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      in Television

      A Duchess Brought Low by ‘A Very British Scandal’

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      In a new show on Prime Video, Claire Foy plays a British aristocrat whose sex life became the subject of salacious tabloid stories in the 1960s.LONDON — Everybody loves a sex scandal, and a posh one is even better. The great and the good brought down in disgrace: That’s a story people want to hear.In “A Very British Scandal,” a three-part series streaming on Prime Video from April 22, Claire Foy plays the Duchess of Argyll, a real-life aristocrat whose sex life was pored over in a 1960s court case that created a media frenzy and riveted the nation. When the BBC aired “A Very British Scandal” this past December, nearly 7 million people tuned in.The show is a companion to “A Very English Scandal,” another hugely popular Amazon-BBC coproduction in which Hugh Grant played an upper-crust politician who suffered a similar fate.These stories, Foy said in a recent interview, appealed to elements of Britain’s national character. “We’re perverts, aren’t we?” Foy said. “Deep down, all British people love it: We love gossip and love the titillating things other people are getting up to,” she added. “Anything that happens behind closed doors, we’re all completely obsessed with.”In the show’s final episode, one of the duchess’s aristocratic friends bemoans the British public’s desire to know what the upper classes are up to. “The little people in their grubby pits look up to us, because we are not them,” says the friend, played by Julia Davis. But stories about the duchess’s sex life, she says, “are dragging us down so we look just like them.”Foy’s character was never one of “the little people,” but she wasn’t always an aristocrat, either. She was born Margaret Whigham, in Scotland, in 1912. Her father, a self-made textiles millionaire, moved the family to New York when she was a child, and she lived there until she was 14. Back in Britain, she became a much-photographed debutante with a fancy trans-Atlantic sheen, and a fixture of newspaper society pages. After a string of high-profile relationships and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she became the Duchess of Argyll in 1951 when she married the duke, Ian Campbell (played by Paul Bettany in the show), whose family had been part of the Scottish aristocracy since the 1400s.A glamorous A-lister who counted society columnists as her friends, the duchess cultivated a chic media image. And she realized early on she could make money from what we would now call her “personal brand,” taking cash from tabloid newspapers to appear in fawning articles. (“Beautiful! Rich! Distinguished!” read a teaser for a 1961 Daily Mirror splash. “This is the Duchess of Argyll the world knows.”)The duchess, photographed in 1955 for magazine coverage of the London social season. She initially had a symbiotic relationship with the British press. Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut when her marriage to the duke broke down, she lost control of the story. The couple’s nasty divorce case — in which the duchess’s intimate photos were presented in court — made her the subject of salacious newspaper articles and gossipy anecdotes, and later, “A Very British Scandal” and even an opera.During the trial, the duke submitted a list of 88 men he said the duchess had slept with during their marriage, as well as Polaroids he had stolen from her that showed the duchess performing oral sex on an unknown man whose head was not in the frame.Ruling in the duke’s favor to grant the divorce in 1963, the judge said the duchess was a “completely promiscuous woman” who had indulged “in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” The details of the “headless man” photos were gleefully written up in British newspapers, which raked over the case for months. Margaret the glittering socialite became Margaret “the dirty duchess.”Over the rest of her life, she frittered away the fortune she inherited from her father on a series of unsuccessful law suits and dubious investments. Her personal relations didn’t fare much better: She fell out with a daughter from her first marriage, and many of her friends. The duchess died in penury, at 80, in a London retirement home. The first hymn at her funeral, in 1993, began, “Dear Lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.”Sarah Phelps, who wrote the script for “A Very British Scandal,” said that the duchess’s case and the media furor around it represented “the end of an era.” It was “the birth of a different kind of journalism, and a way of writing about sex and scandal in a very, very prurient way,” she said. And it paved the way for later media depictions of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Markle — “that viciousness and anger that is directed at women in the public eye,” she said.When the initial outrage faded, the duchess remained the subject of snickering innuendos for decades. Grinning men would pose for photos beside the boarding sign for a Scottish boat that shared her name: “Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll.” Today’s TV audiences will have more sympathy for the duchess, who now looks like a victim of “slut-shaming,” and the nonconsensual sharing of her photos like “revenge porn.” It’s unlikely many viewers will judge her for a sex act that some women’s magazines now offer tips on performing. Yet they might still find it hard to warm to the duchess, who Foy plays as an arrogant, scheming snob.“She lied and she cheated, and she did all sorts of really awful things,” Foy said. “In her defense, they were also done to her.”As a person in the public eye, she sympathized with the duchess and her treatment by the press. “She was one thing, and then they decided she was something else,” Foy said. “Journalists dictate the public perception of you in my industry,” she added. “You are completely in the hands of the people who write the story.”Allison Cook portrayed the duchess in a 2013 production of the opera “Powder Her Face,” staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara krulwich/The New York TimesAnother author of the duchess’s story is the British composer Thomas Adès, whose 1995 opera “Powder Her Face” casts her as its antiheroine. First presented at the Cheltenham Festival in England, when Adès was just 24, “Powder Her Face” has since been performed over 300 times across Europe and the United States, according to Faber, its publisher.Adès said he started out by looking for a classic operatic plot: “someone in a grand position, who’s outwardly very strong and impressive, who is dismantled and brought low by forces from the outside.” Philip Hensher, the opera’s librettist, remembered the Argyll divorce case, Adès said: The duchess fit the bill perfectly.Whereas “A Very British Scandal” ends with the courtroom judgment, “Powder Her Face” picks up at the end of the duchess’s life, when she was broke and holed up in a hotel she couldn’t afford. In a series of dreamy flashbacks, Adès recreates some key vignettes from the story of her life, including the liaison with “the headless man” as an aria from the duchess that begins with words and ends with humming.“You can’t really pretend that she’s an entirely sympathetic character, that she’s Mimì,” said Adès, referring to the fragile seamstress who dies of tuberculosis in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “as much as I think she’s such a tragic figure.” The duchess, he added, was “formidable, and did plenty of things that were pretty questionable.”Paul Bettany, center left, plays the duke in “A Very British Scandal,” alongside Foy’s duchess.Alan Peebles/Amazon Prime VideoDespite a persistent whiff of scandal, the duchess continued to lead an active life in London high society for most of the rest of her life, said Lady Colin Campbell, a relative by marriage. “She was certainly a notoriety, but she was never a pariah. People would gossip and say, ‘Oh, look who’s here: Margaret Argyll,’” said Lady Campbell, 72. “But she rose above it, as simple as that. She simply ignored it,” she added.In her later years, when money was running low, the duchess tried again “to convert her fame into income,” Lady Campbell said. In 1986, Margaret published “My Dinner Party Book,” a guide to entertaining, aimed at housewives, that nonetheless included advice like “never invite the Lord Chancellor and two ambassadors to your dinner party at the same time.” (The book did not sell well, Lady Campbell said.)Two years later, at 76, the duchess appeared on “Wogan,” the BBC’s flagship chat show. The presenter, Terry Wogan, trod carefully around the incident that had made her most famous, gently asking, “What about your own story? Your own story was extremely colorful — do you think it would make a good plot?”“Oh, let’s pray not,” the duchess replied. “Let’s not even think about that.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Writing With Fire’ Review: Speaking Truth to Power

