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      Biden Tries to Turn the Tables on Trump: ‘He’s About as Old as I Am’

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      In his first election-year appearance on a late-night television show, the president joshed with Seth Meyers and poked at former President Donald J. Trump’s own memory lapses.President Biden has come up with a new defense against claims that he is too old to run for another term: At least he knows who his wife is — as opposed to “the other guy.”As he expands his efforts to reassure voters that he is fit for another four years, Mr. Biden took a turn on the talk show circuit, using an appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC to poke his challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, on his own struggles with memory.In a playful but pointed interview aired early Tuesday morning, Mr. Meyers sought to help the president address the age issue, which polls show is an important drawback in the minds of most voters. Mr. Meyers jokingly told the president that he had obtained classified information indicating that “you are currently 81 years old.”Mr. Biden went along with the joke. “Who the hell told you that?” he asked. “That’s classified!”He then went on to jab Mr. Trump, who is 77, over a video in which he seems to call his wife, Melania Trump, by another name. “You got to take a look at the other guy,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”Turning more serious, Mr. Biden added that the contest is not about how old the candidates are. “It’s about how old your ideas are,” he said. “Look, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade. He wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are — 50, 60 years, they’ve been solid American positions.”The president has been on the defensive about his memory in recent weeks, particularly since a special counsel, in a report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, explained that one reason he would not charge Mr. Biden is because he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” During his interview with the special counsel, the report said, Mr. Biden could not remember key dates of his vice presidency or the year his son Beau died. Mr. Biden’s defenders assailed the special counsel for mentioning that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Biden Accuser Was Discredited. Right-Wing Media Is Undeterred.

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      Revelations that Alexander Smirnov, an F.B.I. informant, was a serial fabulist were downplayed on air and online by those who continued to insist the president should be impeached.On Tuesday, a few hours after the credibility of a key source boosting Republican efforts to impeach President Biden collapsed in spectacular fashion, the Fox News host Jesse Watters offered his viewers a reassuring message.“It’s a smear job,” Mr. Watters said.He was referring to the Justice Department’s revelation that Alexander Smirnov, an F.B.I. informant who had accused Mr. Biden and his son Hunter of an elaborate bribery scheme involving Ukraine, was in fact a serial liar who could not be trusted. In a court filing, federal prosecutors said Mr. Smirnov had spread misinformation and was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials.”Because Mr. Smirnov’s claims were frequently cited by congressional Republicans in their now-stalled attempt to unseat Mr. Biden from office, Democrats argued that the impeachment effort had reached a logical conclusion. “He is lying, and it should be dropped and it’s just been an outrageous effort from the beginning,” the president said last week.But the conservative media world reacted with a different, and sharply defiant, narrative. In this worldview, news of Mr. Smirnov’s deceptions was merely part of a conspiracy to protect Mr. Biden at all costs.“They say he has ties to Russian intelligence; where did they get that from?” Mr. Watters told his prime-time audience, noting that Mr. Smirnov had previously been considered credible by the F.B.I. “They just gave the media and the Democrats permission to call the Ukraine bribes and the Biden impeachment ‘Russian disinformation’ for the rest of the year.”Miranda Devine, a columnist for The New York Post, dismissed Mr. Smirnov as a “straw man” and said the evidence against Mr. Biden remained “overwhelming.” Maria Bartiromo, on Fox Business, described the Justice Department’s filing as “an intimidation tactic” and accused the government of “taking this guy down.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Taylor Swift Makes Fox News Suddenly Hate Celebs in Politics

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      The news network that wants Taylor Swift to stick to singing has had no problem handing conservative celebrities the microphone.Taylor Swift, you may have noticed, is everywhere: packing arenas on the Eras tour; filling theaters with her concert film; popping onto your TV screen from a luxury suite at Kansas City Chiefs games, cheering on her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.And now she’s living rent-free in Fox News hosts’ heads.After reports that the Biden re-election campaign was angling for an endorsement from the superstar (who backed President Biden in 2020), commentators on the network strapped on their culture-war helmets. “Don’t get involved in politics!” Jeanine Pirro urged her. “We don’t want to see you there!” Another commentator, Charly Arnolt, pleaded, “Please don’t believe everything Taylor Swift says.” Sean Hannity addressed the issue in prime time: “Maybe she wants to think twice.”Fox’s anxiety attack follows months in which MAGA opinionators have spun baroque conspiracy theories about the power couple: that Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce’s romance was staged; that the N.F.L. was rigging the Super Bowl for the Chiefs; and that it was all an unholy plot to supercharge an eventual Biden