Elections

Doors will open for Republican caucuses across the state at 2 p.m. Eastern time, and those who arrive in person by 3:30 Eastern time will be admitted. There will be one round of voting, and those who were registered as Republicans by the deadline at the end of last year may participate. There is no […] More

In “The Witch of New York,” Alex Hortis revisits a Staten Island case that helped usher in a lurid new era of journalism.THE WITCH OF NEW YORK: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice, by Alex HortisThe story began with a fire: On Christmas night in 1843, a Staten Island teenager spotted smoke coming from the white house owned by Capt. George Houseman. After he raised the alarm, men drinking at the local tavern came running to help put out the blaze. The captain was away at sea, but the men made a grim discovery in the burned-out kitchen: the bodies of Emeline Houseman, 24, and her toddler daughter, Ann Eliza.Suspicion soon fell upon Mary (Polly) Bodine, née Houseman, the dead woman’s sister-in-law. For one thing, Polly, 33 at the time of the fire, had already strayed from the conventions of the era. Born into the comfort and stability of one of the island’s most prosperous families, she blossomed in what was then an idyllic and still mostly rural setting just a ferry ride away from bustling Lower Manhattan, which had exploded in population in the first decades of the 1800s. Following an early marriage to an abusive drunk named Andrew Bodine, Polly returned to her parents’ house with her son and daughter. Now she was “a single mother on an island of gossips,” writes Alex Hortis in “The Witch of New York,” his fascinating look at the crime and what came after.It’s not just that Polly was different. She was also carrying on an affair with George Waite, an apothecary who had hired her teenage son, Albert, as his assistant. As Hortis points out, this was a profession with a “slightly nefarious reputation,” and indeed, Waite and others provided the drugs that women could use to end pregnancy. (Abortion was legal in the state of New York until 1845, when a new law criminalized the procedure and made women vulnerable to prosecution.) Still, Hortis writes, once Polly was identified as a suspect in the murders of Emeline and Ann Eliza, “the public would judge Polly’s character as a woman and her fate would turn on the outcome.”Later it would be rumored that Polly had become pregnant by George multiple times, and that he had provided the necessary means to end each one — except the last. At the time of the murders, Polly was around eight months pregnant. After attending the funeral, at which Emeline’s father, John Van Pelt, declared to his side of the family that she was “the murderess,” Polly fled, despite her condition and the cold, snowy weather. She surrendered on New Year’s Eve, and a few days later delivered a stillborn baby in her cell.This part of the narrative — the fire, the suspect, the police — is really just throat-clearing before Hortis reaches the book’s major topic: how an ascendant new institution, the tabloid press, both reflected and fomented public opinion (and prejudices) in a way that swayed justice itself.As Polly and George sat in jail awaiting trial, reporters and editors at The New York Herald, The New York Sun, The New-York Daily Tribune and others sharpened their pencils. They knew already that “murder mysteries that involved female victims or an element of sex sold newspapers” and the upstart Herald (founded just a few years earlier) quickly got to work on Polly, publishing a woodcut that emphasized her gaunt features and long nose. This visual shorthand, coupled with The Sun’s publication of a hoax confession shortly after, established the archetype through which American readers could understand the crime: Polly was a witch.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

