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    As Mikaela Shiffrin Considers How to Top Herself, She Studies Taylor Swift

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    Shiffrin, the champion American ski racer, is an unabashed Swiftie, and has long seen the pop culture force as a textbook guide for navigating fame, adversity and unprecedented success.As Mikaela Shiffrin plans the next phase of her record-setting career as a skier, she is looking, as she always has, to the example of another female megastar who has experienced kindred highs and lows and highs in her career: Taylor Swift.The American skier Shiffrin is the most successful, and precocious, Alpine racer in history, having smashed the mark for World Cup victories, by women and men, while still in her prime skiing years. The American singer-songwriter Swift is the world’s biggest pop star, smashing music industry records one after another.When Shiffrin made her debut on the World Cup circuit, she was just shy of turning 16, the same age Swift was when she began recording her debut album five years earlier. They have both been teenage sensations lavished with praise and profit. While Swift, named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2023, might right now be the most famous human on the planet, Shiffrin, celebrated at home, has bona fide rock star status in Europe, where ski racing is the national sport of several countries. They are both at the top of their respective mountains.They have been innovators, history-makers and leading figures in their high-wire professions. But like many caught in the pop culture maelstrom, they’ve experienced intense, barbed criticism after any failure, real or perceived. Each has openly dealt with a parent’s death or serious illness and each has taken lengthy breaks from performing.A Swiftie since she was 13, Shiffrin, like legions of other girls and women, sees herself in Swift and has come to recognize elemental parallels in their careers and lives. For perspective, Shiffrin, 28, turns to her idol.Shiffrin at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver in July.Mike DawsonSwift onstage at Empower Field at Mile High, where Shiffrin watched from a luxury box and sang along.Tom Cooper/TAS23, via Getty ImagesIn July, Shiffrin rented a suite for Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver, an event Shiffrin described as “three hours of jumping up and down while singing every song at the top of my lungs.” Within that experience, Shiffrin pondered if there was a lesson that would help shape the next “era” of her own luminous career.Had Swift, the teen prodigy who is now 34, helped point the way from one stage to another?“Absolutely, because I’ve spent 15 years studying Taylor Swift and she has been guiding me a little bit every step of the way,” Shiffrin said in a recent interview in Vermont, where she claimed the 90th of her 93 career World Cup victories. “It’s why most Swifties become Swifties. It feels like her music is speaking directly to you. Her experiences resonate; I’ve always tried to learn from them.”Shiffrin’s mother, Eileen, a former ski racer who is also one of her coaches, insisted that Swift had provided guidance that is more multifaceted and sophisticated than it might seem.“Miki’s sport and career thrives on creativity,” Eileen wrote in an email last month, using Mikaela’s family nickname. She added that “every new Taylor Swift song, concert and video,” is an inspiration and motivation to her daughter.Eileen Shiffrin, right, celebrates with her daughter on the podium after Mikaela’s victory in a World Cup Slalom race in Semmering, Austria, in 2018.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockEileen Shiffrin, who praised Swift’s “street smarts” and business acumen, continued: “She keeps Miki ticking like she does the whole world. And she stands her ground, as she should, and that’s a great role model.”As Mikaela Shiffrin, who has never met Swift, recalled various chapters of her public journey — stunning racing successes, ill-timed flops, the perils of fame, the accidental death of her father in 2020 — Shiffrin readily identified ways Swift had influenced her responses to each situation.That long-distance tutelage began when the preternaturally gifted Shiffrin, nurtured in the Colorado mountains and at a venerable Vermont ski academy, won three World Cup races and a world championship gold medal as a high school senior. A year later, in 2014, she became the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history, at 18, and was thrust into an international sporting spotlight that has only seemed to magnify with each season.But since her days as a 13-year-old listening to Swift’s 2008 album “Fearless” on repeat, she said, she has looked for clues on how to live as a celebrity.“Granted, Taylor is a big fish in a big pond and I’m more of a big fish in a small pond,” Shiffrin said. “But you can see how she’s handled the attention, because she was a teenager too. She was able to hold up and work on her music. And while she’s very comfortable sharing a lot of her life, she builds a layer of protection when she needs it. She can disappear. That does seem to give her energy.