endorsement. The Fox host Jesse Watters even flirted with the speculation, floating the idea that Swift’s success was a psyop masterminded by the Defense Department.In retrospect, “Paul is dead” lacked imagination.Of course, people are entitled to their opinions on celebrity political speech or the possible existence of a secret Pentagon diva lab. But if Fox News’s hosts truly believe that it’s irresponsible and dangerous to invite celebrities to weigh in on politics, they might want to turn their attention to … Fox News.Over the years, Fox has invited Gene Simmons, the bassist of Kiss, to talk about the handling of an Ebola outbreak. It had the fashion model Fabio on to blame crime in California on liberalism. It gave us Kid Rock on cancel culture. Last year, the actor Jim Caviezel declared Donald J. Trump “the new Moses” on “Fox & Friends.”And let’s not forget that Fox was instrumental in the entry into politics of a certain TV celebrity, whom you might know better as the candidate Mr. Biden will likely be running against.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leon Wildes, Immigration Lawyer Who Defended John Lennon, Dies at 90

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      Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was confirmed by his son Michael.For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) doggedly battled the targeting by the Nixon administration and immigration officials of Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.Uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials, in practice, can exercise wide discretion in whom they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the stinging decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” and which halted the effort to kick Mr. Lennon out of the country.Mr. Lennon and Mr. Wildes addressing reporters about the case, which centered on Mr. Lennon’s 1968 London conviction for marijuana possession.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe Beatles had broken up in 1970, and Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York the next year. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entry, but he had obtained a waiver. The waiver was coming to an end, and the Lennons received a deportation notice.“It was a very frightening moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.”When the Lennons engaged Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles — it was nearly impossible not to be — but that the names of its members had escaped him.“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting them in their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He’s not a radical lawyer. He’s not William Kunstler.”Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the antiwar anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and he had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.Nixon administration officials feared that he had outsize influence among the young, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered to 18 from 21. In the paranoid atmosphere then prevailing in the White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, notably the conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, to go after Mr. Lennon.Their case centered on the London marijuana conviction. But the appellate court judge, Irving Kaufman, ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Mr. Lennon an “excludable alien.”The real reasons for the quixotic pursuit of Mr. Lennon, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his relentless digging through records. Early in 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Mr. Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then in charge of visas. Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.“If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be given any extensions of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.For the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that appeared increasingly ham-fisted as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimony, many of the era’s cultural celebrities spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York.“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon’s desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and a new, much younger electorate getting the vote,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his grip on power, any ‘dirty tricks,’ including the abusive misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”Mr. Wildes, seated, consulted with his partner, Steven Weinberg, at their immigration law office in 1983.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe whole time, the F.B.I. was keeping a close watch on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.When Mr. Lennon learned of the skulduggery, he was infuriated. “They’re even changing their own rules because we’re peaceniks,” he said in a television interview.The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Ms. Yoko lived, five years later.In another breakthrough, Mr. Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to aid immigration lawyers battling the deportation of noncitizens today.“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research on the ‘nonpriority’ program, and eventually filed an application for ‘nonpriority status’ for Lennon,” the immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia wrote in her 2015 book, “Beyond Deportation.” “Wildes learned that I.N.S. had for many years been granting ‘nonpriority’ status to prevent the deportation of noncitizens with sympathetic cases, but I.N.S. had never publicized the practice.”Throughout what Mr. Wildes acknowledged was the all-consuming job of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes encountering them, as others did, in what he called the “wonderful upright bed” in their Bank Street apartment.