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      This rousing documentary follows the reporters of India’s only all-women news outlet as they pivot to digital journalism while battling personal and political challenges.Several times in the documentary “Writing With Fire,” we see women reporters standing alone in a crowd of men — cops, miners, political rallyists — asking gentle but firm questions. The women’s grit in the face of palpable hostility is impressive, and it becomes more so when you learn that they’re in Uttar Pradesh, an Indian province known for crimes against women, and that they are Dalits, or members of the country’s so-called untouchable caste.These are the reporters of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only women-led newspaper. In “Writing With Fire,” the directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh follow the outlet’s pivot to digital coverage in the lead-up to the general election in 2019. Many of the women have never used smartphones or cameras, and for much of the film, the reporters train each other and exchange feedback in heartening displays of sororal solidarity.Scenes from the reporters’ home lives emphasize how trivial these technical challenges seem compared to domestic ones. Meera, a veteran, tough-as-a-nut journalist, was married at 14 and earned three degrees while raising her children; the feisty Suneeta cannot get married because her parents can’t afford the dowries charged by men who would allow her to work.But Thomas and Ghosh focus on arcs of resistance rather than repression, tracing how, as Khabar Lahariya’s YouTube channel rapidly gains followers, its stories achieve real results: a neglected town receives medical attention; a rapist is prosecuted. If the film’s brisk telling sometimes presents these victories as too easily won, it’s a necessary corrective to the skepticism the women still face (“They’re destined to fail,” Meera’s husband scoffs).And at a time when the profession faces increasing dangers in India, the film’s faith in the powers of grassroots journalism is nothing short of galvanizing.Writing With FireNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Jim Jarmusch’s Collages Are Ready for Their Close-Up

