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      Why We Keep Rewatching ‘Gilmore Girls’

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      The show, which ended in 2007, was still one of the 10 most-watched shows across major streaming platforms last year, according to the research firm Nielsen.Some things have inexplicable staying power. The Hermès Birkin bag. Cheetos. Crocs.And for nostalgic millennials, there is “Gilmore Girls.” The show ended its seven-year run on the WB and CW networks in 2007, yet viewers keep returning to the familiar comfort of the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Conn., where the series was set.Netflix recorded 500 million viewing hours for the show from January to June of last year, surpassing hits like “Seinfeld” and “Stranger Things,” and data released on Monday by the research firm Nielsen showed that “Gilmore Girls” was among the Top 10 most-watched shows across the major streaming platforms in 2023.The show, which concluded the month before the iPhone was introduced, is even finding a younger audience on TikTok, where users post scenes they love and argue about their favorite romantic partners for every character.Yanic Truesdale, who played the grumpy inn concierge Michel, lovingly called it “the show that will never die.”“I’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, over the years, of people saying, ‘I got a surgery, and your show kept me going,’” he said. “Or, ‘I lost my dad,’ or ‘I lost this person, and I would watch the show and I would feel better.’”He added that he still meets fans who offer testaments to its popularity: “I’m always amazed that 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds — kids — are watching it as if it just came out.”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?  More

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      Bullying, and Suicide, in High School

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      More from our inbox:Fans of Netflix DVDs Offer Sad FarewellsFacing Up to the Spiraling U.S. DebtIf the G.O.P. Wants to Win, It Needs to Pick Candidates Who Can Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Elite School Admits to Failure After Suicide of a Bullied Student” (front page, May 1), about the Lawrenceville School’s reckoning with the suicide of a student last year:Reading the article about Jack Reid’s suicide brought back unpleasant memories, as I attended the Lawrenceville School between 1968 and 1971.I was a shy, timid and closeted — even to myself — gay man. Although I received a great education, and went on to have a successful career as a judge, my three years at Lawrenceville were some of my worst.During my first year, I was called a homophobic slur in Spanish by a housemate, and another housemate wanted to fight me for no particular reason, probably because I was perceived as weak. The assistant housemaster sensed my unhappiness and asked me if I was OK, and, unfortunately, I answered that I was.To deal with my unhappiness and loneliness, I would calm myself by shaking my legs and arms before I went to sleep, in addition to gleefully marking a big “X” on my calendar after I completed another day of extreme misery.In fairness to Lawrenceville, I never disclosed my unhappiness. My heart goes out to the Reid family.I commend Lawrenceville for the steps the school is taking, albeit possibly to avoid litigation.David L. PiperMinneapolisTo the Editor:The story about Jack Reid’s suicide hit home. In the 1960s I was a ninth-grade transfer student. This particular boy spotted me as an easy target in civics class, relentlessly teasing, taunting and humiliating me, five days a week. Students laughed at me, calling me names throughout the halls.The look of shame in the eyes of the teacher was transparent, yet he never said or did anything in my defense. I was already afraid and insecure. Those daily taunts and humiliation destroyed the little self-worth I had.Twice I attempted suicide. My mother was beside herself. She pulled me out of that school and enrolled me in a private Catholic school. I somehow made it through those years only because of my mother’s love and concern rather than anything the school ever did.Bravo to the Lawrenceville School for publicly stating, “We acknowledge that more should have been done to protect Jack.” It’s long overdue for schools to finally step up and take responsibility rather than turning a continual blind eye.Marge KellerChicagoFans of Netflix DVDs Offer Sad Farewells Illustration by The New York Times. Images by Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Here’s Looking at You, DVD.com,” by Pamela Paul (column, April 28):Thanks to Ms. Paul for her eloquent, bittersweet ode to DVD.com. This year marked my 15th year as a Netflix subscriber, and while my queue is a fraction of hers (I have a thing with lists — no more than 10 on there at once), my recent mandate for managing my movies has been to include only those that are not available on any streaming service. (“Altered States” was a recent rental for me, too; maybe Ms. Paul and I had the same disc!)I will treasure these last few months of