Experts say the case against the start-up and its chief executive, Sam Altman, raises unusual legal issues that do not have a clear precedent.From Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Washington, the blockbuster case that Elon Musk filed against OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, has become Topic A. It is the business world’s hottest soap opera.But among lawyers, the case has become something of a fascination for a different reason: It poses a series of unique and unusual legal questions without clear precedent. And it remains unclear what would constitute “winning” in a case like this, given that it appears to have been brought out of Musk’s own personal frustration and philosophical differences with Open A.I, a company he helped found and then left.The lawsuit — which pits one of the wealthiest men in the world against the most advanced A.I. company in the world, backed by Microsoft, one the world’s most valuable companies — argues that OpenAI, a nonprofit organization that created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, breached a contract to operate in the public interest and violated its duties by diverting from its founding purpose of benefiting humanity.Musk’s lawyers — led by Morgan Chu, a partner at Irell & Manella who is known as the “$5 billion man” for his win record — want the court to force OpenAI to open its technology to others and to stop licensing it to Microsoft, which has invested billions in its partnership with the start-up.Among the questions that lawyers and scholars are asking after poring through Musk’s 35-page complaint:Does Musk even have standing to sue? “One of the differences with nonprofits compared to other companies is that, generally, no one other than the state attorney general has standing to sue for the kind of stuff that he’s complaining about, like not following your mission,“ Peter Molk, a professor of law at the University of Florida, said of Musk’s lawsuit. That’s most likely why Musk’s lawyers are presenting the case as a breach of contract instead of attacking the company’s nonprofit status.Musk also alleges that OpenAI has breached its fiduciary duty, but that charge has its own challenges, lawyers said, given that such claims are traditionally handled in Delaware, not California, where the lawsuit was filed. (Musk, of course, has an infamously rocky relationship with the state of Delaware.)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

On Tuesday, Kat Tenbarge and Liz Kreutz of NBC News reported that several middle schoolers in Beverly Hills, Calif., were caught making and distributing fake naked photos of their peers: “School officials at Beverly Vista Middle School were made aware of the ‘A.I.-generated nude photos’ of students last week, the district superintendent said in a letter to parents. The superintendent told NBC News the photos included students’ faces superimposed onto nude bodies.”I had heard about this kind of thing happening to high school girls, which is horrible enough. But the idea of such young children being dehumanized by their classmates, humiliated and sexualized in one of the places they’re supposed to feel safe, and knowing those images could be indelible and worldwide, turned my stomach.I’m not a technophobe and have, in the past, been somewhat skeptical about the outsize negative impact of social media on teen girls. And while I still think the subject is complicated, and that the research doesn’t always conclude that there are unfavorable mental health effects of social media use on all groups of young people, the increasing reach of artificial intelligence adds a new wrinkle that has the potential to cause all sorts of damage. The possibilities are especially frightening when the technology is used by teens and tweens, groups with notoriously iffy judgment about the permanence of their actions.I have to admit that my gut reaction to the Beverly Hills story was rage — I wanted the book thrown at the kids who made those fakes. But I wanted to hear from someone with more experience talking to teens and thinking deeply about the adolescent relationship with privacy and technology. So I called Devorah Heitner, the author of “Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World,” to help me step back a bit from my punitive fury.Heitner pointed out that although artificial intelligence adds a new dimension, kids have been passing around digital sexual images without consent for years. According to a 2018 meta-analysis from JAMA Pediatrics, among children in the 12 to 17 age range, “The prevalence of forwarding a sext without consent was 12.0 percent,” and “and the prevalence of having a sext forwarded without consent was 8.4 percent.”In her book, Heitner offers an example in which an eighth-grade girl sends a topless photo to her boyfriend, who circulates it to his friends without her permission. After they broke up, but without her knowledge, “her picture kept circulating, passing from classmate to classmate throughout their middle school,” and then “one afternoon, she opened her school email to find a video with her image with sound effects from a porn video playing with 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

Molly recommends a novel about a scornful teenager and a collection of interviews about a difficult filmmaker.Johann Joachim Winckelmann and bookAnton Raphael Mengs, circa 1777Dear readers,Some time ago I found a crown-of-thorns plant (Euphorbia milii) by the trash bins in our building. The plant had once been glorious but was abandoned in critical condition, with sap-oozing wounds and wizened limbs. I rehomed it and performed triage. The plant responded by perking and expanding at a “Little Shop of Horrors” rate, expressing tentacles that pricked all passersby, including me, with those murderous titular thorns. Euphorbia milii is a plant that can be loved but never liked.Books are full of characters with the same quality. (As is life.) Below, some irresistible figures with whom you’d never, ever want to grab a beer.—Molly“Lucy,” by Jamaica KincaidFiction, 1990This short novel is a study of several types of defiance: daughters defying mothers, employees defying employers, children defying logic. Lucy Josephine Potter arrives in Manhattan at age 19 from the West Indies to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple and their four kids. The beam of her intelligence is in the range of 200,000 lumens; in a matter of weeks she has taken the measure of the unhappily married couple, captivated their children and mapped out exactly how entangled in this family she wishes to become. (Not very.)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