“I took all that in and kind of assimilated it. Although it was hard for me because I had to go from being an extreme introvert to being comfortable around a lot of cameras and microphones. It’s a bit funny having to go through life quantifying yourself as an introvert but having to live it in an extroverted way.”Shiffrin during her downhill run at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal, in 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAfter winning gold and silver medals at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, Shiffrin won an unprecedented 17 races in the following season. At the time, a five- or six-win Alpine season would have been considered prosperous. But at the start of the next season, Shiffrin did not match the astonishing pace she had set a year earlier.“People started to say that I’d lost my touch, that maybe I had peaked and my career was fading,” Shiffrin said with a look of exasperation as she slumped backward into a lounge chair. “I was like, ‘Oh, gosh, everybody’s saying all this stuff about me like I’m never going to be a good skier again.’ ”Shiffrin was reminded of Swift’s “Reputation” album from a few years earlier, and again saw parallels.“That album was built of basically having her reputation go incredibly downhill, or at least that’s how she perceived it with all the feuds that were going on at the time,” Shiffrin said. “But she came back in a big, big way. I related to the album because it made me feel like life is full of ebbs and flows. And that everything is probably going to be OK.”Shiffrin rallied in January 2020, with successive victories. But roughly a week after the second of those restorative triumphs, on Feb. 1, her older brother, Taylor, reached her by phone in Europe to say that their father, Jeff Shiffrin, had been seriously hurt at home in Colorado. Returning to Denver, Mikaela climbed onto Jeff’s hospital bed for several hours, a vigil that ended with his death on Feb. 2.The family has declined to reveal details of what happened; a coroner ruled the death an accident and listed the cause as a head injury.Shiffrin did not race for the next nine months.Shiffrin looks down at pictures of her late father Jeff Shiffrin in a locket on her necklace after winning a World Cup Giant Slalom race in Meribel, France, in February.Aleksandra Szmigiel/ReutersIn last month’s interview, without prompting, Shiffrin recalled that Swift’s 2020 album “Folklore” came out five months after her father’s death and that it included “Epiphany.” Swift has said the song explores the emotional distress of health care workers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and of soldiers at war, a correlation that pays homage to one of Swift’s grandfathers, who was a battle-hardened U.S. Marine in World War II.Shiffrin played “Epiphany” over and over.“She literally addressed the most unforeseeable and horrific experience I ever have gone through,” Shiffrin said of Swift, whose parents have each dealt with cancer. “It speaks directly to the experiences I had in the hospital with my dad.“It was hard to listen to and heart-wrenching but also uplifting at the same time, which is something I really needed at that time.”Shiffrin’s return to competition in the 2021-22 season included a string of triumphant results, as well as a shocking, demoralizing outing at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal. Since then she has won 20 races, which puts her on pace for roughly 130 career victories if she were to race five more years. The previous World Cup wins record, which stood for 34 years, was 86. She has won 14 world championship medals, one shy of the most in a career.But whatever Shiffrin’s future holds, she is sure of two things. The first is that given her level of sporting fame, Shiffrin could likely arrange to meet Taylor Swift, but she is afraid to do so.“I’d probably trip over myself and be so tongue-tied,” Shiffrin said, laughing. “And then it’d be memorable to her because it’s the first time she’s experienced, like, a goofball.”The second certainty is that she will use Swift as a model to help define the next era of her career, regardless of how many Alpine skiing records she accumulates.“Taylor Swift has reset so many records and held so many titles in the music industry that they have had to create new ways to measure her success,” Shiffrin said. “And I’ve noticed that she just keeps going.”Does that help solve Shiffrin’s central dilemma: What to do next?“Well, there’s an entire universe inside Taylor Swift’s mind that we haven’t tapped into yet — maybe we’ve tapped into 1 percent of what she can accomplish because of her music,” Shiffrin said. “And I think about my skiing in a similar way. I’m closer now to reaching my potential, but it’s not about a record or another title.“I’ve noticed Taylor just keeps going. In a way, you never finish doing that work.” More