“One could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote — “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, oddball musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political operatives like the deputy mayor of New York.”Mr. Wildes at his office in 2015. “He’s not a radical lawyer,” John Lennon said. “He’s not William Kunstler.”via Wildes Family ArchivesLeon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pa., a small coal-mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated at public schools in Olyphant and earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.He quickly gravitated toward immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their U.S. citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and to teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Immigration law had “biblical import to him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a phone interview. “My father drew value from helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done — the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse

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      In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Rustin’ Review: A Crucial Civil Rights Activist Gets His Due

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      Colman Domingo carries this biopic of a March on Washington organizer, the first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company.Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in “Rustin,” which runs like a current through this portrait of the gay civil-rights activist, a close adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifist, ex-con, singer, lutist, socialist — Bayard Rustin had many lives, but he remains best known as the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was Rustin who read the march’s demands from the podium, remaining near King’s side as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.At once a work of reclamation and celebration, “Rustin” seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law. His was a rich, fascinatingly complex history, filled with big personalities and tremendous stakes, one that here is primarily distilled through the march, which the movie tracks from its rushed conception to its astonishing realization on Aug. 28, 1963, when a quarter million people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the defining public triumph of Rustin’s life.After a little historical scene-setting — via images of stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists — the director George C. Wolfe, working from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, gets down to business. It’s 1960, and King (Aml Ameen) is exasperated. Several activists have asked King to lead a mass protest against the forthcoming Democratic National Convention. Sighing, King directs his eyes upward as if beseeching a witness from on high and politely declines: “I’m not your man.” A few beats later and his gaze is again directed up, but now at Rustin, who’s towering above King, challenging him.The protest, Rustin explains, will send a message to the party and its nominee, the front-runner John F. Kennedy. Unless the Democrats take a stand against segregation, Rustin says with rising passion and volume, “our people will not show up for them.” His directness and body language nicely dramatize Rustin’s gifts as a strategist, which reach a crescendo when he sits down, so that now it’s him who’s looking up at King. Swayed by Rustin’s forceful argument, King agrees to lead the protest, enraging establishment power brokers like the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Roy Wilkins (a miscast Chris Rock), and the U.S. Representative for Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (a ferocious Jeffrey Wright, taking no prisoners).Five minutes into the movie, and you’re hooked; everything works in this punchy opener. Yet while Domingo, the unfortunately underused Wright and most of the rest of the cast keep charging forward, the movie soon sags under the weight of its central personality and the monumental history it condenses in under two eventful hours. As it straddles the personal and the political, it struggles to do justice to Rustin, whose life story emerges in frustrating piecemeal, along with an anemic love affair, nods at past hurdles, hints of future milestones and appearances by various major players. Carra Patterson shows up as Coretta Scott King; a vivid Michael Potts pops in and out as the labor organizer Cleveland Robinson.Powell and Wilkins succeed in derailing the 1960 protest, causing a rift between King and Rustin. The story picks up three years later shortly before Rustin begins organizing the 1963 march, shifting the movie into high gear with bustling characters, clacking typewriters and ringing phones. At their best, these scenes underscore how the civil rights movement was a titanic communal effort. Yet partly because the movie also wants to be a great-forgotten-man-of-history story, the larger movement fades amid the clamor of what can seem like a one-man show. It suggests, for one, that Rustin originated the idea for the march when, in a 1979 interview, he specifically credited his mentor A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) — whose March on Washington Movement dates to the 1940s — with its creation.The largest problem with the movie is that it’s finally too conventional, formally and politically, to do full justice to the complexities of either the civil-rights movement or Rustin, a socialist whose activism was rooted in his Quakerism and was informed both by his moral beliefs and by economic analysis. When Rustin and other activists on the Left first planned the march, economics was at the fore. “The dynamic that has motivated” Black Americans in their own fight against racism, the plan read, “may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”Whatever its flaws, “Rustin” can’t help but move you with its images of so many people joined in righteous harmony. The optimism of its moment feels very distant from the fractiousness of our own, yet it lifts you, as does Domingo’s fantastically alive turn. From the second that Rustin sweeps into the movie, throwing open his arms to King — and, by extension, welcoming the future they will help make — the actor seizes hold of you. He grabs you with his expressive physicality and then pulls you closer with the urgency, yearning and luminous sincerity that openly plays across his face. It’s such a lucid, persuasive, outwardly effortless performance that you may not even notice he’s carrying this movie almost by himself.RustinRated PG-13 for adults being adults and sometimes smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      Why a Boston Tea Party Patriot Is Being Honored in Brooklyn

