Aurelia Butler

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    Art to See on Day Trips From New York City This Spring

    Exhibitions and discoveries await in New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and the Catskills, and on the East End of Long Island.The busy calendar of fairs and auctions in May makes New York City an attractive hub of activity for the art crowd. But if a breather is needed or desired, a day trip may be in order. Here are a few art destinations worth considering.The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 Indigenous artists.McKay Imaging PhotographyZimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J.Located at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, the Zimmerli — with a substantial collection strong in American, European and Soviet nonconformist art — has long been overshadowed by New York City institutions. But the museum has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 well-established and emerging Indigenous artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Terran Last Gun, Wendy Red Star and Marie Watt. It was curated by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who was honored with a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2023 and died at 85, a week before the Zimmerli show opened.On view through Dec. 21, it is the largest of more than 30 exhibitions that Smith organized throughout her career in the United States. “Jaune helped define Native art history based on the artists she gave a platform to over the years,” said the Zimmerli director, Maura Reilly. Rather than apply an authoritative curatorial style, Smith asked each artist “how they wanted to be represented,” Reilly said, “very different from how I’ve worked typically.” Smith called the show “a celebration of life,” Reilly recalled: “She said it was about ‘kinship, community, survivance, solidarity and resilience.’”A piece from “Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora & Contemporary Responses,” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.Thomas Cole National Historic Site Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, N.Y.Two centuries ago, the artist Thomas Cole took a momentous boat ride up the Hudson River to Catskill, where the scenery inspired him to found the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He also fell in love with Maria Bartow and moved in 1836 to her family home in Catskill, painting the view from their porch of the Catskill Mountains more than any other.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 May 1, 2025

    Aidan Deshong and Adam Levav move their rears. In a completely innocent and cruciverbal way, of course.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of business jargon. I like plain talk, as you can see from this relatively simple, 15-word sentence.When I entered the corporate world, I was suddenly surrounded by people who spoke what sounded like English but was really a carefully assembled cluster of clichés. The banter in meetings took on the cadence of a postgame interview in which athletes are asked their opinions on how things went.Executive: “Well, the team was out of the loop for the first quarter, but once we leveraged our core competency and drilled down to the silver bullet, we experienced a paradigm shift and, at the end of the day, succeeded in picking the low-hanging fruit. That’s when the team was finally able to move the needle.”Boss: “You forgot to use the word ‘synergy.’”Executive: (Panicking) “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! May I please start again?”Boss: “No. You obviously don’t have enough buy-in to be part of this team. Put him on the back burner, boys.”Executive: (Being dragged from the conference room) “Nooo. …”I bring this up because Aidan Deshong and Adam Levav, the constructors of today’s puzzle, have used a popular business cliché as their revealer, and it is mission critical that we fly it up the flagpole to see what happens, impactually speaking. It’s also so much cheaper than therapy.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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    Judge Rebukes Apple and Orders It to Loosen Grip on App Store

    The ruling was a stinging defeat for Apple in a long-running antitrust case brought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, on behalf of app developers.A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at the company of lying.In her earlier ruling, Judge Gonzales Rogers ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with external links to pay developers directly for services. The apps could then avoid the 30 percent commission that Apple charges in its App Store and potentially charge less for services.Instead, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said on Wednesday, Apple created a new system that forced apps with external sales to pay a 27 percent commission to the company. Apple also created pop-up screens that discouraged customers from paying elsewhere, telling them that payments outside the App Store may not be secure.“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.In response, she said Apple could no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store. She also restricted the company from writing rules that would prevent developers from creating buttons or links to pay outside the store and said it could not create messages to discourage users from making purchases. In addition, Judge Gonzalez Rogers asked the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate the company for criminal contempt.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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    White Supremacist Is Charged in 2019 Arson at Tennessee Civil Rights Landmark

    Regan Prater set fire to the main offices of the Highlander Research and Education Center and took credit for it in encrypted messages, prosecutors said.A Tennessee man with ties to several white supremacist groups has been charged with setting a fire in 2019 that destroyed the offices of a social justice center connected with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., according to court records.In a federal criminal complaint that was unsealed on April 24, the F.B.I. said that the man, Regan Prater, 27, set fire to the main offices of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., near Knoxville, and spray-painted an Iron Guard cross on the pavement outside.The symbol originated with fascists in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Anti-Defamation League. It has more recently been used by white supremacists, including one who murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019.Investigators in Tennessee said that Mr. Prater, of Tullahoma, took credit for the arson while chatting with an informant on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that he used to communicate with other white supremacists.“I didn’t admit that, but dots can be connected,” Mr. Prater wrote to the informant when asked if he had set the fire, according to the complaint.He then gave details about how he had started the blaze, telling the informant, “It was a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”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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    ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Florence Pugh and Pals Kick Some Asterisk