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      The filmmaker has been quietly making small, eerie collages on newsprint for 20 years, with faces switched onto other bodies. Now they’re finally on view.Jim Jarmusch likes removing the heads. He likes to swap the heads of world leaders with Picassos or Basquiats, or simply excise them entirely, leaving a head-shaped void. A man with a coyote’s head rides in the back of a car, rather dejected. Warhol’s head is a favorite motif: twin Andys in sunglasses standing stoically in a tunnel; Warhol’s head grafted onto a state official striding a tarmac; a man slouched in a chair, one of the artist’s Brillo boxes fixed where his head should be.Jarmusch is best known for writing and directing pleasingly downbeat films like “Night on Earth” and “Down by Law,” in which laconic protagonists meander through the weirder corners of the world, encountering fellow travelers, or simply the uncanny. For the past 20 years he’s also been quietly producing collages like these, notecard-size pieces of delicately layered newsprint on cardstock that echo a similar worldview, scrambling imagery to create alternatingly deadpan and revelatory compositions.“I never intended to do anything with these,” Jarmusch, whose thatch of chalk white hair and blackout shades are still a familiar presence on the downtown scene, said in an interview this summer. “But I thought, well, why not share them? See if they amuse anyone.”“Untitled,” 2017. Is this Josef Albers’s head that’s gone missing from the artist’s body? Jim Jarmusch includes a newsprint clue that suggests so.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2017.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsJarmusch says he was content to keep this practice to himself, creating upward of 500 collages, most of which haven’t been publicly seen. But over the last year, while at the Catskills home he shares with his wife, the filmmaker Sara Driver, he was convinced, with the encouragement of Arielle de Saint Phalle, with whom he has worked for nearly 10 years, to organize and present this strain of his practice. The result is Jarmusch’s first monograph, “Some Collages,” published this month by Anthology Editions, which collects more recent examples made in the last seven years. “Newsprint Collages,” a solo show of the original collages, his formal gallery debut, opens at James Fuentes on Wednesday.And they are in fact highly amusing, in an spookily absurdist manner. They recall “La Boutique Obscure,” the impressionistic dream diary the Oulipo writer Georges Perec kept between 1968 and 1972, hallucinatory, slightly terrifying, but also frequently funny. Jarmusch’s collages are manipulations of something originally presented as fact — a détournement of photojournalism serrated and spliced into surrealist scenes that collapse time (a Victorian-era woman in a modern hospital room), or illustrate some psychic fantasy (releasing a primal scream while an audience applauds).Jarmusch has no qualms vivisecting species like a paper-based Doctor Moreau (a man with the head of a Pomeranian led away in handcuffs). But one thing he doesn’t tamper with is scale. The collages dismantle the newsprint’s visual information but remain faithful to its original size, which means many of them are minuscule, some near-microscopically so. It also means the experience of looking at one is physically intimate. The images force you to crane your neck to decipher them, or bring the page closer to your face, as if receiving a secret. As objects go, “Some Collages” is stout, a macabre photo album. It’s small enough to be considered portable, which gives it a utilitarian cast, ready to be produced to divine something important or true about the day’s news. As Joseph Cornell wrote, “Collage = reality.”“Untitled,” 2017, one of many mashups of historical periods.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2017. “I love Nico,” the artist said. “I’m saving her head.”Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“The interesting thing about them is they reveal to me that my process of creating things is very similar, whether I’m writing a script or shooting a film or making a piece of music or writing a poem or making a collage,” Jarmusch said. “I gather the elements from which I will make the thing first. Like, shooting a film is just gathering the material from which you will edit the film, you know? The collages reduce it to the most minimal form of that procedure.”Still, collage presents an attractive convenience. Whereas a film shoot necessitates sophisticated and heavy equipment, not to mention the cooperation of many people, the collages require only solitude and a copy of the paper, a movable feast of broadsheet. “Mostly I do it in between the rigors of making a film, when I need to be left alone, or maybe people around me want me to leave them alone,” Jarmusch said. “I made a lot of these over the last few years before my mother died, in Cleveland. I would stay with her in her house, and go into another room and work on them. It’s stepping aside the real world, so to speak.”Jarmusch keeps an old metal flat file in his garage with drawers dedicated to backgrounds, saved cardboard and “paper I’m attracted to,” newspapers he’s yet to parse. “I have files of heads,” he added. He has a strict set of self-imposed rules: newspapers only (no magazines), no sharp cutting tools (he favors ballpoint pens that have gone dry, which “can cut in a crude way”). The effect is a fiber halo, the tears and separations leaving a roughness that makes the images appear to fuzz, as if in a dream. “I’m not quite sure why I even adhere to these things. It’s like an oblique strategy,” he said, referring to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s card-based method for inspiring creativity.