A little over a week ago, Drake announced a surprise new album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” and released it online a few hours later. Just like clockwork, it has now gone to No. 1, becoming Drake’s 11th album to top the Billboard 200 chart.

“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh studio LP — and his 17th full-length release overall, counting compilations and mixtapes — opened with the equivalent of 204,000 sales in the United States, including 250 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Those figures were enough to send the dance-heavy “Honestly” to No. 1 by a comfortable margin. But they were low by the standards of Drake, who for more than a decade has routinely posted gigantic numbers for new work.

The album’s 204,000 equivalent sales — a measurement that reconciles streams with downloads and any traditional album purchases — are a fraction of the 613,000 that Drake posted for the opening of his last studio album, “Certified Lover Boy” (2021). And they are Drake’s lowest since “Care Package,” a compilation of previously released tracks, which opened (at No. 1, naturally) with 109,000 in 2019. Apart from “Care Package,” no Drake album has begun with fewer than half a million equivalents since “What a Time to Be Alive,” a mixtape with the rapper Future from 2015, when streaming represented a minority of overall music consumption. (As of last year, streaming makes up 83 percent of recorded music sales revenue in the United States.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/arts/music/drake-honestly-nevermind-billboard-chart.html

Ms. Dakhil, however, decided to investigate for herself. “I made a concerted effort to get to know Kareem and have been pleasantly surprised,” she said. “He is brimming over with high levels of EQ” — emotional intelligence — “and yet he doesn’t pretend to know everything. He’s curious and listens. And most of all, I am convinced that he really does love movies.”

Movies have been a passion for Mr. Daniel since childhood. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his mother was a nurse and father a professor. He spent most Saturdays at the Evergreen Plaza multiplex, once taking in back-to-back screenings of “The Empire Strikes Back.” When it came to picking a career, however, his parents insisted on practicality — hence his dutiful decision to study electrical engineering at Stanford University.

At Disney, he is known for peppering conversations with movie lines, sometimes playfully testing subordinates to guess their origin. He collects original movie posters. Over dinner with a reporter, he discussed the plot intricacies of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” about a couturier in 1950s London, and recited lines from “The Breakfast Club” and “The Color of Money.”

He has attended the Sundance Film Festival 21 times. “He sees more movies at Sundance than almost anyone, and he does it because he loves it,” said Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production.

Much has been made, both inside and outside of Disney, about the ways in which Mr. Chapek’s 2020 restructuring took away power from some (the people running the company’s moviemaking and television production divisions) and gave it to others (Mr. Daniel). Not helping has been confusion in the broader industry about how it all works.

Under the new setup, Mr. Daniel’s group sets a spending budget for Disney’s content factories. Using data and research, his teams also determine what type of content is needed (genre, length, targeted demographics) to drive growth on the company’s various platforms. “We share that with them so that they can go create against those needs,” Mr. Daniel said. “We don’t go to a hyper sense of specificity, of course, because we want to inform the creative process but not try to algorithmically program.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/business/media/kareem-daniel-disney.html

Mr. Reynolds disputed that 60 people were focused on the integrity of elections. He said Meta had hundreds of people across more than 40 teams focused on election work. With each election, he said, the company is “building teams and technologies and developing partnerships to take down manipulation campaigns, limit the spread of misinformation and maintain industry-leading transparency around political ads and pages.”

Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said the company was continuing “our efforts to protect the integrity of election conversation and keep the public informed on our approach.” For the midterms, Twitter has labeled the accounts of political candidates and provided information boxes on how to vote in local elections.

How Meta and Twitter treat elections has implications beyond the United States, given the global nature of their platforms. In Brazil, which is holding a general election in October, President Jair Bolsonaro has recently raised doubts about the country’s electoral process. Latvia, Bosnia and Slovenia are also holding elections in October.

“People in the U.S. are almost certainly getting the Rolls-Royce treatment when it comes to any integrity on any platform, especially for U.S. elections,” said Sahar Massachi, the executive director of the think tank Integrity Institute and a former Facebook employee. “And so however bad it is here, think about how much worse it is everywhere else.”

