Piglets Left to Die in Art Exhibition Are Stolen in Denmark
Piglets Left to Die in Art Exhibition Are Stolen in Denmark
Three piglets were stolen from an art exhibition in Copenhagen over the weekend after a provocative artist said they would be allowed to starve to death in a commentary about animal ******** in Denmark, one of the world’s largest pork exporters.
The artist, Marco Evaristti, said in an interview on Monday that his exhibition, “And Now You Care?,” was meant to “wake up the Danish society” to the mistreatment of pigs, pointing to statistics that tens of thousands of pigs die each day because of poor conditions.
“I have some kind of voice as an artist to talk about the issue,” Evaristti, 62, said. “So I will share my thoughts about what I think about the treatment of the animals in Denmark.”
The exhibition, which opened on Friday inside a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, included three live piglets that were caged by two shopping carts on a pile of straw. Large-scale paintings of the Danish flag and slaughtered pigs hung on the walls.
The pigs, which were given water but no food, were expected to live up to five days. Evaristti said he also would not eat or drink until the exhibition came to an end.
But the pigs did not die. They disappeared.
Evaristti, who was born in Chile, said that while the exhibition space was being cleaned on Saturday morning, members of an animal rights organization came to check on the piglets. Shortly after they left, the theft occurred.
“They closed the door while the cleaning people were cleaning the toilet,” he said, adding that the door was unlocked. “After four minutes, they come out and it was no pigs.”
A spokesman for the Copenhagen Police said that it was notified about the theft just before noon on Saturday and that nobody had been charged. Evaristti, who said he and his family had received numerous threats, does not expect the piglets to be returned.
Animal rights groups were divided over Evaristti’s latest exhibition, with some agreeing with his message but not his method and presentation. A review from a Danish newspaper slammed the exhibition as “old-fashioned avant-garde.”
Mathias Madsen, a campaign manager for Anima International Denmark, said in a statement that the organization had reported Evaristti to the police when he announced his plans to starve the piglets to death.
“This would violate multiple sections of the Danish Animal ******** Act, and we wanted authorities prepared to intervene,” Madsen said, adding that the strong public reaction to the exhibition was a reminder that people find animal suffering unacceptable.
There are about 5,000 pig farms in Denmark that produce approximately 28 million pigs annually, according to the Danish Agriculture and Food Council. Many are slaughtered, with more than 70 percent of the pig meat exported to countries within the European Union.
Birgitte Damm, the chief consultant for farm animals and mink for Animal Protection Denmark, said about 25,000 piglets die each day in Danish stables, some from starvation, because the country’s sows are bred to birth 20 piglets but have only 14 teats.
“We completely understand the indignation, frustration and even anger over the continued abuse of millions of pigs in the Danish pig industry,” Damm said about Evaristti’s exhibition. “This has been going on for decades, and it is completely unacceptable. However, we cannot allow three individual piglets to suffer in order to make our point.”
Evaristti said his idea for the exhibition came from reading a newspaper article about the topic around October. “I knew that something was wrong in Denmark, but I didn’t know that it was so bad,” he said.
On Monday night, he faced a critical question: What now? He said that an exhibition without the piglets would be “boring” and “plastic,” before he shut it down altogether on Tuesday.
“If you take your heart from your body, you cannot exist, only as the body without soul,” he said. “My exhibition doesn’t have a soul anymore. It’s only a body and I’m not interested in representing a body. I want the soul with the body.”
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Pelican News
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Bethesda Nintendo *****: lowest prices ever for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Doom (2016), more
Bethesda Nintendo *****: lowest prices ever for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Doom (2016), more
Limbrick135d ago (Edited 135d ago )
FO3 an my Phat and slim, 2009, worked well compared to what I read about that game on other platforms. The crashing was random, some times happening twice in the first hour of play, while other times I could play for 8-10 hours without crashing, The frame rates were OK and only nosedived drastically at the Wheaton Armory.
FO3 Goty: purchased week of release and it flat out was broken. It crashed often and tanked the frame rates. Dlc’s were unplayable. I returned that game for full credit towards Borderlands. Later in 2011 I downloaded the dlc and all were playable except Broken Steel. The problem was more than the frame rates and crashing at the airbase, the problem was how adding that dlc affected the game and other dlc with erratic frames, longer loading times, and crashes. So my future replays were without Broken Steel downloaded. Broken Steel first came to the 360 and had to be recalled and replaced Like the FO4 Far Harbor dlc on PS4. However Broken Steel never was fixed, at least on my PS3.
New Vegas and dlc worked less well than FO3. A big culprit was memory management and save file size. The more played the larger the files became and then frame rates tanked, frame hitching and stuttering, and crashes increased. Then too to avoid crashing when loading into the airbase or outer Vegas I would save quit and restart and reload the save which would refresh the memory pool. Patches somewhat fixed that issue but not the save file size issue.
There was a strange early bug at least on PS3 where when loading into the strip from outer Vegas the player would enter an infinite loading cycle and have to reload the last save. That was patched quickly, but until patched the work around was to wear the item ‘Old Cowboy Hat’ that was sold at the vender in outer Vegas.
Skyrim; I image only those few with a magic PS3 enjoyed that mess on a PS3. After playing FO3, and New Vegas on a PS3 and then reading the reports of Skyrim I decided to pass on playing it on a PS3. Now on my PS4 Pro with some basic make the game look better mods it plays and looks great. I wish FO3 and New Vegas had received updates for PS4 like the excellent update Skyrim received.
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Pelican News
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Porcini Ragù, Shrimp and Grits, Jambon Beurre and Pecan Pie
Porcini Ragù, Shrimp and Grits, Jambon Beurre and Pecan Pie
Good morning. Lent began on Wednesday, the start of a commemoration of the 40 days Jesus spent in the Judean Desert, fasting and avoiding the temptations of Satan. It’s a ******* of prayer, abstention and almsgiving for many Christians, solemn preparation for the miracle of Easter. And, for many, it means avoiding meat on Fridays.
For them, then, though really for anyone with a taste for the delicious (it wouldn’t be a bad call for an iftar meal if you’re observing Ramadan, or for Shabbat dinner): this lovely porcini ragù that Ligaya Mishan adapted from a recipe the cookbook writer Ixta Belfrage ate as a child growing up in Tuscany.
It comes together far more quickly than a ragù you’d make with ground pork or beef, with dried porcinis plumped in hot water, which are then chopped and fried with tomato paste, garlic, crushed red pepper and parsley. Hit that with a lot of freshly ground ****** pepper, some of the water you used for the mushrooms, a little cream and a shower of Parmesan. Toss with tagliatelle and finish with olive oil and a little more cheese. Then give thanks, for this is a fantastic meal.
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Porcini Ragù
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So, too, is a breakfast of Saturday pancakes, and in particular these light, fluffy and rich pancakes that Mark Bittman brought to The Times years ago, with whipped egg whites in the batter and ricotta to boot. Those under maple syrup, with a scattering of coined bananas, are a weekend joy, just the breakfast to consume before an adventure outside the house, experiencing the world.
For New Yorkers, maybe that’s a drive up the Hudson to hike Popolopen Torne. For others, it’s a Nordic ski around a reservoir, or a walk on salt flats or a bicycle ride down a road near the Pacific. (For me, this weekend, I’m hoping it’s a run out through Turkey Basin in the Florida Keys, in search of tarpon and permit.) You’ll make your own call, but let’s all of us eat jambon beurre for lunch.
And then, for dinner, Julia Reed’s impeccable recipe for shrimp and grits, adapted from one she discovered in landlocked Sewanee, Tenn. Follow it with pecan pie if you have the time to bake one, or with bananas Foster if you don’t.
Keep it up with the Big Breakfasts on Sunday. You can eat muesli all week. Say, perhaps, some morning glory muffins alongside a few slices of oven bacon and a big glass of whipped coffee?
Have some leftover ragù for lunch and then fight off the Sunday scaries with a warm kale, coconut and tomato salad for dinner. New York Times Cooking provides.
And please write for help, should you run into problems with your account: *****@*****.tld. (You do have an account, yes? If you don’t, would you consider subscribing today?) Or you can write to me, if you want to cheer or complain: *****@*****.tld. I can’t respond to every letter. There’s a lot of mail. But I do read each one I get.
Now, it’s nothing to do with barley or veal, but I liked Lizzy Caplan in “Zero Day” on Netflix, starring Robert De Niro.
Likewise, Helen Mirren in the insane second episode of the insane second season of Taylor Sheridan’s “1923” on Paramount+, “The ******* Is Winter.”
A one-two punch from The New York Times Book Review sent me crashing into the bookstore the other day: Elisabeth Egan’s silky profile of the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the cusp of releasing “Dream Count,” her first novel in a dozen years, followed by Alexandra Jacobs’s ace review of the book.
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Pelican News
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An Irish Designer Blends Materials and Cultures at World Expo
An Irish Designer Blends Materials and Cultures at World Expo
This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects.
One of the first things visitors will encounter as they enter the east gate of the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, opening on April 13, is a 20-foot-high balletic, ring-shape sculpture poised outside the Ireland pavilion.
“It’s quite a complex piece in some ways, but I was trying to create one simple gesture that would have this sense of harmony,” said its creator, Joseph Walsh, a 45-year-old Irish designer known for wood furnishings and sculptures with dynamic, serpentine shapes. At a 150-acre farm near Kinsale, on Ireland’s southern coast, he oversees a multinational team of two dozen people at his Joseph Walsh Studio.
