Aurelia Butler

President Biden spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure. These final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.President Biden began the final stretch of his political career this week freed from the rigors of running for re-election, appearing by turns nostalgic, liberated and — in some cases — resigned to finding himself once again in a supporting role.After a two-week summer vacation, Mr. Biden has been campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, now at the top of the Democratic ticket, and traveling the country to promote his administration’s accomplishments.But for a man who has spent decades seeking the highest office, only to drop his bid for re-election under pressure from his own party, these final months before the November election are bittersweet, his allies say.“For my whole career I’ve either been too young or too old, never in between,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of union workers on Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. The president, who was not yet 30 when he first won a Senate seat in 1972, cracked that he went on to serve for “374 years.”Earlier in the week, Mr. Biden appeared unbothered about alienating conservatives when he attacked Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — in the Republican’s home state — for not voting for the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s signature legislation.And on Monday in Pittsburgh, during an event with Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden did not seem particularly keen to cede the spotlight. He spoke eight minutes longer than the vice president, even as he said he would be “on the sidelines” going forward.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 Tony winner leads a top-notch cast in Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production of Douglas Lyons’s hopeful new play.There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.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

For the justices, selling books remains one of the few ways to earn income outside the court.For Supreme Court justices, books deals have become a highly lucrative way to shape the public narrative of their lives and legacies.The money brought in by those deals, one of the few ways that they can supplement their income, often far eclipses their salaries, roughly $300,000.A majority of the current justices have published books, most recently Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her memoir, “Lovely One,” which traces the arc of her family from the segregated Jim Crow South to her rise to the Supreme Court, was released this week and shot up Amazon’s best-seller list.Here’s a closer look.Which justices have written books?Six of the nine justices have written books or currently have book deals.Justice Jackson joins Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas in publishing moving accounts of their childhoods and paths to the court. Justice Sotomayor has also written several children’s books.Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has focused on the law, publishing books describing the ethical and legal issues raised by assisted suicide and euthanasia. His most recent, published this summer, is a series of stories drawn from court cases that he uses to argue that administrative overreach and the increasing number of laws have harmed ordinary Americans.Two of the newest justices — Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh — have book deals in place. Justice Barrett’s book has been described as her views about keeping personal feelings out of judicial rulings. Justice Kavanaugh’s is expected to be a legal memoir that is likely to touch on his bruising confirmation fight.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 F.D.A. recommends against using the skin care products without professional supervision. Experts explain the risks.When Laura Messina, 43, wanted to lighten the dark spots under her eyes this summer, she tried a chemical peel she bought online from a department store.Hours later, her face was covered in rough, red, burning splotches. The irritation lingered for days, so she rushed to a dermatologist who prescribed a cream that she applied twice a day for two weeks.“It was silly of me to even try it,” she said. “This was a lesson for me.”Chemical peels, procedures where liquid is applied to skin to remove outer layers, are typically administered by dermatologists and other licensed professionals. There’s evidence that peels help manage pimples, discoloration, scarring and signs of aging.While at-home versions are widely available, they can come with some risks, experts say. In July, the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers against buying chemical peels with high concentrations of certain acids and urged consumers to use peels only under professional supervision.For those who want to try peels themselves, dermatologists said it’s crucial to be safe.What are at-home chemical peels?Over-the-counter chemical peels are similar to those used in dermatologists’ offices — they both may contain a variety of acids. At-home versions usually include alpha-hydroxy acids like glycolic or lactic acid, or beta-hydroxy acids such as salicylic acid. Both types improve skin texture and appearance by penetrating and removing the outer layer of skin.The solutions in at-home versions, however, are generally weaker than those used in doctor’s offices, so their results are often more subtle.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 body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.Move over, body mass index. Make room for roundness — to be precise, the body roundness index.The body mass index, or B.M.I., is a ratio of height to weight that has long been used as a medical screening tool. It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.The classifications have been questioned by athletes like the American Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, whose B.M.I. of 30 technically puts her on the cusp of obesity. “But alas,” she said on Instagram, addressing online trolls who tried to shame her about her weight, “I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”Advocates for overweight individuals and people of color note that the formula was developed nearly 200 years ago and based exclusively on data from men, most of them white, and that it was never intended for medical screening. Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”So welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.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

