lover and the bird. According to their findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Humanities in November, Schieffelin did release 40 pairs of European starlings into New York City twice in the springs of 1890 and 1891. But Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller failed to find evidence that Schieffelin was the Shakespeare superfan he has been made out to be.They found in an essay collection published in 1948 that Edwin Way Teale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nature writer, was the first to link the two. He referred to Schieffelin’s “curious hobby” of introducing “all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”Determined to find the source for Teale’s claim, Dr. Miller drove to the University of Connecticut to sort through a collection of Teale’s archives. (He died in 1980.) In a draft of the essay, Teale muses that perhaps Schieffelin had been influenced by a Shakespeare garden being started in Central Park around the same time — a botanical homage to the Bard that sought to nurture plants, not birds, mentioned in his plays.However, Teale got the timing wrong. The Shakespeare Garden — which you can still visit today — wasn’t planned until a decade after Schieffelin’s death, or 22 years after he first released starlings. Therefore, the garden could not have been a factor. The final version of the essay omitted the mention of the garden but left the connection between Schieffelin and Shakespeare. This statement of fact has since been repeated again and again without challenge in magazines, newspapers of record and birding websites.Several starlings in Fort Tryon park.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“Long story short, we concluded that this commonplace story is mostly fictional,” Dr. Miller said.Dr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also question whether today’s birds are uniquely descended from Schieffelin’s flocks, as is often parroted. Numerous records exist of earlier European starling introductions, starting in 1872, to locations including New York City, Ohio and even as far away as Oregon. Such releases were part of a movement at the time known as “acclimatization” where people deliberately experimented with transplanting species into new areas, either to see how they would adapt or because those species were seen as beneficial in some way.Some tellings of the Schieffelin starling origin story note these earlier introductions but suggest that those birds failed to survive. However, wild starlings were caught in Massachusetts in 1876, far from any of the documented introductions. Likewise, there is a record of wild starlings in New Jersey in 1884. And who knows how many birds truly survived in nature beyond human notice, the researchers argue.“From the perspective of an invasion biologist, most invasions come from multiple introductions,” said Natalie Hofmeister, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University.In 2019, Ms. Hofmeister published a study in the journal Molecular Ecology of the European starling’s genetic variation across North America. If all the birds came from Schieffelin’s small flock, then you’d expect to see a tight genetic bottleneck in the data. Likewise, if the other, earlier introductions had been successful, that should have injected more diversity into the results. But her findings landed somewhere in between.“It does seem like there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether or not the New York birds were really the beginning of the starlings’ expansion,” said Ms. Hofmeister, who has a follow-up study in the works.Hell Is Empty and All the Starlings Are HereA scavenging starling near the southwest entrance to Central Park. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit North America — they are one of the most plentiful bird species on the continent.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also take issue with the depiction of starlings as biological terrors. As evidence, they point to a well-regarded study from 2003 that found out of 27 native cavity-nesting birds, only one showed hints of decline that might be attributed to the introduction of starlings: the small woodpeckers known as yellow-bellied sapsuckers.Nicole Michel, director of quantitative science for the National Audubon Society, sees it differently. It’s her job to drill down into bird population data. And she says looking for declines as a result of any one variable sets “too high of a bar.”“There are many factors out there that we know are impacting birds — cats, building collisions, pesticides,” she said. “And yet it’s very difficult to determine population level impacts.”She added: “So do starlings affect other birds? Definitely. Are they the only ones that affect other birds? No.”Nearly three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. The European starlings here are counted among them, actually, with an estimated decline of 49 percent over the same time frame. (Starlings are also “declining rapidly” in Europe.)Even on the downswing, with about 85 million animals, starlings are bound to create an impact. The more likely scenario is that scientists don’t know enough to see the effects of starlings, said Daniel Simberloff, a biologist at the University of Tennessee.