Elections

Ordering mistakes frustrated customers during nearly three years of tests. But competitors like White Castle and Wendy’s say their A.I. ordering systems have been highly accurate.In the nearly three years since McDonald’s announced that it was partnering with IBM to develop a drive-through order taker powered by artificial intelligence, videos popped up on social media showing confused and frustrated customers trying to correct comically inaccurate meals.“Stop! Stop! Stop!” two friends screamed with humorous anguish on a TikTok video as an A.I. drive-through misunderstands their order, tallying up 240, 250 and then 260 Chicken McNuggets.In other videos, the A.I. rings up a customer for nine iced teas instead of one, fails to explain why a customer could not order Mountain Dew and thought another wanted to add bacon to his ice cream.So when McDonald’s announced in a June 13 internal email, obtained by the trade publication Restaurant Business, that it was ending its partnership with IBM and shutting down its A.I. tests at more than 100 U.S. drive-throughs, customers who had interacted with the service were probably not shocked.The decision to abandon the IBM deal comes as many other businesses, including its competitors, are investing in A.I. But it exemplifies some of the challenges companies are facing as they jockey to unlock the revolutionary technology’s potential.Other fast-food companies have had success with A.I. ordering. Last year, Wendy’s formed a partnership with Google Cloud to build out its A.I. drive-through system. Carl’s Jr. and Taco John’s have hired Presto, a voice A.I. firm for restaurants. Panda Express has approximately 30 automated order takers at its windows through a partnership with the voice A.I. firm SoundHound AI.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

Earlier this week, as Major League Baseball prepared for a tribute game in his hometown Birmingham, Ala., Willie Mays said that age would keep him away but that he would be watching from afar.“Rickwood Field is where I played my first home game, and playing there was it — everything I wanted,” he said in a statement to The San Francisco Chronicle.Mays died the next day, at 93, and as fans walked into the ballpark on Thursday, it felt like he was there in spirit, watching from afar.“I’m sure he’s here,” said his son, Michael Mays, who rushed to California from Alabama to pray over his father’s body and then returned in time for the game. “He figured out a way to be the center of attention like he always did. He’s the star of the show. He’s Willie Mays.”His death added poignancy to M.L.B.’s celebration of the Negro leagues at Rickwood Field — the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, where Mays got his start as a professional — and to the game between the San Francisco Giants, Mays’s old team, and the St. Louis Cardinals.Willie Mays’s death added poignancy to M.L.B.’s celebration of the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field, the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, where Mays got his start as a professional.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

One report documented antisemitic threats. The other, anti-Muslim threats. Both signaled that there may be little room for agreement.Stanford released on Thursday dueling reports on campus culture — one on antisemitism and the other on anti-Muslim bias — that revealed mirroring images of campus life in recent months that may be impossible to reconcile.One report found that antisemitism has been pervasive at the university in both overt and subtle ways, while the other stated that the school had stifled free speech among pro-Palestinian students and faculty. They were emblematic of the rift between Jewish and Muslim groups on campus, and showed that any kind of accord between the two groups and the university were distant.The reports are among the first outcomes of universities’s reckonings with their handling of the flurry of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and pro-Israel counterprotests, over the past academic year. As students across the nation marched on campus, set up encampments and, in some cases, got arrested, universities were met with the difficult challenge of balancing students’ right to free speech and campus safety. At Stanford, 13 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested a few weeks ago after barricading themselves in the president’s office. The report on antisemitism — by a university subcommittee on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, consisting of faculty, students and an alumnus — found that acts of antisemitism have ranged from an anonymous threat on social media against a student journalist who had written about antisemitism to what students said was intimidation in the classroom and residence halls.“Antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious,” the group wrote in the report. “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives.”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

Just two months ago, President Biden appeared to have a daunting financial advantage. Then Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, and Republicans’ wallets opened.Former President Donald J. Trump out-raised President Biden for the second consecutive month in May, outpacing his successor by roughly $81 million in donations over the last two months as he rode a surge of financial support after his felony conviction.In May, Mr. Biden’s campaign and its joint operation with the Democratic National Committee raised $85 million, compared with $141 million for Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to the two campaigns. In April, the Trump team also brought in $25 million more than the Biden team.The Biden campaign said it entered June with $212 million on hand combined with the party. The Trump operation and R.N.C. have not released a full tally of their cash on hand since the end of March. A partial count on Thursday, revealed in Federal Election Commission filings, showed that Mr. Trump had amassed a war chest of at least $170 million with the party.Overall, Mr. Trump was a daunting $100 million behind Mr. Biden at the start of April. In two months, he cut that cash deficit by at least half.The full accounting of both sides’ finances will be made public in federal filings next month. But the combination of Mr. Trump’s improved fund-raising and Mr. Biden’s heavier spending on advertising this spring appears to put the two sides on a path to enter the summer relatively close to financial parity.“Yes, Trump is raising a lot more money now, and that should scare people,” said Brian Derrick, a strategist who founded a Democratic fund-raising platform called Oath. “But at the end of the day, Biden has the funds that he needs to run a really strong campaign.”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