By singing men and women, nobles and servants, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo takes the opera’s theme of human mutability to a chaotic extreme.Charles Dickens was celebrated for solo public readings in which he would give voice to a novel’s full cast of characters. I’ve watched the great actor David Greenspan take all the roles in Eugene O’Neill’s sprawling play “Strange Interlude” and, earlier this year, saw Eddie Izzard do the same in “Hamlet.”But when the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has a go at a similar feat — performing Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” as a one-man show at Little Island — it is an altogether different ambition.An opera singer’s repertoire is usually firmly circumscribed. Sure, transposition can nudge unfriendly music into a more comfortable key. And sure, some mezzo-sopranos can sing some soprano parts, and vice versa. But while Dickens, in a reading, could shift from Scrooge to Tiny Tim simply by adjusting an accent or affecting a growl, it’s another story for one person to hit the notes of both Susanna and the Count in “The Marriage of Figaro,” let alone invest both with beauty and power.A vocal range can be wide, but it’s not infinite; a singer’s identity tends to be pretty fixed.It’s that fixity that Costanzo, who has recently been named the general director of Opera Philadelphia, means to have some fun with. Mozart and his “Figaro” librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, might well nod along: The opera is full of characters pretending to be other people, even other genders. Human mutability is one of the main themes.Costanzo — with his director, Dustin Wills, and his arranger and conductor, Dan Schlosberg — takes this to a challenging, chaotic extreme. In this much-trimmed 100-minute “Figaro,” Costanzo sings all the parts, or enthusiastically tries to: men and women, nobles and servants, high notes and low.I was misleading earlier, however: This isn’t precisely a one-man “Figaro.” It’s more of a one-voice version, with a handful of actors joining Costanzo onstage for much of the relentlessly high-spirited performance, playing main roles, some cast across gender, and impressively lip-syncing along with Costanzo’s sung Italian. (Toward the end, there are also sweet — and audible — contributions from a few child members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.)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 British import on Sundance Now, the series balances sports sudsiness with prickly, fraught drama about sex, maturity, consent and power.Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner in a scene from “Fifteen-Love.”Rob Youngson/Sundance NowJustine (Ella Lily Hyland) was a promising tennis player in her teens, and the French Open seemed like it would be her breakthrough tournament. But a gnarly wrist injury and an total emotional breakdown derailed her. Now she’s in her early 20s, working as a physical therapist at her old tennis academy, stewing in self-loathing and coming to terms with the fact that her coach, Glenn (Aidan Turner), assaulted and manipulated her. Part of her wants to leave that in the past, but when Glenn re-emerges at the club, coaching other teen girls, she can’t.“Fifteen-Love,” a British import on Sundance Now, balances sports sudsiness with prickly, fraught drama about sex, maturity, consent and power. Justine has great instincts but terrible impulses; she knows Glenn preyed on her, but there’s no real mechanism for justice or restitution. Some people in her life believe her; some don’t. But worst of all are the ones, like her mother, who mostly believe her but think what happened is no big deal — always a victim, they say. In Justine’s eyes, though, she never got to be a victim at all.Hyland’s performance here is mesmerizing but grounded, showing us how in some ways Justine grew up too fast, and in others she hasn’t grown up at all. She is angry and can be self-destructive, and the show shines in its argument scenes. Tennis players know how to volley. “You used to be on my side,” Justine spits at her best friend and fellow player. “No,” says the friend. “I was in your shadow.”Over its six episodes, “Fifteen-Love” loses steam, especially when it kicks into thriller mode toward the end. More characters does not always mean more story, and the show is most interesting when it is narrowly focused, probing the dynamic between Justine and Glenn. It’s not as pat as just victim and abuser — where do the other feelings go?Even as the plot sags, the specifics still land. In one scene, Justine and a comrade comb through years of possibly incriminating emails, looking for leads on other victims. What should they search for? “Sexual?” the friend suggests. “Inappropriate?” Justine instead types in “emotional.”So far four episodes are available, with new installments arriving Thursdays. More

The value of the 88-year-old activist investor’s stake in his own company has fallen by nearly $20 billion. Mr. Icahn said that he was “absolutely not selling.”Chief executives of public companies have long feared Carl C. Icahn. The 88-year-old investor made a name and billions for himself by questioning the decisions and strategies of corporate leaders and agitating for change at companies like Apple, RJR Nabisco and Netflix.But now Mr. Icahn is under intense scrutiny from Wall Street investors, who are rapidly selling his company’s stock. In the past year and a half, shares of Icahn Enterprises, his publicly traded investment company, have dropped more than 75 percent, losing nearly $20 billion of value. After dropping more than 30 percent since mid-August alone, it now trades at about $11 a share, its lowest level in more than two decades.Mr. Icahn owns roughly 86 percent of the shares, so he has personally lost billions of dollars, too.“There’s a confidence game and he’s lost the confidence of investors,” said Don Bilson, who focuses on activist investing as the head of event-driven research at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors.Some Wall Street investors are now worried that the stock’s continuing fall could threaten the health of the entire company and that it could be forced to sell companies it holds. Icahn Enterprises holds a mix of public stocks, real estate and other investments, according to interviews with Mr. Bilson and several other market watchers.Investors have been questioning whether Mr. Icahn himself has been selling his stock. He has taken out personal loans using his stock as collateral. Banks that offer these loans typically have strict requirements related to the value of a company. A sharp drop in a stock price could force a lender to sell shares.

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Source: FactSetBy 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