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      Bob McGrath, Longtime ‘Sesame Street’ Star, Dies at 90

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      He was an original cast member who, for nearly half a century, played a sweater-clad and easygoing music teacher who dispensed advice.Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad neighborhood music teacher and general advice-giver on “Sesame Street” for almost half a century, died at his home in New Jersey on Sunday morning. He was 90.Mr. McGrath’s daughter Cathlin McGrath confirmed his death by email on Sunday. She said Mr. McGrath died from complications after a stroke. She said that the night before Mr. McGrath passed, his family had decorated his room for Christmas, and sung and danced around him. “We just knew that he wanted to go the way he lived.”Mr. McGrath wasn’t particularly interested when an old Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother stopped him one night to tell him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But then he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After his first meeting and a look at some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.“Sesame Street” had its premiere in November 1969, with Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone stoop, in front of the building’s dark green doors, beside its omnipresent collection of metal garbage cans. His character, conveniently and coincidentally named Bob, was reliably smiling, easygoing and polite, whether he was singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young humans and Muppets, or taking a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members — Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon — were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street,” their contracts were not renewed.But Mr. McGrath took the news graciously, expressing gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for a whole career beyond “Sesame Street” of doing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.“I’m really very happy to stay home with my wife and children a little bit more,” he said at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, later in 2016. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five minutes more.”Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ill., about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on radio. He did musical plays and studied privately but, as a practical matter, intended to study engineering.But he was invited to attend a music camp outside Chicago the summer after his high school graduation. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “did an about-face,” he remembered in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.He majored in voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the Army, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked with the Seventh Army Symphony. Then he went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.He took a job with St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing assignments, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” came along. He was one of 25 male singers who appeared every week on that show, on NBC, performing traditional favorites like “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s rendition and his light lyric tenor — he had been singing the sentimental Irish American number since he was a little boy — that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s featured male soloist.After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour in Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teenage idol.Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their demand brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads on which he was accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Back home, he amused American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.When “Sesame Street” began, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”He also learned American Sign Language, which he used regularly on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.Asked about important memories of his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often named the 1983 episode devoted to children’s, adults’ and Muppets’ reactions to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the holiday special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), particularly the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi.”In 1958, Mr. McGrath married Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher whom he met on his first day in New York City. They had five children. He is survived by Ms. McGrath, who is 89, and their five children, Liam McGrath, Robert McGrath, Alison McGrath Osder, Lily McGrath and Cathlin McGrath, as well as eight grandchildren. He is also survived by an elder sister, Eileen Strobel.“It’s a very different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath reflected in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”He recalled a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. When he realized that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?” “Bob.” “Do you know where I live?” “Sesame Street.” “Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”“Yep,” the boy answered and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”Livia Albeck-Ripka More

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      Amy Stechler, Documentarian Who Helped Define a Style, Dies at 67

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      She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Florentine FilmsAmy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”He summed up her influence on his career simply.“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

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      The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More

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      Baratunde Thurston Wants You to Be Part of Nature. Right Now.