deliveries. Farewell, red envelopes, but luckily I can fill the void with a combination of fond memories and frequent trips to the New York Public Library DVD stacks (and pray to the lords of corporate do-gooding that Netflix donates its DVD inventory to libraries).Kevin ParksNew YorkTo the Editor:One point Pamela Paul didn’t mention is the superior image and sound quality of DVDs, especially Blu-ray. The colors are much richer, the blacks are blacker and the audio is much fuller. Filmmakers put incredible effort into the look and sound of their art.Luckily I live a few blocks from one of San Francisco’s last video rental stores, Video Wave of Noe Valley. Not only does Colin Hutton, the proprietor, carry hundreds of titles unavailable via the internet, but he also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the films.Whenever I want to watch a movie in which the cinematography and audio design are critical, I walk down the street to pick up a shiny disc.Michael FasmanSan FranciscoThe writer is a filmmaker.To the Editor:I loved this piece. It echoed my feelings and experiences with DVD.com. But there is another layer no one seems to be talking about.I live in a rural area of western North Carolina. I have no cellular service at my house, and my internet connection is via a very slow satellite service and has a data cap. Both the slowness of the connection and the low data cap prevent us from being able to stream anything but fairly short YouTube videos. And those eat up our data allotment pretty quickly. Forget trying to stream an HD movie.As Pamela Paul indicated, we won’t purchase a DVD that we would only watch once.I’m sure we aren’t the only family in America in this situation. So what are we to do? It’s depressing and frustrating.Kimberly Baldwin WhitmireFranklin, N.C.Facing Up to the Spiraling U.S. DebtSenate Republicans hold a news conference outside the Capitol to urge passage of legislation to raise the debt limit and cut federal spending.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds,” by Paul Krugman (column, May 9):It is time to face up to massive U.S. debt that both Presidents Trump and Biden helped accelerate.Many years ago, Mr. Krugman and others accused President George W. Bush and me of trying to privatize Social Security. The rhetoric poisoned the well for Social Security reform, which even Mr. Biden was suggesting was then needed. Reforms would have greatly improved today’s U.S. financial position.The “scolds” I know believe that long-term deficit reduction requires lower expenditures and higher revenues. Having managed four government agencies, I would add better management by political appointees and Congress to proactively address the challenges.We have to raise the debt ceiling, but we need to stop the U.S. debt doubling over the next 10 years. That is not “extortion” or “blackmail.” It is acting to safeguard America’s future.James B. LockhartGreenwich, Conn.The writer is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He was director of the Federal Housing Financial Agency and the Office of the Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, principal deputy commissioner of Social Security and director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.If the G.O.P. Wants to Win, It Needs to Pick Candidates Who CanRon DeSantis has cast himself as more electable than Donald J. Trump, but for years Republican primary voters have cast ballots with their hearts, opting for hard-liners who lose in general elections.Scott Eisen/Getty Images; Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump” (news article, April 23) describes the angst many Republicans feel about the electability of their candidates and the fact that they are losing many elections they feel were winnable.The answer to their problem should be very evident: The majority of Americans favor sensible gun control, including the banning of assault rifles. The majority of Americans favor women’s reproductive rights. The majority of Americans deplore the vicious tone of American politics that prevails today. The majority of Americans do not believe the idiotic conspiracy theories that abound.Yet the Republican Party continues to run candidates who cater to the morally and financially bankrupt National Rifle Association, who seek to eliminate completely a woman’s right to choose, who sow chaos with their nasty political rhetoric and who continue to push the completely ridiculous lie that Donald Trump won in 2020.If the Republican Party ever wants to regain its status as a mainstream, serious participant in governance, it needs to jettison these fringe types it continues to trot out as candidates.Bill GottdenkerMountainside, N.J. More

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      Trump’s Indictment and What’s Next