“Magnus Rinn,” as the sculpture is titled, is his first work to use bronze and his first designed for the outdoors. It was also the product of several years of research. Mr. Walsh engaged in extensive studies with the engineering firm Arup, as well as materials testing with university labs in Dublin and in Stuttgart, Germany. The challenge, he said, was creating a form with his signature lightness and movement that could withstand the weather and seismic conditions in Osaka.
“Japan was actually the most extreme environment we identified on the planet,” he said, noting the threat of earthquakes.
The result was a hybrid form in which a bronze lower portion serves as an anchor and laminated oak torques with a single twist above it. To make the wood more durable, Mr. Walsh and his team used a high-pressure autoclave chamber, a strategy inspired by a visit to the Italian studio of the automobile designer Horacio Pagani, who has used a similar technology for his carbon fiber hypercars. Increasing the atmospheric pressure 600 percent bonded the wood laminates, making them stronger and more weather resistant and producing a “hyper-performing wood,” Mr. Walsh said.
The bronze components, which were cast at a foundry in Italy, are embellished with details that Mr. Walsh hand molded in wax, working intuitively. “I ended up staying at the foundry for a few weeks, undoing and doing and just getting lost in the process,” he said. “Each imprint is time passing with a different thought, conscious or subconscious, each a slightly different shape.”
To observers, the pattern suggests leaf forms, tree bark and even dragon scales.
Mr. Walsh said the idea of gilding the sculpture arose during a visit to Chatsworth House, the home in Derbyshire, England, of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who are regular clients.
“The team at Chatsworth were talking about the fact that the gilded oak windows were the originals from 1700 and that they only regild them every 90 years,” Mr. Walsh said. “I decided to put gilding through the advanced aging test. It doesn’t rust, it doesn’t patinate.”
Outside the Irish pavilion, the shimmering sculpture will stand amid rocks and plantings by Hiroyuki Tsujii, a Japanese landscape designer.
The theme of cultural connectivity, which is central to the pavilion, will continue in a show of contemporary Irish and Japanese craft that Mr. Walsh helped organize for the new Irish Embassy and cultural center in Tokyo, scheduled to open a few days after the expo.
It is also a spirit Mr. Walsh sought to capture with the title of “Magnus Rinn.” The word “rinn,” he said, has meanings in both Gaelic and Japanese that relate to place, circularity and the flow of ideas across cultures.
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Pelican News
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‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 3: The Snake Show
‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 3: The Snake Show
White goes hard with the sound design and editing during the energy healing session. As Valentin holds his hands just above Laurie’s body, the soundtrack is filled with eruptive moans and sighs, woven through the percussive, chiming musical score. When the ladies reunite, Laurie jokes, “I haven’t been not-touched by a man like that in a long time.”
That’s when Kate makes a surprising confession: She finds all this new age healing stuff “goofy,” “spooky” and “kind of witchy.” When Jaclyn suggests that eastern spiritual practices are superior to Christianity because they are more empowering to women, Kate defends the church she has been attending since moving to Texas. This leads to several probing questions. Is this, like, a “real Texan church, with ******-thumpers?” (Kate, noncommittal: “They’re nice people, really good families.”) Does talking politics ever get awkward? (“Why would it?”) Is Kate a conservative now? (“I’m an independent.”) Did Kate vote for Trump? (Long pause, and then, “Are we really gonna talk about Trump tonight?”)
In one of those sharp, funny, “Mike White Touch” moments, Laurie and Jaclyn try to defuse the mounting tension by lying, saying, “Can’t wait to get down there,” and “I really want to come.” Then later, as the day ends, after Kate retreats to her bedroom she can see — and almost hear — the other two talking about her. Unlike the previous snipe sessions, only a line or two of this one is shared with the TV audience. But we can guess what is being said. And if we can, Kate can. She looks stricken.
Elsewhere at the resort on Day 3, momentum starts to build in the season’s major story lines. Rick makes his move with Sritala, posing as a showbiz power-player who wants to connect her with a director in Bangkok. Rick comes across differently with Sritala, unlike how he is with anyone else. He is enthusiastic and open, gushing over her performance at the previous night’s dinner. The upbeat energy feels unsettlingly phony.
This is all part of his plan to get close to Sritala’s husband, Jim, who Rick already knows is convalescing in Bangkok — and who, I assume, may be responsible in some way for the ******* of Rick’s father. Rick mentions his dad again in another of his stress-management sessions, during which Dr. Amrita suggests that the root cause of his stress is anger, and that, “Underneath anger there is always a sadness, something we are grieving.” Rick then brings up the *******, adding ominously, “I can’t get my life back, but maybe I can still get some satisfaction.”
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Slimming World boss’s weight loss legacy with 700k members
Slimming World boss’s weight loss legacy with 700k members
Samantha Noble
BBC News, Derby
Steve Beech
BBC News, Derby
Slimming World
Margaret Miles-Bramwell’s ******** will take place on Monday
“I bet we are reaching way into the millions now for the reach of the people’s lives she has affected in a positive way.”
Slimming World boss Margaret Miles-Bramwell OBE, 76, died surrounded by her family on 2 February.
Her journey started in a church hall in Alfreton, Derbyshire, in 1969 – but her business expanded and became a network of more than 3,500 consultants and about 700,000 members.
Ahead of her ******** on Monday, we look at the life and legacy of the entrepreneur, who colleagues have said was “revolutionary” with “a massive heart”.
Slimming World
Her friends and colleagues said her work has changed people’s lives
Born in April 1948, Mrs Miles-Bramwell was adopted by Emma-Selina and Samuel Birch, and grew up in South Normanton – a mining village in Derbyshire.
Aged 15, she fell pregnant with daughter, Claire, and made a home with her baby’s father, Roy Miles, whom she married in 1964.
In 1977, they had their second child together, Dominic, and three years later their son Ben was born.
After she and Mr Miles separated, the businesswoman married her late husband Tony Whittaker in 1996, who died in 2021 after being diagnosed with ******* and Alzheimer’s disease.
Last month, Mrs Miles-Bramwell died at her home in Mallorca, Spain.
Mrs Miles-Bramwell’s ******** will take place on Monday at Derby Cathedral and ahead of the service, her cortege will leave her home in Mansfield Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire, and head to Slimming World’s offices in Alfreton.
Building a legacy
Professionally, Mrs Miles-Bramwell started small, in a church hall in Alfreton where she had her first slimming group in 1969.
In 1988, it opened its 1000th group – and had 5,000 groups eight years later.
The entrepreneur funded research on macronutrients 1996 – in relation to weight management, their energy density and satiety for Slimming World’s food optimising eating plan.
While shortly after a health scare and major surgery in 1997, Mrs Miles-Bramwell founded the charity Slimmers Making It A Little Easier For Someone (SMILES) which raised more than £30m for charities.
PA Media
In 2009, Mrs Miles-Bramwell received an OBE for services to the health of the nation and to charity
In 2000, Slimming World pioneered the first-ever NHS weight management referral scheme, and opened its first groups in the Republic of Ireland nine years later.
Mrs Miles-Bramwell received an OBE for services to the health of the nation and charity, and in 2010 the University of Derby awarded her an honorary master’s degree.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, she released emergency financial reserves to Slimming World and its consultant franchisees to save the company during lockdown.
Mrs Miles-Bramwell was named Business Woman of the Year at the National Business Women’s Awards in 2023, and had been honoured in the Top 100 Influential People 2025.
Marie Gregory, a planning and inventory manager, said there was “this feeling of love and support” that came from Mrs Miles-Bramwell
In the words of those who knew her, Mrs Miles-Bramwell wanted to “put an end to the shame, guilt, judgement and humiliation faced by those struggling with their weight in 1960s England”.
Marie Gregory said the businesswoman had “made a huge difference to so many lives”.
“You can look at member figures, the people at head office – it’s their families, people who have had children who couldn’t have had children before,” the 43-year-old said.
“I bet we are reaching way into the millions now just for the reach of the people’s lives she has affected in a positive way.”
Ms Gregory, who has been with the company nearly 14 years, said: “I am not looking forward to Monday because it will be a really hard day.”
‘The wickedest smile’
Debbie Lockwood has worked for Slimming World for 31 years.
The 61-year-old training and development manager described the late entrepreneur as “just gorgeous” and “so much fun”.
“Whenever I think of Margaret, the word laughter is the first thing that comes into my head,” she said.
“She had the wickedest laugh and she was always so much fun to be around.
“Margaret was so passionate about members – that was her first love, making sure our members get the service they deserve.”
Slimming World
Margaret Miles-Bramwell, pictured here with Slimming World head office staff in 1989
But above all, Mrs Miles-Bramwell had “built communities”, said Ms Lockwood.
“Margaret knew – she was so clever in 1969 – that’s what people needed, a community of slimmers who never judged you, you were never going to be humiliated, never going to be told what to do.
“You were absolutely empowered to figure yourself out and do your own thinking, and that was revolutionary.”
Debbie Lockwood said “from a business point of view, from a personal point of view, she was just gorgeous – so much fun”
Rebecca Robinson, a 50-year-old director of communications, said Mrs Miles-Bramwell left a huge legacy.
Ms Robinson, who has been with the company for more than 20 years, added: “She was a larger than life character, with a fantastic sense of humour, incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable.
“She was full of integrity, a massive heart, and she really would light up the room when she came in.
“There are still moments when we expect her to walk through the doors, and we realise what a special person we have lost.
“But Margaret’s left a huge legacy.
“Margaret created a legacy in Slimming World that runs through everything we do so Margaret will still be with us in everything we do going forward.”