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      in Movies

      X-Wing Model From ‘Star Wars’ Fetches $3.1 Million at Auction

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      After Greg Jein, an Oscar-nominated visual effects artist, died last year, his friends discovered the prop stashed in a cardboard box in his garage.A model of an X-wing fighter, which was used to film the climactic battle scene in the 1977 “Star Wars,” sold at auction on Sunday for $3,135,000, far exceeding the opening price of $400,000 and setting a record for a prop used onscreen in a “Star Wars” movie, according to Heritage Auctions.Not bad for a model spaceship found buried in some packing peanuts in a cardboard box in a garage.Friends of Greg Jein, a Hollywood visual effects artist, discovered the X-wing stashed in his garage last year after he died at age 76.It was one of hundreds of props, scripts, costumes and other pieces of Hollywood memorabilia that Mr. Jein had collected over the decades, and had left scattered throughout two houses, two garages and two storage units in Los Angeles.Heritage Auctions said the winning bidder did not want to be publicly identified. The buyer had been bidding on the floor of the auction house in Dallas, competing with another collector who was bidding over the phone.A similar model X-wing sold last year for nearly $2.4 million.More than 500 other items from Mr. Jein’s collection also sold at the auction, for a total of $13.6 million.The two-day event was the second-highest-grossing Hollywood auction in history, after the 2011 sale of memorabilia from the actress Debbie Reynolds, which grossed $22.8 million, Heritage Auctions said.Her collection included Marilyn Monroe’s billowing “subway dress” from the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch,” which sold for $4.6 million.The X-wing, one of the original miniature models used for close-ups, was one of hundreds of props, scripts and other pieces of Hollywood memorabilia a visual effects artist had collected.Gene KozickiMr. Jein’s collection reflected his passion for science fiction, comic books and fantasy.It included a Stormtrooper costume from the original “Star Wars” movie, which sold for $645,000, a spacesuit from the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which sold for $447,000, and a utility belt from the 1960s “Batman” television series, starring Adam West, which sold for $36,250.Mr. Jein also collected quirkier pieces, like a lace hairpiece that had been worn by William Shatner as Captain Kirk in the original “Star Trek” television series. It sold for $13,750.But the X-wing drew by far the most attention.Heritage Auctions said the 22-inch prop was used in scenes involving X-wings flown by three pilots in the Rebel Alliance’s final assault on the Death Star. The characters’ call signs were Red Leader, Red Two and Luke Skywalker’s own Red Five.It had been built by Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects studio founded by George Lucas, with motorized wings, fiber-optic lights and other features for close-up shots.But people in the visual effects industry had not seen the model in decades, according to Gene Kozicki, a visual-effects historian and archivist who worked with Mr. Jein on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in the 1990s.“It was like ‘Holy cow, we found an X-wing, a real, honest-to-goodness X-wing,’” Mr. Kozicki said last month, recalling the moment he and several others pulled the X-wing out of a box in Mr. Jein’s garage. “We were carrying on like kids on Christmas.”Mr. Jein’s cousin, Jerry Chang, who attended the auction and spoke on a panel about his cousin’s life and career, said he appreciated that Heritage Auctions “made it a point to honor Greg in everything they did, not just the items up for sale.”Mr. Kozicki said the collection was a testament to Mr. Jein’s love of collecting, which started with baseball cards when he was 5 years old.As his collection spread to Hollywood memorabilia, he was drawn to props and costumes that were made by artisans and craftspeople before the advent of digital special effects, Mr. Kozicki said.Greg Jein, who died last year, in 2008. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978 for his work on Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”Stephen Shugerman/Getty ImagesIt was an art that Mr. Jein knew well.He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978 for his work on Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Mr. Jein led the team that built the model of the alien “mother ship” that appears in the movie. The piece is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum.In 1980, Mr. Jein was nominated for another Academy Award in visual effects for his work on Mr. Spielberg’s “1941,” which was filmed with model tanks, buildings and a runaway Ferris wheel.“Greg famously said ‘I have a hard time throwing anything away,’ and I think in a way he kept the collection going so the recognition of those craftspeople wouldn’t be discarded like a prop,” Mr. Kozicki said in an email on Monday. “I can only hope that the new owners keep that spirit going.” More

