Archives for May 2022

At Twitter, some employees soured on Mr. Agrawal, according to 10 current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He told workers he could not share information on the deal with Mr. Musk as details were hashed out. He was also initially quiet at company meetings, they said, and was absent from an internal employee chat.

Mr. Agrawal’s supporters said he was legally restricted from sharing information about the deal, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, and internally he expressed his frustrations with being unable to initially say more about the deal. After the agreement was signed, Twitter held staff meetings and sent more than a dozen emails to update workers. Last week, Twitter let employees ask Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal and policy, and Ned Segal, the chief financial officer, questions about the deal.

Mr. Agrawal’s defenders said he is more gregarious and charming in smaller group settings. They added that his changes were long overdue, especially at a company that had been resistant to change.

In Slack messages and group chats, other employees have expressed excitement for Mr. Musk’s ownership, believing his passion for Twitter could re-energize the company.

But Mr. Agrawal has detractors. At company meetings in recent weeks, he sometimes said that nothing would change “at this time.” Some employees have mocked his comments, creating memes of Mr. Agrawal making those repeated assurances, the people said.

Many employees remain uncertain about their futures at the company, several people said. Some are also bristling at the golden parachutes that Mr. Agrawal and other top executives will receive if they are fired after the deal with Mr. Musk closes, the people said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/technology/twitter-elon-musk-parag-agrawal.html

Mr. Murphy started college at Princeton but left to join the Navy, serving from 1943 to 1946. The Navy sent him to Cornell, where he earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. He applied to Harvard Business School but was rejected and worked as an oil salesman for Texaco for a year. He later applied to Harvard again and was accepted. He graduated in 1949.

He met Mr. Buffett in the early 1970s, and Mr. Buffett bought 3 percent of Capital Cities. After the price went up, Mr. Buffett sold the stock, that way missing the huge increases in share prices to come.

“Temporary insanity,” Mr. Buffett later said of his decision to sell.

Mr. Lowenstein wrote that Mr. Murphy began checking with Mr. Buffett before making many of his bigger business decisions. The two once proposed buying Walter Annenberg’s publishing empire, which included The Philadelphia Inquirer and TV Guide, on a 50-50 basis for $1 billion. Mr. Annenberg declined to sell.

When Mr. Murphy bought ABC, Mr. Buffett volunteered to buy three million shares, or 18 percent, of Capital Cities stock, as a defensive measure to help Mr. Murphy fight any hostile takeover attempts. Mr. Buffett authorized Mr. Murphy to decide how to vote his shares. (Mr. Buffett also hoped to make money on the investment, which he did.)

Mr. Murphy’s wife, Suzanne (Crosby) Murphy, died in 2009. He is survived by three daughters, Emilie Murphy, Kathleen Murphy and Mary Conlin; a son, Thomas S. Murphy Jr.; and nine grandchildren. A brother, Charlie, and a sister, Betty Murphy Orteig, died before him.

Mr. Murphy liked to brag that he never went to work. In an interview for Harvard Business School, he said: “I just loved fixing things, or figuring out how to make deals and things like that, and I couldn’t wait to get to the office in the morning. So I never went to work. Not many people can say that. It’s an unbelievable luxury to be able to say something like that.”

Maia Coleman contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/business/media/thomas-s-murphy-dead.html

But countries nevertheless clamped down. In France and Austria, customers of Google’s internet measurement software, Google Analytics, which many websites use to collect audience figures, were told this year not to use the program anymore because it could expose the personal data of Europeans to American spying.

Last year, the French government scrapped a deal with Microsoft to handle health-related data after the authorities were criticized for awarding the contract to an American firm. Officials pledged to work with local firms instead.

Companies have adjusted. Microsoft said it was taking steps so customers could more easily keep data within certain geographical areas. Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud computing service, said it let customers control where in Europe data was stored

In France, Spain and Germany, Google Cloud has signed deals in the last year with local tech and telecom providers so customers can guarantee that a local company oversees their data while they use Google’s products.

“We want to meet them where they are,” said Ksenia Duxfield-Karyakina, who leads Google Cloud’s public policy operations in Europe.

Liam Maxwell, director of government transformation at Amazon Web Services, said in a statement that the company would adapt to European regulations but that customers should be able to buy cloud computing services based on their needs, “not limited by where the technology provider is headquartered.”

Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist who won lawsuits against Facebook over its data-sharing practices, said more disputes loom over digital information. He predicted the U.S.-E.U. data deal announced by Mr. Biden would be struck down again by the European Court of Justice because it still did not meet E.U. privacy standards.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/data-privacy-laws.html

After five years, Kendrick Lamar has returned with a No. 1 album — his new “Mr. Morale the Big Steppers,” which notched the year’s biggest opening — though Harry Styles is on deck with what may well be an even splashier start.

“Mr. Morale the Big Steppers,” the much-anticipated follow-up to Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “DAMN.” (2017), has become his fourth album to reach the top spot on the chart. It had the equivalent of 295,500 sales in the United States in its first week out, including 343 million clicks on streaming services, according to Luminate, the music tracking service formerly known as MRC Data.

Its total was a bit better than what Bad Bunny had for “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened last week with 274,000 sales. But the fine print shows a close match. Bad Bunny’s album actually had more streams: 357 million, still the best this year by that measurement. Lamar ended up with a greater overall number because “Mr. Morale” sold three times as many copies as a complete package, moving 35,500, versus about 11,500 for “Un Verano.”

Still, both titles will likely be dwarfed by Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which immediately dominated streaming services upon its release last week and should also be a big hit on vinyl.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/arts/music/kendrick-lamar-billboard-mr-morale.html

Several who worked alongside her said her fearlessness in war zones was double-edged — it produced some good television but also sometimes made them question her judgment. On occasion, they said, she led her producers and crew into situations that they thought were not worth the risk. Some cameramen refused to work with her, one of the former colleagues added, and she could be dismissive of the security teams the network hired to keep its journalists safe.

One former CBS producer who worked with her, Peter Klein, said in an interview that the structure of a large newsroom was a moderating influence. “There’s a system in place in newsrooms that offer checks and balances,” said Mr. Klein, founder of the Global Reporting Centre in British Columbia, a nonprofit. “Most of us need that system — but she really needed that system. And we knew that from the beginning,” he said.

“Now she’s just unfiltered,” Mr. Klein added.

The former CBS journalists said that spending more than a decade reporting from war zones started to take its toll on her emotionally, as it would on almost anyone repeatedly subjected to the trauma of combat. And they said they noticed a considerable change in her demeanor — seemingly more paranoid at times, erratic and deferential to her military sources — after she was sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. In that attack, a mob of men grabbed her, separated her from her crew and tore off her clothes in what she described as a “merciless” attack. She was hospitalized for several days.

The next year, Ms. Logan gave a speech that would presage her downfall at CBS. The American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had just been attacked, killing four Americans and igniting a firestorm among Republicans who accused Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, of underestimating the threat terrorists posed to Americans.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/business/media/lara-logan-cbs-news.html

Like his mother, Mr. Angell became a New Yorker fiction editor, discovering and nurturing writers, including Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Garrison Keillor. For a while he occupied his mother’s old office — an experience, he told an interviewer, that was “the weirdest thing in the world.” He also worked closely with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ruth Jhabvala and V.S. Pritchett.

Mr. Angell was known, too, for his annual page-long holiday poem, titled “Greetings, Friends!” The poem, a New Yorker tradition, began in 1932 and was originally written by Frank Sullivan. Mr. Angell wrote “Greetings, Friends!” from 1976 until 1998, when it went on hiatus, and restarted it in 2008. In recent years, the poem has been written by Ian Frazier.

In his holiday poems, Mr. Angell mixed the boldface names, from high culture and low, that had filtered through that year. Here is a snippet from 1992:

Here’s where hearts grow rife or rifer,
Near Donna Tartt and Michelle Pfeiffer,
With B.B. King and his Lucille,
And Dee Dee Myers and Brian Friel!

Some of his rhymes could be read mischievously. “Yo! Santa man, grab some sky,” he wrote in 1992, “And drop a sock on Robert Bly.”

“I’m not sure there’s ever been a writer so strong, and an editor so important, all at once, at a magazine since the days of H.L. Mencken running The American Mercury,” David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. “Roger was a vigorous editor, and an intellect with broad tastes.”

Mr. Angell became a baseball writer by accident. He was already a fan in 1962 when, he told an interviewer for Salon, he was asked by William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, to “go down to spring training and see what you find.”

It was an auspicious year to be a young baseball writer: the first season of the New York Mets. “They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart,” Mr. Angell said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/sports/roger-angell-dead.html