Aurelia Butler

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    They Caught the Flu, and Never Came Home

    The virus leads to an estimated 36,000 deaths in the United States each season — many of them so sudden that families are left reeling.Lauren Caggiano had felt sick for days by the time she tested positive for the flu in an emergency room on a February afternoon. Hours later, she was in the intensive care unit. By 4 in the morning, she was on a ventilator.Ms. Caggiano, a paralegal who lived in Oceanside, Calif., doted on her two dogs and had recently become a grandmother, died two days later. She was 49.“You don’t really think, if you’re in decent health, that’s going to be what gets you,” her son, Brandon Salgado, said.Many people recover from a bout of flu within a few days or a week. But every year, the virus still kills more than 36,000 people across the United States and sends hundreds of thousands to the hospital. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that this flu season has been especially severe.Some of those who died were at greater risk for getting seriously ill because of underlying conditions or their age. Others, like Ms. Caggiano, were otherwise healthy before their infections. Some had not received the flu shot, which reduces but does not eliminate the risk of death. Some were hospitalized for weeks; others felt ill for only days before they died.All of their deaths came as a shock to the people who knew them.A Swift DeclinePart of what stunned Mr. Salgado was just how quickly his mother died.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Hold Me in the Water’ Review: Smitten, and Primed to Flirt

    Ryan J. Haddad follows up his Obie-winning “Dark Disabled Stories” with a rom-com.In a lake off a beach, on a sun-warmed afternoon somewhere in upstate New York, Cupid was practicing his archery. An arrow, when it flew, pierced a young man’s torso, lodging firmly in his heart.Now, technically, there is no mention of the Roman god of love in “Hold Me in the Water,” the deliciously funny romantic comedy from the playwright-actor Ryan J. Haddad, but there doesn’t need to be. Watching his solo performance at Playwrights Horizons, we sense that arrow strike just as surely as if we’d been there with him, the summer he was 26 and taking a dip with his hot new crush.“This boy who’s holding both of my hands and facing me … Well, he never let go,” Haddad tells us in this slender memoir of a show, in which he plays a version of himself called Ryan. “Not for the entire hour. He held me in that water.” Then, lightly, he adds the crucial fact: “He made me feel safe.”Haddad, who has cerebral palsy, means physically safe; a lake, with its uncertain footing, poses dangers for him. But this attractive acquaintance, whom he has just met at an artists’ residency, seems to understand intuitively what his body needs. The day before, when an already interested Ryan asked for assistance up the steps into a bookshop, the guy (whose identity he blurs: no name, few particulars) knew exactly how to help, as if he had been doing it for years.“No questions had to be asked,” Haddad says. “No mishaps. The trust between our bodies — my hand, his hand — was magnetic and instinctual.”Swoon.Thus begins an exhilarating infatuation, physical trust leading quickly to emotional investment, along with palpable chemistry. But this is a rom-com, so there must be obstacles, separations, mixed signals — and agonizing over all of it, which Ryan does once he is back home in Manhattan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Overlooked Clue Sheds Light on Shakespeare’s Marriage

    New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband to his wife, Anne.Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind to lead a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had famously bequeathed her his “second best bed” in his will.But Mr. Steggle’s new research, expected to be published this week in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity

    Devotees of the human figure, Cecily Brown and Christina Ramberg turn the Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a showplace for the female gaze.Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn’t fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound.By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg’s imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown’s world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited.Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze.Christina Ramberg, “Untitled,” 1970-1971. Felt-tip pens, with graphite and colored pencil on ivory wove graph paper.via Philadelphia Museum of ArtRamberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country’s No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite.Ramberg’s work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women’s slips.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Cuts Threaten Meals and Services for People With Disabilities and the Aging

    Every Monday, Maurine Gentis, a retired teacher, waits for a delivery from Meals on Wheels South Texas.“The meals help stretch my budget,” Ms. Gentis, 77, said. Living alone and in a wheelchair, she appreciates having someone look in on her regularly. The same group, a nonprofit, delivers books from the library and dry food for her cat.But Ms. Gentis is anxious about what lies ahead. The small government agency responsible for overseeing programs like Meals on Wheels is being dismantled as part of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Roughly half its staff has been let go in recent layoffs and all of its 10 regional offices are closed, according to several employees who lost their jobs.“I’m just kind of worried that the whole thing might go down the drain, too,” Ms. Gentis said.In President Trump ’s quest to end what he termed “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” one of his executive orders promoted cracking down on federal efforts to improve accessibility and representation for those with disabilities, with agencies flagging words like “accessible” and “disability” as potentially problematic. Certain research studies are no longer being funded, and many government health employees specializing in disability issues have been fired.The downsizing of the agency, the Administration for Community Living, is part of far-reaching cuts planned at the H.H.S. under the Trump administration’s proposed budget.While some federal funding may continue through September, the end of the government’s fiscal year, and some workers have been called back temporarily, there is significant uncertainty about the future. And some groups are reporting delays in receiving expected federal funds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Man Charged With Arson in Vast New Jersey Wildfire

