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      Don Winslow Is Ready to Trade His Pen for a Protest Sign

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      “City in Ruins” is the third novel in Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism.Like the cops, crooks and gangland toughs who populate his books, Don Winslow has something of a street fighter’s mentality.Growing up in Rhode Island during the New England gang wars of the 1960s, local mafia types were part of the fabric of his childhood. After college, while working as a private investigator in New York City, one of his jobs was to act as bait for potential muggers — then fend for himself until a larger associate could step in, “hopefully before I got too beat up,” he said.Winslow’s familiarity with the grittier side of life has served him well. Over a 33-year span he’s published more than 20 crime fiction novels, many of which have become best sellers or been adapted for film and TV.Now, he’s turning his attention to “something that feels heavier,” he said. “City in Ruins,” the third book in Winslow’s sweeping Danny Ryan trilogy, which casts an Irish mobster as a modern-day Aeneas and draws inspiration from events that led to the Boston Irish Gang War, will be his last novel. He said he’s retiring from publishing in part so he can put more energy into political activism.Since the 2020 presidential campaign, Winslow and Shane Salerno, a screenwriter, have together produced a series of highly combative videos and social media posts excoriating former President Donald Trump as, among other things, a “con man” and a “pathetic, broken little boy” (all told, the videos have received hundreds of millions of views.)“There’s no way I can reach that many people with a novel,” Winslow said. “And the novels take so much time, in an era where really what is needed are much faster responses.”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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      Shohei Ohtani Is Home and Focused on Baseball. Dodgers Fans Are Relieved.

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      Los Angeles finally got a close look at baseball’s megastar on Thursday as a gambling situation involving his former interpreter took a back seat to opening day.The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an eight-foot stone lantern given as a gift to the Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki, who helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a good-will tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodger fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki’s, and for years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired schoolteacher who has been coming to Dodgers game since the 1960s. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”The monument is a homage to the team’s past, and also its present.In December, the Dodgers signed the world’s biggest baseball star, the two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history, $700 million over 10 years. For good measure, the team signed another Japanese superstar, the pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years. It was the most lucrative contract ever for a pitcher.On Thursday, as Los Angeles got a glimpse of its newest megastar, Ohtani’s impact was apparent before he even stepped on the field: New advertisements for Asian companies — an airline, a retail chain, yogurt drinks, skin care products — dotted the stadium. One local newscaster — in pregame coverage that began when most Angelenos were having breakfast, or stuck in traffic — compared Ohtani to Taylor Swift, saying that the Dodgers were baseball’s version of the Eras Tour. And a new addition to the stadium menu is a Japanese fried octopus fritter being promoted as one of Ohtani’s favorite dishes.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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      Lauren Haynes to Be New Head Curator on Governors Island

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      Lauren Haynes brings her curatorial expertise to the goal of growing Governors Island’s public art program.The Trust for Governors Island announced on Tuesday that it has appointed Lauren Haynes as the new head curator and vice president of arts and culture for the 172-acre island, situated in New York Harbor with ringside views of the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront.“We have big ambitions for the arts program here, which is to be New York’s pre-eminent public art destination,” said Clare Newman, the president and chief executive of the Trust, a nonprofit organization created by the city to develop and operate the island as a recreational and cultural resource.“Lauren is very good at bringing emerging voices and underrepresented artists to the forefront and shares our ideas about growing the public art program significantly,” said Newman, who tapped Haynes, most recently the director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Queens Museum.Originally used by the Lenape for hunting and fishing, the island became an Army base in the early 19th century, then was used by the Coast Guard in the late 20th century and opened to the public in 2005. Now ferries run regularly from Lower Manhattan year-round and directly from Brooklyn in warmer months, with 931,000 trips to the island last year, according to the Trust.“We have fantastic examples of public art throughout the city, but what makes Governors Island unique is really our location and the fact that it’s an experience to get here,” Haynes said. The idea of disconnecting from the city, while still visible, and reconnecting to nature on the island, she continued, “feels like where the opportunity is.”Haynes, 42, will build on a half dozen permanent and long-term public artworks by Rachel Whiteread, Mark Handforth, Sam Van Aken, Mark Dion, Sheila Berger and Shantell Martin that are positioned around the island and previously stewarded by Meredith Johnson, the first head curator at the Trust. Early this summer, Jenny Kendler is creating “Other of Pearl,” an immersive installation evoking marine ecosystems in the subterranean spaces of Fort Jay, on the northern part of the island.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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      For Catherine, Living a Public Life in a Public Body, Privacy is Illusory

