Elections

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicVampire Weekend recently released its fifth album, “Only God Was Above Us.” From the band that got started nearly two decades ago at Columbia University but now resides in Los Angeles, it’s an LP that ponders hitting 40, the lessons of history, generational legacies, myths and memories of New York City and Vampire Weekend’s own peculiar status as both an indie-rock success story and an arty pop outlier. It’s also the band’s noisiest album — and perhaps its kindliest.On this week’s Popcast with the guest host Jon Pareles, three critics discuss Vampire Weekend’s latest conundrums, counterpoint, sonic extremes and hidden jam-band core — and its fascination with tunnels.Guests:Amanda Petrusich, staff writer at The New YorkerMatthew Strauss, deputy managing editor of PitchforkConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The voting equipment company Smartmatic has agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit with the far-right One America News Network (OAN) over lies broadcast on the network about the 2020 election.Erik Connolly, a lawyer for Smartmatic, confirmed the case had been settled, but said the details were confidential. Attorneys for Smartmatic and OAN notified a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday that they were agreeing to dismiss the case, which Smartmatic filed in 2021.Smartmatic sued OAN in November 2021, saying the relatively small company was a victim of OAN’s “decision to increase its viewership and influence by spreading disinformation”. Smartmatic was only involved in the 2020 election in a single US county, Los Angeles, but OAN repeatedly broadcast false claims that its equipment had flipped the election for Biden. Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell played a key role in advancing the outlandish claims.Defamation cases are difficult to win in the US, with plaintiffs having to clear a high bar of showing that defendants knew the information was false and published it anyway. The settlement comes months after OAN lawyers apparently accidentally turned over documents showing that the network had obtained a spreadsheet with Smartmatic employees’ passwords. It’s not clear if the passwords were authentic, but Smartmatic lawyers said in court filings that the network may have committed a crime.The settlement also means that internal documents from OAN showing how the network weighed and evaluated claims about the 2020 election will not become public. Before the voting equipment company Dominion reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox last year, those kinds of internal documents offered smoking gun evidence that key personnel at Fox knew election claims were false.The settlement is the latest development in a series of defamation cases that have sought to hold media outlets accountable for spreading false information about the 2020 election. In 2022, OAN settled a defamation case brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers it falsely claimed were involved in stealing the election. The network issued an on-air report saying there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election officials and clarifying that Freeman and Moss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct”.Smartmatic still has a pending $2.7bn defamation lawsuit against Fox.Earlier this month, a Delaware judge set a September trial date for Smartmatic’s defamation case against Newsmax. Both Smartmatic and Dominion also have ongoing defamation cases against Powell, Giuliani and Mike Lindell.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegal scholars are carefully watching the cases to see whether defamation law can be an effective tool in curbing misinformation. More

Organizers released the event lineup for the annual New York event, set for June. It includes films that trace the lives of Linda Perry and Avicii.The 2024 Tribeca Festival will offer the world premieres of a Brat Pack documentary, a movie starring Lily Gladstone and films that trace the lives of the music world figures Linda Perry and Avicii, organizers said Wednesday as they announced the event lineup.Also on the schedule will be a feature starring Jenna Ortega, a buddy comedy with Michael Cera, Maya Erskine and Kristen Stewart and a documentary that looks at the world of queer stand-up comedy.This year’s festival, which will run in Lower Manhattan from June 5-16, will open with the documentary “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge” and will include 103 features from 114 filmmakers in 48 countries. The festival will offer 86 world premieres and 30 movies directed by first-time filmmakers.Officials said their final selections were chosen from more than 13,000 submissions — a record high.“We feel really lucky that there was such enthusiasm, particularly with all of the challenges that the industry had this year,” Cara Cusumano, the Tribeca Festival’s director, said in a phone interview. “It made me feel really optimistic about the future of independent film and about the resiliency of the creative community,”The documentary “Brats” will follow Andrew McCarthy as he crisscrosses the country reconnecting with fellow actors Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and others who in the 1980s and ’90s became collectively known as the Brat Pack. A panel featuring McCarthy, who directed the documentary, and other members of the cast will follow the premiere.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