Slimming World
Mrs Miles-Bramwell was named Business Woman of the Year at the National Business Women’s Awards in 2023
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Pelican News
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Apple’s rumored smart home hub has reportedly been delayed
Apple’s rumored smart home hub has reportedly been delayed
It may be a while still before we see the smart home hub Apple is rumored to be working on. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company has postponed the announcement of the upcoming product due to the . Gurman last month that the release of Apple’s upgraded Siri may be delayed, and Apple confirmed as much in a statement to last week, saying it expects to roll out Siri’s more personalized features “in the coming year.” The smart home hub, according to Gurman, “to an extent, relies on the delayed Siri capabilities.”
previously reported that the first version of the as soon as March. It would be a competitor to Amazon’s Echo line of devices and Google’s Nest Hub. While a March release is looking unlikely, Gurman reports that Apple is now allowing some employees to test it at home.
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Pelican News
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Anne Imhof’s ‘Doom’ at the Armory Has Everything, and Nothing
Anne Imhof’s ‘Doom’ at the Armory Has Everything, and Nothing
A Berlin nightclub habitué of my acquaintance has admonished me, more than once, not to go to concerts or parties without earplugs; too many D.J.s now crank to dangerous decibels, so have your fun and save your hearing. I forgot his advice ahead of “Doom: House of Hope,” an evening-length spectacle of attitude and abjection by the ******* artist and choreographer Anne Imhof, and may have developed tinnitus as a result.
Your ears are not the only organs that may suffer if you come to the Park Avenue Armory, where Imhof’s massive performance work has been one of the most anticipated events of the winter season, and (thanks to its performers as well as its public) is already one of the most Instagrammed. You’ll start out in a corral with a thousand other spectators, prevented from moving forward by crowd control barriers. Expressionless, glassy-eyed performers will soon move toward you as a droning electronic score blares. You’ll be released to explore the whole 55,500-square-foot Drill Hall soon, but ticket holders should, like sensible Germans, opt for comfortable shoes: You’re on your feet throughout.
Around the large hall are two dozen brand-new Cadillac Escalades, the preferred conveyance of the American oligarchy, whose roofs will become stages for limber dancers and mournful singers, and whose trunks will serve variously as pop-up bar, chess competition venue, vape break area and makeshift tattoo parlor. To follow the action of “Doom” you’ll have to chase the performers around the S.U.V.s, onto several stages, and even into the dressing rooms, while above you, on a Jumbotron scoreboard, the evening’s duration ticks down: three hours to go.
The experience of “Doom” is indeed not unlike a night at the club — wending your way through a converted warehouse, losing your friends in the darkness, oscillating from moments of excessive emotion to total boredom. If you get bored, you can always look at your phone; to Imhof, your phone, and your boredom, are integral.
This is a night of harsh contradictions, and I just can’t girdle my judgment into cheer-or-jeer format. “Doom” is narcissistic, frivolous, sometimes naïve — and still, despite all this, feels more important than a hundred cash-and-carry exhibitions in Chelsea. Its roughly 40 performers, who mutter in monotone when they aren’t just staring into space, indulge a youthful nihilism that is obvious and tiresome — until an extraordinary shift in the third hour (by which time much of the opening night’s audience had bailed), when they find grand, even Romantic purpose.
That “Doom” can feel so pointless and so potent, that I disliked well more than half of this evening on my feet and still left gratified and even moved, is testament to Imhof’s rare attunement to contemporary conditions of spectatorship: above all, to how we look at both art and life through screens driving us to derangement. She is struggling, a lot, with how to make something meaningful and powerful in 2025. But by God, she’s trying.
This is the first New York presentation in a decade from Imhof, whose lugubrious performances dramatize the effects of digital technologies on bodies, psyches, societies. New York audiences last encountered her at MoMA PS1 in 2015, where her reedy performers cuddled live bunnies and spat troughs of buttermilk in a performance and exhibition called “Deal.” She hit international prominence with “Faust,” at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where Imhof’s impassive, streetwear-clad dancers stared down audiences at the ******* Pavilion who waited two hours to get in. With “Faust,” Imhof clocked early that a major shift had come to the experience of art with the introduction of the cameraphone, wielded by spectators who (unlike at the theater, ballet or opera) reflexively record what they see. She favored young performers whose willowy bodies belied their training and toughness, and who viscerally knew that their movements were being reduced to digital images for transmission and consumption.
In the wake of the first Trump election and the Brexit referendum, Imhof’s club-kid hauteur and play with totalitarian imagery — her ******* pavilion equated the Nazi show palace to an Apple store — resulted in an uneasy blend of antagonism and exclusivity, one she shared notably with the Georgian fashion designer Demna Gvasalia. But anyone who sees “Doom” will clock quite quickly that it is far less fashionable: For better or worse, Balenciaga is out and “Euphoria” is in.
The youths of this new performance hew closer to European fantasies of American high school, and the Armory has been overlaid with gymnasium flooring for good measure. Its performers, some of whom wear basketball and cheerleader uniforms, include ******* and American models, rappers, writers, actors and randoms (Kim Gordon’s daughter, for crying out loud), as well as dancers from American Ballet Theater, who will swap their school-spirit outfits for Balanchine-approved leotards in the third hour. Throughout the night they preen, stare, cuddle and mope, but only some — above all Toon Lobach and Vinson Fraley, two dancers with very different bodies who circle and shadow each other — display the intense self-focus that Imhof has elicited in the past.
Instead, and very quickly, “Doom” settles into an episodic format that is less an Armory-filling Gesamtkunstwerk than a revue: a series of frequently sloppy numbers, often around five minutes (a pop song length), that you can see up close if you’re standing in the right spot or must crane to catch if you’re not. Some of these numbers display real passion and intelligence, above all a trio of rap performances by Arthur Tendeng, in French and *******, which electrifies “Doom” at the halfway mark.
More are just cliché — such as the wannabe Velvet Underground songs of Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s ex-girlfriend and frequent collaborator — and some are outright humiliating. Over the night you will endure recitations of jejune poetry cribbed from anime scripts (“For heroes there are trials”), a white-girl mumblecore cover of the third-tier R&B singer Jeremih, and a deafening band whose baby-punk singer would get booed off the stage at a suburban bar mitzvah, let alone Park Avenue.
Truly, there’s a cynical intelligence to the variety-show structure of “Doom”: If nothing quite coheres, if everything feels like a pose, if you find yourself looking at sexy 10-second video clips of a slack three-hour performance … well, that’s culture in 2025 for you! An ambient bath. A perpetual ooze. This smooth, streaming, unstructured approach — a condition that the literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has called “immediacy,” in evidence everywhere from no-style autofiction to POV TikToks — is the cultural reflection of our technological and economic disorder, and as you pull out your phone you become one with the defeatism.
And yet still, glistening within the gloom of “Doom,” are the hints of a major artist on the cusp of a breakthrough. You can first detect them in small passages, barely suturing the evening together, from “Romeo and Juliet” — the original star-crossed slackers. Imhof arranges them in reverse order, starting with the double suicide in the tomb and leading back to the first encounter at the ball. The balcony scene is performed on the top of one of those Escalades, livestreamed to the Jumbotron from a performer’s iPhone. (Much later on comes a witty quotation of another “Romeo and Juliet” adaptation: the Jets-versus-Sharks opening number of “West Side Story,” all thrusting arms and kick turns.)
These gobbets of Shakespeare, familiar from American school days, are the first signs of leaving behind style for structure. Like “Doom,” “Romeo and Juliet” is a play in which love drowns in violence — specifically, the violence of social polarization, which bleeds from an older aristocracy’s “ancient grudge” into the lives of their brawling children and manservants. It’s a play about a failed ruling class, which neither church (the Friar) nor state (the Prince) can control. And if the love of Romeo and Juliet is doomed, the play also insists that young love itself remains rough, disruptive, dangerous. “These violent delights have violent ends,” the Friar warns Romeo. So it is not youth, for Shakespeare or for Imhof, that offers hope for the future. Youth comes and goes, and Imhof is now 46.
The hope lies instead in art — which emerges late in “Doom,” when the action thrillingly shifts from disaffection to the hard work of dance. Around the two-hour mark, the audience clusters beneath the Jumbotron for a virtuosic solo by the ballerina Devon Teuscher, whose unhurried arabesques have all the melancholy rigor that “Doom” needed in hours one and two. Soon after, on a stage at the back of the Armory, a whole corps de ballet emerges. There are snatches of Bach, snatches of Balanchine, even a snatch of dance criticism (in the form of Arlene Croce’s notorious non-review of Bill T. Jones from 1994). The poses and pessimism recede, and we are finally, exhaustedly, facing what art can and cannot do.
What brought Imhof fame was how her performances showed humans turning (or turning themselves) into objects, into pictures, into digital commodities: first by power structures more bitter than the Montagues and Capulets, and then by the spectators shoving phones in their faces. That’s a good enough start for a young artist, and “Doom” at first doubles down on that pose — look at me, my life is over, I’m texting through Armageddon, LOL. Yet by the end, through the precision of ballet, Imhof seems at last to be finding the courage to push past fashion, art and music that just mimics our networked commodification. She is finding her way out of immediacy and back to form. In other words, she’s growing up.
“This little screen has all the power,” goes one lyric in one of the night’s many wan ballads, but it doesn’t — not yet — and art’s most important role today is to fight back against the media zombification that Imhof first located in “Deal” and “Faust.” There are obvious predecessors for this task: it was the work of the Cubists, who used collage to disrupt newspapers, and of Nam June Paik, who turned video into an arm against television.
Is Imhof up for the same task, and ready now to drop the as-shapeless-as-the-internet attitude and commit to art? Maybe it was the exhaustion, and the heightened emotional reactions you can have in the last hour in a nightclub. But after three hours on my feet I left the Armory with a funny hope that her art is not yet doomed.