“I can work on them anywhere,” Jarmusch said of his collages. “I make them in hotel rooms. Most of the time I do it between the rigors of making a film.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesJarmusch’s collages fit within a rich art history, which joins with the art world tradition of appropriation, as sacred as it is misunderstood, from Kurt Schwitters, who assembled delirious assemblages from trash, to Hannah Hoch’s and Man Ray’s Dadaist compositions, to Ad Reinhardt’s clattering, modernist “Newsprint Collage.”“Max Ernst, Picasso and Braque, particularly, bringing other textures into their work, which carries through to one of my favorite artists of all time, Jasper Johns,” Jarmusch said. “I like that little kids can make them. You can make them so minimal. In some ways John Baldessari’s are even more minimal than mine because he didn’t even bother to replace faces but just put colored circles over them — some of those I think are very beautiful.”He went on: “In some ways my favorite artists of the 20th century are, on a philosophical level, Duchamp for the first half and Warhol for the second half. I must say I still find it hilarious when people still don’t understand that because Richard Prince reappropriated a photograph, well, why wasn’t that photograph worth hundreds of thousands of dollars before that? How come he gets all that money?.”“Untitled,” 2017Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology Editions“Untitled,” 2016. A man with a coyote’s head rides in the back of a car.Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsBefore he landed on filmmaking, Jarmusch intended to be a poet, studying under the New York School poet David Shapiro (who also made collages) and Kenneth Koch, and traces his animating principle to their strategies. “Koch once gave me a poem by Rilke, and said, bring me your translation in two days. I said, ‘But Kenneth, I don’t know any German.’ And he just looked at me with a kind of twinkle in his eye and said, ‘Exactly.’ And so the idea is take something, anything, and make a new thing out of it.”Newsprint appeals to Jarmusch for its availability, but also its ephemerality. “I like it being so fragile,” he said. “You know, the old joke of yesterday’s newspaper you wrap the fish in or whatever, it’s something intended to be discarded. It reduces it’s own self-importance somehow.”The thought occurs that this story could end up as part of one of Jarmusch’s collages, a neat closed loop. Does he find it ironic that he’s speaking with The New York Times about art he makes with copies of The New York Times? “It’s a little strange,” he said. “But I think it’s funny too. I love that newspaper thing. I love it in old movies where they roll the presses and all of that.”“Untitled,” 2017. Jim Jarmusch and James Fuentes; Anthology EditionsCould that be Glenn Close’s head, on a body with a tuxedo? Jarmusch won’t say beyond, “I try not to think too much about the kind of juxtapositions I’m creating.” Images are from his monograph “Some Collages,” by Anthology Editions.Anthology EditionsThese qualities also give the project an elegiac air. As local newspapers around the country cease operations or migrate to digital-only formats, Jarmusch’s collages become a document of a rapidly evaporating medium. “I realized only recently that, gee, I’m using materials that are almost obsolete now,” he said. “There’s something soothing for me in handling the paper, I don’t know how to explain it. Digital is too cold for me. I love it for many things, my last films have been shot with digital cameras and I’ve been editing on digital machines since 1996. I’m not a total Luddite.”Jarmusch is interested in the pure visual collision of collage, but his source material inevitably troubles their innocence. Politicians creep in, along with images of global strife, which can be interpreted as commentary. “I try not to think too much about the kind of juxtapositions I’m creating,” Jarmusch said. “If they seem too pointed or too cute or something, I get rid of them. Sometimes someone says, ‘Oh, do you realize that’s the former right-wing prime minister of Australia?’ No, I don’t know who that was. Or other times I’ll just find a nice photo of Nico [the Velvet Underground singer]. I love Nico, I’m saving her head. And then I find something where I think, that would be nice for Nico. They’re kind of childlike, my way of putting them together. They’re playful.”Yet he also admits, “Some of them are a little scary or dark. Some of them, I hope, are funny. The New York School poets taught me if there’s nothing funny in any of your stuff, then wow, how unfortunate for you.”Jim Jarmusch: Newsprint CollagesThrough Oct. 31, James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 577 1201; jamesfuentes.com. More