    The actress is the main attraction in Marvel’s latest, about a group of ragtag super-types who join forces to (spoiler alert!) save the world.For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.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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    Judge Rejects Efforts to Free F.B.I. Informant Who Lied About Hunter Biden

    The Trump administration had signaled it might try to undo the guilty plea and six-year prison sentence for Alexander Smirnov.A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a bid by the Justice Department to free a former F.B.I. informant who had pleaded guilty to lying about Hunter Biden and evading his taxes, saying that nothing about the facts of the case had changed and the man might still flee if released.The longtime informant, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty in December in exchange for a six-year prison sentence, admitting that he had lied to the government when he claimed to have information about a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter.Before Mr. Smirnov was charged and eventually admitted his guilt, Republican lawmakers had promoted his false claims about the Bidens in their push to try to impeach President Biden. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Smirnov’s allegations were also amplified by the Trump supporter Kash Patel, who is now the director of the F.B.I.Then, in an abrupt reversal this month, the Justice Department that had sent Mr. Smirnov to prison filed court papers seeking to have him released early, saying it was taking a second look at the case. That request was filed under instructions from senior Justice Department officials in Washington, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge, Otis D. Wright II, rejected that request, saying neither prosecutors nor Mr. Smirnov’s lawyers had presented any evidence that Mr. Smirnov was any less of a flight risk than when he was arrested. The judge also pushed back on what he said were inaccurate claims by the lawyers about the precise terms of his plea deal.The parties in the case, the judge wrote, “present no new facts in their papers that would alter the court’s conclusion that Smirnov is a flight risk, let alone provide ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that he is not one.”The Smirnov case was an offshoot of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and the plea deal was negotiated by David C. Weiss, the special counsel who led the inquiry and then stepped down in January.During the Biden administration, the Justice Department argued against the release of Mr. Smirnov, who had been arrested at the Las Vegas airport after returning to the United States from overseas.In the department’s filing earlier this month, prosecutors said that “clear and convincing evidence for defendant’s nonviolent offenses of conviction shows that defendant is not likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of any other person.”The judge’s order said that the government’s new argument was unconvincing, writing that “the fact remains that Smirnov has been convicted and sentenced to 72 months in prison, providing ample incentive to flee.” More

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    Trump Tariffs and Shrinking GDP Raise Political Stakes

    The report that the economy contracted in the first quarter underscored how much President Trump has at risk as he pursues an aggressive trade war.President Trump took office 101 days ago after a campaign in which voters bought his argument that he could skillfully manage the economy and that his policy prescriptions could both bolster growth and eradicate inflation.So the news on Wednesday that the nation’s gross domestic product had contracted in the first three months of the year was a sharp political jolt as well as a blinking economic warning.It came at the end of a quarter in which stock prices were down sharply, Wall Street’s worst performance at the start of a new presidential term since Gerald R. Ford tried to steer the country out of scandal and inflation 51 years ago. And it only added to the widespread uncertainty among businesses and consumers about what the rest of the year might hold as Mr. Trump pursues a trade war that is already choking off supply chains and threatening to push prices up and lead to shortages of critical components and products on shelves.It is too soon to predict where the American economy is headed for the rest of the year, and Mr. Trump remains insistent that he will produce a flurry of trade deals that will bring manufacturing back to the United States and usher in a new age of prosperity.But the first-quarter figures brought the political risks for him into focus. For Mr. Trump, what is at stake is a question of fundamental competence on an issue that he has always used to define himself.If the report proves to be a harbinger of an extended slowdown or recession, the situation could become the economic analog of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago this summer. Mr. Biden’s job approval ratings never recovered from that early debacle. Nothing he did later — not the millions of jobs created, not the big legislative victories, not the rapid response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — could restore the sense among voters that he could be trusted to carry out the job with the skill they assumed he brought to it.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