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      in Music

      Karol G’s ‘Mañana Será Bonito’ Is No. 1, Making Chart History

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      The latest release by the Colombian pop star is the first Spanish-language LP by a woman to open at the top of the Billboard 200.In December 2020, Bad Bunny made history on the Billboard charts with the first No. 1 album performed entirely in Spanish (“El Último Tour del Mundo”). Now the Colombian pop star Karol G has set another record with the first Spanish-language LP by a woman to take the top spot.“Mañana Será Bonito” (“Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful”), the fourth studio album by Karol G — the 32-year-old singer born Carolina Giraldo Navarro, instantly recognizable for her bold hair colorings — displaces SZA’s “SOS” on the Billboard 200 after a nearly consecutive 10-week run at the top. “Mañana Será Bonito” opens with the equivalent of 94,000 sales in the United States, including 119 million streams and 10,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to data from the tracking service Luminate.It is the latest sign of the growing commercial power of Latin music. Last year, Bad Bunny, from Puerto Rico, had the most popular album (“Un Verano Sin Ti”) and the biggest global tour. Karol G sold $70 million in tickets to her own tour, which Billboard said made it the highest-grossing tour of the United States by any Latin female artist in history.Karol G’s arrival pushes SZA to second place in her 12th week out, while Gorillaz — the “virtual band” created by the musician Damon Albarn and the visual artist Jamie Hewlett — opens at No. 3 with “Cracker Island,” the group’s eighth studio album. Yeat, a Portland, Ore., rapper at the top of the semi-underground “rage” heap, debuts at No. 4 with “AfterLyfe,” and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is in fifth place.Next week’s chart will undoubtedly be dominated by the country star Morgan Wallen, whose latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” came out on Friday. Like his last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” it is stuffed with catchy tunes about drinking, breakups and pickup trucks — “One Thing” has 36 tracks, “Dangerous” 30 — and it is already dominating streaming services.The only real questions facing “One Thing” are how big it will open and how long it will last on the chart. “Dangerous,” which came out at the very beginning of 2021, spent 10 consecutive weeks at No. 1 and is now in sixth place, its 109th time in the Top 10. More

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      in Theater

      Broadway Bounces Back With ‘Best Week Since the Before Times’

