Content Type: Personal Profile

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares15 Views

    Kevin Mazur, the Ultimate Celebrity Photographer

    by

    When Taylor Swift opened her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., in March 2023, Kevin Mazur was granted full access to photograph the show.When Beyoncé opened her Renaissance Tour in Stockholm, Sweden, two months later, Mr. Mazur captured the performance from directly in front of the stage.That fall, when Madonna opened her Celebration Tour in London, Mr. Mazur was once again in position for the best shots.At the Met Gala and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, Mr. Mazur, 63, roams freely while photographers from major news outlets are given a short amount of time to shoot the goings-on away from the red carpet.Bob Dylan has let him into the recording studio, Barbra Streisand has had him in her home, and Kurt Cobain invited him on a Nirvana tour. He took some of the last photographs of Michael Jackson, on the night before his death.His motto — “Why wouldn’t you want to make people look good?” — helps explain how he became the John Singer Sargent of live-action digital photography, a go-to chronicler of rock gods and movie stars.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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Who Is Laura Loomer, the Far-Right Activist Who Traveled With Trump?

      by

      After fellow Republicans criticized her appearance on the trail, noting her history of offensive remarks, former President Donald J. Trump praised her but later said he disagreed with some of her statements.Five years ago Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with a history of expressing bigoted views and a knack for generating publicity, filed an application for a trademark to protect her work in “the field of political activism.”Ms. Loomer, 31, part of a generation of web-savvy right-wing influencers, decided to trademark the term she had coined for her signature move of ambushing people with unexpected, often embarrassing questions. She called it getting “Loomered.”Already a well-known figure among internet obsessives thanks to her anti-Muslim activism, undercover sting operations and web-savvy political stunts, Ms. Loomer found herself at the center of the presidential campaign this week when she traveled with former President Donald J. Trump. She went with him to Philadelphia for the presidential debate, and then accompanied him to Sept. 11 memorial events in New York City and Shanksville, Pa., which drew pointed criticism from Democrats and Republicans because she had previously called Sept. 11 “an inside job.”Here’s more about Laura Loomer.Why are politicians from both parties criticizing her?Ms. Loomer has made a number of racist, sexist, homophobic and Islamophobic comments in the past. She has described Islam as a “cancer,” used the hashtag “#proudislamophobe” and once seemed to celebrate the deaths of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. In 2018, after Twitter banned her for frequent anti-Muslim content, she handcuffed herself to the company’s headquarters in New York and wore a yellow Star of David similar to those Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust (Ms. Loomer is Jewish).After the billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, her account was reinstated, and she has since built up a following of more than 1.2 million people on the site (which Mr. Musk later renamed X) and has a web show. She often blasts out content praising Mr. Trump and viciously attacking anyone she might perceive as a rival.Two days before she traveled with Mr. Trump to the debate, she wrote in a post on X that if Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian American, won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Risking His Own Extinction to Rescue the Rarest of Flowers

      by

      Carlos Magdalena, whose botanical adventures have shades of Indiana Jones, was a driving force in saving the world’s smallest water lily and finding the largest one. He has been called the “plant messiah.”In Australia, he went plant hunting by helicopter and waded in crocodile-infested waters to watch a water lily bloom. In Mauritius, he grabbed a plant specimen off the ledge of a cliff. Last month, while looking for lilies in a tributary of Colombia’s piranha-packed Orinoco River, he jumped from plank to plank in the pitch dark at 4 a.m. to get to a floating pontoon.“It’s not that I am that daring,” said Carlos Magdalena, a research horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. “These situations just arise, and they are not like Superman extreme. Sometimes it’s more Peter Sellers than Indiana Jones.”Mr. Magdalena’s main responsibility at Kew Gardens is tending tropical plants. But he is also known as “the plant messiah,” as anointed by a Spanish newspaper in 2010, for his work rescuing several plant species from the brink of extinction. That work has earned him enormous respect in the field of botany and made him somewhat of a celebrity in the horticulture world.His renown only grew when David Attenborough, the British doyen of nature documentaries, repeated the “plant messiah” tagline at the 2012 premiere of one of his films, which featured a scene of Mr. Magdalena propagating the pygmy lily.The attention, especially from a figure as venerated as Mr. Attenborough, initially dismayed Mr. Magdalena. “Imagine what happens when the God calls you the messiah,” he said, standing outside one of the graceful greenhouses at Kew Gardens.It is appropriate that Mr. Magdalena’s star moment in the documentary showed him working with lilies, the plant closest to his heart and the first one he grew as an 8-year-old on his parent’s finca, a plot of land in the Asturias region of northern Spain.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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      George Santos Is Expected to Plead Guilty, People Close to Case Say