Doom: House of Hope Through March 12. Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, 212-616-3930; *****@*****.tld. All tickets are general admission.
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‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay
‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay
There’s a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let’s all point and stare and wince.
“Housewife of the Year” (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have gone in that direction. The film is about (and named after) a live, prime-time televised competition that took place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland — and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Women, generally married and raising a large family, were judged on qualities ranging from sense of humor and civic-mindedness to budgeting, preparing a simple meal and, of course, keeping up their appearance. All of this, the movie briefly explains via text onscreen, can be seen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to maintain many kinds of employment. “The state shall endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,” Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution proclaims. The competition helped reinforce those values.
As Irish society changed, especially with respect to women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, the competition eventually turned into “Homemaker of the Year,” open to all genders. But that’s not the focus of the documentary, nor is there ponderous narration explaining to us what happened. Instead, “Housewife of the Year” focuses on two main ways of telling its story. The first is archival footage from the competition, which reinforces how much of it focused on patronizing and even belittling the women as they participated, via the male host, Gay Byrne, interviewing them onstage. It’s remarkable to watch.
But woven throughout are present-day interviews with many of the participants, now much older, who see things differently than they probably did back then. They tell stories of what was really going on in the background: alcoholic or deadbeat husbands, economic catastrophes, backbreaking labor. One woman, Ena, talks about having given birth to 14 children by the time she was 31, owing largely to the ban on contraception.
The women ask questions of themselves in these interviews. “Why did we just go along with these things?” one asks, a sentiment that others echo. It was “like a dream world that people accepted all these things,” another muses. Only a couple look back at the time with anything other than incredulity and pain.
The resulting movie is fascinating precisely because we’re hearing their voices. More important, there’s a kind of dignity afforded the subjects through this approach. They ask the questions, musing on the past, and surface what’s often lost when we look back at history. People “back then” weren’t different than they are now — they were just formed in a world with a set of assumptions that might vary from our own. There’s a compassion to this approach, reminding us that someday, we, too, will be making documentaries looking back, incredulous at what we lived through, what we allowed, what we assumed was normal.
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Laurie Woolever Worked With Bourdain and Batali. Now She’s Written a Memoir.
Laurie Woolever Worked With Bourdain and Batali. Now She’s Written a Memoir.
Laurie Woolever has played many roles in the food world. She was Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, and Anthony Bourdain’s assistant, working closely on his books and television shows, from 2009 until his death in 2018. Her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” which Ecco will publish on Tuesday, is a candid account of tending to high-wattage celebrities, and of working as a woman, wife and mother in a wildly male-dominated industry. It’s also a reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that tied the three together. Below is a condensed and edited version of our phone interview.
You grew up in upstate New York and moved to the city after college with hopes of becoming a writer. How did you end up in culinary school?
I was drawn to the industry because I had this very wrong idea that it would be fun. The sort of fuzzy notion that I had of everyone hanging out in the kitchen, cooking, listening to music — that was very wrong. I’m glad that I had that, because I think if I had really understood what professional cooking was, I would have been too scared. I would have probably changed my mind about even going to cooking school.
What was it like to work at Babbo, the restaurant that was the white-hot center of the culinary world?
When the restaurant was brand new, everyone there knew that we were someplace special. It was getting a lot of press, everybody wanted to get in, celebrities were there every night. Mario’s star was on the rise, and I think there was a real collective sense of pride, and we really cared about what we were doing.
You occasionally worked in the kitchen at Babbo. What was it like to move between the front and back of the house?
The dining room seemed like a really luxurious, wonderful place to be from the perspective of the kitchen. When you’re in the kitchen and you’re on your feet and it’s relentless and you’re making a fixed weekly salary, you’re not going to benefit from the generous whims of a customer that might leave a huge tip, or get the chance to sell a great big bottle of wine. I think it’s fair to say that led to some resentment. It’s always a competition between front and back of the house for who works the hardest, who is the most hard-core, who is doing the most for the restaurant.
At the time, how did you reconcile the two Marios: the one who was a “brainy evangelist” for real Italian food, and the one who talked constantly about women’s bodies and bragged about his ****** size?
I would push back on the concept of “two Marios” because I didn’t see two distinct personas at work. There’s no reason why a brainy evangelist can’t also be a funny, charismatic, fun person who makes dirty jokes and is a little too handsy at times and says really outrageous things. It’s not that he was presenting as a choirboy to the world and was a monster in private. It’s that he was a full, complicated person, with vices and blind spots and also some generous impulses and a lot to offer the world. He was able to present the best parts of himself in public and save the more risqué parts of himself for an audience that wasn’t in a position to push back on him or judge.
In 2017, you went back to your journal from your time at Babbo, and read your own accounts of how Mario behaved toward you and other women, you asked yourself: Could I have done anything to stop it?
When Mario grabbed me and I didn’t like it, I did privately, quietly go right to him and say, hey, please don’t do that again. And that was that was as much as I felt I could do. I was scared and he kind of made fun of me for it, but then it didn’t happen again for a long time. I wouldn’t fault anyone for not doing what I did because everyone has to make their own risk assessment in that situation.
I stand by the idea that there was an enormous power differential between me and Mario and between most, if not all, of my colleagues and Mario. It was very clear that he was in charge, and it was very clear that loyalty was extremely important. And in the dominant culture of the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was no way to think: Let’s organize and push back. Let’s confront our boss en masse about behavior that makes us uncomfortable. There was no example to look to, and there was no sense that your job would be safe or that you would be OK.
You were shocked by how casually you had written about his behavior, telling yourself, “You knew what you were getting into.”
I knew from Day 1 working for Mario that he was going to be very flirtatious, that he was going to push boundaries and say outrageous things. That was the atmosphere. It wasn’t part of my job description. But I stayed because it was really hugely beneficial to be aligned with someone who had the power and the influence that he did. I knew what I was getting into and I was an at-will employee and I didn’t leave — until I did.
When you started working with Tony in 2009 he was just starting to become a celebrity outside the food world. Were you surprised that he got as famous as he did?
I already thought his writing was amazing, so it was not a surprise that it struck a nerve with so many people. But then the TV work made him popular and interesting and so valuable in the public sphere. The day that he died, to see both the sitting president and the former president both tweeting about him within hours of the announcement of his death, that took me by surprise, for sure. It was very comforting to see the whole world reacting to his death, to know that a lot of other people cared about him, too.
You write very frankly about your own addictions and risky decisions. When did you realize that you were more similar to Mario and Tony than you may have thought?
I think that is the through line. I don’t want to diagnose anyone else or talk about anyone else’s states of addiction. But it is a very common thing across the world of food and cooking, because there is a lot of adrenaline and a lot of excitement, a lot of status in pulling off a great service or getting through a rush or getting all your prep done before 4 o’clock. That’s a common thread, and that’s one of the really appealing, intoxicating things about working in kitchens.
Batali got #MeToo’d in December 2017. Soon after that, your marriage ended, Tony became involved with the Italian actress Asia Argento and, very soon after that, ended his life in June 2018. How did you feel at that time, how did you get through it?
It was an absolute turning point in my life in a lot of different ways. I felt overwhelmed in those weeks and months after my marriage ended, and I had moved out of the family home and then Tony wasn’t around anymore. And I didn’t have the job, which was very stabilizing and really gave me a center of gravity. I felt like I wasn’t sure who I was or what I was supposed to do. I remember saying to a friend, “I feel like I’m not even sure I exist anymore.”
Did you feel any regret about having become so embedded in the restaurant business?
I think I got really lucky ending up in these really interesting, dynamic, chaotic worlds. My bosses just happened to be these two guys who had extraordinary careers and extraordinary flameouts close to the same time. But you know, what an education. I can’t say that I regret any of it.
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John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86
John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86
John Casey, a writer of lyric yet taut prose in novels, essays and short stories who won the National Book Award in 1989 for “Spartina,” the story of a rough-hewn fisherman that reviewers called the best American story of nautical life since Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” died on Feb. 22 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86.
His daughters Clare and Julia Casey said the cause was complications of dementia.
Mr. Casey, who spent most of his literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, was best known for his pinpoint renderings of blue-collar characters, like ***** Pierce, the Rhode Island boatman at the center of “Spartina,” whom the author referred to as a “swamp Yankee.”
The novel revolves around both Pierce’s romantic entanglements — long married, he starts an affair and gets his lover pregnant — and his struggles to build a boat. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unifying metaphor of the book.
“Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water,” Mr. Casey wrote. “Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife.”
The novelist Susan Kenney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called the novel “splendidly conceived, flawlessly rendered and totally absorbing.”
Mr. Casey’s National Book Award win was something of a surprise, beating out heavy hitters like “The Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, and “Billy Bathgate,” by E.L. Doctorow.
“Thank goodness these five judges were in the mood,” he said at the awards ceremony. “Because that’s what it is, they were in the mood for my book.”
“Spartina” was Mr. Casey’s third book, following a novel, “An American Romance” (1977) and a book of stories, “Testimony and Demeanor” (1979). He also wrote magazine essays about his love for the outdoor life, especially running and rowing.
“John was a charismatic raconteur who knew something about everything and everything about some things, particularly writing,” the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian, a close friend, said in an email. “I considered him a mentor.”
At the University of Virginia, Mr. Casey developed a reputation for generosity with his time and talents in teaching creative writing, encouraging even non-students to submit material for him to critique.
“If someone in the community showed up with a Chapter 1 that showed any promise, John would read it,” the novelist Ann Beattie, who taught alongside Mr. Casey, said in an interview.