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      Broadway shows grossed $51.9 million during the holiday week, the most since 2019, and “The Lion King” set a record for the most earned by any show in a single week.Broadway, still struggling to rebound from the lengthy pandemic shutdown, is starting the new year with a sign of hope: Last week was, by far, the best for the industry since the arrival of the coronavirus.The 33 shows running grossed $51.9 million, which is the most since the final week of 2019. And “The Lion King,” which last fall celebrated its 25th anniversary on Broadway, notched a remarkable milestone: It grossed $4.3 million, which is the most ever taken in by a show in a single week on Broadway.The boffo numbers — 21 shows grossed more than $1 million last week — come with caveats. Both Christmas and New Year’s days fell on Sundays, concentrating holiday travelers into a single week. Twenty shows added extra performances for the holiday week, giving nine instead of the usual eight. And ticket prices were high: The average Broadway seat went for $166, up from $128 just four weeks earlier.But the strong week sent a signal that under the right circumstances, Broadway can deliver. During the holiday week — the week that ended Jan. 1 — the 22 musicals and 11 plays running were, on average, 92 percent full. Overall attendance was 312,878, which is not a record (in fact, it was the 27th-best-attended week in history, according to the Broadway League), but is good (by comparison, attendance over Thanksgiving week was 259,298).The two final weeks of the year saw combined grosses of $86.7 million, which is up 115 percent over the previous year, but down 12 percent compared to those key holiday weeks in 2019.“What you see is that we’re continuing to build and maintain our audience,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and theater owners. “We’re not back to where we were, but we’re doing very well at a time of uncertainty.”According to the League, last week was the third-highest-grossing in history. The highest was the week ending Dec. 30, 2018, when grosses were $57.8 million and attendance was 378,910; the second-highest was the week ending Dec. 29, 2019, when grosses were $55.8 million and attendance was 350,714.“The Lion King,” with a nine-performance week, toppled the previous record for the top-grossing week by a single show, which had been held by “Hamilton,” which grossed $4 million for eight performances during the week that ended Dec. 30, 2018. (The figures are not adjusted for inflation.)“The Lion King” earned $4.3 million last week, the most a single show has ever earned in one week. It resumed performances in September 2021.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesThe holidays are traditionally strong for Broadway, but in 2021 the final weeks of the year were a bloodbath because the Omicron variant led to cancellations of multiple shows. Now, despite the “tripledemic” of circulating respiratory illnesses, Broadway has largely figured out how to keep going: During the last three weeks, 12 scheduled performances were canceled, compared to 221 cancellations during the final three weeks of 2021.Throughout the industry, shows were trumpeting breaking records last week.“Chicago” had the highest-grossing week in its 26-year history, as well as its highest single-performance gross. The once-struggling “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which revived its fortunes after the shutdown by consolidating from two parts into one, was already the highest-grossing play in Broadway history, and last week set a record (nearly $2.7 million) for weekly gross by a play. And a starry revival of “The Piano Lesson” was on track to being the highest grossing play by August Wilson — the much-celebrated and oft-performed bard of 20th-century African American life — in Broadway history.Several shows set house records at the theaters where they are being performed, including the revival of “Funny Girl,” which had been floundering financially until its producers brought in Lea Michele to star. Also setting records were shows including “Beetlejuice,” which closes Jan. 8 after a bumpy ride; “Six,” the pop-concert-style reconsideration of the wives of Henry VIII; “& Juliet,” a new musical imagining an alternative history for Shakespeare’s famously star-crossed lover, and “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical.“We had our best week since the before times,” said Victoria Bailey, the executive director of TDF, a nonprofit organization that runs the TKTS discount ticket booths, who said her staff is noticing increasing geographic diversity among ticket buyers.“We were seeing people from lots and lots of states and lots and lots of countries — it wasn’t the same folks making the numbers bigger, but it was folks from further away,” Bailey said. “I don’t have any reason to say we’re out of the woods, but I don’t think this was just a one-off. And if we get to a point where you periodically have good weeks, that will be helpful.”Bailey and St. Martin both noted that tourists from China have not yet returned in significant numbers as that nation battles surging coronavirus cases. But both said they were particularly heartened by returning domestic tourism.Broadway now enters a period of greater challenge: January and February have historically been weak months for the industry. There are 12 shows scheduled to close this month, which is at the high end of the normal range for January closings. But there are a raft of openings planned in March and April — it looks like the overall number of new shows this season will be within the typical range — and St. Martin said she is feeling good about the industry’s trajectory.“I am overwhelmingly optimistic about the spring,” she said. More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      in Television

      ‘Jeopardy!’ Keeps Seeing Winning Streaks. Champions Ponder Why.