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      The author of “How to Be Black” and host of the “How to Citizen with Baratunde” podcast wants you to experience the outdoors with a new PBS television series.In the midst of the pandemic, Baratunde Thurston decided to start a garden.It was a way for the author, podcaster and TV host to reconnect with his love of the outdoors, and process his feelings about the tumultuous state of the world.“Unfortunately, the squirrels thought I was gardening for them,” Mr. Thurston said. “In the beginning, I saw it as a battle — me versus the squirrels. Over time I realized, these squirrels are my neighbors, too. Maybe we can work something out.”Connecting with the environment, respecting wildlife and finding reverence in nature are all themes of Mr. Thurston’s new television series, “America Outdoors.” The six-part show follows him on a range of outdoor adventures, from running with ultramarathoners in Death Valley, Calif., to bird-watching in Minnesota and trekking through the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina. Viewers learn that nature can be enjoyed by everyone.“Doing a show based in the outdoors was really the right move in terms of ways to experience this country,” Mr. Thurston said. “I got to hang out with true outdoor enthusiasts and was reminded that you don’t have to be obsessive, or particularly well-resourced, to enjoy the outdoors.”“America Outdoors” premieres July 5 on PBS. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.The show is as much about outdoor destinations as it is about people. How do you define an “outdoor enthusiast?”This show is about breaking expectations. When I hear “the outdoors,” I have an extreme landscape like El Capitan in mind. I have a white guy in mind, with a beard, and he’s looking off into the distance, having just conquered something. And we did spend some time with people like that, but we also spent time with the original people on this land. It was a beautiful privilege that I got to interview people from three different Indigenous nations.We spent time with folks who have disabilities, and I got to be guided down a river, white-water rafting and piloted by a man who’s paralyzed. In Idaho, I was hanging out with refugee kids, mostly from Africa and Southeast Asia — part of the “Welcome to America” in Boise is hiking and taking nature walks and getting familiar with all the Americans, all of our neighbors, including the trees and the butterflies. I also met people just in their backyards who maybe don’t have the gear, the car rack, or a subscription to an outdoor magazine, but they know the value of putting their hands in dirt and growing food.You do a lot of really physical outdoor activities in this show — hiking, surfing, rafting, flying a plane! Which was the most challenging?The most challenging by far: sand surfing. Walking in sand, first of all, it’s not fun. That’s a great challenge. I really toned my calves and my glutes and my thighs. So I’m kind of grateful. But trying to ride a board? I don’t do skiing and snowboarding. Trying to stand on frozen water, on an incline, it just feels like … Why would you do that? So then we’re doing it on sand, and there’s no fin on the board. So there’s nothing for it to grip, and so you’re just kind of fishtailing all around. We had so many takes and when you go down a sandy hill, you have to walk back up. There’s no shortcut. It was a lot!Which destinations disrupted your expectations the most?Death Valley was full of life. It was our first shoot and pretty quickly, I was as offended as the Indigenous people by the name because it just sounds barren. The people we spent time with there, they helped me see it differently. The author of “Hiking The Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California,” Shawnté Salabert, took me on this hike to Darwin Falls and it’s just beautiful. I also went running with Mosi Smith, this ultramarathoner, and saw Death Valley through his lens. Of course, being with the Timbisha Shoshone members, who say this place should be called Timbisha, not Death Valley just because some white dude got lost. That’s disrupted expectations just because of what it’s called.There was also a shock for me on Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, with James “Ooker” Eskridge, the mayor of the community. On paper, me and this guy don’t have that much to say to each other. He was in the Trump-iest voting district in America by some measures, and he’s very, very, very conservative. But I had the luxury of spending real time and feeling his energy and experiencing his hospitality. I learned that his home is disappearing due to rising sea levels, due to climate change. He won’t quite call it climate change, but he acknowledges the waters rising and wants to do something about it. He wants sea walls, he wants federal money to be spent to save his town. We were on the coast of his island and seeing tombstones in the water. You can show data about climate change and you could watch an Al Gore presentation and see the temperature going up. But then you can wade through a graveyard. Hearing him describe having to exhume his ancestor to his own backyard; he got emotional talking about it. It made it real. I didn’t expect to have that experience at all. I definitely didn’t expect to have it with someone who’s seemingly so different from me.Climate change comes up a lot in the show. Was that your intention?Making a show about the outdoors is making a show about climate change. We can’t avoid the topic. In every location, I was witness to the effects of climate change: the dryness and lack of water in Death Valley beyond what’s expected; the firefighter training for those wildland firefighters; in Idaho, the smoke from Western fires, and the low