Aurelia Butler

In October, the storm surge from Hurricane Milton flooded 15-year-old Michael Miranda’s street in Land O’ Lakes, Fla. Photograph by Meridith Kohut Nov. 4, 2024 More

Estados Unidos es un mosaico de regiones cuyos límites pueden ser confusos y objeto de debate. Sobre todo el día de las elecciones.Cinturón industrial. Cinturón del sol. Cinturón de la Biblia. Cinturón del grano. Cinturón de la barbacoa. Circunvalación.Estados Unidos es un mosaico de regiones. Y ahora estos términos y otros, que evolucionaron a partir de una abreviatura para describir agrupaciones geográficas, están teniendo un ejercicio cuatrienal a medida que la campaña presidencial se acerca a su fin. Pero, ¿qué significan realmente?“Estados Unidos es un país increíblemente complicado”, dijo Colin Woodard, autor de American Nations, una historia de las culturas regionales de Norteamérica. “Las cosas subyacentes reales que la gente intenta describir a menudo no coinciden con las fronteras estatales”.Mientras las cadenas de televisión ponen a prueba estos términos regionales en la noche electoral, las designaciones geográficas pueden resultar increíblemente confusas para quien no esté pegado a la pizarra mágica de Steve Kornacki. Nosotros te ayudamos.Empecemos por lo básico: el código de coloresDurante décadas, los estados en los que los votantes se decantan mayoritariamente por los republicanos se han conocido como estados rojos, y los estados que se inclinan por los demócratas, como estados azules. Cuando la televisión pasó a ser a todo color, la decisión de qué color iba con qué partido era en gran medida arbitraria entre los productores y no había consenso entre las empresas de medios de comunicación. Eso cambió en las elecciones presidenciales de 2000, cuando los resultados se prolongaron durante semanas y las empresas de comunicación, entre ellas The New York Times, ansiaban coherencia.No es tan sencillo como rojo y azulLos votantes de los estados morados, más conocidos como estados de tendencia electoral incierta o estados disputados, muestran un apoyo prácticamente igual a los dos partidos mayoritarios. En la mayoría de las elecciones, estos estados determinan el resultado de la contienda presidencial. En un extremo del espectro de colores está el muro azul, un grupo de estados que históricamente han votado mayoritariamente por los demócratas en las elecciones presidenciales. Entre ellos están Nueva York, Massachusetts, Oregón y California.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

A musician, bandleader, composer, producer and much more, Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday in California, led many musical lives. Only supreme talent can explain his accomplishments, but there was another factor, too: a ferocious work ethic.From childhood, he fought to learn the skills that would allow him to build a life in music. He first touched a piano at age 11 after breaking into a recreation center looking for food. Two years later, he persuaded a professional trumpeter to give him lessons every morning before school started.But once he had acquired those musical foundations, he worked to expand the range of his skills at a dizzying speed. Over the decades that followed, Mr. Jones was presented with a steady stream of opportunities — sometimes simultaneously. He embraced them all, turning much of what he touched to gold, and remaking American music along the way in a career that endured for more than five decades.These photographs show Mr. Jones both under and outside the spotlight, often helping other artists bring forth their best work. They also show the public side of him — a musical titan honored for his achievements.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesQuincy Jones and the singer Lesley Gore working on the song “It’s My Party” circa 1956 in New York City.Franz Hubmann/Imagno, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones leading a band at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in 1960.Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones guiding a session in a recording studio in 1963.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones and the singer Roberta Flack, circa 1973.A&M Records/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones posing in 1974.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones, left, with Duke Ellington, center, during the recording of the television special “Duke Ellington … We Love You Madly” at the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles in 1973.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesStevie Wonder and Mr. Jones during a recording of the song “Stop, Don’t Pass Go.”G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesMr. Jones won six Grammy Awards in 1991 for his album “Back on the Block.”URLI/GARCIA and Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones in Paris in 1988.Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones leading student musicians at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones and Oprah Winfrey at the 1995 Academy Awards in Los Angeles, where he was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.Associated Press/Associated PressMr. Jones with President Obama in 2011, when Mr. Jones received the National Medal of Arts at the White House.Danny Moloshok/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Jones onstage with Oprah Winfrey at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Jones at a hand and footprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles in 2018.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMr. Jones at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York in 2013. More

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on fiction and nonfiction works about space exploration that were adapted into popular films.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions. More