“We have no idea what its real impact is on insect populations, for example,” said Dr. Simberloff, who is also the editor of the journal Biological Invasions. Nor do scientists know much about more subtle but no less important impacts, such as the way starlings may affect how nutrients cycle through an ecosystem, he said.Anti-perching spikes are used to discourage birds, including starlings, from resting near the runways and taxiways at LaGuardia Airport.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesStarlings are believed to threaten native birds by taking over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesOne factor that’s not subtle is the way European starlings descend on feedlots and dairy farms by the tens to hundreds of thousands. Starlings usually eat insects during the winter, but when livestock feed is available, they’ll pick through it for steam-flaked corn, which is higher in protein and fiber than other parts of the feed. And when that many birds are taking the M&Ms out of the trail mix, so to speak, it can affect growth and milk production in cows and cost dairy farmers millions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.The birds are also suspected of transmitting diseases to livestock, though proving how this happens exactly has been as slippery as deciphering the impacts on native birds. While feedlots with more starlings had higher incidences of antibiotic resistant E. coli, killing more than 70 percent of the starling flock did not change how much E. coli the cows had. It’s also unclear if starlings are bringing microbes into the feedlots or simply spreading microbes that are already there.A research economist for the U.S.D.A.’s National Wildlife Research Center, Stephanie Shwiff has seen how starlings congregate at dairy lots firsthand and, she said, it is “impressive.” But as she tallies up losses to the agricultural sector, she sees no redemptive arc for these birds — only financial harm.“A lot of producers know exactly the damage that the birds are doing, but they have this overwhelming sense that it’s just the cost of doing business,” Dr. Shwiff said. She said blueberry farmers and wine grape vineyards also get slammed: “They have an almost defeated attitude.”To help farmers and livestock owners, the U.S.D.A.’s Wildlife Services program helps disperse, relocate or eradicate starlings. In 2020 alone, the program shooed away nearly eight million European starlings, and killed another 790,128 of them. A vast majority of these animals were killed with a poison invented specifically for them called DRC-1339, or Starlicide.Starlings and Arrows of Outrageous FortuneJoan Berry Hale of Stockbridge, Ga., a survivor of a 1960 Eastern Airlines plane crash that was the result of a bird strike.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhile starlings’ impact on native birds is still debated, no one can question the effect they’ve had on American aviation. Just ask Joan Berry Hale.On Oct. 4, 1960, Ms. Hale was working as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines when the Lockheed L-188 Electra she was crewing scared a flock of starlings as it took off from Boston en route to Philadelphia.“I could see out the window in the back, and I saw all these black birds fly by,” said Ms. Hale, now 85. The plane’s propellers ingested hundreds of starlings, which disturbed the engines and forced the craft to pitch left and crash nose first into the bay. “They didn’t find the front-end crew until they pulled the nose up out of the mud the next day,” she recalled.Of the 72 people on board, only 10 survived. Most were severely injured, but Ms. Hale emerged unscathed and helped survivors exit the wreckage, put on life preservers and board rescue boats.The Electra crash remains the deadliest accident resulting from a bird strike in world history. It was also a turning point in aviation safety.“That was the crash that started it all,” said Carla Dove, program manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab, which was created in response to the Electra accident.Since its formation, the Feather Identification Lab has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to make air travel safer. Using the Smithsonian’s vast collection of feathers, Dr. Dove and other experts can take a piece of “snarge,” what they call bits of bird that have gone through a jet engine, and figure out which species it belonged to. Then, airport managers and wildlife biologists can work together to make the facilities less attractive to those species.For starlings, says Richard Dolbeer, a science adviser for the U.S.D.A.’s Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, something as simple as letting the grass grow can discourage the birds from landing. Spacing out trees also cuts down on large, communal overnight roosts that might keep the animals near an airport.This Great Breach in the Starling’s Abused NatureRyan Kronenbitter, the operations group supervisor for the team at LaGuardia Airport that helps manage wildlife.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut while starlings have caused plenty of wreckage to agriculture and aviation, the birds may have some admirable qualities that are typically overlooked.Dr. Simberloff, a pioneer in the field of invasion biology, said that it was a great tragedy that starlings had been introduced, but that some of the rhetoric around them is overblown.