The idea behind the Fairphone is that if you want a phone with new technology, you can get it without having to replace your current device entirely — and if something goes wrong with the phone, like you drop it, it can be easily fixed. That makes the Fairphone the antithesis of most smartphones today and shows how tech companies can design the gadgets differently, for durability and sustainability.

How it could be with the hardware

Take your iPhone or Android phone and look at it closely. Notice how it is shut tight with unique screws that require special screwdrivers. Apple even invented its own screw.

But the Fairphone comes with a small screwdriver that invites you to open up the phone. So, when I began testing it, that was the first thing I did.

Taking the Fairphone apart turned out to be a breeze. Removing its plastic cover revealed its camera, battery, speakers and other components. They were held in place with ordinary screws that could be quickly taken out with the screwdriver. In less than five minutes, I removed all of those parts. In about the same amount of time, I reassembled the phone.

The experience of taking the phone apart was empowering. I had the confidence that if I had to do a repair or some basic maintenance, like swapping in a new camera or battery, I could do so in minutes and for cheap. (Fairphone charges $30 for a new battery and $80 for a new camera.)

Disassembling my iPhone, on the other hand, was a nightmare.

When I took the Apple device apart during a previous test, it involved removing the proprietary screws with a special screwdriver and melting the glue that held the case together. To remove the battery, I had to use tweezers to yank on the tiny strips of glue underneath it. Even though I eventually succeeded in replacing the battery, I broke the iPhone’s screen in the process — and a replacement display cost about $300.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/technology/personaltech/smartphone-lasts-decade.html

Since 2004, Timothy Krueger has taught history to younger teenagers in the North Syracuse district in upstate New York. His students once raised a bogus TikTok conspiracy theory that Helen Keller faked her blindness and deafness. Others had said they were unvaccinated against Covid-19 because their parents had told them, inaccurately, that the shot would make them infertile.

Mr. Krueger began including more lessons about evaluating evidence and fact-checking. In November, a pilot program he helped design with the American Federation of Teachers will be piloted in Cleveland, helping in part to train educators to teach media and information literacy using “safe” methods to shield them from harassment.

“We’re under attack — it’s now such an openly polarized society, where teachers are afraid to talk about hot topics or controversial issues,” Mr. Krueger said.

But, he added, teachers are “Step 1” in showing young people how to think clearly for themselves: “If we want them to be a truly intelligent constituency, we have to start now.”

New educational efforts are constantly being deployed. Twitter and Google have so-called pre-bunking initiatives to warn users about common misinformation tactics. The nonprofit News Literacy Project, which said the number of students using its free Checkology curriculum surged 248 percent between 2018 and 2022, recently introduced a short elections misinformation guide on Flip, a video-based online platform for teachers.

But Peter Adams, a former teacher who heads research and design for the News Literacy Project, is pushing for a broader consensus on the types of skills students should learn and the results educators want. Without it, he worries that lessons could backfire.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/technology/misinformation-students-media-literacy.html

Vice faces financial headwinds this year as it tries to achieve a full year of profitability, which would be a milestone for the company. A memo obtained by The Times sent to employees in June by the company’s chief executive, Nancy Dubuc, said the company’s revenue forecast was flat against the same period last year, meaning that the company was “slightly behind” its overall financial target.

“This means being ruthless about areas of the business that are not growing and focusing our energies on areas that are,” Ms. Dubuc wrote.

Vice’s deals with commercial partners have caused internal strife in the past. In 2018, as Vice Media was preparing to introduce a media brand funded by Philip Morris called Change Incorporated, focused on persuading readers to quit cigarettes, members of the company’s communications team drafted a memo raising concerns that the deal could cause “anger, frustration and widespread resentment within Vice,” according to a document obtained by The Times.

The company planned to work with Fleishman Hillard, a public relations firm, to develop a crisis communications plan, according to a document viewed by The Times, and proposed developing a “response site” in the event of a leak. Vice also planned to identify “key opinion leaders” on staff, “expose them” to the project and “take them away for a day or two and get them to absorb all this.”

