Newspapers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Joe Galloway, Decorated Vietnam War Correspondent, Dies at 79

      by

      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

    • 63 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Times Newsletters Director Announces Changes

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Pulitzer-Winning Critic Wesley Morris Captured the Moment

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      How a Times Team Captured the Sound of a Harlem Gospel Choir

      by

      What does a socially distant gospel choir sound like? Here’s how Times journalists and technologists put users inside the sanctuary of a church in Harlem.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March 2020, one of the earliest coronavirus superspreader events in the United States occurred when a church choir in Washington State met for a rehearsal. Of the 61 singers who attended, 53 developed symptoms of Covid-19. Soon after, congregations around the country held what would be their last in-house services of the year.Tariro Mzezewa, a New York Times reporter, talked to churches recently to learn how they had adapted. “My favorite part of going to church as a kid was the music and the sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to know how the pandemic changed that.”Some churches had a soloist sing from home during live-streamed services. Others created small pods of a few singers that performed from an empty sanctuary. Some had choir members spread out in the pews or the balcony.Churches are built for their acoustics, so when Tariro told our Narrative Projects team about these socially distant choirs, we wondered: What does that sound like? Three months later, we’ve created a special feature to give you a feel for that sensory experience.As a visual editor at the Times, I work on innovative journalism, joining with colleagues to leverage new technologies like augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3-D modelingand visualization and volumetric video (moving 3-D images of real people, like a hologram). One of the best parts of my job is the thrill I get from trying new things.For the past year, we have been experimenting with a technology called environmental photogrammetry, with which we can build photorealistic 3-D models of a room or a neighborhood.We wanted to transport our readers into a church to hear the new sound of these choirs. With the help of Bethel Gospel Assembly in Harlem, we built a 3-D model of its sanctuary and embedded 3-D audio in it, something we’ve never done before for the Times website.Times journalists and technologists spent two days at the church in April. They used lasers and sensors to measure the size of the room and the distance between all the objects in it. They also took more than 7,000 photographs, many of them using a drone inside the sanctuary (with the church’s blessing) to capture images of the upper reaches of the balcony and ceiling. That data was combined using photogrammetry software to produce the 3-D model in this interactive article.With 31 microphones, two mixing boards and a sea of cables, our team recorded a live rehearsal with a small group of singers, a band and Bethel’s leader, Bishop Carlton T. Brown. Using binaural audio, which replicates the acoustics of the human ear, we created a 3-D audio experience meant to mimic what it sounds like in that room.“You really get a sense of the energy and how important the live part of making music is,” said Jon Cohrs, a technical producer on The Times’s research and development team and an audio engineer. In the two days he spent at Bethel, Jon witnessed the camaraderie and connection among choir members. “It’s really special, and you can see how impactful it is for everybody involved.”The music you hear in the opening of the interactive feature is captured from two microphones in the back of the church, as if you were sitting in the pews hearing the voices reverberate through the cavernous space. You can move through the space in the 3-D experience, and the sound changes as you get closer to the stage and fly over the instruments.Working on this project over the past few months, I’ve spent many minutes a day listening to the ethereal music we recorded, often with my eyes closed, my mind floating somewhere between my home office in Brooklyn and that sanctuary in Harlem.Our reporting affirmed why so many churches went to great lengths to bring music to their communities during times of hardship. Again and again, pastors, congregants and choir members told us that church without music was never an option. Music is healing, they said, and it brings people together in a shared spiritual and cultural experience, even when we have to be physically apart.As part of her research, Tariro attended an Easter Sunday service at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, which is now allowing a small number of parishioners to attend in person. “There was a real sense of people sighing in relief, like, ‘We made it,’” she said. “A year ago they didn’t know if they’d make it.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      'Living Newspaper' at the Royal Court Theater Stirs Up Stories of Our Time