Michael R. Bloomberg, who is the former mayor of New York City and a Democratic megadonor, has donated nearly $20 million to support President Biden’s re-election campaign, a Bloomberg representative said.Mr. Bloomberg gave $19 million to Future Forward, the main Democratic super PAC supporting Mr. Biden, and $929,600 to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fund-raising committee between Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee, said Howard Wolfson, the Education program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies.Mr. Bloomberg’s donation was first reported by The Washington Post.“I stood with Joe Biden in 2020, and I am proud to do so again,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement.Mr. Bloomberg, who spent $1 billion of his own money on his failed presidential campaign in 2020, ultimately backed Mr. Biden in the Democratic primary that year and was a significant financial supporter of his campaign. He spent tens of millions of dollars through his political action committee on television ads supporting Mr. Biden and vowed to spend heavily in Florida, which then-President Donald J. Trump ultimately won by about three percentage points.Mr. Bloomberg’s $19 million donation to Future Forward is significant, but pales in comparison to the super PAC’s spending ambitions for the election. The group has reserved a $250 million ad campaign in seven battleground states, starting in August and running through Election Day. More

Were you on Billy Bratton’s wavelength?Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — In any themeless puzzle, there should ideally be a lot of open space (read: fewer black squares) so that the constructor can pack the grid with long, interesting entries. I consider these lively entries my reward for wrangling all of the shorter fill that I encounter earlier in the week. And when they are triple-stacked the way they are in Billy Bratton’s crossword, with exciting entries in all four quadrants, a good time is certain to be had by all. Or by most of us, anyway.I predict that there will be what I like to call the Goldilocks reaction to Mr. Bratton’s puzzle (“This puzzle is too easy!” or “No, this puzzle is too hard!”). But perhaps we can take a moment away from the competition to appreciate what we do have: a crossword with sizzling entries and fun clues. In particular, I loved 8D. The entry is a fairly common phrase, yet it is making its New York Times Crossword debut. It was fun to see the clue call our attention with a red siren emoji on each side of it.Whether you did or didn’t struggle with Mr. Bratton’s puzzle is unimportant, in my opinion. I just hope you enjoyed the experience. Remember, crosswords are games, and games are meant to be fun.Tricky Clues15A. The [Notes taken by a single person?] are musical notes, and that person is singing or playing a SOLO.16A. Not only is [Condescendingly spells out] a synonym for MANSPLAINS, but that spelling out is typically also done to someone who is already an expert in the area that is being explained.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

Resetting the “Memory” musical in the world of ballroom competitions makes for a joyful reincarnation.A D.J. pawing through a carton of old LPs — Natalie Cole, Angela Bofill — comes upon a curiosity: the original cast album of “Cats.” When he opens the gatefold, glittery spangles fly everywhere.That’s how “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” begins, and it’s basically what the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s drag remake of the Broadway behemoth does to the drab original. It sets the joy free.Whether upper- or lowercase, cats never previously offered me much pleasure. The underlying T.S. Eliot poems, ad libbed for his godchildren, are agreeable piffle, hardly up there with “Prufrock” as fodder for the ages. The musical, instead of honoring the material’s delicacy, stomped all over it, leaving heavy mud prints. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, and especially the rigged-up story and original staging by Trevor Nunn, tried so hard to make big statements from little ditties and kitties that it wound up a perfect example of camp.Camp, cleverly, is the new version’s base line, neutralizing that criticism. It turns out that the show once advertised vaguely (and threateningly) as “now and forever” — it ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 — works far better in a specific past.That past is the world of drag balls, which at the time of the original “Cats” was beginning to achieve mainstream awareness. Madonna’s appropriation of the participants’ style and dance moves in her videos and concerts, as well as Jennie Livingston’s celebration of them in her documentary “Paris Is Burning,” helped pave the way for the supremacy of RuPaul and dragmania today. But beneath that triumph lay a darker truth: that the thrill of ball culture depended on its drawing extravagance from destitution, meeting prejudice with bravery, and staring down death with style.The key insight of this “Jellicle Ball,” which opened on Thursday at the new downtown arts cube, is that at least some of those themes could resonate with Eliot’s subtext and Lloyd Webber’s score. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have thus transported Grizabella, Skimbleshanks, Rum Tum Tugger and the rest from a metaphysical junkyard to a hotel ballroom for a vogueing competition, accompanied by new versions of the songs that go heavier on the synthesizers, turn some lyrics into raps and add a distinctive house beat.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

Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday, Mr. Trump repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” He was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”Mr. Trump suggested that he had wanted to enact such a policy while in office but “then we had to solve the Covid problem.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact many of the immigration restrictions that officials had wanted to put in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s term.Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires.” Mr. Trump’s comments stood in contrast to the immigration policy he adopted while in office and were a direct overture to wealthy business leaders whom he is courting as donors and supporters of his campaign. Mr. Sacks hosted a fund-raiser this month for the former president in San Francisco, the beating heart of the liberal tech industry, that raised about $12 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign.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