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      Amy Schneider isn’t the only one on a roll. Just a dozen players have won 10 or more games, half of those in the past five years, and a quarter in this season alone.When Amy Schneider became the fourth contestant in the history of “Jeopardy!” to surpass $1 million in winnings in regular-season play on Friday, she extended her winning streak to 28 games.It was a remarkable milestone for Schneider, who last month became the woman with the most consecutive wins on the program.Her victory came as long winning streaks have grown more common on “Jeopardy!” — there even seem to be streaks of streaks. Earlier this season Matt Amodio won 38 consecutive games, the second-longest run in the show’s history. The player who beat him, Jonathan Fisher, ended up winning 11 games in a row, a rare feat in itself.Since “Jeopardy!” got rid of a rule in 2003 that had limited contestants to no more than five wins in a row, only a dozen contestants have managed to win 10 or more games in a row. Half of the dozen, or six streaks, have occurred in the past five years, while half of those six have been this season.The winning streaks have provided some welcome excitement, and ratings boosts, for a show that has struggled to choose a permanent replacement for Alex Trebek, its beloved longtime host, who died in November 2020. But they have also raised new questions.Is this trend simply a result of chance? Are contestants getting better at prepping — have they learned to game the game? Is this a case of improvement over time, much in the same way that top runners and swimmers are able to best the records set by their predecessors? Could the clues possibly be getting easier?Earlier this season Jonathan Fisher won 11 games in a row.Jeopardy ProductionsHe beat Matt Amodio, who won 38 consecutive games.Jeopardy Productions“Behind the scenes we’ve spent a lot of time discussing whether this is some kind of ‘new normal’ or whether we’ve just had an unusual windfall of brilliant ‘Jeopardy!’ players,” Michael Davies, the show’s executive producer, wrote in an email.He discounted the notion that the clues could be getting easier.“I actually think the show may be getting harder,” Davies wrote, noting that the subject matter covers an ever-wider range of material. “Let’s face it, so few people read the same books anymore or watch the same TV shows. And we have massively diversified the history, cultural and pop cultural material we expect our players to compete over.”Theories abound about the show’s recent run of big winners. In interviews and emails, several recent champions and people who write about “Jeopardy!” and study it obsessively offered their thoughts.The show’s longtime host, Alex Trebek, left, posed with Ken Jennings after his earnings from his record breaking-streak surpassed $1 million in 2004.Jeopardy Productions, via Getty ImagesThe writers and producers behind the show have talked about several possible explanations, Davies wrote, including that contestants now have access to a wealth of online resources (including a fan-generated website called J! Archive, which Schneider relied on to prepare, that includes clues dating back to the 1980s).Andy Saunders, who runs the website ​​ The Jeopardy! Fan, has started to run the numbers and believes the trend may be significant beyond this particular moment. In a blog post on Friday, Saunders wrote that the average streak length started increasing in the season spanning 2010 and 2011, which he suggested could be the result of more intensive preparation on the part of contestants.Some point to the influence of one star player: James Holzhauer, a professional sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019 and continues to hold the record for the most money won in a single game.Holzhauer’s strategy — to start with the high-value clues, hunt for the Daily Doubles and make risky wagers — proved to be a winning one for him, and some contestants took note. Amodio, for example, said he copied Holzhauer’s approach of starting with the large money clues at the bottom of the board. But Schneider has done the opposite, taking a more traditional approach that she called a “reaction against James Holzhauer.”James Holzhauer, a sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019, influenced the strategy of some contestants who followed. John Locher/Associated PressHolzhauer’s take on the current trend? A product of chance.“People always assume everything is a paradigm shift,” Holzhauer wrote in an email, “when it’s actually fairly normal for results to occasionally cluster.”One theory holds that the pandemic may have played a role, causing delays that increased the lead time — and potentially the study time — contestants had after they had been invited to compete on the show.“You had a whole bunch of people who knew they were going to be on the show and could spend a whole bunch of extra time preparing,” Saunders noted.Amodio and Schneider were two of those people. Amodio, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Yale, was initially scheduled to compete in April 2020 but because of pandemic cancellations, started taping a year later than originally planned.In that time, Amodio said in an interview, he focused on boning up on pop culture, a weak area of knowledge for him. He listened to pop music he had not heard before (discovering Dua Lipa in the process) and watched samples of a broad swath of current television (including “The Good Place,” which earned him the correct response to a $1000 clue in his 13th game).Schneider was invited onto the show in fall 2020, but the taping was delayed and she didn’t compete until about a year later, giving her more time to practice with the clues from previous games and correct gaps in her knowledge (“like forgetting which Brontë sister was which,” she said).But she said in an interview that she was skeptical that the extra study time was a significant factor. She views a well-prepared contestant as someone who has long been an intellectually curious person — not someone who crams before the test. “You just have to live a life where you’re learning stuff all the time,” she said.Fisher, who beat Amodio, had little time to prepare: There was only about a week between his getting the call inviting him to appear on the show and his arrival at the studio.Still another explanation being considered is the recent increase in applicants. Shortly before the pandemic hit, the show introduced a new entrance test that would-be contestants can take at any time, rather than limiting it to particular times. In a recent article for The Ringer exploring the trend in streaks, Claire McNear reported that before the new exam was introduced, “Jeopardy!” had about 70,000 applicants each year; with the new exam, it gets an average of about 125,000 a year.The show has also replaced regional in-person follow-up rounds with virtual rounds, a change that Cory Anotado, a game-show journalist who will appear on the show as a contestant this week, views as an important factor.“When you lower the barrier of entry, a lot of times you get better results,” he said.The string of successes comes at a time of upheaval for “Jeopardy!” The search for someone to succeed Trebek devolved into controversy after McNear reported that the chosen successor, Mike Richards, had made offensive comments about women on his podcast several years earlier (Richards stepped down from the hosting role then left the show entirely). Ken Jennings — who holds the record for the longest streak since winning 74 games in 2004 — and the sitcom actress Mayim Bialik have shared hosting duties since, but the show has put off officially naming a permanent host for the regular season.McNear, the author of a 2020 history of the show called “Answers in the Form of Questions,” wrote in the article that the elimination of the five-day cap in 2003 had been “an explicit ploy by then-executive producer Harry Friedman to drum up interest in the show,” and noted that the show’s ratings have been up this season compared to last season.Asked if it was possible for the show to try to engineer streaks by, say, pitting champions against weaker opponents, Davies said, “I can assure you that that isn’t the case.”He said that a diverse pool of contestants is selected for every taping and that an outside compliance agency randomly selects which games they will play in and in which order.It is also hard to predict how well a contestant might do based on what’s on paper. One element that is critical to a “Jeopardy!” streak is not related to knowledge or information recall but skill at using the buzzer in the specific environment of the studio.As a defending champion, Schneider said she quickly learned that she had a significant advantage over newcomers because she was already comfortable and quick with the device.“Now that I’ve been on a streak of my own,” she said, “I’m almost surprised that it hasn’t happened more often.” More