Facebook’s role in potentially distorting elections became evident after 2016, when Russian operatives used the site to spread inflammatory content and divide American voters in the U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg testified before Congress that election security was his top priority.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-midterm-elections.html

Even with such a performance, some cautioned that Mr. Musk might still change his mind about completing the deal for Twitter.

“I assume he’s operating on two tracks,” said Ann Lipton, a professor of corporate governance at Tulane Law School. “Maybe he wants to lower the price or even cancel the deal. If the deal goes through, he wants additional investors.”

She added: “Publicly talking to Twitter employees, trying to assuage their concerns, maybe gives reassurances to potential investors. But I’m not clear whether that’s his Plan B or his Plan A.”

Twitter declined to comment on the meeting, and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk had been scheduled to speak to Twitter’s employees weeks ago, but the session did not take place. Then over the past week, the San Francisco-based company began collecting questions for him from employees on its internal Slack messaging system. The meeting, scheduled to start at 9 a.m. San Francisco time, began a few minutes late, with Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, thanking Mr. Musk.

Then Mr. Musk started answering questions, including about remote work. This month, he sent memos to workers at Tesla and SpaceX saying he expected them to be in the office for 40 hours a week. Twitter’s employees have largely worked remotely in the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Musk told Twitter employees that he was open to their working remotely, given that developing software is different from showing up daily to build cars. But he said a broad lack of in-office participation could contribute to a dwindling “esprit de corps” and hoped that people would be willing to go into the office more in the future.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/elon-musk-twitter-employees-meeting.html

Cue up the celebratory tweets: A new Beyoncé album is coming.

Early Thursday, Beyoncé updated her social media accounts to indicate that a new project called “Renaissance,” apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” would be released on July 29. A link on her website allowed fans to add the album in advance to their collections on streaming music services, and her site is selling four “poses” — versions, or at least bundles — of boxed sets for the album, containing items like T-shirts, posters and a collectible box.

“Renaissance” will be Beyoncé’s first solo studio album since “Lemonade” in 2016. But she has released other material since then, including “Everything Is Love,” her joint album with Jay-Z, her husband, in 2018 (credited to the Carters); “Homecoming” (2019), a live album and concert film from her appearance at the Coachella festival; “The Lion King: The Gift,” a companion album to the 2019 remake of “The Lion King”; and songs like “Black Parade” (2020), which won a Grammy Award for best RB performance, and “Be Alive” (2021), which appeared in the movie “King Richard” and was nominated for an Oscar.

Most surprising is that Beyoncé teed up “Renaissance” in advance at all. Back in 2013, she blew up the music industry’s marketing playbook by releasing her visual album “Beyoncé” with no notice, simply telling fans via social media that it was available to purchase. The album, and its novel method of release, became a global news story, demonstrating the power of superstars on social media to corral their fans and bend the rules of the business to their favor. For years after, artists and their record companies sought to “pull a Beyoncé” and repeat her success. Of course, only Beyoncé could pull it off again, as she did in 2016 with “Lemonade.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/arts/music/beyonce-renaissance-new-album.html

As L.A. News falls apart, Marika flees her husband’s violent behavior, and the Tur family falls apart, too. But the father remains Tur’s unresolved business, cropping up to demand she pay the phone bill and unloading fresh drama when she least expects it. As when she’s covering the Boston bombing:

“Do you have a minute? Are you alone? Are you sitting down?”
Yes, Dad, I thought. What is it now?
“Well, I have some big news,” my dad said.
I took another bite of my cheeseburger, then nearly choked to death.
“I’ve decided to become a woman.”

Bob becomes Hannah, then settles on the name Zoey. Regarding her past violence against her wife and children, she blames the feeling of being trapped by a macho news identity.

Despite Tur’s efforts to understand, and Zoey’s self-appointed role as an erratic spokeswoman for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, the transition doesn’t help their relationship, and neither do Zoey’s strangely retrograde comments. “I’m already a worse driver,” Zoey claims, after starting hormones. But it’s Zoey’s demanding that Tur exonerate Bob that sticks in both Tur’s and the reader’s craw. “We need to talk about the violence,” Tur says on one call, trying to confront Zoey’s past. She writes, “It felt like my dad was using a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed.”

