Archives for April 2021

There are plenty of earnestly respectful vaccine selfies, where the inoculated person bares a shoulder and thanks science for their shot. But the array of vaccine brands, each with their own protocols and typical symptoms, has made room for them to be interpreted as an internet-wide personality test, with all the irrational identification of an astrological sign or a BuzzFeed quiz.

When a young TikToker called @idrinkurmilkshake winkingly identified herself as a member of the “Pfizer Gang,” she kicked off a joking rivalry that tore ebulliently through the internet. “Umm, only hot people get the Pfizer vaccine,” she said, smugly tucking a gleaming curl behind an ear. “If you got Moderna, then I don’t know what to tell you, queen.” In another popular video, @ellynmariemarsh appears on both ends of a phone conversation, playing Pfizer as a preening celebrity sipping bubbly from a flute while gabbing at her underrecognized frenemy Moderna.

It feels very American to convert our biggest brush with socialized medicine into a personal branding exercise rooted in the worship of pharmaceutical companies. The internet stanning of the Pfizer vaccine — “it sounds rich, decadent, luxury!” as one TikToker put it — has inspired concern over whether this elitist discourse could discourage acceptance of other brands, as Heather Schwedel detailed in Slate.

But that’s the joke — these vaccine performances are tinged with an edge of uber-capitalist sociopathy. Part of the commentary is how deeply our experience of the pandemic has been warped by the internet. When @idrinkurmilkshake uploaded her audio to the app so other users could lip-sync to her voice, she clarified her stance by titling the track “imjusykiddingyouareallhot.” In a follow-up video, she used a filter that gave her face the bloated look of extensive aesthetic dermatology, and played out an alternate reality where vaccines are distributed like wellness products. “Hey beauties, I just had to show this beautiful package from Pfizer, they sent me a beautiful set,” she purred. “Very effective against coronavirus,” she added. “Use my code, you can get 15 percent off.”

Vaccine content provides the inoculated with a sense of closure, even as infections continue to spread and herd immunity is out of reach. The vaccine rollout has also supplied content for an upside-down social media world, in which Covid skeptics, conspiracy theorists and antivax influencers run the show, and they are envisioning a very different kind of twist. In one TikTok video, a conservative influencer acts out dramatically refusing a vaccine, getting beaten to death for her insolence and ascending to heaven. The writers behind the vaccine show may be busy drafting their finale, but not everyone is tuning in.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/arts/covid-vaccine-tiktok-content.html

In her email to staff on Tuesday, Ms. Reidhead acknowledged that Norton could have done more to look into the allegations. “As a publishing company we are limited in our investigative abilities,” she wrote, “but we recognize that there may be situations, such as allegations of potentially criminal conduct, where we should actively consider bringing in outside assistance.”

Some of the allegations against Mr. Bailey were reported earlier by The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate and The Los Angeles Times, and additional accusations have been reported since.

In an email to the Times last week, Mr. Bailey denied the allegations, calling them “categorically false and libelous.” A lawyer for Mr. Bailey, Billy Gibbens, called Norton’s response to the allegations “troubling and unwarranted.”

In an email on Tuesday, Mr. Gibbens added: “Norton made the drastic, unilateral decision to take Mr. Bailey’s books out of print, based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr. Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.”

Norton did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Since the #MeToo movement began, publishers have canceled contracts with a number of authors who have faced charges of sexual harassment and assault. In 2017, Penguin Press canceled a forthcoming book on the 2016 election by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, authors of the best seller “Game Change,” after Mr. Halperin was accused of sexually harassing women at ABC News, where he once directed political coverage.

And in March 2020, Hachette Book Group dropped a forthcoming memoir by Woody Allen amid a wave of criticism, including a walkout by employees, who cited the longstanding accusations that Mr. Allen had molested his adopted stepdaughter Dylan. (Both Mr. Allen and Mr. Halperin later found other publishers.)

Pulling books that have already been published is less common, and even Norton’s initial “pause” last week drew concern from free expression groups.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/books/norton-philip-roth-biography-blake-bailey.html

“He loved writing but grew to love editing and supporting reporters,” his wife, Rebecca Strum, said by phone. “He was at a place with many giant egos, and he didn’t have one.”

Mr. Strum collaborated with five Times reporters on the book “Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax” (1990), about the 1987 case in which a Black teenager claimed to have been kidnapped, gang-raped and further defiled by white racists. Mr. Strum acted as the internal editor for the book, which was reported by Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, E.R. Shipp, M.A. Farber and Craig Wolff and written by Mr. McFadden.