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      To be clear, there is nothing private about having cancer. A diagnosis requires referrals and a bewildering number of scans and tests. There are ultrasounds, MRIs, PET scans; colonoscopies, bronchoscopies, endoscopies. There are needle biopsies, razor biopsies, or liquid biopsies. Most of the tests require getting naked, or mostly naked, beneath a robe, sometimes waiting in a large room full of other terrified strangers also in robes, before presenting oneself to strangers who push, jab, thread and insert tools into or onto body parts that are not normally explored. Frequently, these tests have to be repeated, or different tests ordered, to rule something out.“I’ve been naked in front of so many people in my life at this point. You sort of lose some of that sense of, ‘My body is private,’” said Isabel Blumberg, who is my gynecologist. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, Blumberg was the first person to call me. She told me that she’d had cancer, too.In the video Kensington Palace released on Friday, Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealed her cancer status after more than six weeks of silence and pleaded for privacy. “We hope that you will understand that, as a family, we now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment,” she said while wringing her thin hands. A princess no doubt bypasses the waiting rooms and receives a level of medical care inaccessible to most. But she cannot evade the intrusions and indignities of cancer — the anxious waiting for pathology reports, the shock of the news, the series of treatment decisions that no young, healthy person has ever imagined having to make. The treatment can feel like a grueling, interminable invasion.Catherine publicly announced her diagnosis in a video released on Friday.BBC Studios, via Getty ImagesAnd because Catherine is a princess, the violations went further: the wild and incessant speculation about what had gone wrong with her body, the alleged unauthorized infiltrations of her medical files, which the London Clinic, where she underwent “major abdominal surgery,” is investigating. “There is no place at our hospital for those who intentionally breach the trust of any of our patients or colleagues,” Al Russell, the clinic’s CEO, said in a statement.Even in health, privacy is difficult for a public figure to attain, and since she married Prince William in 2011, Kate Middleton has lived under a microscope. Her physical body — her legs, her hair, her behind, her clothing — has been scrutinized in the way of every female celebrity but also because of her royal function and role. 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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      Radu Jude Brings TikTok’s Chaos to the Movies

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      Radu Jude’s films are messy mash-ups of art, literature, advertising and social media, with some dirty jokes thrown in.Halfway through a recent Zoom interview with Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian director of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” he offered a glimpse into his creative process. He pulled out one of the books he’s reading, an illustrated tome about commedia dell’arte. Then he shared his screen to reveal a collection of texts and images — Van Gogh still lifes, Giacometti sculptures, Japanese haikus — saved in folders on his computer. Jude stopped scrolling at a picture he took of a sign posted on an apartment building entrance.“It says ‘Please have oral sex so as not to disturb the other tenants,’” Jude explained, translating from the Romanian with a grin on his face.The autodidact Jude is not above a dirty joke. His work melds tragedy and farce, drawing promiscuously from art, literature, street ads and social media to fuel his brazen visions of Romanian history and contemporary life.Jude’s previous film, the Golden Bear-winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” starts out with the making of a humorously sloppy sex tape and concludes with a witch trial against one of the tape’s participants. His latest, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday.The black comedy follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, shuttling clients and equipment around Bucharest, Romania’s capital. One of Angela’s gigs entails interviewing former factory employees who were injured on the clock for a chance to feature in a corporate safety video. Scenes from the present-day, shot in black-and-white, are interwoven with colorful clips of another woman named Angela: a taxi driver in the 1980s also chained to a thankless job that involves navigating the streets of Bucharest.Ilinca Manolache as Angela, a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”4 Proof FilmWe 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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      Sarah Shook & the Disarmers Took the Hard Path. The Music Kept Coming.