      by

      Mr. Santos could change his mind, but witnesses in his campaign fraud case were told by federal prosecutors that he intends to plead guilty on Monday.George Santos, the former Republican congressman from New York undone by a mind-bending array of biographical lies and moneymaking schemes, has told prosecutors that he intends to plead guilty and avoid a federal trial that was expected to begin next month, according to two lawyers involved in the case and two other people with knowledge of the matter.The plea, which is expected to occur on Monday in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., would spare Mr. Santos from a trial that almost certainly would have been a colorful spectacle. Mr. Santos, whose trial on 23 felony charges was scheduled to begin on Sept. 9, could still change his mind. But this week, two lawyers representing multiple witnesses in the case were told by federal prosecutors that Mr. Santos had decided to plead guilty.Two others with knowledge of the plans confirmed that he intends to plead guilty on Monday; one of the people said Mr. Santos is expected to give a statement in court acknowledging his crimes. The terms of his expected guilty plea and what sentence he might face were not clear.Lies, Charges and Questions Left in the George Santos ScandalGeorge Santos, who was expelled from Congress in 2023, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.Public court records show that an in-person hearing has been scheduled for Monday afternoon at the request of prosecutors and Mr. Santos’s lawyers. The records did not explain the purpose of the hearing. Mr. Santos and one of his lawyers, Joseph Murray, did not respond to requests for comment.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

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      He Made a Game About a Joyous Journey. He Also Got a Bit Lost.

      by

      Anthony Tan was 16 when his idea for a video game about a deer caught the industry’s eye. Nine years later, he’s still working on it.Anthony Tan’s hands shook as he took his seat in a dark Los Angeles theater. The neon green lights sporadically illuminated the 7,000 faces around him.Tan, a solo video game developer, was just 20 years old. Yet a trailer for his game, Way to the Woods, was about to share screen time with dozens of other coming Xbox titles, including those from mega-franchises like Gears of War and Halo. Unlike those games, created by teams of hundreds with eight- or nine-figure budgets, Tan had built his alone in his spare time, buoyed by grant funding.By the time he sat down in the theater at Microsoft’s annual hype-building event, in June 2019, Tan had watched his trailer more than 100 times. He knew every note, every camera pan. As the lights dimmed and the screen faded to black, he was too nervous to look. Everyone else watched his game’s stars — a deer and a fawn — appear onscreen, pushing a railway handcar across a golden plain.Even before the event was over, Tan’s phone blew up with Twitter messages from strangers. Millions of people had been watching the livestream online. Some praised the game’s art style, which Tan said was inspired by the Studio Ghibli movies “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away”; others were intrigued by its unusual main characters.Tan was now shaking from adrenaline, not nerves.“It was absolutely exhilarating,” he said.Tan’s game about animals navigating an abandoned world had struck a chord. The final seconds of his stylish, mysterious trailer made a promise, or as close to one as the world of video game development allows: “Coming 2020 … for real this time.”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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      For the Man Who Plays Lafayette, It’s a Marquis Event