In a time when the headlines are dominated by wars and a divisive presidential campaign, the magazine-world rivalry between The Atlantic and The New Yorker doesn’t amount to much.So you might have missed it when, on April 2, The Atlantic beat The New Yorker in three big categories at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.But to Rusty Foster, who chronicles the media industry and internet culture in his daily newsletter, Today in Tabs, The Atlantic’s victory was big news.Shortly after the awards ceremony, which took place at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, Mr. Foster tapped out a fanciful report for his audience of media obsessives. Under the headline “Shutout at the TK Corral,” he wrote that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “solemnly folded up and ate each of his prepared speeches as he watched The Atlantic win every category.”Mr. Foster then turned his attention to Anna Wintour, the editorial director of Condé Nast, the publishing giant that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and other publications, writing that she “donned an emergency second pair of sunglasses” in reaction to the company’s poor showing.A surprising thing about Today in Tabs — which has a knowing, satirical tone that has made it an enduring hit among media insiders — is that Mr. Foster writes it from the bucolic setting of Peaks Island, Maine, which is where he was when the National Magazines Awards ceremony took place.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

Since October 7th, this Committee and the nation have watched in horror as so
many of our college campuses, particularly the most expensive, so-called elite
schools, have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.
Dr. Shafik [shuh-feek], Mr. Schizer [shiz-zer, rhymes with scissor], Ms. Shipman, and
Mr. Greenwald, you are here testifying today because Columbia University is
one of the worst of those hotbeds and we have seen far too little, far too late
done to counter that and protect students and staff. Columbia stands guilty of
gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those
supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.
For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former
Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick while shouting
racial epithets.
The following day, a crowd of anti-Israel protestors marched on the university’s
Kraft Center for Jewish Life, causing the building to be locked down and forcing
Jewish students to shelter inside.
More recently, on March 24, anti-Israel groups hosted a “Resistance 101″ event
in a Columbia dorm featuring speakers linked to U.S. and Israel-designated
foreign terrorist organizations, including the PFLP. Speakers explicitly endorsed
terrorism and called on students to support it. This unauthorized event was
nevertheless promoted by Columbia faculty and staff.
That a taxpayer funded institution would become a forum for the promotion of
terrorism raises serious questions.
Moreover, Columbia administrators have repeatedly failed in their duty to
protect Jewish students from this hateful, retrograde form of discrimination.
Don’t take my word for it. In February, Columbia undergraduate Eden Yadegar
told the Committee, “It is impossible to exist as a Jewish student at Columbia
without running face first into antisemitism every single day. Jew-hatred is so
deeply embedded into campus culture, that it has become casual and
palatable among students and faculty and neglected by administrators.”
Let me repeat: neglected by administrators.
Eden and some of her fellow Jewish classmates are in attendance today. I
believe they deserve direct and clear answers about how you will address their
concerns.
I need not remind you that this is not just a moral duty, but a legal duty set forth
in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. More

The country’s exhibition was already closed after its artist refused to exhibit her work until there was a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza. But that didn’t calm the discontent.The Israel pavilion at the Venice Biennale is closed this year, since its creative team decided not to exhibit work until there was a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza, but it was nonetheless the site of a large demonstration on Wednesday that drew more than 100 protesters.“Viva, viva Palestina!” the protesters chanted as they marched through the gardens where much of the Biennale takes place. The protest was organized by a mix of artists involved in the Biennale and activists not affiliated with the event. “We gather as arts workers to refuse silence,” one demonstrator shouted to a crowd of onlookers.Tensions surfaced in February, when activist groups began calling on the Biennale to ban Israel from the event over its conduct of the war in Gaza. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks in Israel, in which Israeli officials said about 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage, and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which the authorities there say has killed more than 33,000 people, protests have rippled through the art world.The Biennale’s organizers and Italy’s government affirmed Israel’s right to participate this year, but when the media preview began on Tuesday, visitors to the pavilion found the doors locked. Ruth Patir, the artist chosen to represent Israel at the Biennale, had refused to open her exhibition, posting a sign on the window that the pavilion would remain shut until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”But Patir’s action was not enough to calm the discontent among many artists at the event, which opens to the public on Saturday. During the preview week, attendance is restricted to art world figures, including artists, curators, gallerists and critics.“I think it is the right place to make a protest,” said Maj Hasager, the rector of the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden, who watched the protest. “We need to lay out the different positions, and there is no Palestine pavilion,” she added.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