levels of the river and the high temperatures of the river. In Minnesota, the premise of one of our segments with the Abbas family, the farming family, was trying to breed climate-resilient trees that can bear higher temperatures, because the forest we were standing in is going to disappear. And so rather than just mourn that, what kind of new forest can we create in its place? They’re engineering just through basic biology to harden the forest so that their kids have trees, too. When we were in Duluth, Minne., we could hardly breathe. Minnesota is having mad fires now. We couldn’t see Lake Superior. I had to wear an N95 mask when we weren’t shooting, because it was burning inside.Everywhere we went, we had a climate story. Sometimes it was more of a focal point of who we were talking with and the story; other times, it just affected how we could make the show.What do you hope people may learn from this show?I want people to see the outdoors as a place where we can literally experience common ground among the wide range of differences that make up this nation. Pretty much everybody should be able to see themselves in the show — we’ve got different time zones, different ecologies, different ages and body shapes and abilities. I hope we’ve reflected the diversity of the nation both in its natural state and in its human state. I want this show to be a mirror for everybody.The Indigenous people I spoke to have a culture of being a part of nature, as opposed to apart from nature. We got to relearn that. That was a really big takeaway for me, especially as the climate gets more volatile in the next decades. We should all stay connected in that way. This is not just something to use. It’s something to belong to.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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      Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85

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      A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years.Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit, died on Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85. His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Politics loomed large for Mr. Shields even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m. so he could glimpse President Harry S. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. He started as a legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates; his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993.He had successes, like helping John J. Gilligan become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White win re-election as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who vainly pursued national office in the 1970s, among them Edmund S. Muskie, R. Sargent Shriver and Morris K. Udall.“At one point,” Mr. Shields said, “I held the N.C.A.A. indoor record for concession speeches written and delivered.”As the 1970s ended, he decided on a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry.He started out as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the inherent anonymity of the job discomfited him. He asked for, and got, a weekly column.Before long, he set out on his own. While he continued writing a column, which came to be distributed each week by Creators Syndicate, it was on television that he left his firmest imprint.From 1988 until it was canceled in 2005, he was a moderator and panelist on “Capital Gang,” a weekly CNN talk show that matched liberals like Mr. Shields with their conservative counterparts. He was also a panelist on another weekly public affairs program, “Inside Washington,” seen on PBS and ABC until it ended in 2013.In 1985, he wrote “On the Campaign Trail,” a somewhat irreverent look at the 1984 presidential race. Over the years he also taught courses on politics and the press at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.Mr. Shields during a taping of “Meet the Press” at the NBC studios in Washington in 2008.Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the PressHis longest stretch was as a commentator on “PBS NewsHour” from 1987 through 2020, when he decided at age 83 to end his regular gig. A self-described New Deal liberal, Mr. Shields was the counterpoint to a succession of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the last 19 years, David Brooks.In a panegyric to his colleague, Mr. Brooks wrote in his New York Times column in December 2020 that “to this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics.”Mr. Shields’s manner was rumpled, his visage increasingly jowly, his accent unmistakably New England. He came across, The Times observed in 1993, as “just a guy who likes to argue about current events at the barbershop — the pundit next door.”His calling card was a no-nonsense political sensibility, infused with audience-pleasing humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an office holder: pomposity. Not surprisingly, his targets, archconservatives conspicuous among them, did not take kindly to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.Of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Shields said dismissively that “the toughest thing he’s ever done was to ask Republicans to vote for a tax cut.” The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was “an invertebrate”; Senator Lindsey Graham made Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many are afflicted with “the Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing,” he said. “Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school,’ and ‘I’d love to be with you but we had a family appointment at the taxidermist.’”Still, for all their foibles, he had an abiding admiration for politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, simply for entering the arena.