He continued to teach at Virginia until retiring in 2018. But he departed under a cloud.
In 2017, several former students filed separate Title IX complaints against Mr. Casey, accusing him of ******* harassment, inappropriate touching and favoring male students in his classes. A university panel recommended he be dismissed, but he retired instead.
John Dudley Casey was born on Jan. 18, 1939, in Worcester, Mass., where his father, Joseph, was a lawyer and a Democratic U.S. representative. His mother, Constance (Dudley) Casey, was a Democratic Party activist.
John grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., though he spent a year at Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Switzerland.
Intent on following his parents into public service, he studied Russian history and literature at Harvard. After he flunked out in his junior year, his father made him join the Army Reserve. He returned to Harvard and graduated in 1962, then from its law school in 1965.
While in law school, he took a writing course with Peter Taylor, a novelist and short story writer, who saw promise in his work and encouraged him to pursue fiction.
After practicing law for a year, Mr. Casey decided to follow Mr. Taylor’s advice. He received a fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and completed his master’s degree in 1968.
Among his classmates were Gail Godwin and John Irving, and he found a close mentor and friend in Kurt Vonnegut, an instructor at the workshop.
Despite Mr. Casey’s elite background, his friends said they could already see in him the writer he would become.
“I can’t explain it, but — even in Iowa — there was something of the solitary, intrepid mariner about Casey,” Mr. Irving wrote in an email.
Before graduating, Mr. Casey sold two stories to The New Yorker and another to Sports Illustrated.
Rather than march triumphant into a literary hot spot like New York or Cambridge, Mass., he and his wife, Jane, whom he had married in 1967, bought land on an island in Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, where they lived without electricity or phone service.
He and his wife later divorced. He married Rosamond Pittman in 1982; they also later divorced. He married Robin Fray in 2012. She died in 2015.
Along with his daughters Clare and Julia, from his second marriage, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Nell and Maud Casey; his sisters, Constance and Caroline Casey; a brother, Joe; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Casey moved to the University of Virginia in 1972 at the behest of Mr. Taylor, who was teaching there and wanted to build out its creative writing program.
Among Mr. Casey’s early students was Breece D’J Pancake, a promising writer from West Virginia. Mr. Pancake, who almost immediately established himself as a rising literary star, published several stories in The Atlantic before dying by suicide in 1979.
His death hit Mr. Casey hard. In 1983, he edited “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” and wrote an afterword.
Mr. Casey published three more books of fiction after “Spartina,” a collection of his outdoor writing, a book about the art of fiction and two translations of novels originally written in Italian, which he had learned while in Rome on a fellowship.
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Stop Doing ‘Arm Day.’ Here’s a Better Way to Grow Your Arms
Stop Doing ‘Arm Day.’ Here’s a Better Way to Grow Your Arms
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
Forget arm day. According to Mike Israetel, it may be time to retire the classic bicep and tricep workout. His argument? There are smarter ways to build your arms without dedicating a whole session to them.
Israetel is an exercise scientist and co-founder of Renaissance Periodization, known for his evidence-based approach to training. With years of experience coaching—and a Ph.D.—he’s a respected authority on maximizing hypertrophy and performance.
Everyone has their own workout splits to reach their goals, but according to Israetel, there are more effective ways to build big arms than dedicating a full day just to them. For one, getting a bicep pump during arm day actually impedes your range of motion for the triceps.
“Biceps and triceps just don’t heal at the same rates,” he says. “Your triceps are roughly double the size of your biceps, so the triceps typically take longer to heal.”
If you’re determined to keep arm days for the pump they provide, the key is ensuring you don’t disrupt the recovery of those larger muscle groups—and Israetel offers a couple of workout split suggestions.
One option is to follow this five-day split:
The other six-day split option involves organizing muscle groups based on their recovery times and ensuring they don’t interfere with each other:
Chest, triceps, and side delts
Back, biceps, and side delts
Chest, triceps, legs, and biceps
Ultimately, keeping an arm day in your program is fine, as long as it follows sufficient recovery from chest and back training, you’ve taken a rest day, or trained another muscle group before doing arms.
Related: Top Natural Bodybuilder Swears By This Superset for ******* Arms
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The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in March
The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in March
Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles for subscribers in the United States. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)
‘The Leopard’
Starts streaming: March 5
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published 1958 novel, “The Leopard,” is a rich reflection on the mid-19th century unification of Italy and how it affected the aristocrats who were reluctant to concede their land to the people. The book was adapted into a 1963 Luchino Visconti film, widely considered one of the best movies in cinematic history. Now it has been adapted again into a six-part mini-series. Kim Rossi Stuart plays Don Fabrizio Corbera, who is clinging to his prestige even as his ambitious, pragmatic nephew, Tancredi (Saul Nanni), sides with the revolutionaries. Like the novel, the series compares the larger sweep of history with the characters’ personal desires, including the question of who Tancredi will marry: Don Fabrizio’s daughter Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli) or the more politically connected Angelica (Deva Cassel).
‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’
Starts streaming: March 7
The latest documentary from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “The Fog of War”) is partly a collaboration with the journalist Tom O’Neill, who spent decades investigating the crimes of the hippie guru Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. O’Neill turned his research into the 2019 book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties,” contending that the typical framing of the Manson Family’s murders — as would-be revolutionary acts by an evil counterculture cult — does not line up with evidence that suggests a criminal conspiracy involving gangsters and the government. Morris anchors his film with an extended interview between himself and O’Neill, intercut with clips from old news reports about Manson and his disciples. Like a lot of Morris’s work, “Chaos” examines the myths society supports and how the official versions of some stories break down under scrutiny.
‘Adolescence’
Starts streaming: March 13
In this opening minutes of this British mini-series, a teenage boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is arrested on suspicion of murdering a classmate. Stephen Graham (who also wrote all four episodes of “Adolescence” with Jack Thorne) plays Jamie’s father, Eddie, who is named the boy’s “appropriate adult,” and watches helplessly as his son is swabbed, stripped, searched and questioned. Each episode of this procedural mystery takes place in real time and plays out entirely in one shot — an approach that the director Philip Barantini used previously in the 2021 film “Boiling Point,” starring Graham. The format may seem gimmicky, but the creative team does not treat it that way. Instead it focuses on the granular details of the arrest and its aftermath, shifting between the perspectives of the police, the suspect and the suspect’s family, all of whom are wondering not only what happened to the victim but also why.
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Old-School ******* Volume Training Still Offers Big Bodybuilding Results
Old-School ******* Volume Training Still Offers Big Bodybuilding Results
Bodybuilders first popularized the ******* Volume Training (GVT) method in the 1970s, when they realized they could gain lots of lean muscle mass by subjecting their muscle fibers to a tremendous amount of overload.
******* Volume Training was then re-popularized by legendary coach Charles Poliquin in the early 1990s, says strength coach Jim “Smitty” Smith, C.P.P.S. “While it is very efficient at building more muscle mass (hypertrophy) in a short amount of time, the key is the intensity (amount of weight used vs. amount of reps per set) used during the high-volume protocol.”
Charles often recommended a load of around 60 percent of 1RM (a lifter’s greatest effort for 1 good repetition), says Smith.
The goal is to perform 10 sets of 10 repetitions for one exercise per body part during a workout, so each workout may consist of only three or four exercises. Lifters should focus on one big exercise for each body part for the 10×10 approach and include some accessory lifts to wrap up the workout with 3 sets of 10 reps.
As the name implies, ******* Volume Training forces muscle to endure a huge volume of work, so the tempo of the workout should be slow. Rest times between sets are relatively short—between 60 and 90 seconds. Because the volume is so high, lifters should start with a lighter weight than normal to combat fatigue on the later sets.
“GVT is very demanding and should be cycled in and out of your training cycle on a periodic basis,” says Smith.
“Too much volume, too often is the quick path to over-training and poor gains. In addition, when considering the volume, volume, the amount of weight on the bar, and perfect technique is important,” he says.
A sample schedule would have lifters working out on the following schedule:
Monday – Chest/BackTuesday – Legs/AbsThursday – Arms/Shoulders
Benefits:
Although it may seem simple, GVT can certainly stimulate big gains in lean muscle. The intense amount of volume will spur muscle growth in both beginner and advanced lifters.
Before You Start, Though:
Because the volume is so high, lifters should monitor their progress carefully and watch out for overtraining. Due to the difficulty of GVT-style workouts, you’ll probably recover much slower than normal. For that reason, each body part should only be hit once per week.
Sample Upper Body Workout:
1A) Incline Bench Press – 10 sets of 10 reps1B) Chin-up – 10 sets of 10 reps2A) Tricep Extensions – 3 sets of 10 reps2B) Bicep Curls – 3 sets of 10 reps
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Betty Bonney, 100, Dies; Her Paean to Joe DiMaggio Was a Big-Band Hit
Betty Bonney, 100, Dies; Her Paean to Joe DiMaggio Was a Big-Band Hit
Betty Bonney was already a veteran big-band vocalist at 17 when she joined Les Brown and His Orchestra in 1941 — in time to sing the praises of the New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio as he was racking up his major-league-record 56-game hitting streak.
While performing that summer at a club in Armonk, N.Y., in Westchester County, the band “got caught up in the streak,” Mr. Brown told Newsday in 1990, and “would announce it from the bandstand every night if Joe had gotten another hit, or if he was coming to bat late in the game still without a hit.”
As DiMaggio piled up hits — from mid-May to mid-July — a New York City disc jockey, Alan Courtney, and the band’s arranger, Ben Homer, wrote a jaunty tune, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which Ms. Bonney sang in her smooth, elegant style at the Armonk club while band members goofed around with baseball gloves, bats and caps, Mr. Brown said.