Scientists have long known that a little dirt can be good for you. Research has suggested that people who grow up on farms, for instance, have lower rates of Crohn’s disease, asthma and allergies, likely because of their exposure to a diverse array of microbes.In the 1970s, scientists even found a soil-dwelling bacterium, called Mycobacterium vaccae, that has an anti-inflammatory effect on our brains, possibly both lowering stress and improving our immune response to it.More recently, there’s been an explosion of interest in the human microbiome — with people taking probiotics, seeking food with live cultures and “rewilding” their microflora. At the same time, scientists have been discovering how broad a role dirt microbes can play in our mental and physical health.When we’re touching soil or even just out in nature, “we’re breathing in a tremendous amount of microbial diversity,” said Christopher A. Lowry, a professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder.A recent Finnish experiment found that children attending urban day cares where a native “forest floor” had been planted had both a stronger immune system and a healthier microbiome than those attending day cares with gravel yards — and continued to have beneficial gut and skin bacteria two years later.It’s not just good for kids; adults can also benefit from exposure to soil-dwelling microbes, Dr. Lowry said. So this spring, make a little time to go outside and get grimy.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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ensure safety on our campus. Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to
protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or
discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.
As protests grew, we worked to secure the campus and ensure the safety of our students.
We restricted access to our campus to those with valid Columbia identification, increased the
public safety presence across all of our campuses, brought in external security firms, and added
resources to our existing safety escort programs.
It also became clear that our policies and structures in place were not well designed to
cope with the unprecedented scale of the challenges we faced. To address this, I along with my
colleagues immediately put in place changes. We updated our policies and procedures to
respond to the events on our campus, with the goal of ensuring safe and responsible events such
that all members of our community can participate in their academic pursuits without fear for
their safety. We launched an updated reporting and response process in an effort to make it
easier to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior,
including antisemitic behavior. This included improved training processes on Title VI and
reporting obligations for staff working with students and groups, enhanced reporting channels,
and supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators. We are in the
process of establishing an office with the sole purpose of investigating and responding to
allegations of discrimination, including antisemitism, in our community.
In October, we also quickly formed a Task Force on Antisemitism with the purpose of
addressing the root causes behind the antisemitic incidents at our University by independently
identifying problems and offering solutions. Thus far, the Task Force has done important work,
and we are already working to implement many of its recommendations. These steps will be
further supported by our longer-term efforts, which include a review of our event policies,
revisions to orientation sessions and mandatory training for students to specifically address
antisemitism, and additional investments in scholarship and programming that elevate campus
debate on difficult issues.
Some of these steps have provoked strong reactions from students, faculty, and outside
groups across the ideological spectrum, but we believe they were necessary. We do not, and will
not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations. We have enforced, and we will
continue to enforce, our policies against such actions. We believe we can confront antisemitism
and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting
rigorous academic exploration and freedom. This is my highest priority right now at Columbia,
and I believe we are moving in the right direction. There is, to be sure, much more work to do,
and we welcome feedback from our students and other members of the Columbia community,
from Jewish leaders and organizations, and from this Committee.
I have approached our response with four principles: ensuring the safety of Columbia’s
students and faculty; demonstrating care and compassion; balancing freedom of speech while
ensuring members of our community feel safe and welcome; and using education to address the
problem of antisemitism. More