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      in Theater

      A Rush of News: Behind The New York Times's Live Coverage

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      When readers need information immediately, teams of journalists collaborate to tell a single unfolding story.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.When the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan began accelerating with stunning speed, The New York Times quickly shifted into live coverage mode: Reporters and editors posted developments as they happened on the collapse of Kandahar, the disintegration of the Afghan military, the global response to the U.S. government’s actions and more, all packaged together.The live coverage format, which allows journalists to share the news as they learn it, has become a familiar one at The Times for reporting big events. So far this year, the newsroom has published more than 800 live stories, each consisting of a series of dispatches and updates that together can amount to thousands of words. On a typical day, The Times publishes four live packages — on the coronavirus, politics, business news and extreme weather — but there have been days with as many as eight.In the middle of it all is the Live team, a unit of about a dozen reporters and editors that was formed at the beginning of the year to collaborate with desks across the newsroom in creating and executing breaking news coverage.The Times has outgrown its role as a New York-centric print newspaper, Marc Lacey, an assistant managing editor who leads the Live team, said. It is now a global digital news organization that also produces podcasts, videos and newsletters along with a newspaper — the investment in the Live team is just the latest step in its continuous evolution, he added.“I want people all over the world to think about us when a big story breaks,” he said. “Whether it’s in Times Square or Tiananmen Square or somewhere in between.”Front-page news events — wildfires, the earthquake in Haiti, the resignation of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — are obvious candidates for live coverage. But The Times has offered live coverage of the Grammy Awards, the National Spelling Bee, the Olympics, even Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.“Anything people want to know information about immediately is a good fit,” Traci Carl, one of two deputy editors on the Live team, said.Live stories are anchored by beat reporters who are experts on their subject matter, and the Live team works as a group of consultants to other departments. Its journalists will offer ideas, troubleshoot problems, assist in reporting and editing, and at times create or manage a live story. “We act as a support system for desks,” Ms. Carl said. “We help them get a team in place and advise on the best approaches, but we don’t want to run their coverage.”While The Times’s Express desk, another unit of reporters and editors, initially responds to many breaking news stories, the Live team, working with other departments, focuses on setting up live coverage. Express reporters are frequently critical in contributing to live coverage as other desks like International and National dispatch correspondents to the scene.The Times mainly uses two types of live formats. A fast-moving blog, in which the latest information appears at the top, allows for short comments by reporters interspersed with concise reported items, a format used for the Derek Chauvin trial and the Emmy Awards. Briefings, which have an index of their entries at the top, “are more of a synthesis of a big story, a little higher altitude,” Mr. Lacey said.“A blog is like a fire hose of news,” Melissa Hoppert, a deputy editor for the Live team, said. “A briefing is a curated experience with takeaways at the top: Here’s what you need to know if you read only one thing on the subject all day.”The Times has experimented with live blogs for about a decade, and it turned to live coverage to report on momentous events like the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. The Times published its first daily coronavirus briefing on Jan. 23, 2020, and has not stopped since, making it the organization’s longest running 24-hour live briefing.The reader demand for live coverage, especially the coronavirus briefing, which recently surpassed 900 million page views, led The Times to create the Live team.Producing the daily live briefings requires collaboration among dozens of editors, reporters and researchers around the world: The coronavirus briefing, for instance, is a 24-hour relay involving multiple time zones and three hubs in Seoul, South Korea; London; and New York.The editors overseeing the briefings stay in constant contact through video conferences as well as email, multiple encrypted apps, internal chat groups and Google Docs.“It’s intense,” Ms. Hoppert said of working a briefing shift during a fast-breaking news event. “You’re essentially figuring out what’s going on at the same time readers are.” More