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      The fallout will be widespread, with ramifications for the 2024 presidential race, policymaking and more.Donald Trump is likely to turn himself in on Tuesday.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesWhat you need to know about Trump’s indictment A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Donald Trump over his role in paying hush money to a porn star, making him the first former president to face criminal charges. It’s a pivotal moment in U.S. politics — there was an audible on-air gasp when Fox News anchors reported the news on Thursday — with ramifications for the 2024 presidential race, policymaking and more.Here are the most important things to note so far.Mr. Trump is likely to turn himself in on Tuesday, which will see the former president be fingerprinted and photographed in a New York State courthouse. (Prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, wanted Trump to surrender on Friday, but were rebuffed by the former president’s lawyers, according to Politico.) Afterward, Mr. Trump would be arraigned and would finally learn the charges against him and be given the chance to enter a plea. The former president has consistently denied all wrongdoing.Mr. Trump and his advisers, who were at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, were caught off guard by the announcement, believing some news reports that suggested an indictment wouldn’t come for weeks. The former president blasted the news, describing it in all-caps as “an attack on our country the likes of which has never been seen before” on Truth Social, the social network he founded.The case revolves in part around the Trump family business. Charges by the Manhattan district attorney arise from a five-year investigation into a $130,000 payment by the fixer Michael Cohen to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, before the presidential election that year.The Trump Organization reimbursed Mr. Cohen — but in internal documents, company executives falsely recorded the payment as a legal expense and invented a bogus legal retainer with Mr. Cohen to justify them. Falsifying business records is a crime in New York. But to make it a felony charge, prosecutors may tie the crime to a second one: violating election law.The fallout will be wide, and unpredictable. Democrats and Republicans alike used the news to underpin a flurry of fund-raising efforts. (Among them, of course, was Mr. Trump’s own presidential campaign.)It’s unclear how the indictment will affect the 2024 race. Mr. Trump, who can run for president despite facing criminal charges, is leading in early polls. Still, his potential opponents for the Republican nomination — including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president — harshly criticized the move. House Republicans have also flocked to his defense, potentially increasing the chances of gridlock in Washington.But while the charges may give Mr. Trump a boost in the G.O.P. primary, they could also hurt his standing in the general election against President Biden.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING European inflation remains stubbornly high. Consumer prices rose 6.9 percent on an annualized basis across the eurozone in March, below analysts’ forecasts. But core inflation accelerated, a sign that Europe’s cost-of-living crisis is not easing. In the U.S., investors will be watching for data on personal consumption expenditure inflation, set to be released at 8:30 a.m.A Swiss court convicts bankers of helping a Putin ally hide millions. Four officials from the Swiss office of Gazprombank were accused of failing to conduct due diligence on accounts opened by a concert cellist who has been nicknamed “Putin’s wallet.” The case was seen as a test of Switzerland’s willingness to discipline bankers for wrongdoing.More Gulf nations back Jared Kushner’s investment firm. Sovereign funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have poured hundreds of millions into Affinity Partners, The Times reports. The revelation underscores efforts by Mr. Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and others in the Trump orbit to profit from close ties they forged with Middle Eastern powers while in the White House.Lawyers for a woman accusing Leon Black of rape ask to quit the case. A lawyer from the Wigdor firm, who had been representing Guzel Ganieva, told a court on Thursday that the attorney-client relationship had broken down and that Ms. Ganieva wanted to represent herself. It’s the latest twist in the lawsuit by Ms. Ganieva, who has said she had an affair with the private equity mogul that turned abusive; Black has denied wrongdoing.Richard Branson’s satellite-launching company is halting operations. Virgin Orbit said that it failed to raise much-needed capital, and would cease business for now and lay off nearly all of its roughly 660 employees. It signals the potential end of the company after it suffered a failed rocket launch in January.A brutal quarter for dealmaking Bankers and lawyers began the year with modest expectations for M.