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      After a tumultuous childhood in an ultraconservative family, River Shook finally heard country music at 23. It prompted a long journey of self-discovery.River Shook warned their father: If the family left western New York for North Carolina, something awful would happen.Living at home at 19, Shook was the introverted middle child who had relocated to so many new towns, they’d given up on making friends. Their parents, Robert and Rita, had led rough and wild early lives, Robert playing lead guitar in lascivious bands and Rita escaping an abusive first marriage and descending into hard drugs. The couple met through church, married and vowed to shelter their kids — home-schooled and raised on classical and Christian music, with boys, booze and bad behaviors verboten. Whenever God told Robert to move, everyone obeyed.This, though, was different. At 9, Shook realized they were bisexual and began questioning the family faith. They hid both from their parents, living a Janus-like life of two faces for a decade. But Shook had found confidants at the Wegmans where they worked, friends who supplied secret mix CDs featuring the Gorillaz and Elliott Smith. They were interning at a local dance studio, teaching yoga to kids and unsteadily emerging from a miasma of childhood depression. And then, in 2005, the family headed South.“I went from 0 to 100, from having been kissed once to having sex to having a threesome the next night,” the singer and guitarist said during a series of video interviews in early February, grinning wryly from the porch of their rural North Carolina home. (Yes, they stayed.) “And then I married a guy I met on Myspace three weeks later and got pregnant two months later. Upending everything my parents held dear was an act of self-preservation, because their belief system taught me I could not be myself.”During the last 20 years, Shook, now 38, has slowly discovered who they are — a nonbinary, atheist, vegan single parent using incisive and honest country songs to unpack past baggage. The process has been arduous, even life-threatening. When their band, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, played 150 shows a year, they would drink until they blacked out almost every night. But in July 2019, following a Canadian bacchanalia, Shook accepted their own ultimatum: Sober up or die trying.That epiphany led to therapy, daily walks in the woods, a new name, and, ultimately, the Disarmers’ new album, “Revelations,” due March 29. A stirring country-rock record that two-steps between Waxahatchee’s incisive beauties and Tom Petty’s winking classics, “Revelations” is the work of a songwriter relishing newfound clarity and confidence.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 American Tenor Jonathan Tetelman, a Puccini Specialist, Arrives at the Met

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      Jonathan Tetelman will sing in “La Rondine” and “Madama Butterfly” in New York. He trained as a baritone and worked as a D.J. before finding his “authentic voice” as a tenor.In the middle of last summer’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the Salzburg Festival, the American tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought down the house. As Macduff, Tetelman gave a searing rendition of “Ah, la paterna mano,” the heartbreaking aria after his character learns that the bloodthirsty monarch has slaughtered his wife and children.Tetelman’s performance in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s monumentally gloomy production was one of the festival’s highlights. Later this month, the 35-year-old tenor will make his Metropolitan Opera debut in Puccini’s “La Rondine.” He’ll also be heard at the Met as Pinkerton in a revival of the composer’s better-known “Madama Butterfly” that reunites him with his “Macbeth” co-star, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, in April and May. (There are planned Met Live in HD broadcasts of both productions.)In an email, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, wrote that Tetelman had a “beautiful and big voice that is perfectly suited to the generous size of the Met’s auditorium, which is much larger than most European opera houses, and to these soaring Puccini roles.”Tetelman has swiftly risen to become one of his generation’s most in-demand lyric tenors and is particularly sought after for his Puccini. After singing Rodolfo in “La Bohème” for the first time in 2017 in Fujian, China, he reprised the role a year later at Tanglewood (replacing the Polish star tenor Piotr Beczala) and then on opening night of Barrie Kosky’s production at the Komische Oper Berlin in January 2019.Tetelman played Macduff in a performance of “Macbeth” at the 2023 Salzburg Festival.Bernd Uhlig/SFBut Tetelman’s path to the Met’s stage was anything but typical. Born in Chile, Tetelman was adopted by an American couple when he was 6 months old and grew up in Princeton, N.J. As an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Music, he trained as a baritone but felt frustrated.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