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      Ebenezer Stevens was among those who boarded three British ships in a symbolic act that helped jump-start the American Revolution.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out why a grave in Brooklyn is getting a plaque about the Boston Tea Party. We’ll also find out about a new theater at the site of what is widely considered the first Black theater company in the United States.The Boston Tea Party took place in Boston.So why will officials from groups based in Boston that are preparing to celebrate the uprising’s 250th anniversary spend Wednesday morning at a cemetery in Brooklyn, 230 miles from where the tea was thrown overboard?To commemorate Ebenezer Stevens, a patriot who boarded one of the ships in Boston Harbor.“He’s a classic example of an ordinary person who does an extraordinary thing,” said Jonathan Lane, the executive director of Revolution 250, a consortium of Massachusetts organizations that is preparing for the anniversary on Dec. 16.“He doesn’t do it alone — he’s in concert with many of his friends and neighbors,” Lane said, “but he was part of a moment in time where people stood up for what they believed were their individual rights and liberties.”Lane will attend this morning’s ceremony at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, during which a plaque for Stevens’s grave will be presented to Jeff Richman, Green-Wood’s historian. The medallion will be the 136th placed on the grave of a Tea Party participant; Stevens is the only one buried in New York City.“He was a rather spirited individual, rather brave, of course,” said Evan O’Brien, the creative manager of Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, who devised the campaign to mark the graves of the Tea Party patriots. And, O’Brien added, Stevens “risked everything for this cause he believed in — you get a glimpse of his personality that he was involved in this rather outrageous event.”Stevens was one of about 150 people assigned to board three ships in the harbor to protest a British tax on tea and, more broadly, to protest taxation without representation.“What a lot of people think about is it was this unruly mob,” O’Brien said. “That is not true at all. It was a well orchestrated, finely tuned operation. Each man knew his job. Some would haul the chests of tea out of the holds. Others were waiting at the rails to break them open and shake the tea out.”Stevens went on to fight in the Revolution. He took part in the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 and was there when the British general John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and eventually served under the Marquis de Lafayette.Later, as a major general in the New York State Militia, he mobilized soldiers to defend New York City in case of a British attack during the War of 1812. A fort named for him guarded Hell Gate and the East River channels.Richman, the Green-Wood historian, said that Stevens’s life outside the military was also eventful: He amassed a fortune as an owner of ships — a notice in The Evening Post in 1807 advertised passage and freight shipping to Bordeaux, France, aboard one of Stevens’s “new and fast” sailing ships. He sold liquor to Thomas Jefferson. And a granddaughter became famous: the author Edith Wharton.WeatherLook for a sunny to partly sunny day with temperatures in the mid-50s. Tonight, under a partly cloudy sky, the low will be in the 40s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Nov. 23 (Thanksgiving Day).The latest New York newsJeenah Moon for The New York TimesMore local newsTurkey ties: A major federal corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams’s fund-raising is examining whether his campaign conspired with members of the Turkish government to receive illegal donations. Here’s what we know.Guilty plea: Samuel Miele is the second person who worked on Representative George Santos’s House election campaigns who has pleaded guilty to federal charges.E-bike blaze: After scooter batteries burst into flames on Sunday and killed three people at a home in Brooklyn, the fire commissioner blamed big corporations for contributing to a rising death toll from electric-vehicle batteries.Deadly dispute: A landlord was arrested and charged with murdering his tenants on Tuesday after three people were found stabbed to death in the bedrooms of a Queens home.A new theater that honors what was there beforeCarl Cofield, an associate arts professor at New York University, on the stage of the African Grove Theater.Jonathan KingFor the opening tonight of New York University’s new African Grove Theater, the site’s the thing. The original African Theater, widely considered to have been the first Black theater company in the United States, presented classics like “Richard III” and “Othello” at the same corner, Bleecker and Mercer Streets.