“I already feel different,” Zoey replies. “My female brain is getting softer and more emotional. I’m filled with calm and love.” Eventually, Zoey says, “Bob Tur is dead.”

“The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead,” Katy Tur tries to explain. “You yelled. You hit. You caused pain.”

“Who did I hit?”

“All of us,” she says. “You even kicked the dog.” But Zoey denies it even harder.

As Tur’s fame grows, Zoey worsens her attacks against her daughter, telling media outlets she is transphobic and unsupportive because, Zoey says, supporting the L.G.B.T.Q. community would “hurt her career.” By Tur’s telling, none of this appears to be true; in fact, she seems patient, given Zoey’s provocations. She’s careful in using Zoey’s name and the pronoun “her” from the moment Zoey calls her to discuss her transition, while continuing to consider her a father (“I’m still Dad,” Zoey affirms).

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/review/rough-draft-katy-tur.html

Some of Mr. Trump’s former aides testified that the Fox call shocked them but also undermined their confidence in his chances of victory. Jason Miller, a senior aide on the Trump campaign, said in video testimony played by the committee that he and others were “disappointed with Fox” for making the call but at the same time “concerned that maybe our data or our numbers weren’t accurate.”

Mr. Miller had shared none of that concern on election night, when he tweeted that Fox was a “complete outlier” whose call should be ignored by other media. At Mr. Trump’s insistence, he and other aides immediately reached out to Fox executives, producers and on-air talent to demand an explanation. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, went straight to the top, calling Mr. Murdoch. The scene played out in part on the air as Fox talent commented about the complaints raining down on them from the Trump campaign.

“Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said at one point, referring to Arnon Mishkin, the person on the decision desk who was responsible for analyzing the data and recommending when Fox issue its calls.

On Monday, Mr. Stirewalt did not describe either Mr. Murdoch or Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corporation executive chairman, as being part of the decision desk’s process. And network executives have said the Murdochs were not involved.

Though Fox News coverage is typically favorable to conservative, pro-Trump points of view, that deference has never been adopted by the decision desk, which is a separate part of the news-gathering operation overseen by Mr. Mishkin, a polling expert who is also a registered Democrat. In the days after the election, Mr. Mishkin was unwavering in his defense of the call as Fox anchors pressed him. Once, as the host Martha MacCallum peppered Mr. Mishkin with a series of “what if” scenarios that could bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of eking out a victory, Mr. Mishkin responded sarcastically, “What if frogs had wings?” (Mr. Mishkin remains a paid consultant for the network, not an employee, and will run the decision desk for the midterm elections in November.)

The decision desk was created under the former Fox News chairman and founder Roger Ailes, who relished making controversy and drawing ratings more than he cared about toeing the line for the Republican Party. Its quick calls angered Republicans on more than one occasion, including in 2012, when it was the first to project that President Barack Obama would win Ohio and a second term, and in 2018 when it declared that Republicans would lose the House of Representatives even as votes were still being cast on the West Coast.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/business/media/jan-6-hearings-fox-news.html

Mr. Goldston left his first major imprint on ABC News as an executive producer by transforming “Nightline,” the high-minded, late-night newscast hosted by Ted Koppel, a veteran of Washington coverage who left the show in 2005. Under Mr. Goldston, the “Nightline” set moved from Washington to New York, and it became a breezier program that was less focused on politics and policy and aimed to compete more with David Letterman and Jay Leno, who hosted shows in the same 11:35 p.m. slot.

The revamping was a ratings success even as some critics complained that the show spent too much time on pop culture figures like Michael Jackson, whose death in 2009 it covered extensively. Inside ABC, Mr. Goldston was credited with saving “Nightline” from cancellation.

Mr. Goldston’s former colleagues said that when he took the helm as president of ABC News in 2014 he transformed a newsroom culture that was often deferential to top correspondents and created a more top-down structure that empowered senior producers and executives.

