Under Mr. Xi, the party’s traditionally suspicious stance against businesspeople who are politically active or outspoken has worsened. Wang Gongquan, a former venture capitalist who financed advocacy for more liberal social and political policies, was among the first high-profile individuals jailed after Mr. Xi came to power. Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate tycoon, was sentenced last year to 18 years in prison after he repeatedly criticized Mr. Xi’s policies, including the government’s mishandling of the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.

In private chatrooms and behind closed doors, some people are asking what signal Beijing is sending to the private sector by arresting Mr. Sun. Outspoken and generous, Mr. Sun is in some ways the model of the civic-minded businessman the party extols. He has built a town — Dawu City — around his company’s campus in rural Hebei Province, complete with a hospital with 1,000 beds.

“My dream,” he once said, “is to build a modern city in the countryside.”

Mr. Sun, 66, was born in Xushui, in Hebei Province, about a two-hour drive south of Beijing. He joined the People’s Liberation Army after graduating from middle school. He left the army eight years later and moved back to his hometown to work at the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China.

A curious and restless soul, he studied college law and took Chinese literature courses in his spare time. In 1985, he quit his banking job and started a business with 1,000 chickens and 50 pigs. His company, Dawu Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Group, now employs about 9,000 people, many from nearby villages.

As his business grew, Mr. Sun sought out liberal intellectuals in Beijing. By the spring of 2003, he was becoming a voice for farmers and entrepreneurs’ rights, giving speeches at top Chinese universities.

After irritating the authorities, he was arrested on accusations of illegal fund-raising. His new friends leapt to his defense. Legal scholars argued that the law he was accused of violating had been written in a way that gave the authorities broad discretion to charge businessmen who fell out of favor.

Liu Xiaobo, the human rights activist who later became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and who died in prison in 2017, explained then that Mr. Sun “poses a tremendous challenge for the current system.” As an entrepreneur, wrote Mr. Liu, Mr. Sun despised bribery, had the financial resources to act independently and had the courage to speak up and urge political reform.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/business/china-sun-dawu.html

“We really pride ourselves on being very specifically designed for the clinical setting,” said Mr. Scarpone-Lambert, 21, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who met Ms. Mancillas, 36, in 2019 at a hackathon sponsored by Johnson Johnson that encouraged nurses to collaborate on solutions to health care problems.

They were able to finance the product, which went through 30 prototypes and iterations, with grants and personal money as well as funding from start-up accelerators and awards, Ms. Mancillas said. Through their start-up, Lumify Care, the pair raised about $50,000.

On its face, uNight Light, which retails for $22, may not seem different from other portable lights, such as those used by cyclists and runners. However, it has features that distinguish it from others on the market, including different light modes — blue, red and white. The blue light can help promote alertness, Mr. Scarpone-Lambert said.

“Your red light can be used to really kind of amplify your main vision,” he said. “And it’s also less disruptive than bright white light. The white light can be used for dental assessments and kind of like if you need to look at something a little bit more closely, like blood or fluid.”

Some studies have shown that the color red can trigger a person’s fight-or-flight reaction and psychological responses, such as fear or anxiety, leading the body to feel more alert, according to Mariana G. Figueiro, former director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. More research is needed, however, she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/health/wearable-night-light.html

The organization has also enlisted name-brand chefs, like Sean Brock in Nashville, Stephanie Izard in Chicago and Dominique Crenn in San Francisco, to produce meals at their own restaurants and serve as ambassadors for the program, recruiting new chefs in their home cities.

Alma’s experiment began in March, when the city ordered all restaurants to close. Ms. Stein and her friend Emily Lerman, an owner of a catering company, decided to join forces to feed the community and keep their staffs employed. In April, they partnered with the chef José Andrés’s nonprofit food-relief organization, World Central Kitchen, to cook as many as 1,500 meals a week. In August, they formally named their new business Alkimiah — Arabic for alchemy.

