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      A Memoir Offers an Insider’s Perspective Into the Pentagon’s U.F.O. Hunt

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      In “Imminent,” the former intelligence official who ran a once-secret program shares some of what he knows.Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort.Elizondo’s disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes.“Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species,” Elizondo wrote.The book, “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for U.F.O.s,” is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.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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      Piecing Together an Ancient Epic Was Slow Work. Until A.I. Got Involved.

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      Scholars have struggled to identify fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh — one of the world’s oldest literary texts. Now A.I. has brought an “extreme acceleration” to the field.In 1872, in a quiet second-floor room at the British Museum, George Smith, a museum employee, was studying a grime-encrusted clay tablet when he came across words that would change his life. In the ancient cuneiform script, he recognized references to a stranded ship and a bird sent in search of land. After he had the tablet cleaned, Smith was certain he’d found a prototype of the biblical flood story.“I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion,” Smith reportedly said in a frenzy of excitement.Smith realized that the tablet, which had been excavated in what is modern-day Iraq, was a small part of a much longer work — one that some then thought could help shed light on the Book of Genesis. The discovery made Smith, who came from a working-class family and had largely taught himself cuneiform, famous. He dedicated the rest of his life to searching for missing pieces of the poem, making multiple trips to the Middle East before dying of an illness on his final trip in 1876, at age 36.For 152 years since Smith’s discovery, successive generations of Assyriologists — experts in the study of cuneiform and the cultures that used it — have taken up his quest to piece together a complete version of the poem known now as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the epic, which was written more than 3,000 years ago and was based upon still earlier works, have re-emerged as tablets have been unearthed in archaeological digs, found in museum store rooms or surfaced on the black market.The researchers face a daunting task. There are as many as half a million clay tablets housed in the Mesopotamian collections of various world museums and universities, along with many more tablet fragments. But since there are so few experts in cuneiform, many of these writings are unread and many more are unpublished.So despite a generation-spanning effort, about 30 percent of Gilgamesh remains missing and there are gaps in modern understanding both of the poem and Mesopotamian writing in general.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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      ‘It Ends With Us’ Soars at the Box Office

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      The film, which cost $25 million to make, is on track to earn at least $45 million in North America on its opening weekend, analysts say.Colleen Hoover’s book “It Ends With Us” has been a fixture on the best-seller list for years. And now, the movie adaptation has become a smash at the box office. The $25 million film from Sony Pictures is on track to earn at least $45 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts say.Starring Blake Lively, the romance is based on Ms. Hoover’s most popular book — one that was initially released in 2016 but reappeared on the best-seller list in the midst of the pandemic in 2021 and has since spent some 140 weeks there. Buoyed by TikTok, the book, about a complicated love triangle with undertones of domestic violence, has sold 8 million copies and found fans worldwide.The low-budget film comes at a time when there has been little in the marketplace geared to women, in contrast with last summer when “Barbie” earned $1.4 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of the year. Sony took advantage of this dearth in the marketplace with a potent social media campaign that featured Ms. Lively, guest appearances by her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the help of her friend Taylor Swift, who contributed the song “My Tears Ricochet” to the film and the trailer.On Friday alone, the PG-13 rated film earned $24 million as audiences tuned in to see Ms. Lively play a florist with a challenging past who falls for a sexy, abusive neurosurgeon played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film.The film’s performance is a welcome boost for the box office, which is still down some 15 percent since last year at this time.“Pure romance is not a big performer at the box office, but occasionally the right story based on the right book comes along, and with a well-cast female lead the movie catches fire,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “That’s happening here.”Reviews have been middling. The New York Times called it “fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.” Yet audiences are giving it high marks. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is hovering at 94 percent positive and the exit score, as recorded by tracking service CinemaScore, is A-.The film will just miss the No. 1 slot for the weekend with Mr. Reynolds’s hit, “Deadpool vs. Wolverine,” holding on for its third frame. The Marvel movie will soon cross the $500 million threshold.Things weren’t as rosy for the Lionsgate adaptation of the video game “Borderlands,” which despite the star power of Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black will probably only gross in the single digits. It was a total misfire for the $115 million sci-fi comedy from the director Eli Roth. More