“You see a lot of these popular papers that talk about it as one of the great scourges of North America,” Dr. Simberloff said of starlings. “And they don’t seem to be that.”Dr. Dolbeer, who is also an ornithologist, said he had “great admiration for starlings because they are so adaptable.” He’s also fascinated by the way starlings can intermingle and even roost with native species, such as red-winged blackbirds. “It’s sort of like the analogy of America being a melting pot, with all the people coming in and gluing together,” he said.Dr. Simberloff said his daughter rescued a starling and raised it up from a chick. “It knows its name very clearly,” and will sometimes say it — Blue — when prompted, he said.There may even be reasons to further consider the birds’ ecological impact. The 2003 paper on starling dominance found three species of woodpeckers experienced population increases since the European birds arrived, although it does not make a case for causation. And Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller point to a 1915 study by U.S.D.A. scientists who concluded that starlings gobbled up fewer crops and ate more crop pests than native species.And while his research has made the Shakespearean starling legend seem well and truly dead, the question of how to view the European starling these days seems very much to depend on whom you ask.After more than 60 years, Ms. Hale thinks about the crash anytime she sees a large flock of birds. So many innocent people lost their lives, and she’ll never forget the cold bite of the water. Ultimately, she thinks she became a better person because of the accident.And while she “doesn’t care much for those pesky birds,” she also doesn’t blame the European starling. “It wasn’t their fault,” Ms. Hale said. “That’s just nature.”A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and a life changes course in the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.A starling undeterred by an anti-perching device on a lamppost at LaGuardia.Karsten Moran for The New York Times More
Matthew Broderick, who is now starring on Broadway in a revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Plaza Suite,” has tested positive for the coronavirus. He did not perform Tuesday night, and it is not clear when he will return to the show.Broderick’s co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, who is also his wife, has tested negative, and went on Tuesday night opposite Michael McGrath, who is Broderick’s Tony Award-winning understudy. (McGrath won in 2012 for a production of “Nice Work if You Can Get It” that starred Broderick.)Broderick’s positive test result comes as coronavirus cases have once again been rising in New York City, and a number of Broadway shows have been affected.Last Saturday, the actor Daniel Craig was among several members of the company of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth” to test positive, and that show has since canceled all performances until Monday. More
A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More
The show, which just began previews on Tuesday, hopes to resume on April 8.Daniel Craig, who is starring in the title role of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth,” tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, forcing the show to cancel most of next week’s performances.The show, which just began previews on Tuesday and is scheduled to open April 28, had already canceled Friday night’s performance, citing another positive coronavirus test among cast members, when on Saturday it canceled both the matinee and an evening performance, citing Mr. Craig’s positive test. Then, late Saturday night, the production said that it was canceling all performances until April 8 “due to the detection of a limited number of positive covid test results within the company.”Coronavirus cases have recently been rising in New York City, and several Broadway performers have tested positive. In most instances, shows have been able to turn to understudies to keep going, but because “Macbeth” had just begun performances, it had not yet fully rehearsed the understudies.All Broadway actors — in fact, all workers in Broadway theaters — are required to be fully vaccinated. Broadway also currently requires that ticket holders be fully vaccinated and wear masks except when eating and drinking; on Friday, the theater owners and operators said that those rules would remain in place at least through April 30, and that they would decide by April 15 whether to retain, alter or drop the audience protocols after the end of the month.“Macbeth,” of course, is a well-known and much-loved tragedy by William Shakespeare, and this revival has been one of the most anticipated productions of the spring on Broadway. Mr. Craig, who is fresh off his long run playing James Bond on film, had repeatedly said he wanted to be part of Broadway’s efforts to rebound after the industry’s long pandemic shutdown.Mr. Craig is starring opposite Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, in the production, which is directed by Sam Gold. The show does not have much leeway — it is already scheduled to be the last production to open this season, and its opening night is on the final day when shows can open to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. More