Government reimbursement rates for charitable meals tend to hover around $3 per meal. In contrast, World Central Kitchen pays $10. The higher rate, Ms. Stein said, was key to her program’s success: It allowed Alkimiah to serve food that was a sharp upgrade from the typical fare at community and senior centers.

Its meals generally follow the strict “EAT-Lancet” guidelines for planetary health, which emphasize whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts, and limit meat and dairy. A typical lunch may be caramelized onion dal with rice and curried cauliflower, or Cajun salmon and grits with tomato-coconut gravy and roasted broccoli. The higher reimbursement rate also allows Alkimiah to pay its cooks $16 an hour, plus benefits.

“José Andrés saved us,” Ms. Stein said. “Without him, we wouldn’t have been able to stay open or solidify next steps to expand the initiative.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/dining/restaurants-food-insecurity.html

Several companies, for example, are developing alternatives to leather, since hides are particularly problematic, from the methane-producing cows that produce it to tanning methods that often involve toxic chemicals like chromium. Vegan leather, despite its environmentally friendly name, is no better because it uses plastic, said Theanne Schiros, a materials scientist and an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

One alternative is mushroom leather, which relies on mycelium, or mushroom roots, to produce an animal-free alternative. Mycelium has been used for thousands of years in a variety of ways, Dr. Schiros said, even to dress wounds, but entrepreneurs and designers have set their sights higher.

In addition to Bolt Threads, a fiber and material producer that gained attention last fall when it announced its product and collaboration with several designers, others companies, like Mycoworks, are developing “leathers” from mycelium.

Mycowork’s chief executive, Matthew Scullin, said that while the company was exploring uses in automotive upholstery, the current emphasis was on apparel and footwear.

F.I.T.’s Dr. Schiros is part of a team at Columbia University working on a bioleather alternative; the latest prototype, she said, is “a naturally dyed, microbe-grown sneaker that is a part of Slow Factory’s One x One initiative,” referring to the nonprofit that works on sustainability and climate issues.

The pandemic has forced her to work from home, rather than at a lab, but she has found a clever workaround.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/fashion/sustainability-clothes-environment-technology.html

Finding a suitable replacement was the least of my concerns when I moved to New York in the early ’90s. The city, after all, was the world capital of Jewish baking. It had the best bagels, the best rugelach. The brash, bumptious New Yorkers I’d encountered in college had assured me that everything in New York was “the best.”

On a childhood visit, I’d marveled at the city’s Jewish delis, black-hatted Hasidim and Jewish mayor, all sources of wonder to a boy from Savannah, where Jews were a tiny minority. Surely this city had world-class rye bread.

For years, I sampled the city’s brands and bakeries. One of my childhood friends, a kid named David Levy, had a poster in his bedroom, purloined from a famous ad campaign of the era, of a smiling Black child eating a rye sandwich under the slogan, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

I tried Levy’s. I didn’t love it.

I tried the other supermarket brands. I picked up loaves from the best Jewish bakeries on the Lower East Side and uptown. I ordered sandwiches on rye in the famous Jewish delis (“the best!”) in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where I lived. None equaled the rye of my memory.

After a few years, a startling truth began to creep up on me: That rye was a rare thing.

And a corollary: Perhaps, in this case, New York did not have the best.

I stipulate that I do not claim to have tried every rye bread out there. Nor have I carried out a rigorous side-by-side blind tasting. I cannot assert with any objective authority that Gottlieb’s rye was the best in the world ever.

My wife wisely suggested that perhaps the best rye was whichever one you grew up with. I’m sure there’s truth to that. Especially if you grew up in Savannah when Gottlieb’s was around.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/dining/jewish-rye-bread-gottliebs-savannah.html

The bar scene here, which not even Hurricane Katrina fully shut down, has been brought to its knees by the pandemic, but it hasn’t been snuffed out. As current regulations forbid bars without food permits to serve indoors, the activity has largely moved outside, aided by relatively mild winters and laws that allow public consumption of alcohol. (Bars with food permits can serve indoors at 25 percent capacity, but can sell alcohol only with food. Mask-wearing and social distancing have been required in New Orleans since early in the pandemic.)