“If the model of the African Theater had been followed, American theater would be different,” said Michael Dinwiddie, professor of dramatic writing at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who spearheaded a campaign to name the new performance space in the African Theater’s honor. “It helps us understand the complexity of the American theater.”Appropriately, the play being staged tonight is based on the story of the play that opened the earlier theater on the site, “The African Company Presents Richard III.”The original theater was organized by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward from the West Indies. The location at Bleecker and Mercer was his second. He had started out in what is now known as TriBeCa, staging poetry readings and short plays for Black New Yorkers. He moved to the location now occupied by N.Y.U.’s Paulson Center in 1821. Appearing as the king in “Richard III” on opening night was an enslaved man; New York would not outlaw slavery until six years later.Brown presented “Othello” in the second month, but he lasted only two years at the new location. “When he dared to go toe-to-toe with a nearby white theater, each presenting rival Shakespeare productions,” our critic Maya Phillips wrote in 2021, “he was harassed by police and his theater was raided. His performers were attacked. He changed the theater’s name and moved it several times, opening and closing and reopening until the financial well ran dry.”Carl Cofield, an associate arts professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts and the associate artistic director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, said that Brown was competing against a theater that was “bringing in the biggest stars from Europe,” including Junius Brutus Booth, a British actor whose actor sons included one who was famous, Edwin Booth, and one who was infamous — John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln.Dinwiddie told me that he had noticed a plaque commemorating the African Theater at the corner when he moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s. “I was like, I remember that — I had read about it,” he said, including a chapter in “Black Manhattan” by James Weldon Johnson, N.Y.U.’s first Black professor.Hopper’s paintings as operaThe opera “Later the Same Evening” takes five Edward Hopper paintings and imagines what happens to the figures in them. John Musto, who composed the music for Mark Campbell’s libretto, described “Later the Same Evening” as “a love letter to New York, set in 1932.”It’s a love letter as complicated as New York (and New Yorkers), with Hopper-esque moodiness and estrangement.There is a couple that is not getting along. There is a widow who has come to the city for a date she is not sure she wants to go on. There is dancer who is leaving town, her dreams of stardom dashed. The director, Alison Moritz, writes that all of the characters eventually “converge for a moment of true New York serendipity at — where else? — a Broadway show.”Backstage, there is a moment in one scene when four singers converge around a microphone. “Hopper could have done some painting around this one mic,” said Michelle Rofrano, the assistant conductor, who cues them for an old-fashioned radio commercial that is heard onstage. The four sing a made-up toothpaste jingle — “It’s not just white, it’s Pearladent white.”Without a Hopper to capture it, the little tableau dissolves. The singers have other roles in the opera, which will be performed tonight and Friday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at the Juilliard School.“The odd thing is people keep talking about Hopper and his sense of color,” Musto said. “I have to keep telling them color means nothing to me. I am colorblind.”METROPOLITAN diary‘You are everything’Dear Diary:I was waiting for a friend outside a building on East 73rd Street when an S.U.V. pulled up and parked.The driver stayed in the car with the radio on and the windows open. “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics came on, and I began to sing along (quietly).As the song got to the chorus — “You are everything, and everything is you” — a guy walked past me. He was singing along too, and we exchanged man-this-is-such-a-great-song nods.Just then, the driver turned off the radio. The other guy and I shared a confused look. Then he approached the car.“Bro,” he implored the driver. “Turn that back on!”And he did.— Joe KatzIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      in Music

      Secretary of State Blinken Plays the Guitar to Launch “Music Diplomacy” Initiative

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      A viral video of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken introduced Americans to the guitar geek hidden within.It’s usually not a good sign when video of a senior government official singing goes viral on social media, where the crowds are as tough as they come.But when Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken picked up a black Fender guitar at a State Department event on Wednesday night and joined a band for Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” the response on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, where the video has been watched more than eight million times, drew positive reviews — and more than a little shock.“I had. NO. Idea,” said one X user, who used an expletive to express her amazement, in the video’s most-viewed reply.To be sure, there was also snark of the don’t-quit-your-day-job variety, and some tut-tutting about decorum (“Ukraine is on fire and Blinken is playing the guitar,” one user said). But on the whole, Mr. Blinken’s soulful baritone and crunchy blues chords, showcased at an event promoting a State Department “music diplomacy” initiative that was attended by the Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, escaped the dreaded label of cringecore.Perhaps more interesting was the understandable surprise that America’s top diplomat has a rock ’n’ roll bone in his body. Mr. Blinken, 61, is unfailingly soft-spoken and so formal that he wore his suit jacket — buttoned, no less — for the jam.Music is Mr. Blinken’s greatest nonpolitical passion. He once told Rolling Stone magazine that “the thread that runs throughout my life is probably music,” and said that hearing his parents play “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles as a child was a thunderbolt that has defined him ever since. “I remember being absolutely hooked,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview last week.His great guitar love is Eric Clapton, whom Mr. Blinken reports having seen live about 75 times.Mr. Clapton’s bluesy style and frequent covers led Mr. Blinken to discover the electric blues greats like B.B. King, Otis Rush and Luther Allison. One of them discovered him back: While living in Paris with his family at the age of 16, Mr. Blinken worked his way to the front of the stage during a performance by Mr. King, singing along with the lyrics he had memorized completely.