“When you dare to run for public office, everyone you ever sat next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or car-pooled with knows whether you won or, more likely, lost,” he said. “The political candidate dares to risk the public rejection that most of us will go to any length to avoid.”Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married.“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”Mr. Shields, right, talking with Sandy Levin, Democrat of Michigan, before a meeting of the House Democratic caucus at the Capitol in Washington in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHe attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. With military conscription looming, he chose in 1960 to enlist in the Marines, emerging in 1962 as a lance corporal. He learned a lot in those two years, he said, including concepts of leadership encapsulated in a Marine tradition of officers not being fed until their subordinates were.“Would not our country be a more just and human place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that ‘officers eat last’?”As he set out on his career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They were married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren. There were bumps along the road, including a period of excessive drinking. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of one,” he told C-SPAN, adding: “I have not had a drink since May 15, 1974. It took me that long to find out that God made whiskey so the Irish and the Indians wouldn’t run the world.”Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.” More

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      Ken Bode, Erudite ‘Washington Week’ Host on PBS, Dies at 83

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      Beginning in 1994, he brought to the moderator’s role credentials as a political activist, an academic and a national correspondent for NBC News.Ken Bode, a bearded, bearish former political operative and television correspondent who, armed with a Ph.D. in politics, moderated the popular PBS program “Washington Week in Review” in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 83.His death, in a care center, was confirmed by his daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, who said the cause had not been identified.Beginning in 1994, Mr. Bode (pronounced BO-dee) coupled congeniality and knowledgeability in steering a Friday night discussion among a rotating panel of reporters about the issues of the day coming out of Washington. His role, as he saw it, was to “bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other,” he told The Washington Post in 1999.As host of the program, now called “Washington Week,” he succeeded Paul Duke, who had helmed that roundtable of polite talking heads for two decades, and preceded Gwen Ifill, a former NBC News correspondent who died in 2016 at 61. The program, which debuted in 1967, is billed as TV’s longest-running prime time news and public affairs program. The current host is Yamiche Alcindor.The program’s loyal and generally older viewers were so brass-bound in the 1990s that when Mr. Bode took over, even his beard proved controversial. He proceeded to introduce videotaped segments and remote interviews with correspondents and bring more diversity to his panel of reporters.He also took more liberties with language than his predecessor.Mr. Bode moderating an episode of “Washington Week in Review.” He hosted the program from 1994 to 1999 while teaching politics at DePauw University in Indiana. PBSEnding an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post about President Bill Clinton’s economic policies, Mr. Bode quoted a British newspaper’s snarky prediction that the president’s impending visit to Oxford, England, would present people with an opportunity to “focus on one of the president’s less well-publicized organs: his brain.” He described a vacancy on the Supreme Court as constituting “one-ninth of one-third of the government.”Still, Dalton Delan, then the newly-minted executive vice president of WETA in Washington, which continues to produce the program, wanted to invigorate the format. He proposed including college journalists, surprise guests and people-on-the-street interviews and replacing Mr. Bode with Ms. Ifill (she said she initially turned down the offer) — changes that prompted Mr. Bode to jump, or to be not so gently pushed, from the host’s chair in 1999.Kenneth Adlam Bode was born on March 30, 1939, in Chicago and raised in Hawarden, Iowa. His father, George, owned a dairy farm and then a dry cleaning business. His mother, June (Adlam) Bode, kept the books.Mr. Bode in his office in 1972, when he was involved in Democratic politics.George Tames/The New York TimesThe first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Bode majored in philosophy and government at the University of South Dakota, graduating in 1961. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was active in the civil rights movement.He taught briefly at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then gravitated toward liberal politics.In 1968, Mr. Bode worked in the presidential campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and George S. McGovern. He became research director for a Democratic Party commission, led by Mr. McGovern and Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, that advocated for reforms in the selection process for delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He later headed a liberal-leaning organization called the Center for Political Reform.His marriage to Linda Yarrow ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Margo Hauff, a high school social studies teacher who wrote and designed educational materials for learning-disabled children. He