Serving the tourists who are bound to join costumed locals on the streets may amount to little more than selling to-go drinks and food for customers to carry as they stroll. At a news conference on Monday, Mayor LaToya Cantrell welcomed visitors for Mardi Gras while commanding them to obey pandemic restrictions, “so our residents and our folks at the forefront of hospitality are safe.”

Tom Thayer, the owner of d.b.a., a music club in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, is considering recruiting musicians to play outside his club on Frenchmen Street, a live-music corridor. His decision will depend on what happens with infection rates.

“Having done almost no business since last March, it’s very tempting to try and grab the money,” said Mr. Thayer, 54, “but not at the risk of prolonging this virus.”

Ms. Watts, 55, plans to decorate the Avenue Pub to resemble a Mardi Gras float, as many locals have already done to their homes. “I just want something that will make people smile when they drive by, even if they don’t stop,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/dining/drinks/mardi-gras-new-orleans-coronavirus.html

And tech has certainly helped trash the place — the place being America.

Hence, the need for reinvention, which I discussed with Mayor Francis Xavier Suarez of Miami last month. It seems like an eternity has passed since our conversation — yet it still resonates.

I had called the peppy pol because of the spate of attention that the Florida city has gotten recently after a bunch of well-known Silicon Valley investors — like Keith Rabois and Shervin Pishevar — had relocated there from the Bay Area to begin anew.

Remember “Miami Vice,” the TV crime drama set in Florida that was an ’80s phantasmagoria of white suits, fast speedboats and a whole lot of artisanal beard stubble? Now, decades later, consider the latest trend: Miami VC.

Mr. Suarez, a young Republican rising star, has garnered a lot of attention lately by using social media to market his balmy city as the next great place to start over. It all began early in December when a longtime investor suggested on Twitter that Silicon Valley should move to Miami.

“How can I help?” Mr. Suarez replied, employing a can-do, come-on-down brio that is in stark contrast to the growing disdain cities like San Francisco have developed for tech culture.

Mayor Suarez loves you, tech bro, he really loves you.

He kept at it for weeks, with a series of pithy and adorkable comments on Twitter, trying to take advantage of the wholesale re-evaluation many tech firms are having about staying in the Bay Area, given that the pandemic has spurred a rethink of remote work.

Of course, Mr. Suarez knows that creating the next Silicon Valley has been tried and has failed many times over the last decades — remember Silicon Prairie? Silicon Desert? Silicon Beach? Recreating that iron triangle of venture capitalists, a major world-class university and tech giants is far-off for Miami, and perhaps futile, too.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/tech-hope-america.html

She did not directly mention the Paycheck Protection Program — the largest lending program by far in the agency’s nearly 70-year history — but she acknowledged the turmoil many companies are experiencing.

“So many small businesses across the country have been devastated by the pandemic and economic crisis,” Ms. Guzman said. “A disproportionate impact has fallen, as it often does, on our businesses owned by people of color.”

Most of the program’s financiers, including some of the country’s largest banks, said they plan to resume lending. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Cross River Bank and Wells Fargo, which collectively made more than one million loans, said they intend to start taking applications as soon as the S.B.A. gives them the green light.

Bankers said their borrowers are clamoring to apply for a second loan.

“We think we are likely in for a very tough winter until the vaccine is more widely available, and we expect there will be a pretty heavy demand,” said John Asbury, the chief executive of Atlantic Union Bank, in Richmond, Va., which made more than 11,000 loans through the program’s first iteration.

The relief loans, which are backed by the government but issued by banks, are designed to be forgiven so long as borrowers use most of the money to pay their workers. The rare offer of essentially free money has been a lifeline for business owners grappling with the pandemic’s forced shutdowns and other economic shocks.