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      in Movies

      Joe Galloway, Decorated Vietnam War Correspondent, Dies at 79

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      He chronicled the first major battle of the war in “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” and raised questions about the invasion of Iraq.Joe Galloway, a war correspondent whose wrenching account of the first major battle of the Vietnam War was the basis for the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which became a best seller and the basis of a hit movie, died on Wednesday in Concord, N.C. He was 79.His wife, Dr. Grace Liem, said the cause was complications of a heart attack.Mr. Galloway started in journalism at 17 and worked for 22 years as a war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International. He was the only civilian awarded a medal of valor by the Army for combat action in the Vietnam War.He later wrote for U.S. News & World Report and for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. He played a vital role in the skeptical reporting by the chain’s Washington bureau about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, claims the administration used to justify the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.“He hates war, and he loves soldiers,” Lewis Lord, a former colleague at U.S. News, told the Military Writers and Editors Association when it honored Mr. Galloway in 2006 on his return to his home in Texas from his reporting base in Washington.Mr. Galloway and Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore collaborated on a wrenching account of the first major battle in Vietnam, published in 1992.In the foreword to “We Are Soldiers Still,” a sequel to “We Were Soldiers,” General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led allied forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, called Mr. Galloway “the finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”Mr. Galloway, who carried a weapon while covering the Vietnam War as a U.P.I. correspondent, was embedded with American troops during the four-day battle of Ia Drang, in the jungle of the Central Highlands, which began a day after his 24th birthday in 1965. He was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with the “V” device, denoting heroism, for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire during the engagement.Both sides claimed victory, with the United States convinced it could win a war of attrition and North Vietnam confident it could withstand whatever technological advantage the Americans wielded over Vietnamese guerrillas.The U.S. troops were commanded by Harold G. Moore, then a lieutenant colonel and later a lieutenant general, with whom Mr. Galloway would collaborate on “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.” The book was published in 1992 and adapted 10 years later into the Randall Wallace film “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson, in which Barry Pepper played Mr. Galloway.Nicholas Proffitt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” was “a car crash of a book; you are horrified by what you’re seeing, but you can’t take your eyes off it.”Mr. Galloway and Lieutenant General Moore published “We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam” in 2008.Articles by Mr. Galloway reconstructing the battle, which became the basis of the first book, won a National Magazine Award for U.S. News & World Report in 1991.As a result of Mr. Galloway’s critical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld summoned him to a meeting with high-ranking officers and accused him of relying on sources who were retired and out of the loop. As John Walcott, a colleague of his at U.S. News, Knight Ridder and McClatchy (which bought Knight Ridder), recalled, Mr. Galloway startled the group by declaring that some of his sources “might even be in this room.”He later admitted that he only said that to rattle the assembled military brass, and that “it was fun watching ’em sweat.” Mr. Galloway was an author, along with other U.S. News staff members, of “Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War” (1992). His coverage of the later Persian Gulf conflict was portrayed in Rob Reiner’s film “Shock and Awe” (2017), in which Tommy Lee Jones played Mr. Galloway.In the 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers Once,” based on their book, Barry Pepper, left, played Mr. Galloway and Mel Gibson played General Moore, who was a lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War.Stephen Vaughan/Paramount PicturesJoseph Lee Galloway Jr. was born on Nov. 13, 1941, in Refugio, Texas, to Joseph Galloway Sr. and Marian (Dewvell) Galloway. His father worked for Humble Oil.Less than a month after he was born, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four of his mother’s brothers went to war; so did his father and five of his brothers.“I did not meet my father until the end of 1945, when he came home from the service,” Mr. Galloway said in an interview seen on C-SPAN. “My earliest memories,” he added, “are of living in houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the telegraph boy.” He was so affected by the war, he said, that he decided to become a war correspondent.He was hired by The Advocate in Victoria, Texas, when he was 17, joined U.P.I. at 19 and was bureau chief or regional manger in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi, Singapore, Moscow, Los Angeles and Vietnam, where he served four stints.In addition to Dr. Liem, whom he married in 2012, he is survived by two sons, Joshua and Lee, from his first marriage, to Theresa Magdalene Null, who died in 1996. (His second marriage, to Karen Metsker, ended in divorce.) He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Li Mei Gilfillan; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. He lived in Concord.Mr. Galloway acknowledged that when he arrived in Vietnam, most of what he knew about war he had learned from John Wayne movies, but he understood the need for accuracy in a combat zone. “You really don’t want to screw up a story about men who are armed and dangerous and who you will likely see again,” he said in an interview with historynet.com.He was also torn about reporting his doubts about American prospects for an honorable exit strategy.“I thought, ‘This war we can’t win, but I’m not going to say that, because I don’t want to hurt my friends, the soldiers who are fighting this war.’” he recalled. “You know the one thing about soldiers is that if they are in combat and they are losing their friends and buddies, you can’t tell them that they died for nothing. You can’t say that; you wound them, you hurt them, you damage them. And that I could not do.”Still, he said, he wished he could have “written a story so powerful about that battle” that it would have driven President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw.Mr. Lord, his former colleague, described Mr. Galloway as “a most unlikely antiwar activist — a big, blunt Texan, proud to bear arms, as politically incorrect as he could be, full of unprintable epithets and anecdotes.” But, he added, Mr. Galloway “had a heart as big as his home state, a superb intellect that shone mischievously through smiling Irish eyes, and an openness that made it possible for him to conclude that it was an unpardonable sin to send young Americans to fight meaningless wars.”Mr. Galloway’s view of war came through when he responded to criticism from the Pentagon after he profiled a retired Marine general who had critiqued Mr. Rumsfeld’s conduct of the Iraq war.In an email exchange, Mr. Rumsfeld’s spokesman maintained, “We’re all hard at it, trying to do what’s best for the country.” So was he, Mr. Galloway replied, during four decades of covering America’s valiant warriors.“Someone once asked me if I had learned anything from going to war so many times,” Mr. Galloway told the Pentagon spokesman. “My reply, ‘Yes, I learned how to cry.’” More

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      Times Newsletters Director Announces Changes