Richard Tofel, a former news executive at ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal, said news organizations should try to avoid entering into voluntary commercial agreements with governments whenever possible and condemned Mr. Khashoggi’s murder.

But he added that news organizations should also be careful not to draw up a list of “bad guys” and “good guys” because it has the potential to compromise their coverage.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/business/media/vice-saudi-arabia.html

Alden operates some 200 newspapers across the country, including The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News and The Denver Post, through MediaNews Group, a company in which it has a controlling stake. Journalists have decried Alden’s strategy of slashing costs at daily and weekly publications, referring to the company’s leaders “vulture capitalists.” The publicity-averse Mr. Freeman, who declined to comment for this article, said in a rare interview with The Washington Post in 2020 that Alden rescues local papers that would otherwise go out of business.

Since the start of the pandemic, when not busy overseeing Alden’s $630 million purchase of the Tribune Publishing newspaper chain, Mr. Freeman, who is in his 40s, has gone on another kind of spree centered on Hamptons hospitality businesses.

The East Hampton Star, the paper of record on the East End, has chronicled the activities of Mr. Freeman and a group of investors in taking over the leases of or buying venues including EHP Resort and Marina in East Hampton, the Harbor Bistro in East Hampton, the Inn Spot in Hampton Bays and the former Red Bar Brasserie in Southampton.

Mr. Freeman has also enlarged his footprint in Montauk, which is technically a hamlet in the town of East Hampton. He and his partners operate Buongiorno, an Italian-style bakery and espresso bar on Montauk’s South Embassy Street. In 2019, according to public records, Mr. Freeman bought a wood-shingled cottage along Ditch Plains Beach for $2.4 million. It lies a Frisbee throw from the house now under construction.

In addition, limited liability corporations that share a New Jersey address with Smith Management, the investment firm run by Mr. Freeman’s fellow Alden executive, bought two neighboring lots in the Montauk Colony subdivision, paying more than $12 million for them in 2021, according to public records. All told, Mr. Freeman and L.L.C.s affiliated with Alden and Smith Management have spent close to $20 million for a few acres of beachfront.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/style/in-montauk-big-money-moves-in-on-a-surfers-paradise.html

And the show’s differences from the books may be less significant here than their differences from Jackson’s movies. A multiseason series can’t live in the operatic intensity of a fantasy film; it needs to build a world, evolve character and develop story arcs over time.

So as Galadriel seeks allies in her hunt for Sauron, the two premiere episodes, directed luminously by J.A. Bayona, establish several story lines with Entish deliberateness. (Númenor, the Atlantis-like kingdom of humans whose rise and fall dominates the Second Age, doesn’t even figure into the opening hours.)

The ruling elves, who live in a series of Thomas Kinkade paintings, have their own ambitions. These involve sending Elrond to negotiate a pact with Durin (Owain Arthur), the gruff dwarf prince of Khazad-dûm — in the films, a ruin with a nasty Balrog infestation but here a thriving, cavernous marvel. And in an outpost deep in human country, the elf warrior Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) nurses a forbidden crush on a mortal healer, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), whose downtrodden neighbors picked Sauron’s side in the last war.

So far, so high-fantasy. But as Tolkien realized, without characters of human scale (or smaller) that have the spark of personality, the doings of the high and mighty risk becoming stiff. (This is a lesson so far lost on HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” which practically begs for an Arya Stark or Hot Pie to cut the genealogical grimness.)

That’s where the hobbits come in — or here, the Harfoots, a woodsy, secretive, nomadic band of small wanderers who live more precariously than their domesticated descendants did in Bilbo’s Shire. Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) is a variation on another Tolkien type: the young dreamer who longs for adventures. One day, fate serves one up in the form of a meteor. In its burning crater she finds a mysterious stranger (Daniel Weyman) with wizardly tendencies, whose identity remains a riddle. (Speak, friend, if you have a guess.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/arts/television/the-rings-of-power-lotr-review.html

“We face a female opponent, so we’ve added prominent female politicians who have endorsed Ted,” Mr. Felts said. (Mr. Budd’s Democratic opponent is Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.)