      by

      Tired of reading the headlines? You can watch artistic interpretations of the stories of our era by trailing actors in a Living Newspaper production, section by section.LONDON — Have you had enough of wading through newsprint or scrolling online? The Royal Court Theater has a bracing online alternative that refracts current events through a vibrant and eclectic array of plays that give many of today’s hot-button topics a piquant spin.The self-evident inspiration for “Living Newspaper” is the project of the same name from Depression-era America, a federally funded response to the social concerns of the day that had its origins in the Russian Revolution and saw art as an agency for change.That immediacy tallies with the history of engagement at the Court, a theater that prides itself on taking the temperature of the times. Not for nothing is one of the makeshift spaces adapted for this collection of plays referred to as the Weather Room. (The idea was to reconfigure the Court so that its spaces, onstage or off, approximated the sections of a newspaper.)Kayla Meikle in the solo play “And Now, the Weather,” written by Nina Segal. Helen MurrayAnd what, you might ask, is the forecast? “Unpredictability, volatility and destruction,” announces the actress Kayla Meikle in a solo play by Nina Segal, her reply hinting at a sense of uncertainty, or worse, common to much of the writing here. Its tone cheerful, then chilling, Segal’s play runs less than six minutes and forms part of Edition 5 of an ambitious seven-part venture. The Court is due to reopen to the public in June.The playhouse in Sloane Square, long devoted to new writing, has put the pandemic to culturally productive use. At a time when theater professionals have been reeling from an absence of work, the Living Newspaper has employed over 300 freelancers, two-thirds of them writers and actors. The first four “editions” are no longer available, but Editions 5 and 6 are, with the final one to be available beginning Monday for two weeks. That one will be devoted to writers ages 14 to 21.How can a building work as a newspaper? Surprisingly easily. We experience the stories in different physical places much as we might flick through the news pages. Each “edition” comes with an obituary and advice “pages,” for instance, into which are slotted plays to match. The front page tends to be reserved for a larger-scale piece with music to get the proceedings off to a rousing start.The result has allowed as varied a range of expression as you could imagine, sometimes cheeky and satirical, just as often pointed and polemical. (The Living Newspaper of legend knew a thing or two about agitprop.) The writers include regulars like E.V. Crowe, whose teasing “Shoe Lady” was at the Court last spring just as London theaters were shut down, and Tim Crouch, a maverick actor-writer whose solo play “Horoscopes” shows him at his most wicked as he eviscerates the 12 signs of the zodiac.Nando Messias outside the Royal Court performing a work by Hester Chillingworth.Helen MurrayThemes of empowerment and self-identity recur, just as various forms of the word “apocalypse” betray a prevailing unease. Normalcy exists only to be upended, not least in Crowe’s “The Tree, the Leg and the Axe,” in which two women (Letty Thomas and Alana Jackson, both terrific) sit cozily in the theater bookstore and exult in being “safe ones” far removed from the virus — no masks for them! — only to reveal a landscape marked by savagery.Several plays embrace the environment of the Court. Maud Dromgoole’s witty “Museum of Agony,” a solo piece delivered with sustained brio by Jackson, folds its simmering anger into a discussion about what to order from the theater bar. Episode 6 features an arresting turn from the performance artist Nando Messias, whose “Mi Casa Es Su Casa,” by Hester Chillingworth, concludes with the elegantly clad Messias rising from the outdoor steps of the Court and entering the playhouse, an invitation for us to follow scrawled on the performer’s back.Any of these themes could fuel an entire season in nonpandemic times, especially at the Court, known for keeping an eye on the mood of the moment. It has a history of plays embracing political tensions (one was Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland) and of casting a wide geographic net. The theater also introduced the notion of the “angry young man” in 1956 with John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” and it courses with palpable emotion here.Tensions in the Middle East fuel several of the plays, like Dalia Taha’s “A Warning,” about planting the seed for revolution in Ramallah in the West Bank. The renewed violence in Northern Ireland propels the bitterly funny “Flicking the Shamrock” by Stacey Gregg. At four minutes, it is beautifully performed by Amanda Coogan and Rachael Merry as women whose preferred forms of sign language (BSL versus ISL) indicate a power-sharing that may not be going according to plan.Cian Binchy in Amy Bethan Evans’s “Neurodiverge-Aunt.” Helen MurrayThe Living Newspaper offers a theatrical potpourri comparable to the Lockdown Plays, which were a highlight of pandemic-era writing and folded in many a recognized name from the Court. As with any newspaper, you can dip in and out, alighting on whichever play catches the eye. I would happily return to Amy Bethan Evans’s cheekily titled “Neurodiverge-Aunt,” in which the wonderful Cian Binchy, who is autistic, ponders the limits of compassion allowed by an advice columnist: “I can’t be your friend because that’s unprofessional.”I laughed out loud at Leo Butler’s “In Memoriam (With Helen Peacock),” in which the actress Nathalie Armin looks back dispassionately at a forbidding list of recent deaths that includes “nuance” and “debate,” which has made it all the way from ancient Greece only to surrender to modern-day trolling.And cheers for Rory Mullarkey’s “This Play,” which describes theater of all styles and structures, including those that have been impossible during the pandemic. At one point, the actress Millicent Wong demands, “Just give me plays again now,” her voice rising. Any devotee of the Court, and its downstairs bar, would surely drink to that.The Living Newspaper continues online through May 9. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Dominic Fike Video Shows Paul McCartney and New York Times