is survived by her, in addition to their daughters, as well as by a brother and two grandsons.After working in politics, Mr. Bode began writing for The New Republic in the early 1970s and became its politics editor. He moved to NBC News in 1979, encouraged by the network’s newsman Tom Brokaw, a friend from college, and eventually became the network’s national political correspondent. In that role he hosted “Bode’s Journal,” a weekly segment of the “Today” show, on which he explored, among other issues, voting rights violations, racial discrimination and patronage abuses, as his longtime producer Jim Connor recalled in an interview.Mr. Bode left the network a decade later to teach at DePauw University in Indiana, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Media. While at DePauw, from 1989 to 1998, he commuted to Washington to host “Washington Week in Review” and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992).Beginning in 1998, he was dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years and remained a professor there until 2004.Mr. Bode said he retired from broadcast journalism for family reasons. “I was raising my kids from 100 airports a year,” he said. As he told The New York Times in 1999, “I knew then that my problem was, I’ve got the best job, but I’ve also got one chance to be a father, and I’m losing it.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches’ and Awards Shows

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      A new documentary about Frederick Douglass debuts on HBO. And both the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards air this weekend.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 21-27. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE ENDGAME 10 p.m. on NBC. An F.B.I. agent (Ryan Michelle Bathe) and a mysterious criminal mastermind (Morena Baccarin) fight to one-up each other materially and verbally in this new thriller series. The plot revolves around a series of major bank robberies in New York City. Expect fireworks: The “Fast and Furious” director Justin Lin is an executive producer of the show and directed Monday night’s debut episode.TuesdayFANNIE LOU HAMER’S AMERICA: AN AMERICA REFRAMED SPECIAL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This feature-length documentary special looks at the influential civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. The program shows Hamer’s legacy as an advocate for voting and women’s rights and explains how she went from working as a sharecropper in Mississippi to organizing grass-roots campaigns.WednesdayFREDERICK DOUGLASS: IN FIVE SPEECHES (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. David W. Blight’s Pulitzer-winning 2018 book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” is the foundation of this new documentary, which includes commentary by Blight and the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. that speaks to the abolitionist’s crucial place in American history. But the documentary also takes advantage of its own medium, emphasizing the power of Douglass’s words: It features five actors — Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Jonathan Majors and Denzel Whitaker — performing words from five Douglass speeches from several different decades. A sixth actor, André Holland, narrates.ThursdayAIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS (2013) 5:15 p.m. on Showtime 2. The filmmaker David Lowery had proven himself a skilled maker of moody dramas by last year, when he released the Arthurian romance “The Green Knight.” Lowery’s reputation is due in part to this somber quasi western. In it, Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play Bob and Ruth, a couple that gets involved in a shootout. The fight leaves one man dead and a sheriff’s deputy (Ben Foster) injured. Bob goes to prison, and Ruth gives birth to their daughter. Later, Bob escapes and journeys back to Ruth. But he’s wanted, and things get complicated.FridayDaniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in “Queen & Slim.”Universal PicturesQUEEN & SLIM (2019) 7:35 p.m. and 10:20 p.m. on FXM. Both the outlaw romance “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” (above) and Melina Matsoukas’s “Queen & Slim” feature couples whose lives are transformed, quickly, by violence. The story of Queen and Slim (played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya) opens with an awkward first date that leads into a deadly encounter with an aggressive white police officer (Sturgill Simpson). They become fugitives on the run, and “Queen & Slim” turns into a road movie and a love story. What lingers, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, “are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend.”SaturdayRyan Reynolds and Jodie Comer in “Free Guy.”20th Century StudiosFREE GUY (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. This action comedy was a pandemic-era box-office success story. Now it can be a watch-from-home Saturday night diversion. A sugary sci-fi romp with notes of “The Truman Show” and “The Matrix” (but filtered through the director of “Night at the Museum”), “Free Guy” casts Ryan Reynolds as Guy, an Everyman who learns that he’s a side character in a video game. When he meets a player named Millie (Jodie Comer), Guy is drawn into a mission to stop the C.E.O. of the studio that created the game (Taika Waititi) from enacting evil deeds. The movie is “perky though predictable,” Maya Phillips wrote in her review for The Times.53RD ANNUAL N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. One of the joys of the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual Image Awards show is that it allows for some matchups that you don’t see at the Oscars, Emmys or Grammys. The ceremony recognizes movies, TV shows and music. Some of the categories in this year’s edition are fairly typical: Halle Berry, Andra Day, Jennifer Hudson, Tessa Thompson and Zendaya are all up for the best actress in a film award, while “Encanto,” “Luca, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Sing 2” and “Vivo” will compete for best animated movie. But other categories break genre boundaries: The nominees for entertainer of the year are Jennifer Hudson, Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Regina King and Tiffany Haddish.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Marc Brown on the End of ‘Arthur’ and His Favorite Fan Theories