“He sees me, I guess, and at the end he comes to the edge of the stage and bends down, and gives me his guitar pick,” Mr. Blinken said, sounding as though his mind remains slightly blown.As a young man, well before people called him “Mr. Secretary” and bodyguards followed him everywhere, Mr. Blinken played in bands and collected at least a half dozen guitars, including a high-end Martin acoustic “that I don’t deserve,” he said. Years of noodling at home with a four-track culminated in his release of three singles on Spotify, under the moniker Ablinken. (Say that out loud slowly for dad-joke effect.)The Spotify songs, which have collectively been streamed about 150,000 times — watch out, Harry Styles — show off a blues-rock sound with Everyman lyrics that bear no relation to the government official who talks about multilateral engagement and “diplomatic variable geometry.” (“And then I came home to you/But you said, ‘Let’s just be friends, yeah’” he sings over staccato electric chords in “Lip Service.”)Mr. Blinken noted that he had recorded and uploaded the songs between 2018 and 2020, during the Trump era, when he was out of government and unsure whether he would return. “I had little idea that there would be another run at government, or a public career of any kind,” he said. “And so when the president put me forward for this job, there they were.”The songs, which he has labeled “wonk rock,” occasionally pop up in his official life. They have been blared from speakers at overseas events, including before he addressed embassy employees in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, in June 2021. A Finnish radio station broadcast one when Mr. Blinken visited Helsinki in June to deliver a speech about the war in Ukraine.Mr. Blinken’s former band, which has played under the name of Cash Bar Wedding, was pretty cool, at least by the standards of Washington. His bandmates included Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore who went on to be a writer for “The West Wing,” and Jay Carney, a onetime spokesman for President Biden when Mr. Biden was vice president.Mr. Carney called the band mostly “an excuse to hang out and talk about music.” But the group was serious enough to take semiregular trips to music meccas like New Orleans, booking studios for a day of writing and recording songs.“As to the quality of the songs we created, let’s just say, mistakes were made!” said Mr. Carney, now head of policy and communications for Airbnb. They have jammed with indie-rock legends like Alex Chilton of Big Star, Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü and Aimee Mann.“Tony is actually a fine guitarist and songwriter,” Mr. Carney said. “We’re worried his State Department gig is a sign that he’s ditching us to launch a solo career.”Many foreign diplomats and leaders have clearly done their homework: No fewer than eight have given Mr. Blinken guitars or accessories like guitar straps as customary gifts (which he must purchase if he wants to keep). From Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, came a blue acoustic guitar with an engraving of U.S. and Israeli flags. Another guitar was offered by Qin Gang, the Chinese foreign minister who mysteriously disappeared this summer.In an interview, Mr. Blinken recalled a special rapport with Japan’s former foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, a skilled pianist, guitar player and Beatles nut. “We totally bonded over music,” Mr. Blinken said, calling it “a constant refrain in our diplomatic discourse.”Mr. Blinken with Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan’s former foreign minister, left, and Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, during the Group of 7 meeting in April.Pool photo by Andrew HarnikThat discourse could get nerdy. Invoking a famous Beatles track, Mr. Blinken recalled “bad pun references like, ‘This policy’s going to be a long and winding road.’”In April, Mr. Hayashi hosted a meeting of the Group of 7 foreign ministers in Hiroshima, Japan. When the ministers convened one evening after official business was concluded, Mr. Blinken produced a small travel guitar he sometimes takes on foreign trips. Mr. Hayashi brought his own. With the help of a karaoke machine, they strummed chords as the other ministers, briefly forgetting matters like Ukraine and climate change, joyously sang along.“It’s a wonderfully bonding thing to forget about the weight of the world for a couple of hours and come together just as friends with a common passion for music,” Mr. Blinken said.He noted that the United States has used music as a diplomatic tool for decades. Amid competition with the Soviet Union for global influence in the 1950s, the State Department sponsored foreign tours for jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.Today’s version lacks that star power: Mr. Blinken’s new initiative includes a mentorship program for foreign music professionals that works in partnership with the Recording Academy, the organization that stages the Grammy Awards. English classes taught abroad by the State Department, which are hugely popular overseas, will now incorporate popular music lyrics.“Music is the most powerful connecter,” Mr. Blinken said. “It transcends virtually any kind of barrier you can think of.” More