The song was also heard regularly on the band’s radio show and released in September as a 78 r.p.m. record; according to Billboard magazine, it was the 93rd-best-selling single of 1941.
The song starts off with Ms. Bonney asking, “Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?” to which the clarinetist Ben Most, playing the part of DiMaggio, replies, “We need a hit, so here I go.”
She later sings:
He started baseball’s famous streak That’s got us all aglow He’s just a man and not a freak Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
Win Goulden, a columnist for The Central New Jersey Home News of New Brunswick, praised not only the song but also Ms. Bonney’s performance of it. “You should really see Miss Bonney do the number in person to appreciate it,” he wrote, “if you get what we’re driving at.”
“It’s not just her voice that puts over a song,” he added.
DiMaggio threatened to sue Mr. Courtney “for using his name,” Mr. Brown told Newsday, but relented when he learned that Mr. Courtney “didn’t have a cent.”
Ms. Bonney died on Jan. 29 in Calabasas, Calif. She was 100. Her son Trevor Lindsey confirmed the death, in an assisted living facility.
Betty Jane Bonney was born on March 8, 1924, in Bridgeport, Conn., and grew up mainly in Norfolk, Va. Her father, Albert, was a railroad purchasing clerk. Her mother, Doris (Anderson) Bonney, supported Betty’s musical career from an early age: She accompanied her to local radio gigs, starting when she was 6, and joined her on the road as a teenager with the Auburn Cavaliers, a band based in the South.
In 1941, when she was still a teenager, Betty sang with the bands of Charlie Spivak and Jimmy James before joining Mr. Brown’s, where she replaced Doris Day. (Ms. Day would return in 1943.)
“Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” was featured in an episode of Ken Burns’s documentary series “Baseball” in 1994. It became one of the enduring songs about baseball players, along with “Talkin’ Baseball (*******, Mickey and the Duke),” by Terry Cashman; “Say Hey (The ******* Mays Song),” by the Treniers; and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” by Count Basie and His Orchestra.
Ms. Bonney recorded other songs with the Brown band, including “Lament to Love,” Fats Waller’s “All That Meat and No Potatoes” and “He’s 1-A in the Army (and He’s A-1 in My Heart).”
She left Les Brown soon after marrying Douglas Broyles Jr., an Army officer, in June 1942. But after Mr. Broyles went overseas to serve in World War II, she resumed her singing career with the bands of Jan Savitt, Jerry Wald and Frankie Carle. Then, as a solo act, she recorded several songs for RCA, including “Ho Hum (Wish I Were Someone in Love),” which put her on the cover of Billboard in 1945.
“She’s had all the breaks any thrush could ask for,” the magazine wrote, “crowded into the 13 years she’s been chirping in showbiz.”
In 1949, Ms. Bonney toured in a national production of the hit Broadway musical comedy “High Button Shoes.” The next year, the bandleader Sammy Kaye hired her and gave her a new name: Judy Johnson, which she would use for the rest of her career.
“Sammy had a thing about changing singers’ names for good luck,” she told Newsday.
Her time as a vocalist with Mr. Kaye was brief. Under her new name, she sang on Sid Caesar’s landmark television sketch-comedy series, “Your Show of Shows,” from 1950 to 1953 and was the star of a nightclub act, “Judy Johnson and Her Dates,” in 1953.
“Very few people knew her as Betty,” her son Trevor said in an interview. “She didn’t correct them because she was just as comfortable as Judy.” Privately, she was known as Judy Lindsey.
In 1954, Ms. Bonney divorced Mr. Broyles and married Mort Lindsey, who went on to be the bandleader on Merv Griffin’s television talk show. She made occasional radio, TV, club and stage appearances, including replacing Helen Gallagher as Miss Adelaide in the revival of “Guys and Dolls” at New York City Center in 1955.
She also worked on “The Judy Garland Show” — where Mr. Lindsey led the band — as Ms. Garland’s stand-in during studio rehearsals in 1963 and 1964.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Bonney sang occasionally with Mr. Griffin and his band (conducted by Mr. Lindsey) in various venues, including Mr. Griffin’s Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., and the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif.
In addition to her son Trevor, from her marriage to Mr. Lindsey, she is survived by another son, Steve, also from that marriage; a daughter, Bonney Dunn, from her marriage to Mr. Broyles; three stepchildren; seven grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Mort Lindsey died in 2012.
Trevor Lindsey said that his mother’s father pushed her into singing for money when she was 5 because he was barely earning a living.
“Mom would recount stories of him bringing her to a bar in the middle of the day and saying, ‘Do your little act,’” he said, “and people would throw money at her.”
He added, “She never forgave him for that.”
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Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies
Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies
Near the end of the lullaby that gives way to the blazing finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, the music slows and thins to a whisper.
In the ballet, this is the moment when an evil sorcerer and his minions fall into a deep sleep. In some renditions, it registers as little more than a pause. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery to that transition.
Just moments earlier, she had coaxed some of the most opulently sensual playing of the evening from the ensemble, including a voluptuous bassoon solo and swooning strings. Then, as the texture tapered, she appeared to drain the music of its pulse with medicinal deliberation. An unnerving trance settled over the room. When the finale’s ***** solo emerged — noble, transcendent — it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious.
There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert, which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. Alsop has an ability to manipulate time to expressive effect, and the sound she drew from the Philharmonic was cohesive and malleable, the playing poised between discipline and individual dazzle.
In Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, she leaned into the uncertainty of the opening phrase, shaping each swelling chord with its own gradient from quiet to louder, its own testy relationship to the beat. When the music erupted and rushed onward, the release felt all the more liberating for having gone through such visceral hesitation.
Brahms’s work Variations on a Theme by Haydn requires forensic attention to balance with ever new iterations that often need to be adjusted and contained in such a way that they just barely shine through the finicky business of the rest of the score. Alsop led a transparent reading that patiently marshaled its forces for a majestic finale.
The violinist Renaud Capuçon joined the orchestra for the world premiere of Muhly’s brightly hued but emotionally aloof concerto. Capuçon’s performance felt tense at times, although that may have partly resulted more from the visual awkwardness of his stiff stance while reading from a music stand lowered to the height of his waist. He played with a gleaming, sweet sound and glassy clean intonation in double-stop passages where the solo violin seems to act like a prism refracting light from the orchestra.
Muhly’s concerto leans heavily on traditional expressive devices including suspensions: temporary dissonances resulting from one voice moving a step out of sync with a second voice. In Baroque music, that push and pull typically lends a slow movement its sense of flow, but here, they hang in the air with throbbing ambivalence.
A strength of Muhly’s is his meticulous attention to instrumentation and the distribution of sound in space, including a wonderfully subversive series of “solos” — really just bright dabs of single notes — written for players on the last desk of the first and the second violin sections. With Capuçon spinning high lines that tangled with resonant metallic percussion accents, it was easy to miss these solos on the periphery of the orchestra, and yet they were part of a fastidiously inventive sound world.
New York Philharmonic
This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
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Russian forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian troops from the rear in Kursk
Russian forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian troops from the rear in Kursk
LONDON (AP) — Russian special forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian units from the rear in the Kursk region, Ukraine’s military and Russian war bloggers reported, as Moscow moves to recapture parts of its border province that Kyiv seized in a shock offensive.
Ukraine launched in August a daring cross-border incursion into Kursk, in what marked the largest attack on Russian territory since World War II. Within days, Ukrainian units had captured 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of territory, including the strategic border town of Sudzha, and taken hundreds of Russian prisoners of war. According to Kyiv, the operation aimed to gain a bargaining chip in future peace talks, and force Russia to divert troops away from its grinding offensive in eastern Ukraine.
But months after Ukraine’s thunder run, its soldiers in Kursk are weary and bloodied by relentless assaults of more than 50,000 troops, including some from Russia’s ally North Korea. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers run the risk of being encircled, open source maps of the battlefield show.
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According to Telegram posts by a Ukrainian-born, pro-Kremlin blogger, Russian operatives walked about 15 kilometers (9 miles) inside the pipeline, which Moscow had until recently used to send gas to Europe. Some Russian troops had spent several days in the pipe before striking Ukrainian units from the rear near the town of Sudzha, blogger Yuri Podolyaka claimed.
The town had some 5,000 residents before the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and houses major gas transfer and measuring stations along the pipeline, once a major outlet for Russian natural gas exports through Ukrainian territory.
Another war blogger, who uses the alias Two Majors, said fierce fighting was underway for Sudzha, and that Russian forces managed to enter the town through a gas pipeline. Russian Telegram channels showed photos of what they said were special forces operatives, wearing gas masks and moving along what looked like the inside of a large pipe.
Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed on Saturday evening that Russian “sabotage and assault groups” used the pipeline in a bid to gain a foothold outside Sudzha. In a Telegram post, it said Russian troops were “detected in a timely manner” and that Ukraine responded with rockets and artillery.
“At present, Russian special forces are being detected, blocked and destroyed. The enemy’s losses in Sudzha are very high,” the General Staff reported.
The Associated Press could not independently verify these accounts. The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday reported that its troops have taken the village of Lebedevka, some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) northwest of Sudzha, and inflicted defeats on multiple Ukrainian units in and near the town. It did not specify when exactly these clashes took place. Ukraine did not immediately comment on the Russian ministry’s claims.
France announces new aid package for Ukraine
Meanwhile, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Sunday that France will use profits from frozen Russian assets to finance an additional 195 million euros package ($211 million) in arms for Ukraine, the latest in a series of military aid deliveries funded through the mechanism.