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      With the beloved PBS children’s show ending after 25 seasons, its 75-year-old creator answered some off-the-wall questions about his 8-year-old aardvark.From the minute Marc Brown meets you, he’s sizing you up. Just maybe not in the usual way.“People remind me of animals,” said Brown, the 75-year-old creator of the illustrated character Arthur Read, the 8-year-old bespectacled aardvark who, since the book “Arthur’s Nose” debuted in 1976, has been helping children navigate the world around them. “When the child that I’m talking to reads a book and all the characters are animals, they don’t care what color their skin is. They are immediately drawn to the character that they identify with and feel an affinity with.”For more than 25 years, Brown and a team at WGBH, Boston’s PBS affiliate, have produced the animated adaptation series “Arthur,” in which the aardvark, his friends and a lineup of animalized guest stars tackle difficult subjects like bullying, divorce and disability. The series, which has won praise from both children and parents for its candor in depicting challenging situations — as well as seven Emmy Awards and the distinction of longest-running children’s animated series on American television — will air its final episodes this week. (All four will air on Monday afternoon and stream free on PBS Kids.)Brown appears in animated form in an episode from the new and final season of “Arthur.”WGBH“One of the reasons I love ‘Arthur’ is because of the imperfections in our characters,” said Carol Greenwald, who created the show with Brown and now serves as an executive producer. “It’s important to show kids that you can really screw up and it’s not the end of the world. You can learn from your mistakes and come back a better person.”Both Brown and Greenwald said that the idea from start was for the series not only to reflect issues relevant to kids but also to present a world in which they could see themselves. When they first got started, Greenwald said, the WGBH team dispatched people with cameras to capture neighborhoods around Boston to help animators diversify the homes in Arthur’s world.“Arthur lived in a beautiful little house with a picket fence,” she said, “but we wanted to diversify the world enough that kids who lived in apartment buildings, or in smaller, lower income neighborhoods, would feel like they were as a part of that story.”And Elwood City, Arthur’s fictional home, did come to feel like home for many viewers, not just in Boston but also around the world. So when one of the show’s writers revealed in July that the show had wrapped production — and when PBS later announced that the series’s final episodes would air this winter, the reaction, at least on social media, was a collective balled fist (a riff on a popular Arthur meme).Arthur, a bespectacled 8-year-old aardvark, debuted in Brown’s 1976 book “Arthur’s Nose.” The books were adapted into a PBS animated series for 25 seasons.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesArthur’s friends are all animals, too. “People remind me of animals,” Brown said.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesBut for fans who have been with Arthur across more than 250 episodes, there’s some consolation: The characters will live on in a new Arthur podcast, games and digital shorts — and the series’s final episode will flash forward to provide viewers a glimpse of what Arthur and his friends grow up to be.“There are definitely some surprises,” Greenwald said.In a recent video call from his sunny West Village living room, Brown was candid, sprightly and puckish. His clothing and furnishings were impeccably tidy, his white hair neatly combed — it wasn’t hard to see where Arthur, fond of polo shirts and V-neck sweaters, took his sartorial cues. Brown, who is still an executive producer of the show, reflected on its longevity and why now was to right time to end it, and he talked about some of his new projects, including the long-gestating Arthur movie that has gained new momentum recently. (He also set the record straight on a few fan theories.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations on 25 years! Did you ever think you would be having this conversation when the first episode premiered in October 1996?Not in my wildest dreams. I thought it’d last two years — if I was lucky.Many authors help create a show, then step back. Why are you still so intensely involved after 25 years?I still have the same feeling I had when PBS came to me and wanted to put Arthur on television. I had invested 15 years before that in the characters, and I was getting lots of letters from kids. It felt like a little family, and I wanted the characters to be faithful to my vision. And so I’ve been a guard in the corner in that way.