After his stint as New Jersey bureau chief, Mr. Strum continued to write for The Times occasionally, often flashing his characteristic wit. One article, in 2000, was about taking a French immersion class.

“Mercifully, this was not like high school, where teenagers wince from embarrassment,” he wrote. “I felt no trace of the angst of my sophomore year, when my teacher — a humorless woman who looked like Howdy Doody with a gray wig and spoke French with an Indiana twang — aimed her intolerance up and down the rows like a machine-gunner.”

He married Rebecca Ware, known as Becky, in 1970. In addition to her and their son, he is survived by their daughter, Kate Strum, as well as twin daughters, Sara and Mary Lee Kenney, from a relationship with Nancy Kenney, a former Times staff editor.

After retiring from The Times in 2014, Mr. Strum worked for three years as an editor at The Marshall Project, the nonprofit journalism site that covers criminal justice.

“Some editors edited stories; Chuck edited writers,” said Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The Times who was The Marshall Project’s founding editor in chief. “He made them better. At the start, being a start-up, we had some writers who had more promise than practice. Chuck didn’t just fix their stories, he helped them grow.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/media/charles-strum-versatile-editor-for-the-times-dies-at-73.html

“Law Order: SVU” has been appearing as a credit in stage actors’ Playbill biographies for many years, but once Broadway shut down it became an even more integral part of their work diet — in part because flying in stars was complicated by quarantine rules, and in part out of a conscious effort to help the New York theater community.

“When everything shut down, we were all like, ‘What are we going to do?’” said Adriane Lenox, a Tony Award winner who played a judge on “SVU” just months after testing positive for the virus early in the pandemic. Ms. Lenox, like many other actors, said she had to go on unemployment at one point and that she had tried to make ends meet by looking for jobs such as dog walking on websites like ZipRecruiter.

She was one of more than 100 local stage actors who were featured on the show this year, according to Warren Leight, its showrunner.

“I just made the call early on: ‘Let’s make this the year where the first pool of actors we go to is the Broadway actors, the off-Broadway actors,’” he said. “It really does seem like the right thing to do. Logistically, it’s easier to hire locally.”

The effects of the pandemic have been felt most acutely in the cities like Los Angeles and New York, where, at least in prepandemic times, roughly two thirds of the country’s film, television and theatrical jobs were located. In New York City, for instance, officials have estimated that employment in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector fell by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020.

But there are signs of a rebound. By the end of last year, television shoot days in Los Angeles had recovered to roughly 62 percent of what they had been in 2019, according to FilmLA, the official film office for the city and county of Los Angeles. After taking a hiatus during the winter as an outbreak hobbled California, TV production in the city is approaching normal, prepandemic levels, FilmLA reported last week, even as other sectors of the entertainment industry lag behind.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/arts/television/tv-production-coronavirus.html

“Law Order: SVU” has been appearing as a credit in stage actors’ Playbill biographies for many years, but once Broadway shut down it became an even more integral part of their work diet — in part because flying in stars was complicated by quarantine rules, and in part out of a conscious effort to help the New York theater community.

“When everything shut down, we were all like, ‘What are we going to do?’” said Adriane Lenox, a Tony Award winner who played a judge on “SVU” just months after testing positive for the virus early in the pandemic. Ms. Lenox, like many other actors, said she had to go on unemployment at one point and that she had tried to make ends meet by looking for jobs such as dog walking on websites like ZipRecruiter.

She was one of more than 100 local stage actors who were featured on the show this year, according to Warren Leight, its showrunner.

“I just made the call early on: ‘Let’s make this the year where the first pool of actors we go to is the Broadway actors, the off-Broadway actors,’” he said. “It really does seem like the right thing to do. Logistically, it’s easier to hire locally.”

The effects of the pandemic have been felt most acutely in the cities like Los Angeles and New York, where, at least in prepandemic times, roughly two thirds of the country’s film, television and theatrical jobs were located. In New York City, for instance, officials have estimated that employment in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector fell by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020.

But there are signs of a rebound. By the end of last year, television shoot days in Los Angeles had recovered to roughly 62 percent of what they had been in 2019, according to FilmLA, the official film office for the city and county of Los Angeles. After taking a hiatus during the winter as an outbreak hobbled California, TV production in the city is approaching normal, prepandemic levels, FilmLA reported last week, even as other sectors of the entertainment industry lag behind.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/arts/television/tv-production-coronavirus.html