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      A new portfolio from Opinion and the newsroom will expand our ambitions in an age-old medium.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Newsletters have a history even longer than newspapers, and email is several decades older than the web. Despite this lengthy pedigree, email newsletters are having a very buzzy moment — and here at The New York Times, we’re striving to bring even more depth, ambition and scale to our lineup.This summer marks 20 years since The Times published its first newsletters. We started off in 2001 covering technology, books and finance, among other topics. Some of those newsletters are still thriving, in various incarnations, as part of a portfolio that reaches some 15 million people every week — a number that has surged over the last two years. Flagships such as The Morning and DealBook serve as a destination for readers and a crucial gateway and guide to our journalism, while offering original reporting and analysis.As the editorial director of Times newsletters, I’ve been thinking with my colleagues about what comes next. How can we break new ground in the inbox and deliver sophisticated coverage of the topics that our readers care about most? Newsletters are already a core part of our subscriber experience: Nearly half of our subscribers engage with a newsletter every week. This week, we’re pulling back the curtain on a new kind of Times journalism: more than 15 newsletters that will be available only to our subscribers. The goal is to continue developing the inbox as a destination for our journalism, and to add value to a Times subscription.The first batch focuses on topics that our readers are passionate about, is staffed by journalists with deep expertise and features exciting, diverse new voices. It includes newsroom favorites Well, On Tech, At Home and Away, On Soccer and Watching, and columnists like Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie.It also features a new set of newsletters in Opinion (which remains a completely separate, independent entity, apart from our news operation):John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguist, will explore how race and language shape our politics and culture.Kara Swisher, host of the “Sway” podcast, will open her notebook to track the changing power dynamics in tech and media.Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will offer a sociologist’s perspective on culture, politics and the economics of our everyday lives.Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, will reflect on matters of faith in private life and public discourse.Peter Coy, a veteran business and economics journalist, will use his decades of expertise to unpack the biggest headlines.Jay Caspian Kang, a wide-ranging cultural critic and New York Times Magazine contributor, will tackle thorny questions about politics, culture and the economy.Jane Coaston, host of “The Argument” podcast, will offer context to and analysis on the biggest debates in sports, politics and history.All of these subscriber-only newsletters represent a unique collection of talent and expertise in Opinion and the newsroom, assisted by editors, designers, developers, product managers and other specialists.We’ve spent most of the last year working toward this launch, and more new and revamped newsletters — including a new version of On Politics and a revamped Smarter Living focused on back-to-work issues — will join this initial batch in the coming months.You can subscribe to Times newsletters here. More

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      Pulitzer-Winning Critic Wesley Morris Captured the Moment

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      For his piercing insights on race and culture, Wesley Morris recently received his second Pulitzer Prize. But he won over colleagues long before that.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Wesley Morris was ready for his medal.In 2012, he had just won his first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, as a writer for The Boston Globe, and was at the ceremony at Columbia University with his mother. But when he wondered out loud where he could pick up the award, he got a surprise.“Oh, sweetie,” Tracy K. Smith, that year’s poetry winner, told him. “We don’t get a medal, only the public service winner gets that. We get a paperweight.” (OK, she was exaggerating a little.)“My mom was like, ‘Oh my God, Wesley,’” he said, laughing.It was the rare oversight for Mr. Morris, a deep thinker and New York Times critic at large who recently won his second Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the only person to receive that award twice.He was recognized for an ambitious body of work over the past year on race and culture that included not only incisive essays about the racial justice movement and the impact of cellphone videos on Black Americans, but poignant personal pieces like a Times Magazine story about how growing a mustache was connected to his sense of Blackness.“I love important, weighty ideas,” he said, though he added that he also likes considering topics that are lighthearted and frivolous.Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s culture editor, said Mr. Morris’s pieces stood out for their scope and accessibility.“He has a unique ability to step back, look across the cultural and social landscape and speak to us in a way that makes it seem as if we’re engaged in a conversation,” Mr. Cruz said. “A funny, smart, sometimes emotional and always riveting conversation.”Sia Michel, The Times’s deputy culture editor who has edited Mr. Morris’s work for three years, similarly praised both Mr. Morris’s intellect and his common touch. “He has an imposing sense of critical authority and moral authority but always invites the reader in,” she said.Mr. Morris said his dreams of becoming a critic dated back to when he received an assignment in eighth grade: Write a report after either reading Howard Fast’s 1961 novel “April Morning” or watching the TV movie version of it. He decided to do both, then wrote a scathing critical review.“You didn’t really do what I asked you to do,” he recalls his teacher, John Kozempel, telling him. “But you did do a thing that exists in the world. It’s called criticism, and this is a good example of it.”Of course, not everyone can write elegant essays that educate even when they excoriate, and which provide an entry point to a conversation rather than closing a door to opposing views. But when Mr. Morris begins to put words on a page, the ideas flow.“I don’t know how I feel about a lot of things until I sit down to write about them,” he said. “That’s my journey as a writer — to figure out where my brain, heart and moral compass are with respect to whatever I’m writing about.”When Mr. Morris files a story, Ms. Michel said, she always knows she’ll get four things: surprising pop cultural and historical connections; a brilliant thesis; at least one “breathtaking” passage that reads like poetry; and a memorable, revised-to-perfection ending.“He always reworks his last graph until it slays,” she said.Mr. Morris said his biggest challenge is that he has so many ideas, he never has time to pursue all of them.“I can be paralyzed by my glut of ideas,” he said, “which often means I wait to write things until the last minute.” He added that he’s been known to write 3,000-word pieces on a same-day deadline.Yet somehow, amid writing for the daily paper, the Sunday Arts & Leisure section and The Times Magazine, as well as co-hosting the weekly culture podcast “Still Processing,” Mr. Morris manages to make time for everyone, his podcast co-host, Jenna Wortham, said.When Mr. Morris won his first Pulitzer in 2012, Mx. Wortham, who uses she/they pronouns, was a newly hired Business reporter for The Times who had been assigned to write a story about him. They left a voice mail message and sent an email to Mr. Morris.Thinking he would be too busy to respond right away, Mx. Wortham went out for coffee but after returning found a long, thoughtful voice mail from Mr. Morris with “more information than I needed.”“It left the deepest impression on me,” Mx. Wortham said. “And I remember thinking I would strive to be someone who always made time for other reporters.”Their friendship, which began six years ago, has only blossomed and deepened since then, Mx. Wortham said.“I’ve seen Wesley give a barefoot unhoused man money for a pair of shoes and absolutely demolish a dance floor with equal amounts of grace,” she said. “There’s no one like him, and we are all so lucky to exist in this iteration of life alongside him.”Although Mr. Morris’s profile is much higher now, he said he intended to respond to every one of the hundreds of congratulatory emails, texts, calls and Twitter messages he received after this year’s win — a goal that’s still in progress.“I’m still not done,” he said recently. “Even with strangers, if someone took a second out of their life to congratulate me for this, it’s important to me to say thank you.” More