Other differences have been more subtle. Mr. Budd, for example, has made no changes to a page that outlines his views on abortion, but he has moved the link to that page lower on his website’s list of his positions; it was second as of July 23, but is now fifth.

J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, once listed abortion sixth on his “issues” page, but now lists it 10th.

Sometime between Aug. 7 and Aug. 26, Mr. Vance also expanded his abortion language on that page to emphasize government support — including an expanded child tax credit — to ensure “that every young mother has the resources to bring new life into the world.” He has made no changes, however, to his description of himself as “100 percent pro-life.”

Recent polls and elections underscore the dangers of the current political environment for Republicans. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and abortion bans took effect in many states, Democrats have exceeded expectations in four special House elections, and Kansans decisively rejected a constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for an abortion ban or major restrictions.

And now, the widening F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents is shining a light on the former president when Republicans would rather have voters focus on the current one.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/us/politics/abortion-trump-gop-midterms.html

“I’ve been going through a deep depression the last few months,” he continued. “And my friends, who are some of the most famous people in the world, send me 77 texts until I answer. The night of my last show, Joshua Bassett showed up at my studio within 40 minutes, on the night before New Year’s Eve, to be with me while I literally cried on the floor of my studio. And then after that, who was there for me was Ariana, who was on me to figure out what my next step was.”

Losing his syndicated show forced him to assess whether he was in the business of radio, or the business of Zach Sang. When his contract ended, he’d already been having conversations with Amazon for a few months, and he began to see Amp as an opportunity to spread his gospel of the power of radio even more widely.

The very nature of radio is changing and has been for the past two decades. First came the rise of satellite radio, which jeopardized local specificity. Same went for market consolidation. Finally, the ascension of the internet, especially as a facilitator for livestreaming and playlists, threatens — or maybe promises — to undermine the primacy of radio as a delivery system for new music. By July, Sang and his team had relocated to a more substantial studio, the one that Rick Dees, the countdown show kingpin, previously used to broadcast out of. But even though Sang knew how to operate all of the fancy equipment in the room, the entire show was run off his iPad.

“The way I view a microphone at this point in my life is, when I lost the show, it’s like I lost every friend I’ve ever made,” he said, in between playing Beyoncé songs. “It’s about regaining chemistry — it takes time. People find out every day we’re not on the radio.”

He referred to the Sang universe as a “friend group” — the combination of the characters with him in the studio and the listeners.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/arts/music/zach-sang-radio-amazon-amp.html

Mr. Bezos is still engaged, however, weighing in during budgeting season and participating in calls. He declined to comment for this article, but the Post spokeswoman said any suggestion that Mr. Bezos had become less interested in The Post was “absolutely false.”

Much of the decision-making, though, falls on Mr. Ryan, 67. A former official in the Reagan administration and chief executive of Politico, he came to The Post in 2014. He replaced Katharine Weymouth, a scion of the Graham family, which was The Post’s longtime owner. When Mr. Bezos selected him in 2014, he thanked him for taking the job, adding that Mr. Ryan was “excited to roll up his sleeves.”

The Post’s efforts to diversify its journalism beyond political coverage extends back until at least the summer of 2016. At that time, senior editors considered a plan that would expand the newspaper’s coverage to temper a decline in readership during what they thought would be the presidential administration of Hillary Clinton, according to two people with knowledge of the proposal.

The plan, code-named Operation Skyfall, was set aside after Mr. Trump won the presidential election.