    A 19-year-old was accused of setting wooden pallets on fire and leaving before the fire was extinguished, sparking what could become the largest blaze in the state in nearly 20 years.An unextinguished bonfire was the cause of one of the largest wildfires in New Jersey for almost 20 years, officials announced on Thursday, and a 19-year-old was accused of sparking the blaze.Joseph Kling, 19, of Waretown, in Ocean Township, has been charged with aggravated arson and arson in connection with the fire.Mr. Kling, who had left the bonfire unattended in the Forked River Mountain Wilderness Area, in Ocean County, was taken into custody at the Waretown police headquarters and is now in the Ocean County Jail.The wildfire, which was first spotted from atop a fire tower in Cedar Bridge on Tuesday morning, has grown rapidly from about 20 to 15,000 acres over three days, shutting down a parkway, destroying a commercial building and affecting air quality from the Pinelands area, in southern New Jersey, to New York City. It is about 50 percent contained, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.Nearly 85 percent of wildfires in the United States are caused by people, according to the United States Forest Service. Risky human activities include unattended campfires, burning debris or discarded cigarettes. The abnormally dry conditions in the southern part of New Jersey provided ample fuel for the unattended bonfire to spread rapidly, officials said. More

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    Las Vegas Sands Drops Bid to Open a Casino on Long Island

    The company cited the threat that online gambling posed to its profits in its decision to bow out of the competition for one of three casino licenses around New York City.Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company that has aggressively maneuvered to build a casino on Long Island in recent years, said on Wednesday that it was dropping its campaign, citing the potential threat posed to its profit margins by online gambling.Casino companies and real estate developers have fiercely competed in recent years for three casino licenses to be awarded by the state in and around New York City. Las Vegas Sands, one of the largest casino companies in the world, has been a leading contender for the right to open a casino on the site of Nassau Coliseum, a large arena just outside New York City.Its decision to drop that bid — over what it said were concerns about “the impact of the potential legalization of iGaming on the overall market opportunity and project returns” — was a major development in the cutthroat competition to bring full-fledged casinos to New York.Other developers who have vigorously pursued bids include Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, who wants to open a casino at Citi Field in Queens with Hard Rock Entertainment; the Hudson Yards developer Related Companies, which has proposed a casino on the Far West Side of Manhattan with Wynn Resorts; SL Green Realty Corporation, which wants to open a casino in Times Square with Caesars Entertainment; and Bally’s Corporation, which seeks to open one at a site in the Bronx that once housed the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point.In a statement, Sands said it still believed that Nassau Coliseum would be the best location for a new casino. It said it would seek to transfer its right to bid for a license on that site to another company, and would use the money it might have spent on the project to buy shares of Las Vegas Sands and a subsidiary, Sands China.The proposal to open a casino in Nassau County has been met with resistance from community groups as well as Hofstra University, which has said it believes the casino would be too close to its campus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    NYT Crossword Answers for April 24, 2025

    Kathleen Duncan makes her New York Times Crossword debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — I’ve said it before in this column, and I will say it again: When it comes to Thursday puzzles, expect anything. Thursday themes will not always be the longest entries in a puzzle; they may not all be Across entries, as thmed entries typically are earlier in the week; and sometimes the letters may even escape the grid.You get the idea.Keep your mind open and flexible for this clever debut by Kathleen Duncan. I had a lot of fun with it, and I think you will, too.Today’s ThemeSometimes theme entries go off in different directions, and that is precisely what is happening in today’s puzzle. We will be making film genres bend to our wills: Each theme clue contains two movies each, and we need to figure out 1) what their genres are, and 2) where we need to bend them.Oh, and that’s why there are dashes in your clue list if you are solving online. The dashes indicate that the remainder of the genre you are solving for is included in that space.For example, the theme clue at 1A is [ “Interview With the Vampire” and “Prince of Thorns”]. The answer is DARK F and then just trails off. That doesn’t make any sense, so something else must be going on. If you look at 5D, where the F is in the first position, the clue is one of those dashes. Boo. That’s no help.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More