Elections

We want to hear from doctors, nurses, technicians, patients and others with experience in the system. Tell us your experiences below.The New York Times is interested in the organ transplant system.Do you have a tip about irregularities in the system? If so, we need your help.If you are a doctor, nurse, technician or anybody else working on organ transplants, we’d love to hear from you. We are also eager to talk to from medical residents working in those transplant programs. And of course, we also want to hear from patients and their families.Share your story about the organ transplant systemWe will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. We may use your contact information to follow up with you. More

The presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired a consultant, according to the campaign’s manager, after a video circulated of her urging an audience to support Mr. Kennedy on the ballot in New York because it would help former President Donald J. Trump defeat President Biden.The consultant, Rita Palma, had falsely identified herself as the New York state director of Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, Amaryllis Fox, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, said late on Wednesday, adding that the campaign had fired Ms. Palma “immediately” after seeing the video “in which she gave an inaccurate job title and described a conversation that did not happen.”In that video, Ms. Palma — who Ms. Fox said had been hired as a ballot access consultant in the state — said that “the Kennedy voter and the Trump voter, our mutual enemy is Biden,” adding, “Whether you support Bobby or Trump, we all oppose Biden.”Encouraging the audience of Republicans to support Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Palma outlined a hypothetical scenario in which Mr. Kennedy would win enough electoral votes to prevent both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden from winning 270 electoral votes, pushing the decision to Congress in what is known as a contingent election.“Right now, we have a majority of Republicans in Congress,” Ms. Palma said in the video, referring to the House of Representatives. “So who are they going to pick? If it’s a Republican Congress, they’ll pick Trump.” In such a scenario, the Senate — which the Democrats currently control — would also elect the vice president.CNN reported earlier this week that Ms. Palma had also promoted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, whom she repeatedly called her “favorite president.”Before saying that Ms. Palma had been fired, Ms. Fox said in a statement earlier in the week that “the video circulating was not taken at a campaign event.”She added: “Palma was speaking as a private citizen and her statements in no way reflect campaign strategy, the sole aim of which is to win the White House.”Allies of Mr. Trump have been discussing ways to elevate third-party candidates such as Mr. Kennedy in battleground states to divert votes away from Mr. Biden.Mr. Kennedy has also recently aligned himself closer to Mr. Trump by sympathizing with those who have been convicted of crimes in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. Mr. Kennedy later retracted many of those comments, saying that his campaign made “unforced errors” when addressing the issue, but stood by his commitment to appoint a special counsel to “look at” the criminal cases of some of the rioters. More

He ran to football fame on the field and made fortunes in movies. But his world was ruined after he was charged with killing his former wife and her friend.O.J. Simpson, who ran to fame on the football field, made fortunes as a Black all-American in movies, advertising and television and was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a 1995 trial in Los Angeles that mesmerized the nation, died on Wednesday. He was 76.The cause was cancer, his family announced on social media. The announcement did not say where he died.The infamous case, which held up a cracked mirror to Black and white America, cleared Mr. Simpson but ruined his world. In 1997, a civil suit by the victims’ families found him liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid little of the debt, moved to Florida and struggled to remake his life, raise his children and stay out of trouble.In 2006, he sold a book, “If I Did It,” and a prospective TV interview, giving a “hypothetical” account of murders he had always denied committing. A public outcry ended both projects, but Mr. Goldman’s family secured the book rights, added material imputing guilt to Mr. Simpson and had it published.In 2007, he was arrested after he and other men invaded a Las Vegas hotel room of some sports memorabilia dealers and took a trove of collectibles. He claimed that the items had been stolen from him, but a jury in 2008 found him guilty of 12 charges, including armed robbery and kidnapping, after a trial that drew only a smattering of reporters and spectators. He was sentenced to 9 to 33 years in a Nevada state prison. He served the minimum term and was released in 2017.Over the years, the story of O.J. Simpson generated a tide of tell-all books, movies, studies and debate over questions of justice, race relations and celebrity in a nation that adores its heroes, especially those cast in rags-to-riches stereotypes, but has never been comfortable with its deeper contradictions.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

VO2 max has become ubiquitous in fitness circles. But what does it measure and how important is it to know yours?Fitness is full of numbers meant to help you become faster and stronger. There’s your mile run time, your resting heart rate and measures of strength and flexibility. But perhaps the gold standard is VO2 max.A handful of years ago, the test — which tracks how much oxygen your body absorbs — was an obscure tool mainly used by elite athletes. Today, it’s touted by fitness professionals and wellness experts like Peter Attia as being a useful measure for all exercisers.But getting an accurate number requires an expensive and exhausting lab evaluation. And estimates provided by wearable devices might not tell you much. So how useful is it to invest time and money in the full work-up, and how important is knowing your VO2 max?For everyday people who want to be healthy and live a long time, the measurement is “the best piece of empirical information we have on health and longevity,” said Kate Baird, a clinical exercise physiologist and the coordinator of running and metabolic services at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.The key, she said, is acting on what the data tells you.What is VO2 Max?“VO2 max” is a two-digit number that expresses how effectively your body metabolizes oxygen. The measurement itself is the milliliters of oxygen consumed in a minute per kilogram of body weight.As you exercise, your body needs ever more oxygen. The more you can efficiently consume, the more energy your muscles will have, increasing the time and intensity you can exercise. Generally speaking, someone with a higher VO2 max will be able to sustain a run or an aerobic activity at a given pace longer than someone with a lower VO2 max.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