Under his leadership, ABC News made several changes that signaled a culture shift. When Ms. Sawyer stepped down as anchor of “World News Tonight” in 2014, a few months shy of her 69th birthday, Mr. Goldston named David Muir, who was 40, to replace her. He brought the popular daytime talk show “The View” under the purview of the news division and away from ABC’s more entertainment-focused daytime unit.

Mr. Goldston had relatively few direct dealings with Mr. Trump over the years. But like most high-level news executives, he has recalled being on the receiving end of an occasional phone call from him — mainly to complain about coverage. In 2019, the two sat together at the same table for a dinner in London honoring Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

When he spoke at a Canadian media conference in early 2017, Mr. Goldston described the Trump presidency as double-edged. It was harmful, he said, to be referred to as the “enemy of the people.” But it had also given journalists “a true clarity of purpose about what we do.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/business/media/james-goldston-january-6-committee.html

The anti-L.G.B.T.Q. protests culminated in 1997, when the Southern Baptist Convention announced a formal boycott, spurred, in part, by Disney’s refusal to block Gay Days. (The church lifted the boycott in 2005.) Would Gay Days 2022 mark a return to that divisive time?

“There is definitely an added significance this year,” Tom Christ, who helped found One Magical Weekend in 2009, said by phone shortly before the event. “One way to fight back is to show our numbers.” He ended our call with an admonishment about my impending visit: “If you see any hanky-panky,” he said, “I don’t want to read about it.” (I did not witness such behavior. Unless you count a few hairy, heavyset men — bears, in gay slang — rubbing bellies at the Riptide party in a pool area deemed “bear lagoon” while wearing bootleg “Little Mermaid” trunks.)

On Saturday morning, as “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from “Mary Poppins” played on the loudspeakers, Gay Days participants streamed into Disney World. Many of them wore red shirts with the words “SAY GAY” on the back, a reference to the recent controversy. Veronica Starr, 28, and her wife, Samantha Starr, 32, rolled up with plans to ride Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. “It means a lot, to be seen,” Veronica said. “When we all wear red, we can’t be ignored.”

Both women said a favorite part of Gay Days involved running into allies, including volunteers from Free Mom Hugs, an L.G.B.T.Q. support organization. Just then, Kerri McCoy arrived with her husband and eight teenagers in red shirts, members of a group that supports L.G.B.T.Q. youth. “All the Disney cast members have been waving and telling us to have a happy Pride,” she said, using Disney’s term for company employees.

Although Disney does not sponsor or promote Gay Days, its Parks Resorts division celebrates Pride month with a barrage of rainbow merchandise in its shops, including a button featuring Mickey Mouse and a rainbow along with the slogan “Belong, Believe, Be Proud.” There were also rainbow-themed desserts.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/style/disney-gay-days.html

There’s been a lot of discussion this season about the role of understudies and standbys, who kept many shows going when other performers tested positive for the coronavirus. Can you talk about what your intention is for Sunday on that front?

In three of my six Broadway shows, I was an understudy. And I began in this industry in the ensemble. There’s no way in the world that a host like me is going to let this moment go by without acknowledging swings and understudies, but also the myriad groups of people that put in the work to keep this industry going, and that includes stage managers, dance captains, associates, hair and makeup departments, musicians. There’s not a version of the world where I don’t have something up my sleeve. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but what I am going to tell you is if it doesn’t happen, you can hold me accountable.

One of the other important developments this season was the death of Stephen Sondheim. Should we expect to see that acknowledged?

Well, we wouldn’t have the American theater as we know it without him. So while I will not tell you what we are doing, there will be a beautiful moment for the man that is Stephen Sondheim.

How has the pandemic affected you?

I’m one of the few actors who actually had opportunities — I’m painfully aware of that, and I have a bit of survivor’s guilt. But my eyes are very open, and I’ve seen all the challenges that my colleagues have faced. It’s part of why I was really passionate about coming back to host the Tonys.

What’s your sense of how Broadway is doing?

We’re taking steps in the right direction. There is work to be done, though. If you look at this crop of nominees, you look at the shows that were on Broadway this season, there were steps taken toward equity and inclusion. I’m happy to see more faces that look like mine. I’m happy to see that the honorees are more diverse.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/theater/ariana-debose-tony-awards.html