Forget the mayor’s race. Forget ballot measures about crime and schools. For many San Franciscans, short of the presidency, the most important contest on Tuesday will determine the future of one short road.It is not just any road. It is a quintessential California stretch — so magnificent, it is named the Great Highway — that hugs the city’s westernmost edge, offering sweeping views of pelicans swooping over the Pacific Ocean and of surfers tackling its mighty waves.Proposition K on the San Francisco ballot would permanently close the flat, two-mile stretch of pavement to cars. The measure would turn it over to cyclists, pedestrians, roller skaters and dogs, charting a path, backers promise, to create the city’s next great park. Think the High Line or Hudson River Yards in New York City, they say.But in San Francisco, where small ideas regularly lead to huge fights, the squabbles over the road’s fate have become louder than sea gulls at a beach picnic.“It feels like people on all sides are fighting for their lives,” said Marjan Philhour, who is running for the city’s board of supervisors to represent the Richmond District, the neighborhood just north of Golden Gate Park.Proposition K on the city ballot would permanently close a section of the highway to cars.The two-mile stretch would be turned over to cyclists, walkers, roller skaters and dogs.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

The dollar, Treasury yields and crypto currencies have fallen, reversing some elements of the so-called Trump trade after an unexpected poll result. In the race’s final hours, a poll reminds the markets of the power of women voters.Caroline Gutman for The New York TimesDown to the wire Investors on Monday appear to be unwinding bets on the so-called Trump trade. In a major reversal, bonds have rallied and the dollar and crypto currencies have dipped in the race’s final hours.One explanation is a surprising new poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris, powered in part by support from women and older voters, edging ahead in deep-red Iowa — a finding that’s also led to a tightening of Donald Trump’s lead in political prediction markets.Why the change of heart? The highly regarded Ann Selzer/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll that was published on Saturday gave Harris a three-point advantage over Trump in the Hawkeye State, a Republican stronghold. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer said.Some urged caution about the poll. The Economist questioned whether the small sample size in Selzer’s poll made it a good predictor of what might happen in other states. And the Trump campaign pointed to another Iowa poll out this weekend that showed the former president with a 10-point lead over Harris.But Michael McDonald, a politics professor at the University of Florida who runs a vote-tracking site, pointed to similar dynamics in a recent Kansas poll.The Selzer poll has roiled the political betting markets. Following its publication, Trump’s odds of victory fell on platforms including Polymarket, after they had climbed in recent weeks, in tandem with crypto and other elements of the Trump trade.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

The start-up raised $400 million in a funding round with investments from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital and OpenAI.Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, plans to announce on Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors.The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond.The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That’s significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing.The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks.“What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” said Karol Hausman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.”It’s a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in A.I. models that can interpret visual data.Among the company’s co-founders are Mr. Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at the payments giant Stripe.In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software — called π0, or pi-zero — enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more.“It’s a true generalist,” Mr. Hausman said. Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT.Mr. Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough “could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out.”The field of robotics A.I. is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot A.I.; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Mr. Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications.Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major A.I. ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company’s humanoid robot would be “the biggest product ever of any kind.” More

As Kamala Harris visited a church in Detroit on the last Sunday of the campaign, Donald J. Trump told supporters that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after the 2020 election.It was the final Sunday of the campaign for president, and Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump were continuing to race across battleground states in their search for support. But in message and demeanor, Ms. Harris, the Democrat, and Mr. Trump, the Republican, could not have been more different.Ms. Harris began her day at a Black church in Detroit where she told congregants that the nation was “ready to bend the arc of history toward justice,” invoking the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Trump began his at an outdoor rally at an airport in Pennsylvania where, his shoulders slumped and his voice subdued, he threw out his prepared remarks to tell supporters that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after his loss to President Biden in 2020.The dueling scenes offered a contrast that captured just how differently these two candidates were using the final days of a campaign that a last round of polls suggested remained as tight as it was when their contest began in August.Mr. Trump went to Lititz, Pa., where, after announcing he was discarding his prepared speech so the “truth” could come out, he proceeded to deliver dark, rambling and at times angry remarks in which he attacked polls, assailed Democrats as “demonic,” and suggested he would not mind if reporters were shot.“To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, ’cause, I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” he said as he called attention to the bulletproof glass barriers that have surrounded him at outdoor rallies since he was shot in July in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.Vice President Kamala Harris stopped at a Black-owned barbershop in Pontiac, Mich., on Sunday.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesWe 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