As the importance of moving beyond Washington coverage became more urgent over the past year, Mr. Ryan has given some mixed signals about how ambitiously he wanted to move.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/business/media/washington-post-jeff-bezos-revenue.html

In 2017, British Vogue “had languished creatively and tonally, speaking almost exclusively to an upper-middle-to-upper-class pocket of Britishness,” he writes. “The magazine felt to me like it was drifting ever further from the beating heart of the country — to say nothing of the world at large. I didn’t think it reflected the Britain I knew and felt a part of.”

This Britain is one that celebrates the diversity of its people, something Enninful has worked to highlight not only at British Vogue but throughout his three decades in fashion, an industry he describes as “borderless.” He acknowledges that when he got to Vogue he stopped rebelling against commercial fashion, accepting that he was now a part of it. Still, his commitment to inclusivity, to portraying a world that is real and welcoming to those who’ve previously been excluded, has never waned. “I became known to the staff as ‘the guy who shoots Black girls,’” he writes, “which was pretty reductive, but fine by me if it at least meant more women of color in the pages.”

The industry insights are intriguing, but some of the most memorable and endearing passages in this book consist of Enninful’s more personal disclosures. There’s the time he “wanted to make a show of domesticity” for Maxwell, but his skills in the kitchen were so nonexistent that he “ordered in some homey-looking fare from a local restaurant and passed it off as my own”; and there’s the wardrobe malfunction at Buckingham Palace the day he became a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He writes poignantly about his close relationship with his mother, his adoration of his siblings and his tense relationship with his father, who “told us all that if he found out we were gay he’d slit our throats,” and who kicked Edward out of the house when he learned he’d been skipping school to go to showroom appointments and photo shoots. The memoir truly shines in its most intimate revelations of Enninful’s sobriety and depression, of what it felt like to soar professionally while struggling personally — and of how he learned to lean on those who love him most.

“A Visible Man” is about a life in the media and fashion worlds, but it is also about a man of many identities finding his voice in a world that has not always wanted to hear it. Enninful is making that world a more beautiful and welcoming place than he found it.

Tariro Mzezewa, a former national correspondent at The Times, is a reporter who writes about culture and style.

A VISIBLE MAN: A Memoir | By Edward Enninful | Illustrated | 270 pp. | Penguin Press | $30

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/books/review/edward-enninful-a-visible-man.html

On Truth Social, one user with more than 31,000 followers and three Qs in his profile name posted an image in May of Mr. Trump sitting on a throne with a crown and a Q emblem behind him. Mr. Trump reposted the image.

Mr. Trump has also amplified messages that included the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA (for “where we go one, we go all) and that referred to a “storm,” a description for the mass arrests that the QAnon faithful believe will be used to destroy the deep state. Other messages later backed by Mr. Trump included a call for “civil war” and claims that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, was a “coup,” according to the report.

Mr. Trump also shared messages at least a dozen times from an account that posted about the “storm” and “a war against sex traffickers and pedophiles” to its more than 36,000 followers, NewsGuard found. Ricky Shiffer, a man killed by the police this month after he tried to breach the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati office, had also engaged with the same account.

Of the QAnon accounts identified on Truth Social by NewsGuard, 47 have red verification badges, which the platform says it reserves for “VIPs” with “an account of public interest.” Data.ai, which monitors app store activity, said Truth Social had been downloaded three million times in the United States on Apple iOS systems through Aug. 26.

Truth Social executives and backers have also interacted with QAnon supporters on the platform. Devin Nunes, a California Republican who resigned from Congress after 19 years to become Truth Social’s chief executive, regularly engaged with and tagged @Q. That account, which has more than 218,000 followers, has used “trust the plan” and other phrases associated with the conspiracy theory, NewsGuard said.

Mr. Trump teamed up with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, to start Truth Social. Digital World’s chief executive, Patrick Orlando, has also reposted QAnon catchphrases for his nearly 10,000 followers on the platform, according to the report — which a representative for Mr. Orlando described as a “false and defamatory” accusation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/technology/qanon-truth-social-trump.html