      by

      On a recent sultry Monday, Mark Schneider pulled up to a stable in Williamsburg, Va., ready to get back to the grind, 18th-century style.He was already wearing his leather breeches and ruffly linen shirt. After preparing his horse, he went back to the car for his waistcoat, swords, wig and plumed hat, before hoisting himself into the saddle and heading toward a grassy field near the town’s restored colonial-era courthouse.Tucked in his jacket was a cellphone, for emergencies. He also carried a period-correct flask full of water, for discreet hydration.“I wouldn’t want people to see the Marquis de Lafayette drinking from a flask and get the wrong idea,” he said.Schneider as Lafayette. He’s also an in-demand Napoleon, especially in Europe.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesFor the past 25 years, Schneider has worked at Colonial Williamsburg portraying the French aristocrat who arrived in America at age 19 and became a hero of the American Revolution. But for “Marquis Mark,” as friends jokingly call him, this has been an especially historic summer.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Gwen Walz, la esposa calmada y ultracompetente de Tim Walz

      by

      [Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En 2006, durante su primera campaña para el Congreso, Tim Walz tenía previsto hablar en una cena de recaudación de fondos en Mankato, su ciudad natal en Minnesota. En ese momento, era un político desconocido que participaba en una campaña muy reñida contra un candidato titular que había ocupado el cargo durante seis mandatos. La cena le brindaba la oportunidad de hacer campaña en su distrito local del Partido Demócrata-Agrario-Laborista de Minnesota y aumentar los fondos de su campaña.Solo había un problema: Walz tenía laringitis.Mientras los invitados se servían la comida, se sorprendieron al ver que otra persona subía al escenario: Gwen Walz, la esposa de Walz.Estaba acostumbrada a hablar ante grandes grupos: al igual que su marido, Gwen Walz había sido profesora de una escuela pública durante más de una década. Los asistentes quedaron impresionados por su seguridad y claridad.“Hubo otros candidatos que hablaron, y ella fue la más elocuente del grupo”, dijo John Klaber, un residente de North Mankato que asistió a la recaudación de fondos hace casi dos décadas. “Todos miramos a nuestro alrededor y dijimos: ‘¿Por qué ella no se postula?”.La mayor parte del público estadounidense pudo ver por primera vez al gobernador Tim Walz la semana pasada en un mitin en Filadelfia junto a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, quien ese mismo día había anunciado que era su compañero de fórmula. Al final de su discurso, el país también pudo ver por primera vez a la mujer con la que ha estado casado durante 30 años.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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      These Modern Homesteaders Live Off the Grid, but They’re Extremely Online

      by

      In corners of the internet — and in wooded, undeveloped parts of the country — young men are documenting their efforts to to live off the land.Nate Petroski’s address doesn’t help visitors find his house. Locating it, instead, requires specific GPS coordinates to a spot deep in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, and precise instructions on how to get there. Many of the surrounding roads are impassable without an ATV to traverse several creeks and muddy inclines.It’s much easier to visit him online.Mr. Petroski, 39, is a prominent video creator in the modern-day homesteading movement, determined to live a life of semi-self-sufficiency “off grid,” or disconnected from the power, water, gas and telecommunications lines that connect most residential addresses in the United States. But rather than embracing the reclusive life often associated with off-grid homesteaders in rural areas, Mr. Petroski is extremely prolific online, broadcasting his daily life to millions of followers on social media.His property, known as NarroWay Homestead, is one of the most sophisticated and most-watched operations in a burgeoning niche of online creators who document their off-grid or sustainable living projects across the country, often promoting a way of life that seems diametrically opposed to the mediums they use to share it.“Almost everything I own is a hybrid of ancient knowledge and modern technology,” Mr. Petroski said. His water, he explained, comes from rainwater that runs off his roof into a self-filtering pipe and tank system — and is then pumped throughout his buildings with solar-powered electric pumps.One afternoon in July, Mr. Petroski and his wife, Jen, filmed a video for TikTok, which helps them support their homesteading lifestyle.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesMr. Petroski’s video recording setup.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesThe plaque Mr. Petroski received from YouTube when he reached one million subscribers.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesWe 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