Portraits go undercover in the new Metropolitan Museum show “Hidden Faces,” about the practice of concealing artworks behind sliding panels and reverse-side paintings.The Met’s delightful show “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” illuminates a curious trend in 15th- and 16th-century painting: the slow reveal. The works on view, originally concealed in special cases and behind sliding or reversible panels, gamify the experience of looking at portraiture; they have to be moved, before they can move us.Of course, we can’t actually handle these artworks, many of them on loan to the Met from European museums including the Courtauld in London and the Uffizi in Florence. But we can peer at them from double-sided glass cases and watch animations of faces emerging from sliding panels. The covers are marvelous works in their own right, with elaborate emblems and allegories that are themselves a form of representation.The interactions between the different components can be quite playful, with a literary and theatrical flair. A mesmerizing portrait of a Florentine lady in a flowing sheer veil, attributed to the early-16th-century Italian painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, is accompanied by a decorative panel with the Latin inscription “To each his own mask” and a trompe l’oeil face covering to match.Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Attributed to Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Cover With a Mask, Grotteschi, and Inscription”; at right, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Portrait of a Woman (La Monaca),” both circa 1510.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmong the show’s many examples of Netherlandish portraiture, a clever narrative unfolds through a double-sided work by Hans Süss von Kulmbach, a protégé of Albrecht Dürer. On the front is a bust-length image of a man who seems to be looking at the upper left corner of the painting — or, perhaps, he is gazing up at the woman sitting in a window who appears when the panel is flipped.The Renaissance practice of covering paintings was rooted in earlier religious traditions and liturgical rituals, a point made in the show by a work borrowed from the Cloisters: a private devotional shrine with wings that open to display images of a female donor and her husband next to Saint Catherine.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 university is the latest in a series of highly selective schools to end its test-optional policy.Harvard will reinstate standardized testing as a requirement of admission, the university announced Thursday, becoming the latest in a series of highly competitive universities to reverse their test-optional policies. Students applying to Harvard in fall 2025 will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores, though the university said a few other test scores will be accepted in “exceptional cases,” including Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests. In making the decision, the college said it had been persuaded by research that found that standardized testing was a valuable tool to identify promising students in disadvantaged environments and struggling schools, especially when paired with other credentials.“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said in a statement announcing the move.“When students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application,” Ms. Hoekstra added. “In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range.”Harvard was one of about 2,000 colleges across the country that dropped test score requirements over the last few years, a trend that escalated during the pandemic when it was harder for students to get to test sites. Critics of standardized tests have long raised concerns that the tests helped fuel inequality because some wealthier students raised their scores through high-priced tutoring.But new research has challenged the conventional wisdom, finding that bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds had been overlooked by admissions offices because they had chosen not to submit test scores, even though they outperformed their peers.A growing number of schools have now reversed their policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue.This is a developing story. More

It’s no secret that many voters are not looking forward to the election in November.A New York Times/Siena College poll from February found that 19 percent of voters held an unfavorable view of both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. And 29 percent of Americans believe that neither candidate would be a good president, according to a March poll from Gallup.At the same time, the prospect of a new president is exciting for many, and nearly half of Republican primary voters are enthusiastic with Mr. Trump as their nominee, the Times/Siena poll found. About a quarter of Democratic primary voters said the same about Mr. Biden.Those findings are broad measures of an issue Americans have complex feelings on. To dig a little deeper, we asked respondents in that Times/Siena poll to summarize their feelings about the upcoming rematch in just one word. More

Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the Harlem institution, will leave at the end of 2024 after guiding it through pandemic years and securing funds.After guiding The Africa Center through rocky pandemic years and securing a huge chunk of funding for a major construction project, the leader of the Harlem institution is stepping down.Uzodinma Iweala, who is in his seventh year as chief executive of the Africa Center, will depart at the end of 2024.Iweala’s leadership helped to settle an institution with a tumultuous past of various mandates, locations and even names. It was formerly known as the Museum for African Art, which The New York Times’s co-chief art critic, Holland Cotter, called the “source of some of the most conceptually daring exhibitions of its era,” and before that, the Center for African Art. Faced with a delayed opening date during the pandemic, Iweala expanded its programming to include lectures and visits from heads of state, outdoor dance parties, films and author talks. All of it was aimed at connecting with the African diaspora and changing the way Americans interact with the African continent.Iweala, who as a writer and medical doctor has a nontraditional background for an arts institution leader, said he planned to focus on new creative projects including finishing a book. His multifaceted background and personal history — he is Nigerian-American and has lived in Nigeria — were regarded by many in the arts community as a good fit for an institution trying to transform itself into more than a museum or gallery. In an interview last year, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Thelma Golden called him “visionary.”“I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to build over the past few years, especially in a challenging environment,” Iweala said. “It’s the right time to leave for me and for the institution.”Under Iweala, the Center has partnered with the Museum of Food and Drink on an exhibition as well as independent curators to offer “States of Becoming,” a 2022-23 exhibition that featured 17 African artists from the continent and diaspora. He partnered with the University of Cape Town to help organize a media index to track how Africa is covered in the media and created the Future Africa Forum that offered discussions with presidents, philanthropists and other leaders during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.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