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      Matt Amodio Beats James Holzhauer’s Streak on ‘Jeopardy!’

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      The Yale Ph.D. student, who is studying computer science, has won 33 games in a row, making him No. 2 on the game show’s hall of fame roster for longest streaks.Two years ago, one “Jeopardy!” contestant, James Holzhauer, captured the imaginations of game-show fans who watched nightly to see his lightning-fast buzzer reflexes and risky bets.Holzhauer’s 32-game run put his face (with his trademark strained smile) all over the “Jeopardy!” hall of fame. But on Friday, another contestant, Matt Amodio, a Ph.D. student at Yale, won his 33rd game, smashing through Holzhauer’s streak and taking his place as No. 2 in the record book for most games won in a row. The first spot is held by Ken Jennings, who won 74 games and ultimately became a consulting producer on the show.Amodio’s victory brought him to $1.27 million in total winnings, and he has a long way to go to beat Holzhauer’s $2.46 million. With such an extraordinary total, Holzhauer was poised during his 33rd episode to possibly surpass Jennings’s record of $2.52 million won during the regular season, but he was bested by Emma Boettcher, a librarian who wrote her master’s paper on “Jeopardy!”The fanfare around Amodio — some on social media are calling it the “Amodio Rodeo”— is perhaps a relief to the people behind the game show, who have been struggling to find a replacement for Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year. The show’s former executive producer, Mike Richards, was announced as the new host, then swiftly stepped down after The Ringer reported on offensive comments he had made on a podcast he created several years ago. The actress Mayim Bialik and Jennings are hosting episodes until the end of the year.“Jeopardy!” superfans are also rejoicing at the shift in focus from behind-the-scenes drama to what’s actually playing out onstage.Andy Saunders, who runs the website The Jeopardy! Fan, said Amodio and Holzhauer have similar approaches to the game: In the first round, they both start by tackling all of the $1,000 clues, then try to find the Daily Double, to double their winnings and gain a significant lead over the other competitors. Where the two diverge, Saunders said, is in the next round, where Holzhauer tended to inflate his score by betting large sums on the Daily Double clues.“Where James might bet $13,000 or $14,000, Matt is betting $5,000 or $6,000,” he said in an interview. “And that’s pretty much the difference in their scores.”Saunders thinks that Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy comes from a higher level of confidence that he is going to give the correct response. Based on Saunders’s statistics, Holzhauer tended to get three or four more correct answers than Amodio does each episode, providing more of a foundation for that confidence. The willingness to bet big could also have come from Holzhauer’s background as a sports bettor, where he grew comfortable putting down large sums of money on games.That difference in strategy makes it unlikely that Amodio, who is studying computer science, will start to best Holzhauer in the category of single-game winnings, which Holzhauer completely dominates.However, if Amodio keeps up his dominance, he has a chance at beating Jennings’s 74-game streak from 2004 and setting a record for all-time winnings in regular-season play.Amodio tends to be humble about comparisons to the “Jeopardy!” all-stars, saying in a news release that it was “surreal” to be beside Jennings in the hall of fame and, on Twitter, writing that Holzhauer is better than him “in literally every way.”Amodio’s star turn, only two years after Holzhauer rose to fame, has raised the question: Is “Jeopardy!” getting easier, or are players just getting better?Saunders, who tracks the results of every game, thinks it’s that players are getting better. He said he doesn’t see substantial changes in the content of the clues but, instead, thinks that contestants have taken note of Holzhauer’s winning strategy and are taking advantage of a vast internet archive of past “Jeopardy!” clues to prepare.As for Jennings’s record, Amodio still has to double his streak, then win nine more games, to beat it.“Let’s look at that in another month,” Saunders said. “Then maybe Ken should start to get worried.” More

