Archives for April 2022

He entered the Army in 1953 and served at Camp Polk (now Fort Polk) in Louisiana. His admiration for Sinatra’s music swelled when he listened to his records on the radio at night in the barracks. “Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about,” he told Vice. “If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about.”

Mr. Mark stopped using his surname early in his career but never changed it legally.

After his discharge in 1955, Mr. Mark got a job at the Red Hill Inn, a jazz club in Pennsauken, N.J., as a talent coordinator. His responsibilities included driving artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington to and from their hotels. They would often talk about Sinatra, further stoking Mr. Mark’s interest in his music. More important, he was hired around that time as a disc jockey at WHAT-AM, a jazz station in Philadelphia. He hosted a one-hour show called “Sounds in the Night.”

One night in 1955, when the station’s overnight D.J. did not show up, Mr. Mark was asked to fill in.

“It was a show called ‘Rock and Roll Kingdom,’ and I wasn’t going to do that,” he told The New Yorker in 2021. He asked his audience what they wanted to hear, and one fan suggested playing an hour of Sinatra’s music. “The all-night guy got fired for not coming in, and they kept me on.” Several months later, in 1956, the show formally began its run as “Friday With Frank.”

By the early 1960s, Mr. Mark’s popularity in Philadelphia was growing. He was hosting “Friday With Frank” and a daily six-hour jazz show, “Mark of Jazz,” which would run for nearly two decades, on WHAT. He also had a weekly jazz program on local public television.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/arts/music/sid-mark-dead.html

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that rates the age appropriateness of media and technology, gives Zigazoo high marks for its lack of images of violence, drugs and “sexy stuff.” There are no comments on the app, only positive-reinforcement mechanisms, and each video is moderated by a human being. But though Common Sense’s review states that consumerism is “not present” on the app, it is everywhere. Every time I opened Zigazoo, I learned that I had earned more “Zigabucks,” the platform’s in-app currency, for dutifully visiting every day. Also, I was constantly prompted to care about Zigazoo’s latest NFT drop: images featuring JJ, the cartoon infant star of CoComelon.

CoComelon is a wildly popular YouTube channel featuring crudely rendered C.G.I. videos and repetitive nursery rhymes, like “Dentist Song” and “Pasta Song.” Though it has no discernible value beyond its ability to hypnotize toddlers for long stretches of time, it has taken over the world; recently the brand partnered with the Saudi government to construct a physical CoComelon village in Riyadh, perhaps as a part of Saudi Arabia’s larger public-relations effort to become known for something other than torturing dissidents. (Let’s call that “practicing essential geopolitical skills.”)

Anyway, children love it: The CoComelon NFTs were sold out before I could snag one, so I waited for the Qai Qai NFTs to drop, watching the countdown clock on the Zigazoo app for my moment to “invest.” Qai Qai’s NFTs were selling for $5.99 to $49.99 a pack, with more cash buying you a higher likelihood of acquiring not just a “common” NFT but a “rare” or “legendary” one, a distinction that went unexplained. (Though every Zigazoo NFT is linked to a unique digital record on the Flow blockchain, the app did not make clear how many of these records it was assigning to each Qai Qai image, which makes it even harder to guess just how worthless it might be in the future.) I selected a “rare” pack of Qai Qai collectibles for $19.99, answered a “Parents only!” multiple-choice multiplication problem to prove I was an adult (although I knew my multiplication tables better when I was a kid), and ultimately was rewarded with four still images of Qai Qai and one “rare” repeating video of Qai Qai executing the “Heel Toe Dance.”

Over the next few days, I was invited to trade my NFTs with other users and participate in NFT-related challenges like “#QaiQaiDrop: What new toy are you hoping to get?” and “CoComelon: Can you show us your favorite pajamas?” Each challenge’s “winner” was rewarded with yet more NFTs. The real challenge in this case appears to be to “express yourself by helping to hype a new tech gimmick to a younger class of consumers.” This concluded my NFT education on Zigazoo.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/arts/nft-zigazoo-qai-qai.html

Recruits have also fretted that the shares included in their offer letters could quickly become devalued if Mr. Musk took Twitter private.

Twitter’s recruiting problem could balloon further if current employees quit, as some have warned they would do if Mr. Musk took over. Other employees worried about layoffs or the loss of work visas under Mr. Musk, and raised questions about these issues with Mr. Agrawal.

Managers responsible for hiring have been asked to keep track of how many prospective employees turn down job offers because of fears about Mr. Musk, according to internal communications reviewed by The Times.

Employees have also wondered: Could he also move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, as he did with Tesla? Could he end the company’s flexibility about returning to the office, which has become a selling point for employees and recruits? Mr. Musk, after all, fought with officials in California to keep his car factory open early in the pandemic.

Mr. Agrawal tried to calm his work force. In the question-and-answer session on Monday, he urged employees to “operate Twitter as we always have,” adding that “how we run the company, the decisions we make, and the positive changes we drive — that will be on us, and under our control.”