“I thought it’d last two years — if I was lucky,” Brown said of the animated adaptation, which premiered in 1996. Today it is the longest-running animated children’s show on American TV. GBHSo many of the stories are inspired by real-life experiences you had when your kids — Tolon, Tucker and Eliza — were little. Now that they’re adults, is it more difficult to come up with fresh ideas?So many episodes grow out of our writing team’s experiences — and it turns out they’re still helpful and relevant to kids! There are episodes, like the one on head lice, that every time we run them, because it’s still an ongoing problem for a lot of kids, it gets a lot of positive feedback.Why end it now, then?Technology has changed in the last 25 years, and kids are now watching stories on their iPhones, listening to podcasts, playing games on their devices — they’re getting information so many other ways. We’re looking for ways to try new things.Have you been surprised by the reaction?It was wonderful to see the response. I’m still getting many messages on my Instagram page: “Is Arthur really over?” I love seeing reactions from these young adults who grew up with Arthur, the fact that these characters are still fresh in their minds. It’s great that he’s touched so many people so deeply that they want him to continue.In the first book, “Arthur’s Nose,” Arthur looked like an aardvark with a long snout, not a mouse with glasses. What happened?The second book, “Arthur’s Eyes,” came from when my son Tolon was getting glasses. He came home and said, “Dad, I thought all my friends were better-looking.” You can’t make that up! So of course Arthur had glasses, too. As the series went on, I just got to know him better, and he became more lovable and more humanlike — and his nose got shorter. It was not intentional!Have you ever met an aardvark?[Laughs.] I haven’t had any encounters with aardvarks, although I think there may be one that lives in an apartment across the street.The series is notable for its diverse characters, including ones with blindness, dyslexia, autism and dementia. How did you ensure those representations were accurate?We work with a series of experts for each episode, like the one we did about Arthur’s grandfather, Dave, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember Arthur’s name. Things like that are so important, and so many families are dealing with that. We heard from a dad who watched the show about autism and discovered through the show that his son was autistic and wrote to thank us. The show helped parents understand their kids. Matt Damon’s mom happens to be one of our wonderful experts who’s helped us with many episodes. That’s how we got Matt Damon as a guest star. The poor guy didn’t know what hit him!The show made headlines in 2019 when it revealed that Mr. Ratburn, Arthur’s teacher, is gay. The episode also showed his wedding to a man. Did you have any worries about how people would react?We want to represent the world around us. When we wanted to have Arthur’s teacher get married, we thought it could be opportunity for him to marry a same-sex partner — and kudos to PBS, who got behind us and let us do that, and do it in a way that wasn’t about his sexual orientation. It was about the fact that their teacher, who they love, found a partner who he loved, and they were happy for him.When The New York Times talked to you in 1996 — shortly after the first episodes aired — you were getting 100,000 letters a year from kids. How much fan mail do you get these days?I get letters asking for Francine’s phone number — well, Francine [a monkey character on the show] doesn’t have a phone number! Years ago, I was really stupid: In the book “Arthur’s Thanksgiving,” I put our home phone number in a little illustration of a bulletin board that says “Call Arthur at 749-7978.” Every Thanksgiving, the phone began to ring and ring and ring. My wife, Laurie, had the best response. You’d hear a little voice say: “Hello? Is Arthur there?” And she’d say, “No, he’s at the library.” That was when we lived outside Boston; it went on for a few years!Brown in his Manhattan home with his cat Romeo. “I haven’t had any encounters with aardvarks,” Brown said, “although I think there may be one that lives in an apartment across the street.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhat’s next for you?For three years now, I’ve been working on a new preschool animated show called “Hop.” It’s a little frog, and one of his legs is a little shorter than the other. It’s a show about the power of friendship, solving problems together and kindness.And my dream for an Arthur feature film, which I decided wasn’t ever going to happen, might actually happen in a way I could be proud of. When that idea was hatched 15 years ago, I spent way too much time out in Los Angeles talking to people that weren’t making a whole lot of sense — in my mind. But now I think I’ve found the right people.Can we do a quick speed round? There are several fan theories that I’d love to have you confirm or deny.Sure.Let’s start with the most plausible: Arthur lives in Pennsylvania.Well, I grew up in Erie, Penn. Lakewood Elementary School was where I went to elementary school. I can still see my third-grade class, and all my friends, many of whom turned into characters in Arthur’s world. But I also lived in Massachusetts for many years, and I used a lot of elements from there — the movie theater in “Arthur’s Valentine” was the theater down the street where we lived. When Carol and I were trying to come up with a name for Arthur’s hometown, she suggested Elwood City, which is also in Pennsylvania, near a place where she lived as a child. That’s how it happened, folks!Arthur gets married.I’m not telling you! You’ll have to tune in and find out.Arthur takes place in a multiverse.No? [Laughs.]Arthur is a reality series directed by Matt Damon.I hadn’t heard that one. That’s interesting.The whole show is acted out by aliens.Well, we did do something similar a few years ago with Buster and his fascination with aliens, so …That’s not a no?I couldn’t be happier inspiring people’s imagination. That’s a good thing! More