      by

      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At a New York Times printing plant in College Point, Queens, the soundtrack is usually the rapid thwap, thwap, thwap of blank paper turning into the next edition. But one night in February, thanks to a famous Beatle and the singer Dominic Fike, things got a little more musical.“Have you,” Mr. Fike sings in a music video shot at the plant, “read the paper?” The song is a cover of Paul McCartney’s “The Kiss of Venus,” and Mr. Fike is shown at the plant taking in the 14 miles of conveyor belts ferrying copies of The Times all around him.With the presses rolling and assembled copies sailing overhead, he glances at the dizzying activity and sings, in verses he added to the track, about people’s differences on issues and the media. “What’s your take on it?” he asks.The 78-year-old former Beatle himself makes a cameo at the end of the video, seated on a bench outside London. He whistles the tune as the camera zooms in on the copy of The New York Times International issue he is perusing. Mr. McCartney slowly lowers the paper to reveal wide eyes and a shock of gray hair. Then he raises his eyebrows and grins.“Paul whistled that perfectly the first time,” Jack Begert, who directed the video, said. “He’s elite.”Mr. Begert added that the image of Mr. McCartney enthusiastically poring over a copy of the paper underscores that he, ultimately, is the source of the music. “Even though Dom reimagined that song, at the end of the day, it’s a Paul McCartney song,” Mr. Begert said.Last year, Mr. McCartney wrote and recorded “The Kiss of Venus,” a smooth acoustic ballad, for his recent solo album “McCartney III.” Mr. Fike’s reimagined version — an R&B pop earworm — is part of the album “McCartney III Imagined,” out Friday, which features A-listers covering “McCartney III” tracks.So how did The New York Times score a starring role in Mr. Fike’s video?Mr. Begert said that he considered “The Kiss of Venus” a reflection of the stop-and-go energy of modern life — and that when the time came to conceptualize a video, his first thought was New York. “It’s still and beautiful, but also crazy,” he said.The video’s creative director, Reed Bennett, suggested the Times printing plant. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect,’” Mr. Begert said. “I wanted to link back to the theme of one person feeling small but also like they have a really important place in the universe.”The cavernous, 550,000-square-foot plant — about the size of 11 and a half football fields — prints copies of The Times each night, along with copies of Newsday and USA Today.At College Point in Queens, the presses are several stories tall. Clayborne BujorianThe presses are generally quiet during the day, but at night, the seven cerulean blue behemoths — each several stories tall — roar to life. “It gets your adrenaline pumping,” Nick D’Andrea, the vice president of production at the College Point plant, said. “You get that excitement as they start up to get the paper out.”The late edition of the paper goes to press at about 10:15 p.m., so a video crew of eight showed up a little before then on a Friday night in February to scout potential shots, Mr. Begert said. After that, the pressure was on: They had a few hours — max — until the presses shut down for the night.“We just knew we had to move as quickly as possible to get all the different shots we wanted,” Sam Canter, the executive producer of the video, said.Once they began shooting, Mr. Fike marveled at the organized chaos happening around him.“I don’t know what I expected, but it was surreal,” he said in an interview. “It felt like the North Pole, like Santa’s elf factory on the evening of Christmas.”Although Dominic Fike isn’t a frequent consumer of the news, he was struck by the machinery required to print it. Clayborne BujorianThis isn’t the plant’s first on-screen appearance. It got around two minutes of time in a scene in “The Bourne Legacy” — which took three days to shoot — and has been featured in episodes of “30 Rock,” “Elementary” and a couple of commercials.Mr. D’Andrea, who has worked at Times production facilities for 46 years, said visitors were often taken aback by the plant’s team of laser-driven robots, which glide around replacing rolls of paper on the presses.“People are always like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’” he said.But Mr. Fike had the opposite reaction. “I was surprised by all the original machinery and how old it was,” he said. “Everything that ever happened was printed there, recorded and written down.” Maybe not quite everything, but still plenty of history. Mr. Fike said he was particularly taken with a page (printed at a different plant) showing the 1969 moon landing.Although Mr. Fike is not an avid news consumer, the experience of seeing the presses and sensing some of the history there might have had an influence on him. “I’m not a news guy. But I love the NYT and I’m going to start reading the news,” the 25-year-old singer said. “That’s what people do when they get older.”Well, perhaps, but reading the news can help keep you young, too. Just ask a 78-year-old whistler. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      A Theater Photographer Senses a Broadway Bloom