In an interview with the La Tribune Dimanche newspaper, Lecornu said that Paris will send new 155 mm artillery shells and glide bombs for Mirage 2000 fighter jets it previously gave to Ukraine.
The move prompted an angry response from the speaker of Russia’s parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin. A statement by the State Duma’s press service Sunday cited Volodin as saying that Paris “will answer for its actions” and eventually have to return what Volodin called “stolen” funds.
Ukrainian drones said to target Russian oil infrastructure
Elsewhere, Russian officials and Telegram channels reported that Ukrainian drones targeted oil infrastructure in south and central Russia overnight into early Sunday. One drone struck an oil depot in Cheboksary, a Russian city on the Volga River about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the border, the local governor reported. According to Oleg Nikolaev, nobody was hurt but the depot needed reconstruction work.
Footage circulated on Russian Telegram channels at what appeared to be a fire at or near one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, in the southern city of Ryazan. Shot, a news channel on Telegram, cited local residents as saying they heard several nighttime blasts near the refinery. Local Gov. Pavel Malkov said Ukrainian drones had been shot down nearby. He claimed there had been no casualties or damage.
Ukraine did not immediately comment on either incident.
___
Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at
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NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, March 10 (game #372)
NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, March 10 (game #372)
Looking for a different day?
A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Sunday’s puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Sunday, March 9 (game #371).
Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… You’re pushing my buttons
NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
VOTE
MORE
BIDE
LEAN
ROGUE
POEM
NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• Works your TV
NYT Strands today (game #372) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First side: bottom, 4th column
Last side: top, 4th column
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #372) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #372, are…
VOLUME
BACK
POWER
HOME
MUTE
GUIDE
CHANNEL
SPANGRAM: REMOTE CONTROL
My rating: Easy
My score: 1 hint
Losing a REMOTE CONTROL is really frustrating. As a scatterbrained person it’s something I do a lot. It’s almost a superpower – well if superpowers were useless and annoying.
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Losing a remote is a great example of how powerless we are without technology – with the TV remaining on (or off) and stuck until the blessed “zapper” is located.
I’ve found ours in the fridge before and I once took it to work, leaving my wife at home having to watch National Geographic all day (there are worse channels it could have been stuck on) or pull the plug.
The worst remotes are the tiny ones. I’ve gone through three for my Amazon TV Fire Stick, all possibly eaten by the couch (or a cat) but vanished forever after lengthy hours-long searches. I could tape an AirTag to it, but this seems an extreme measure considering how it’s a housebound object.
How did you do today? Let me know in the comments below.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Sunday, 9 March, game #371)
PURR
HISS
SNUGGLE
STRETCH
SWAT
BLINK
POUNCE
SPANGRAM: CAT BEHAVIOR
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s not-so-new-any-more word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable that has been running for a year and which can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
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Nepal rally wants king back amid politics frustration
Nepal rally wants king back amid politics frustration
Thousands of supporters have greeted Nepal’s former king in the capital Kathmandu and demanded his abolished monarchy be reinstated and Hinduism brought back as a state religion.
An estimated 10,000 supporters of Gyanendra Shah blocked the main entrance to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport as he arrived from a tour of western Nepal.
“Vacate the royal palace for the king. Come back king, save the country. Long live our beloved king. We want monarchy,” the crowds chanted.
Passengers were forced to walk to and from the airport.
Hundreds of riot police blocked the protesters from entering the airport and there was no violence.
Massive street protests in 2006 forced Gyanendra to give up his authoritarian rule, and two years later the parliament voted to abolish the monarchy as Gyanendra left the royal palace to live the life of a commoner.
But many Nepalis have grown frustrated with the republic, saying it has failed to bring about political stability and blaming it for a struggling economy and widespread corruption.
Nepal has had 13 governments since the monarchy was abolished in 2008.
Rally participants said they were hoping for a change in the political system to stop the country from further deteriorating.
“We are here to give the king our full support and to rally behind him all the way to reinstating him in the royal throne,” said Thir Bahadur Bhandari, 72.
Among the thousands was 50-year-old carpenter Kulraj Shrestha, who had taken part in the 2006 protests against the king but has changed his mind and now supports the monarchy.
“The worst thing that is happening to the country is massive corruption and all politicians in power are not doing anything for the country,” Shrestha said.
“I was in the protests that took away monarchy hoping it would help the country but I was mistaken and the country has further plunged so I have changed my mind.”
Gyanendra has not commented on the calls for the return of monarchy.
Despite growing support for the former king, Gyanendra has slim chances of immediately returning to power.
He became the king in 2002 after his brother and family were massacred in the palace.
He ruled as the constitutional head of state without executive or political powers until 2005, when he seized absolute power.
He disbanded the government and parliament, jailed politicians and journalists and cut off communications, declaring a state of emergency and using the army to rule the country.
Mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of people forced him to relinquish power to parliament in 2006.
Nepal’s parliament voted to abolish the monarchy in June 2006, officially declaring the country a federal republic on May 28, 2008.
On Thursday, while addressing a gathering in eastern Nepal, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli challenged the former king to contest elections and formally enter politics.
“If you think you are popular, you can contest elections,” Oli said.
“You are welcome to run, but stop this hide-and-seek game.”
with EFE
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This Chicken Curry Laksa Is Gorgeous
This Chicken Curry Laksa Is Gorgeous
Does anyone else find themselves happily tumbling into more project cooking lately? Maybe it’s because I’m clinging to the coziness winter provides. Maybe I’ve watched too many charming, ASMR-adjacent YouTube videos of people calmly assembling wonderful dinners in beautiful locations. Or maybe it’s because, if my hands are busy smashing garlic or deveining shrimp, I can’t doomscroll on my phone. Whatever the reason, I’ve really been enjoying my quality kitchen time as of late.
So I’m very excited to make Lara Lee’s chicken curry laksa, a gorgeous, hearty noodle soup that’s kaleidoscopic in flavor: Sour tamarind and spicy dried chile punch through the sweet coconut milk; salty dried shrimp and gently bitter nuts balance umami-rich shrimp paste. Lara is a really thoughtful cook — as anyone who has read her “Coconut and Sambal” and “A Splash of Soy” cookbooks knows — so her recipe is full of tips and tricks for anyone needing ingredient substitution and shortcut advice, like how to boost store-bought laksa paste with lemongrass, garlic and ginger.
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Chicken Curry Laksa
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This laksa also scratches a particular cooking itch of mine: making something at home that I’d normally order at a restaurant. I’ll bet that a lot of readers behind the five-star reviews for Hetty Lui McKinnon’s sweet and sour cauliflower — which rejects deep-frying those florets for a cornstarch-coated roast in a hot oven — are also happy for a fast, meat-free version of a takeout staple. If you add Hetty’s salt and pepper tofu, some sautéed baby bok choy and a pot of steamed rice, that’s a pretty epic Saturday night feast.
Or, if it’s not Saturday night without some pizza, how about a Crazy Crust Pizza? “The no-yeast, no-knead recipe for Crazy Crust Pizza was first popularized decades ago when it was published by Pillsbury,” writes Cybelle Tondu, our recipe’s creator. The simple batter of flour, milk and eggs is poured into a cornmeal-dusted skillet and topped with crushed tomatoes, shredded mozzarella and your choice of toppings (Cybelle calls for the classic sausage, red onion and pepper combo). This pan pizza comes together in about an hour, which is less time than it takes for me and my husband to decide where to order pizza from.
A while ago my colleague (and perfect blue sweater-wearer) Tanya Sichynsky wrote a “we have wine bar at home” Veggie newsletter, and I think that’s the perfect way to describe the sort of fancy-ish but not fussy dinners I aim to assemble. Mark Usewicz’s simple pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter, a recipe adapted by Julia Moskin, is the exact sort of dish I’d want to serve alongside Ali Slagle’s new halloumi-flecked salad or Martha Rose Shulman’s chickpeas with baby spinach and some sort of chilled, skin-contact wine (with marinated olives for the table, naturally).
And Ramadan Mubarak to all those observing! Zaynab Issa has two lovely new lassi recipes — a strawberry lassi and a salted lassi — as well as a helpful lassi how-to. “The drink’s origins can be traced back to the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent,” Zaynab writes, “and it’s been consumed for more than 1,000 years, with good reason. The simple yogurt-based refreshment, blended with sweet or savory ingredients, is versatile, easy to make and especially ideal for slaking thirst any time of year.”
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Book Review: ‘The Unworthy,’ by Agustina Bazterrica
Book Review: ‘The Unworthy,’ by Agustina Bazterrica
THE UNWORTHY, by Agustina Bazterrica; translated by Sarah Moses
Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings doomed to create dystopian conditions wherever they go?
In the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s brilliant, chilling new novel, “The Unworthy,” the young, unnamed narrator enters a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood after spending an unspecified amount of time wandering a landscape ravaged by climate catastrophe. Is this place, overseen by the Superior Sister and an unseen, all-powerful He, a refuge or a nightmare? And what exactly happens when a member of the unworthy class is elevated to the rank of the Chosen?
These are among the questions that propel this slim, suspenseful novel. Amid global hunger and drought the Sacred Sisterhood has managed to cultivate a steady food supply — even if it involves eating a lot of crickets — and drinkable water. But danger abounds. The hierarchy is at once enigmatic and brutally enforced. Sacrifices are demanded. The punishments for infractions, administered by the sadistic Superior Sister, include whipping, disfigurement and being buried or burned alive.
The mind-bending violence crushes any possibility of fellowship between the women who have found their way to this place (in the opening chapter, the narrator recounts dropping cockroaches into the pillowcase of another sister and then sewing up the slip). The unworthy are quick to turn on one another, claws out and teeth bared, in the name of survival.