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      Bob Woodward to Publish ‘War’ This Fall

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      Woodward, an author and journalist, has written more than 20 best selling books. His latest will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East, and the battle for the U.S. presidency.The author and journalist Bob Woodward will publish a new book this fall called “War,” his publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced on Wednesday. The book, which will be released on Oct. 15, will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East and the “raw cage-fight of politics” of the 2024 election.“For more than 50 years, Woodward has done groundbreaking reporting on every president, starting with Richard Nixon,” Jonathan Karp, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster and Woodward’s editor, said in a statement. “His work on the power of the presidency is unrivaled. With ‘War,’ Woodward illustrates the dramatic contrast he sees between Donald Trump and his opponents for the presidency — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, making this a must-read before heading to the polls.”Simon & Schuster said Woodward’s new book would offer a behind the scenes look at President Biden’s efforts to manage the war in Ukraine and contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East, trying to deter the use of nuclear weapons and avoid “a rapid slide into World War III.”Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, has been part of that newsroom for more than 50 years. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first for his coverage of Watergate and the second for coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.Woodward has written more than 20 best selling books, according to the publisher; 15 of them have been No. 1 New York Times best sellers. More

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      JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

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      In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.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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      Pelosi Says She Pushed Biden to Step Aside Because of Need to Defeat Trump

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      A new book by the former speaker details her clashes with the former president, but it was written before her most recent exercise of political might: helping persuade President Biden to end his re-election bid.To hear Representative Nancy Pelosi tell it, her quiet but firm push to get President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race was a simple matter of the ruthless political math that she has spent decades honing a talent for on Capitol Hill.“My goal is defeat Donald Trump,” Ms. Pelosi, the former speaker, said in a recent interview before the release this week of a book on her years in Congress. “And when you make a decision to defeat somebody, you make every decision in favor of that. You don’t mess around with it, OK? What is in furtherance of reaching that goal? I thought we had to have a better campaign.”The book, titled “The Art of Power,” is Ms. Pelosi’s retelling of major moments of critical decision-making during the Iraq War, a catastrophic financial meltdown, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and multiple clashes with former President Donald J. Trump, among other events.But it may be her most recent deft exercise of political finesse and muscle — one that took place well after the book was written — that will stand as a final testament to Ms. Pelosi’s stature as the Democratic Party’s premiere powerhouse of recent decades. In a formidable display of her enduring clout, she helped persuade the incumbent president to abandon his re-election bid to give her party a better chance of holding the White House in November.Ms. Pelosi plays down her role in nudging Mr. Biden aside and insists the decision was his alone to make. In her focus on polls and fund-raising and in private conversations with the president and rattled Democratic colleagues, she said, she was driven by the single imperative of beating Mr. Trump.The former speaker said she did not initiate calls with colleagues, trying to dispel claims that she had orchestrated the ouster of Mr. Biden, a longtime ally. But if Democrats triumph this fall after staring down the prospect of a resounding defeat, the maneuvering by Ms. Pelosi — along with personal appeals to Mr. Biden from the Democratic congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York — may turn out to be among her most significant acts.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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      Can You Uncover the Hidden Book Titles?

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      The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale.The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale.The fever had dissipated but the six patients were having respiratory issues that were resistant to treatment and the next few hours were going to be precarious. Half the group had already crossed the line between serious and critical condition, as two of them were on oxygen and one was on life support.Meanwhile, as investigators examined the body of evidence in the case, their nexus of activity focused on the farm on Lakewood Road, where they would soon find a beautiful poison toadstool that someone had seamlessly blended in with the straw mushrooms for sale. More

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      Test Your Literary Knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance

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      Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment tests your knowledge of novels, poems and memoirs by writers connected to the Harlem Renaissance, a creative movement by Black authors, artists and musicians that crystallized into a cultural force a century ago. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books and other information if you’d like to do some further reading.3 of 5In 1930, Langston Hughes collaborated on a play called “Mule Bone,” which was never finished but was published in a new edition and produced on Broadway in 1991, long after both authors were dead. His co-writer, who was also an anthropologist, was the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including an autobiography titled “Dust Tracks on a Road.” Who was it? More