Holly Schaffner, the owner of Mrs. Turbo’s Cookies, a bakery in Ohio, received two P.P.P. loans totaling $48,000 for her two stores. Before the pandemic, she had 20 employees; in March, as the crisis took hold and she was briefly forced to close, her staff plunged to six. Her sales dropped as much as 70 percent in some months last year.

The relief loans allowed her to rehire several people she had laid off. “If it hadn’t been for that money, I’m not sure I would have had the revenue to be able to make a payroll,” she said. “It was incredibly helpful.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/smallbusiness/ppp-loans-restart.html

Narinder Singh Kapany was born on Oct. 31, 1926, in Moga, a town in Punjab, in northwest India, and raised in Dehradun, about 200 miles to the east. His father, Sundar Singh Kapany, worked in the coal industry; his mother, Kundan Kaur Kapany, was a homemaker. After graduating from Agra University (now Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University), he worked for a government munitions factory in Dehradun before moving to England.

Despite his love for research, Dr. Kapany had never planned on becoming an academic scientist. He had originally moved to Britain for an internship at an optics firm in Scotland, to learn skills he could use in starting his own company back in India. But the opportunity to work with Professor Hopkins, a towering figure in the world of optics, was too tempting to resist.

However, their relationship, though fruitful, proved unstable: Both of them were physically imposing men with outsize personalities, and they fell out soon after publishing their seminal paper in Nature. Professor Hopkins accused Dr. Kapany of overstating his contribution; Dr. Kapany retorted that only he was able to turn the professor’s chalkboard musings into reality.

In 1954, soon after the Nature article appeared, Dr. Kapany married Satinder Kaur, like him an Indian native, who was studying dance in London. The next year the two sailed to New York after he was offered a job at the University of Rochester and a consulting contract with Bausch Lomb, the eye care company.

Two years later, after the birth of their son, Raj, the Kapanys moved to Illinois, where Dr. Kapany took a job teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology and where their daughter, Kiran, was born.

Satinder Kapany died in 2016. Dr. Kapany is survived by his two children and four grandchildren.

Dr. Kapany cut a dashing figure around the Chicago social scene — his jackets custom made and slimly cut, his beard knotted tight to his chin and his mustache trimmed “like David Niven’s,” said his son, referring to the British actor.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/technology/narinder-s-kapany-dead.html

But he itched to start his own company, the family statement said, and he seized an opportunity in 1968 when he recognized the appeal of air-conditioning for people living in an island climate. He founded his first business, Appliance Traders Ltd., after he persuaded the Fedders Corp. of Edison, N.J., to allow him to represent the brand in Jamaica.

From there, Mr. Stewart developed his overarching business philosophy: “Find out what people want, give it to them and, in doing so, exceed their expectations,” the family statement said. At first, Adam Stewart said, this involved being willing to install air-conditioners for his customers any time, day or night.

“He did whatever it took,” Adam Stewart said.

Mr. Stewart’s work with the Sandals and Beaches resorts led to leadership roles in Jamaica’s tourism industry, including a decade as director of the Jamaica Tourist Board. In 1992, his Butch Stewart Initiative pumped $1 million a week into the foreign exchange market to help halt the slide of the Jamaican dollar.

In 1994, he led a group of investors that took control of Air Jamaica, the Caribbean’s largest regional carrier. He put together an investment group that paid $37.5 million for 70 percent of the airline, giving himself a 46 percent stake.

The move was the kind of grand public gesture Mr. Stewart had become famous for, as The New York Times reported in an article about the move.

At the helm of the troubled state-owned airline, Mr. Stewart began adding routes and improving service. As part of the turnaround, he increased the airline’s revenue and grabbed market share from competitors.

“One thing you have to give Butch Stewart, he is going to try everything to make the company work,” Peter J. Dolara, a senior vice president of American Airlines at the time, told The Times. “The man is a ferocious competitor.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/world/americas/gordon-butch-stewart-sandals-dead.html