The horror is made visceral by Bazterrica’s feverish, mythic prose, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses: “There’s something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being. … Something was throbbing in the air, silent and ********.” Some sentences break off midstream; others contain words crossed out. We witness the narrator’s struggle to wrest the unspeakable into language.
The act of writing sustains her. She writes in the blue ink left behind by the monks who once tended this land; she writes with charcoal made from plants; she writes with her own blood. The writing is a mortal risk: She must hide these pages meticulously, so they’re not discovered by the Superior Sister. She creates a record of both her cloistered, terrorized life with the Sacred Sisterhood and the world she knew before. The memories of her mother and of Circe, her companion after the apocalypse, are especially vivid and anguishing.
Like Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” this dystopian narrator feels compelled to make a record of the end times; for both women, to write is to preserve a drop of agency, of humanity, in a blasted world, where survival often demands a willingness to commit unfathomable violations. “Without mercy you survive,” Bazterrica’s narrator says. To write is to process the new reality that is taking shape, the new story that is unfolding, and that will no longer die with her. “Why put myself in danger with this book of the night?” the narrator writes. “Because if I write it, then it was real.”
The scrap of humanity the narrator has preserved through the act of writing is awakened when a mysterious stranger, Lucía, appears inside the walls of the Sacred Sisterhood. She seems to be a wanderer, as the narrator once was, and is taken in. Before long, Lucía displays otherworldly powers and, perhaps even more shockingly, a sense of compassion.
“The Unworthy” is a novel filled with secrets, and part of the thrill is cracking open one forbidden door at a time. Given that it’s populated almost entirely by women, it’s striking that patriarchal violence is at the center of the Sacred Sisterhood’s rotten core.
Solidarity between the unworthy, then, becomes a way to fight back. A secret bond forms between Lucía and the narrator, one that reminds them both that communion with others will always generate more strength than remaining crouched in suspicious solitude. These glimmers of hopeful connection are, of course, radically fragile — at any moment the two could be discovered and killed — but they are nevertheless critical to the narrator’s emotional opening. In the novel’s final moments, she remembers what survival is really for.
THE UNWORTHY | By Agustina Bazterrica | Translated by Sarah Moses | Scribner | 177 pp. | $28.99
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Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say
Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say
A giant wave of undulating gas and dust appears, per new research, to have engulfed our Solar System millions of years ago.
As New Scientist reports, astrophysicists have discovered that the Radcliffe wave — a 9,000 light-year-long structure full of stars and the gas and dust needed to form new ones — seems to have swept over our entire Solar System around 14 million years ago.
Previous research into this fantastic galactic wave suggested that Earth passed through it some 13 million years ago, plunging our planet into “a festival of supernovae going off,” as Harvard astrophysicist Catherine Zucker told the Washington Post last year.
Now, University of Vienna doctoral student Efrem Maconi thinks that our whole Solar System may have passed through this incredible structure.
Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, Maconi and his team identified recently-formed stars and the gases surrounding them within the Radcliffe wave to see how the structure itself appears to be moving.
Comparing that data to estimates about our Solar System’s trajectory, the Vienna researchers found that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were near each other between 12 and 15 million years ago. Ultimately, the scientists estimated that we moved through the wave roughly 14 million years ago. On a geological and even evolutionary scale, that’s incredibly recent; the dinosaurs are believed to have gone exstinct around 66 million years ago.
Along with the finding, Maconi also told New Scientist that the sky would have looked very different to anyone looking out from Earth when our Solar System passed through the Radcliffe wave.
“If we are in a denser region of the interstellar medium, that would mean that the light coming from the stars to you would be dimmed,” he explained. “It’s like being in a foggy day.”
Extrapolating this finding even further, the scientists behind this discovery also think there’s a chance that the Radcliffe wave played a role in the climate cooling that occurred in the Middle Miocene epoch, when temperatures plunged and permanent ice sheets were established. According to Ralph Schoenrich, an associate climate and physics professor at University College London, that may be a stretch.
“A rule of thumb is that geology trumps any cosmic influence,” Schoenrich, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. “If you shift continents or interrupt ocean currents, you get climate shifts from that, so I’m very skeptical you need anything in addition.”
More on star stuff: James Webb Spots Mysterious Object Crossing Space Between Stars
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Frustrated Dems unleash the F-bombs
Frustrated Dems unleash the F-bombs
When Rep. Jasmine Crockett reacted to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening, profanity leaped effortlessly from her lips: “Somebody slap me and wake me the ***** up because I’m ready to get on with it.” Just a few days earlier, when asked of her message to Elon Musk, she told him to “***** off.”
Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, took a more Midwestern approach: “Go to hell,” he said, adding later on X: “I said what I said.” Meanwhile, Senate Democrats launched coordinated social media videos fact checking Trump, each of them calling his claims “***** that ain’t true.”
In the earliest weeks of Trump’s second term, Democrats have careened from strategy to strategy to respond to him, often ineffectually. But one unifying thread as they try to invigorate their connection to the American voter has been a reach for profanity.
Democrats are cursing up a storm.
“******** it, tell me who started that?” said Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a frequent purveyor of profanity.
Cursing is, of course, not new in politics. Among operatives, principals and journalists, it is a familiar way to broker instant bonhomie. Nor is it new for the Democratic Party, particularly when confronting Trump: Former DNC Chair Tom Perez frequently deployed profanity in 2017 in stump speeches, saying, for example, that Trump didn’t “give a ***** about health care.”
But the breadth of swearing is unmistakable, newly fashionable among members of a party in the wilderness who are looking for shortcuts to authenticity to channel voters’ rage.
In recent days, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said he wanted the “intern” at the National Republican Campaign Congressional Committee who posted “racist *****” on X fired. And appraising the landscape of Trump’s America, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii noted this week that the “stock market is down but at least everything is more expensive and services are getting shittier.”
Politics, the late Andrew Breitbart once observed, is downstream of culture. And linguistically speaking, Democrats are up a certain creek.
Trump beat them to it, using curses increasingly in his march back to the White House, though for some Democrats it is part of their native tongue.
“I mean, I was swearing before Trump, so I can’t really blame it on him,” Gallego told POLITICO. “I’m gonna blame it more on being in the Marines for as long as I was.”
Now, Democrats are seeking to bottle up their impolite words and serve them up the maw of an increasingly coarse and foul-tongued populace.
“Some of it is genuine, some of it is people trying to seem faux-edgy authentic,” said Lis Smith, the Democratic adviser whose profanity is so legendary that her f-bombs played a hand in earning Amazon’s otherwise wholesome documentary on Pete Buttigieg in 2021 an “R” rating. “If the first time you’ve used a cuss word in public is reading off a script, it’s probably not authentic and not something you should do.”
It’s also become part of Democrats’ increased social media strategy. After posting their “***** that ain’t true” videos on social media, Senate ********* Leader Chuck Schumer made one “breaking down the BS Trump told” during his joint address. (The top Senate Democrat didn’t go as far as saying ********* in the video though — opting instead for “bull.”)
It is not always working. Last month, when Democrats joined federal workers at a rally of the American Federation of Government Employees to protest DOGE cuts, the profanities nearly rivaled those gathered.
“I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to ***** Trump,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), adding, “Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.”
The awkward formulation — which landed less like a diss and more like a proposition — was roundly mocked.
“The key to doing it and doing it well is that you can’t overdo it and you can’t force it,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran. “If elected officials are going to cuss, they have to mean it. If it’s authentic to who they are and how they’re feeling, voters will probably be fine with it and even relate to it. But if it’s not authentic, there’s nothing more cringeworthy.”
But there is also something more guttural in Democrats’ appeal to a deeply unsettled base.
“The truth is that we’re driven by the same things most people are — like anger at honest folks being denied a fair shot – and we need to prove it by showing fight,” said Andrew Bates, who worked for the famously foul-mouthed-in private Joe Biden. “One way to do that is to call out that Trump’s whole campaign was about lower costs right away – his words – but now he’s raising those costs with tariffs that will fund a tax handout for the rich; and yes, that is ********* and it shows his true colors and we should be eager to say it.”
Democrats concede their party can’t just be all talk.
“In this existential moment, the Democratic base does want to see their leaders fighting back. But at the end of the day, that means successful legislative and legal maneuvers — not just the occasional f-bomb on a podcast,” said one Democratic speechwriter, granted anonymity to assess the party’s rhetoric.
This person, acknowledging “mad as hell” vibes in the party, added, “Some of it is an expression of authentic outrage at Trump smashing Democratic norms and institutions. Some of it is that — between Trump and his acolytes — the bar’s been lowered on how we expect public officials to comport themselves.”
Deeper still, some Democrats see a core moral failing in the public profanities.
“Democrats who think that vulgarity and dehumanization are reliable, appropriate or beneficial ways to advance their political interests profoundly misunderstand what has happened in our politics and what is required in this moment,” said Michael Wear, Barack Obama’s former faith outreach adviser and the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, and author of “The Spirit of Our Politics.” “These are not tools that can be used in the service of any political goals. These things promote the very distrust, estrangement and animosity which is the fuel for the reckless, antagonistic politics Democrats — and all of us — ought to reject.”
Crockett’s f-bomb got some attention back in her district. She said at the Capitol on Thursday that people called the pastor at her church to “tattle” on her. (Though Crockett added her pastor said he approved her message: “He’s not going to be the one to try to reign me in.”)
For now, she is unrepentant. She said her answer was “real” and reflected her frustration with Trump and Musk’s actions.
“Like I have a potty mouth, especially when I’m mad,” she said. “We’re working on it. We’re going to pray about it.”
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