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      in Television

      Lights, Camera, Run! Behind the Videos of Mayor Candidates

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      What did it take to record videos of eight Democrats who are vying to lead New York City? Collaboration, hustle and a willingness to talk to ambulance drivers, for starters.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On June 22, New Yorkers will go to the polls to choose the Democratic candidate who will very likely be the city’s next mayor. After a chaotic year, many voters are, understandably, just tuning in now.As a politics producer on The New York Times’s Video desk, I spend most of my time thinking about how we can use original visual reporting to bring additional depth to key races and issues. For this project on the mayoral race, our goal was to help readers get to know a big group of contenders in a way that was clear, informative and fun.Last month, we digitally published our final product, an interactive set of videos featuring interviews with the top eight Democratic candidates. The interviews, conducted by the Metro reporters Emma Fitzsimmons and Katie Glueck, along with photography done on set, inform a print version of the project that appears in Sunday’s newspaper.When we started planning, we knew that the race had a number of distinct qualities we needed to take into consideration. First, many of the candidates were not well known to those who didn’t closely follow city politics. This was also the first year New York City would be using ranked-choice voting — in this race that means voters can rank up to five candidates on the ballot. (A full explanation of how this voting will work can be found here.)Our team included Metro editors and reporters, designers, graphics editors and video journalists. The initial idea for the piece was based on past Times projects that focused on Democratic presidential candidates in advance of the 2020 primaries. (here and here). The core idea was simple: Bring in the candidates, ask them all the same questions and publish their answers in an interactive format that allowed readers to “choose their own adventure” and navigate through topics of interest.We wanted to give these interviews and the project a New York City feel, so we selected two different spaces in The New York Times Building where we could use the city as a backdrop.Emma Fitzsimmons, The Times’s City Hall bureau chief, on set for an interview with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesOur interviews were set primarily in natural light, which can pose certain challenges. Ideally, an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best, because you want light to hit your subject evenly. A cloud that moves in front of the sun and casts a shadow on your subject’s face can ruin a shot. This meant closely tracking the weather and cloud movements with Noah Throop, our cinematographer, in advance of every shoot. On bad weather days, we filmed in the Times Center auditorium, which was less susceptible to light change.We also had to navigate the challenges of filming during a pandemic, meaning we needed to find large open spaces and set up testing regimens and safety protocols for both staff members and guests.Shaun Donovan, a mayoral candidate, on set. When filming in natural light, either an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesBehind the scenes, we coordinated with the campaigns in an effort to catch each candidate arriving, which at times meant running through the Times Square subway station, trying to scout for their vehicles in traffic and looking to confirm whether Andrew Yang and his team were in fact having lunch at Schnipper’s (a burger joint in the Times building) before his interview. The cameras were rolling from the moment we met up with candidates outside until the moment they left the building.The author looks out for Mr. Throop in the Times Square Subway station.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe decided to make one video per candidate, instead of organizing videos by topic, to give viewers an opportunity to sit and listen to a particular individual if they desired. The interviews ranged in length from 40 minutes to more than an hour based on the candidate’s speaking style and brevity.The videos on Kathryn Garcia and the other top seven Democratic candidates were organized so that viewers could sit and listen to a candidate at length. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMy role during an interview as a producer is to focus on how everything will look and sound on video. This means that the array of things I do includes listening for good sound bites, monitoring what questions might need an additional take, fixing people’s hair and running outside to ask ambulance drivers on a break to turn off their flashing lights (which I had to do numerous times during these shoots).In editing down the interviews, we tried to highlight what made a candidate unique and pull out key differences among members of the group — along with some moments of levity. But ultimately what we wanted to provide was a resource where voters could hear from each person, relatively unfiltered, to help them make up their minds.Who Wants to Be Mayor of New York City?The race for the next mayor of New York City may be one of the most consequential elections in a generation. Here are some of the leading candidates vying to run the nation’s largest city. More