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      ‘Kipchoge: The Last Milestone’ Review: Skipping Ahead

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      This documentary about the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge takes a victory lap for an athletic feat.Never cut the course at a marathon, but you could probably skip the first half-hour of “Kipchoge: The Last Milestone” without missing much. A tribute to the pathbreaking Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, this documentary sets out to show how, in 2019, he became the first person in history to run a marathon distance in less than two hours.The well-intentioned but bromide-laden first part of the film introduces us to Kipchoge the man, shown as a runner with a tireless work ethic, a contemplative attitude and a fundamental modesty. We hear about how he inspires colleagues and young athletes. There are so many slow-motion running clips, abrupt switches to black-and-white or scenes that appear staged for effect (e.g., as Kipchoge discusses how his mother instilled a sense of discipline, we see a woman awakening a boy for a morning routine) that you could cut the movie into Nike ads with minimal alteration. The director, Jake Scott, son of Ridley, has in fact made such commercials.But the documentary’s pulse quickens when it turns its attention to Kipchoge’s efforts to beat the two-hour mark. His 1:59:40 doesn’t count as an official world record because he didn’t run it under traditional marathon strictures. The film illustrates how a wide array of collaborators optimized conditions. Various participants describe the road surfacing, how laser guidance helped set the pace and how teams of fellow runners took turns making Y formations around Kipchoge to reduce air resistance. The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.Kipchoge: The Last MilestoneRated PG-13 for … strenuous running? Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Beyoncé Makes History With 28 Grammy Wins

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftBeyoncé not only came to the Grammys, she won four and made history.March 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETBeyoncé had a record-breaking night and now holds the most Grammy wins by a female artist.Credit…CBSBeyoncé not only showed up at the Grammys (surprise!) — she won four, broke a record, and then got onstage to offer gracious remarks on a night when she was nominated nine times but did not perform.By the end of the night, Beyoncé had become the female artist with the most ever Grammy wins (28), a record previously held by Alison Krauss.More than two hours into the telecast, viewers were surprised to see a camera show Beyoncé seated at the award ceremony. Minutes later she would win best rap song with Megan Thee Stallion, who gushed about her collaborator in her acceptance speech.“I definitely want to say thank you to Beyoncé,” she said. “If you know me, you have to know that ever since I was little, I was like, ‘You know what, one day I’m going to grow up, I’m going to be like the rap Beyoncé.’ That was definitely my goal.”Then Beyoncé herself won another Grammy for best R&B performance for “Black Parade” and gave her own acceptance speech.“It’s been such a difficult time, so I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful Black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the whole world,” she said. “This is so overwhelming. I’ve been working my whole life — since 9 years old — and I can’t believe this happened.”With those two awards under her belt, plus the awards for best rap song (again for “Savage”) and best music video that she earned before the broadcast, Beyoncé broke the record for most Grammy wins ever by a female artist, previously held by Alison Krauss.“History!” the host, Trevor Noah, exclaimed. “Give it up for Beyoncé. This is history right now!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More