The stress at the mention of Mr. Musk is a stark contrast to the welcome he enjoyed from employees two years ago. Although some employees at the event in 2020 said they were skeptical of Mr. Musk, many of them listened attentively as he gave his advice for Twitter: The company should step up its moderation, he said, by doing more to weed out bots and scammers from the actual humans using the platform.

“By the way, do you want to run Twitter?” Mr. Dorsey asked Mr. Musk.

The assembled Twitter employees laughed. Mr. Musk did not immediately answer.

Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/twitter-employees-elon-musk.html

Bridget Todd, a director at UltraViolet, a women’s rights organization, said Mr. Musk’s deal could be treacherous for online speech because he might not be in favor of Twitter’s community standards and barring users who violated those standards.

“This is a massively slippery slope,” she said.

In Washington, Republicans, who have long accused Twitter of censoring their views, cheered Mr. Musk’s deal.

“I am hopeful that Elon Musk will help rein in Big Tech’s history of censoring users that have a different viewpoint,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a tweet.

Mr. Trump told Fox News on Monday that he would stick with posting on his own social network, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter,” he said, but added that he hoped “Elon buys Twitter, because he’ll make improvements to it.”

Democrats were restrained on the deal. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, declined to comment on Twitter’s sale specifically but said that President Biden “has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms” and that they should be “held accountable for the harms that they cause.” She said Mr. Biden supported changes to online-speech and antitrust laws.

Beyond speech issues, Twitter faces questions about its business. For years, the company has struggled to gain new users and keep others returning. Its advertising business, which is the main way Twitter makes revenue, has been inconsistent. Twitter has not turned a profit for eight of the last 10 years.

Last year, the company lost $493 million on revenue of $5.57 billion. In contrast, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, had profits of $39 billion and revenue of $118 billion last year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/musk-twitter-sale.html

Wall Street was likely to view the openness of Twitter’s board to Mr. Musk’s bid as “the beginning of the end for Twitter as a public company with Musk likely now on a path to acquire the company unless a second bidder comes into the mix,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note on Sunday.

Mr. Musk’s offer for Twitter is a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he began investing in the company in late January. But Twitter’s shares traded higher than Mr. Musk’s bid for much of last year.

Several analysts have said they expected Twitter’s board to only accept a bid that valued it at a minimum of $60 a share. Twitter’s stock rose above $70 a share last year when the company announced goals to double its revenue, but has since fallen to around $48 as investors have questioned its ability to meet those targets.

Mr. Musk, 50, has made clear that he sees many deficiencies in Twitter as a social media service. He has said that he wants to “transform” the company as a “platform for free speech around the globe” and that it requires vast improvements in its product and policies.

Mr. Musk has tried to negotiate with Twitter using the service itself, threatening in several tweets that he might take his bid directly to the company’s shareholders in what is called a “tender offer.” A tender offer is a hostile maneuver in which an outside party circumvents a company’s board by asking shareholders to sell their shares directly to them.

He has also acted erratically on the platform, raising concerns over how he might manage the service should he be in charge of it. On Saturday, Mr. Musk took aim at the billionaire Bill Gates, saying that Mr. Gates had taken a “short” position on the stock of Tesla, which meant that Mr. Gates was betting the carmaker’s shares would fall. On Sunday, Mr. Musk tweeted that he was “moving on” from making fun of Mr. Gates.

Even so, Mr. Musk maintains amicable ties with some high-ranking members of Twitter. Over the weekend, Mr. Musk traded friendly tweets with Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and a board member. Mr. Dorsey stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in November and soon will be leaving its board.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/technology/twitter-board-elon-musk.html

Forty-three weeks ago, in June 2021, the rapper, singer and Baudelaire-referencing cultural omnivore Tyler, the Creator released “Call Me if You Get Lost,” his sixth studio album.

Critics were fascinated by its high-concept throwback to the style of mid-2000s mixtapes, and fans embraced Tyler’s return to straight-up rap after a detour into neo-soul on “Igor,” his previous album. “Call Me” opened at No. 1, appeared on numerous year-end critics’ lists, and this month took home the Grammy Award for best rap album — just as “Igor” did two years ago.

But something had been missing since the initial rollout of “Call Me”: its vinyl edition. As early as August of last year, Tyler had hinted at his frustration with the delay. “Call Me,” like so many other pandemic-era albums, had seen its vinyl version pushed back by many months. The reason for Tyler’s delay was unclear, but many other artists found their LPs held up by supply-chain chokeholds and the limited production capacity of the overtaxed vinyl industrial complex.

Now “Call Me” has finally been released on vinyl — and returned to No. 1.

The album tops the latest Billboard album chart with the equivalent of 59,000 sales in the United States. Of those, 49,500 were for the vinyl version of “Call Me” — on two LPs — which were sold only through Tyler’s website. It is the biggest week for a hip-hop album on vinyl since 1991, when reliable data used to track music sales began by SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, the name of the data service that now powers Billboard’s charts.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/arts/music/tyler-the-creator-vinyl-billboard-chart.html