On This Week’s Episode:Yousef Hammash has been moving his family from one place to another in Gaza for five months. He always finds options. Now his youngest sister is about to have a baby, and everyone may need to move again. They’re all looking to Yousef to find one more option.Yousef Hammash in 2022.via Yousef HammashThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling and provides news, depth and serendipity. It is available to Times news subscribers on iOS. If you haven’t already, download the app and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Our audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time. More

I slipped away from this nightmarish election campaign into a delicious dream the other evening. I dreamed that, when Joe Biden gets up to reset his beleaguered presidency at the State of the Union address, he gives this astonishing speech:Mr. Speaker. Man, Mike Johnson was a nobody just weeks ago — now he’s Neville Chamberlain. Madam Vice President. Oy.Our first lady — you hottie! And our second gentleman. Members of Congress, leaders of our military, justices of the Supreme Court. And you, my fellow Americans.My report is this: The state of my mental competency is strong. And the union’s OK, too.You think I’m forgetful? Take a look at the other guy — he can’t even remember who Nancy Pelosi is, and that gal is the best speaker in United States history! You know what I remember? I remember how to lift people up, not tear them down and pit them against one another. I remember how to tell the truth when my lips move.I may be 81, but it’s not about your chronological age. It’s about how old your ideas are. Donald Trump wants to yank us back on women’s rights, the environment, mail-in voting — actually, all voting. He’s undermining NATO, the strongest alliance ever. I’m trying to build a high-speed train from Vegas to L.A., baby!I remember very well that, three years ago, our economy was reeling. Our administration has created nearly 15 million jobs and helped fund 46,000 infrastructure projects. Unemployment has been under 4 percent, and the inflation rate has gone down.My boy Hunter made mincemeat out of the House Republicans. His Irish was up, and he told those clowns there was no corruption on my part. I see you down there, Matt Gaetz, you lying, dog-faced pony soldier! When you tried to quiz Hunter about his drug use, he made quick work of you. Pot calling kettle! How could you give Hunter a hard time when you’re under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct and using illicit drugs? Lots of luck with that, man!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

“I have to go get a photo of Adam!”A young woman in dark glasses, a tan trench coat and a lavender bucket hat darts into the street and runs after the white Porsche convertible in which Representative Adam Schiff and his wife are slowly being driven through Chinatown as part of the Lunar New Year’s parade in Los Angeles. Planting herself several feet in front of the car, the woman snaps some pics and then calls out to the passing House member, “Thank you for all that you do!”As she heads back toward her friends, I try to stop her, asking why she is a fan of Mr. Schiff, who is running for the Senate to succeed Dianne Feinstein, who died in office last September at age 90. The woman keeps moving but gushes, with a hint of perplexity suggesting I’m an idiot for having to ask: “Everybody loves him! My mother-in-law in Madison, Wisconsin, loves him! He’s done so much!”Jake Michaels for The New York TimesAnd with that, she melts back into the crowd, not bothering to elaborate on what it is that Mr. Schiff has done. Not that she needs to. Around his home state — and beyond — the 12-term Democrat has achieved bona fide celebrity status thanks to his emergence as a prime antagonist of Donald Trump.As the House member who spearheaded Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, who played a key role in the Jan. 6 select committee and who has served as a top Trump critic on cable news, Mr. Schiff has been vilified across the MAGAverse. He has earned no fewer than three puerile nicknames from the former president: Pencil Neck, Liddle’ Adam Schiff and, my favorite, Shifty Schiff. More seriously, House Republicans booted him from the intelligence committee early last year and later censured him for his role in the Russia investigation, claiming he advanced politically motivated lies about Mr. Trump that endangered national security. All this, in turn, has made Mr. Schiff a hero to the anti-Trump masses.At multiple points along the parade route, in fact, people yell their gratitude and encouragement. “Keep it up!” urges Chris (first name only!), a tour guide visiting from Tampa, raising a fist in salute.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