      by

      For Sara Krulwich, who has shot productions for The New York Times for more than two decades, a series of recent assignments hinted at an industry revival.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On the first evening in April, Sara Krulwich, a New York Times photographer, visited the Kraine Theater in the East Village, where Mike Daisey, an actor and monologuist, was rehearsing a show for which the seating capacity would be limited to 22. The restriction, Mr. Daisey said, reminded him of his earliest days as a performer, when he was thrilled if even a handful of people were in the audience.For about 20 minutes, Ms. Krulwich photographed Mr. Daisey, adjusting her shutter, she later said, to ensure that “the theater lights and my camera were going to talk to each other in a kindly way.”The next day, Ms. Krulwich photographed part of a performance at the Daryl Roth Theater at Union Square. And on Saturday, she shot a 36-minute performance at the historic St. James Theater in Midtown. Those assignments added up to her busiest stretch of theater work in more than a year.Theatrical productions, dormant since last spring, are resuming in New York City, the first tentative steps toward what actors, directors and others hope will be a strong comeback by the fall. And many in the theater world may see Ms. Krulwich’s presence as a reassuring sign.For more than two decades, she has been a Broadway and Off Broadway fixture, photographing about 100 shows a year, a body of work that led to her receiving a Tony Honor in 2018.After a yearlong absence, Ms. Krulwich began photographing performances and rehearsals, feeling her way back into familiar tasks and reflecting on early traces of a theatrical revival, which, she said, mirrored the stirrings of spring.“The blooms are beginning,” she said by phone. “Even if we’re not seeing the full flowering just yet.”Ms. Krulwich joined The Times as a staff photographer in 1979, working for the Metro, National and Sports desks before becoming the paper’s first culture photographer in 1994.At that time, she said, it was common for news organizations to run theater photographs handed out by producers that tended to present reality in the light most favorable to them. Ms. Krulwich, however, wanted to cover theater with the same journalistic approach that the paper employed while reporting on other events.Ms. Krulwich said that her approach was direct, telling producers that theater was looked upon as news inside The Times and should be documented that way. Eventually, she obtained access to almost every production in the city.Over the years, Ms. Krulwich has captured moments that have become a part of theater lore. She photographed developmental work on the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America.” In 1996, she took what is believed to be the last picture of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of “Rent,” hours before his death the night before the show’s first Off Broadway preview.Her Tony, in 2018, made her the first journalist recognized for excellence in the theater, an honor given to people, organizations and institutions that have contributed to the industry but are not eligible to win in other Tony categories.Returning to work inside venues she’s accustomed to, Ms. Krulwich said she took delight in seeing people she has known for many years and looked forward to a time when everyone connected to productions will, once again, be able to make a living.“It’s a small group of people,” she said. “Almost an extended family.”The day after photographing Mr. Daisey, Ms. Krulwich wore an N-95 mask and climbed a ladder at the Daryl Roth while shooting about 20 minutes of a performance of “Blindness,” an audio adaptation of the dystopian novel of the same name by the Portuguese writer José Saramago.And then, the following day, at the St. James, she photographed the dancer Savion Glover and the actor Nathan Lane at the 36-minute event they performed in front of a masked audience of 150.It was, noted Michael Paulson, a Times theater reporter, the first time in 387 days that there was activity inside a Broadway house.Ms. Krulwich said the performance was not the same as one that would have taken place before the coronavirus pandemic, but she added that she felt at home back inside the St. James and appreciated the hints of what is to come.“I must say, it felt familiar to me,” she said. “It’s just a little bit. It’s a tiptoe. It’s the doors opening a crack.” More