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    The Last Lucille Roberts

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    All that remains of the Lucille Roberts gym empire is a modest location in Queens.At its height, the brand had more than 50 locations in the New York area and its commercials aired non-stop on local television.The gym helped set off the fitness craze that would revolutionize women’s health.The most loyal Lucille Roberts devotees have little interest in working out anywhere else.The Last Lucille RobertsOn a busy thoroughfare in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens sits a women-only gym with faded hot pink signage. It is the last surviving location of Lucille Roberts, a chain of women’s health clubs that once thrived in New York, leading a trend that fused fitness with feminism. Now that it has dwindled down to just one location, its most loyal members have ended up here.Women in their 50s and 60s who have worked out for decades at Lucille Roberts now take classes including Zumba and “Brazilian Butt and Gutt” in a fluorescent-lit studio. They have little interest in going anywhere else. Signs on the walls remind members not to leave their purses and handbags unattended when they’re using the machines. A magenta poster announces: “Strong Women Work Out Here.”On a recent afternoon at this gym on Austin Street, members explained why they have stuck with Lucille Roberts long after it was a leader in its field, with more than 50 locations in the New York area.Marguerite Toussaint pumped some iron after finishing her morning shift as a hotel pastry cook at the Park Hyatt in Manhattan. She has been a Lucille Roberts member since the mid-1990s, when she signed up at a location in Brooklyn, not long after she moved from Haiti to New York. She wakes up each workday before dawn and trains here on her way home.“All of us hope this gym never closes,” Ms. Toussaint said. “It’s not like other gyms. It’s a community for women. We care about each other here. If you don’t see somebody, you call and find out. ‘Hey, why didn’t I see you today?’ I don’t see that at Planet Fitness.”Marguerite Toussaint has been a Lucille Roberts member since the mid-1990s.A member stretches at the chain’s last location.

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      How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life

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      In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)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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      With a Pace Gallery Show, Robert Mangold Demonstrates His Consistency

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      At 87, the abstract artist Robert Mangold will exhibit 19 recent paintings and works, including one of his largest in decades.The abstract artist Robert Mangold has been so remarkably consistent and disciplined with his approach to painting and drawing that he makes pretty much everyone else look capricious and changeable.Mangold has been exploring geometry, form and color for more than 60 years, with a half-century of that time on a charming property here in the Hudson Valley with an old farmhouse and a barn.Now 87, Mangold has definitely slowed down. But he is still working, and he has a show of recent paintings and works on paper at Pace Gallery in Chelsea that opens on Friday.“Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space” is timed to coincide with the busy spring art season in New York and remains on view until Aug. 15.The exhibition has 19 works, and some have multiple components — including “Four Pentagons” (2022), a four-panel work that is one of his largest in decades — so it may seem even bigger, and it spreads over two floors. (“Four Pentagons” and a few other works are on loan from museums or private collections, in this case from the Art Institute of Chicago.)Mangold can spend years iterating on a shape. Circles and semicircles are forms that he has returned to again and again, sometimes embedded with or embedded in rectilinear forms, as in “Circle Painting #4” (1973), which sold for $365,000 at Christie’s in 2014.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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      What Comes After Trauma and a TikTok Hit? Gigi Perez Is Finding Out.

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      The artist, 25, struck platinum with “Sailor Song.” Her debut album is a tribute to her lost sister, and an attempt to make sense of a few rudderless years.Gigi Perez walked into a Brooklyn restaurant last week with a toothpick wedged in her mouth, stood up after dinner and slid in another one. She had glanced at a clear box of them sitting on the table periodically, like she was seeking comfort or reinforcement. But for two hours, she mostly kept her gaze fixed to the side, avoiding eye contact while she spoke — as she often finds herself doing — about death.“Getting older, watching the people in your family get older — I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt that’s going to this inevitable end,” she said.At 25, Perez speaks with a weariness of someone at least twice her age. She was at one of her favorite Japanese spots in Williamsburg, not too far from where she used to live; she was days away from releasing her debut album and 10 hours from a brutally early wake-up call for “The Today Show.”Like many young musicians, Perez is figuring out what comes next after virality. Her lilting, guitar-powered anthems have blazed through TikTok, amassing millions of streams and a fervent fan base. “Sailor Song,” a ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway (yes, it was based on a real woman), went platinum and has been planted on Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States for months; it became a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall. But Perez’s career hasn’t been built on celebration. She is carving a catalog out of grief.“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” Perez said. OK McCausland for The New York TimesOne of her first songs to garner attention on SoundCloud, “Sometimes (Backwood),” took off six months after her older sister, Celene, died suddenly in 2020. Perez’s LP, “At the Beach, in Every Life,” released less than a week ago, is largely a tribute to her. It is also an attempt to shape and sharpen the last, often rudderless years of her own life.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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      Overlooked Clue Sheds Light on Shakespeare’s Marriage

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      New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband to his wife, Anne.Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind to lead a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had famously bequeathed her his “second best bed” in his will.But Mr. Steggle’s new research, expected to be published this week in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.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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      Mario Vargas Llosa: An Appreciation

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      The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas.Such was Updike’s influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89.More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Updike took note of the author’s handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa’s substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness.Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would.Even Updike was two decades late to the writer’s work. Vargas Llosa had already published most of his major and enduring novels, including “The Time of the Hero” (1963), “The Green House” (1966), “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) and “The War of the End of the World” (1981). These grainy, raunchy, politically minded and mind-expanding books found a worldwide audience but were slower to catch on in the United States.Vargas Llosa had helped start, in the early 1960s, a movement that became known as the Boom, a term applied to a freewheeling and socially conscious new generation of Latin American writers: García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Miguel Ángel Asturias, among others.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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      She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

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      A barracks-style detention center in Louisiana is jammed with around 90 immigrant women, mostly undocumented workers from central and South America, sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.There is also, among them, a Russian scientist.She is 30 years old, shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work, because her laptop was confiscated. She plays chess with other women when the guards allow it. Otherwise, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard. Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.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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      The Masters Helped Turn Ely Callaway Into a Golf Club Maker

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      He invented the Big Bertha driver, which changed the game of golf. Bobby Jones, a creator of the tournament, was a Callaway cousin.Ely Callaway, founder of the namesake golf club company, did something few golf enthusiasts could imagine doing. He declined an invitation from Bobby Jones to join the Augusta National Golf Club in 1957.Jones, a revered amateur golfer who won the Grand Slam in 1930 and was a co-founder of Augusta National with Clifford Roberts, was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero. Over the family’s mantel, long before the Masters achieved the major status it has today, hung a lithograph of Jones winning the Amateur Championship, also known as the British Amateur, and completing the Grand Slam. Across it was a personal handwritten inscription from Jones to Callaway and his first wife, Jeanne.Bobby Jones teeing off at St. Andrews in Scotland in 1928. Jones was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero.Getty ImagesNicholas Callaway said his father had practical reasons to turn down Jones.“Ely’s rationale later in life when he became the Callaway of Callaway Golf was that since Augusta was only open for a portion of the year, most of the year he would spend fielding calls from friends angling to get an invitation to play,” he said. His father’s posthumous memoir, “The Unconquerable Game: My Life in Golf & Business,” is being released this month.It worked out fine for him. “In the 1990s, he attended the Masters for many years and would get invited to play often in the days following the tournament,” his son said.The decision had to have been difficult. Something that comes across in Callaway’s memoir was the impact Jones had on him.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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      How a Black Progressive Transformed Into a Conservative Star

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      In the summer of 2020, Xaviaer DuRousseau was preparing to appear on a Netflix reality show called “The Circle,” where a group of strangers, isolated in separate apartments, compete for a cash prize and occasionally adopt fake digital personas to trick one another.Mr. DuRousseau, then 23, was a progressive who marched in Black Lives Matter protests, had pushed his university to require ethnic studies courses as a graduation requirement and voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016. For the TV show, producers wanted Mr. DuRousseau, a Black man, to pose as a white woman and lecture others about racial injustice, before revealing his true identity.Mr. DuRousseau spent hours boning up on right-wing politics to get ready for debates with conservative contestants.But as he watched videos from PragerU, the conservative advocacy group, and Candace Owens, a right-wing influencer, he found himself nodding along.Maybe, he began to think, the media really was targeting President Trump for taking on the political establishment. Maybe free college and free health care were unrealistic goals, despite what Mr. Sanders said. Maybe police brutality against Black people was less common than he thought.“I was getting so frustrated, because I kept agreeing with some of the stuff that they were saying,” he said. “I just kept debunking myself, over and over.”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