&A. Rising interest rates, concerns about the economy and costly financing had undercut what had been a booming market for deals.But the first three months of 2023 proved to be even more difficult than most would have guessed, as the volume of transactions fell to its lowest level in a decade.About 11,366 deals worth $550.5 billion were announced in the quarter, according to data from Refinitiv. That’s a 22 percent drop in the number of transactions — and a 45 percent plunge by value. That’s bad news for bankers who had been hoping for any improvement from a dismal second half of 2022. (They’ve already had to grapple with another bit of bad news: Wall Street bonuses were down 26 percent last year, according to New York State’s comptroller.)The outlook for improvement isn’t clear. While the Nasdaq is climbing, there’s enough uncertainty and volatility in the market — particularly given concerns around banks — to deter many would-be acquirers from doing risky deals. Then again, three months ago some dealmakers told DealBook that they expected their business to pick up in the middle of 2023.Here’s how the league tables look: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the boutique Centerview Partners led investment banks, with a combined 58 percent of the market. And Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell Lipton and Goodwin Procter were the big winners among law firms, with 46 percent market share.Biden wants new rules for lenders The Biden administration on Thursday called on regulators to toughen oversight of America’s midsize banks in the wake of the crisis triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as policymakers shift from containing the turmoil to figuring out how to prevent it from happening again.Much of the focus was on reviving measures included in the Dodd-Frank law passed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. These include reapplying stress tests and capital requirements used for the nation’s systemically important banks to midsize lenders, after they were rolled back in 2018 during the Trump administration.Here are the new rules the White House wants to see imposed:Tougher capital requirements and oversight of lenders. At the top of the list is the reinstatement of liquidity requirements (and stress tests on that liquidity) for lenders with $100 billion to $250 billion in assets like SVB and Signature Bank, which also collapsed.Plans for managing a bank failure and annual capital stress tests. The administration sees the need for more rigorous capital-testing measures designed to see if banks “can withstand high interest rates and other stresses.”It appears the White House will go it alone on these proposals. “There’s no need for congressional action in order to authorize the agencies to take any of these steps,” an administration official told journalists.Lobbyists are already pushing back, saying more oversight would drive up costs and hurt the economy. “It would be unfortunate if the response to bad management and delinquent supervision at SVB were additional regulation on all banks,” Greg Baer, the president and C.E.O. of the Bank Policy Institute, said in a statement.Elsewhere in banking:In the hours after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure on March 10, Jamie Dimon, C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, expressed his reluctance to get involved in another banking rescue effort. Dimon changed his position four days later as he and Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, spearheaded a plan for the country’s biggest banks to inject $30 billion in deposits into smaller ailing ones. “If my government asks me to help, I’ll help,” Mr. Dimon, 67, told The Times.“We are definitely working with technology which is going to be incredibly beneficial, but clearly has the potential to cause harm in a deep way.” — Sundar Pichai, C.E.O. of Google, on the need for the tech industry to responsibly develop artificial intelligence tools, like chatbots, before rolling them out commercially.Carl Icahn and Jesus Illumina, the DNA sequencing company, stepped up its fight with the activist investor Carl Icahn on Thursday, pushing back against his efforts to secure three board seats and force it to spin off Grail, a maker of cancer-detection tests that it bought for $8 billion. But it is a reference to Jesus that the company says he made that is garnering much attention.The company said that it had nearly reached a settlement with Mr. Icahn before their fight went public, in a preliminary proxy statement. It added that he had no plan for the company beyond putting his nominees on the board.But Illumina also said Mr. Icahn told its executives that he “would not even support Jesus Christ” as an independent candidate over one of his own nominees because “my guys answer to me.”Experts say Mr. Icahn’s comments could be used against him in future fights. Board members are supposed to act as stewards of a company, not agents for a single investor. “If any disputes along these lines arise for public companies where Icahn has nominees on the board, shareholders are going to use this as exhibit A for allegations that the directors followed Icahn rather than their own judgment,” said Ann Lipton, a professor of law at Tulane University.Mr. Icahn doesn’t seem to care. He said the comments were “taken out of context” and the company broke an agreement to keep negotiations private.“It was a very poor choice of words and he is usually much smarter than that,” said John Coffee, a corporate governance professor at Columbia Law School. “But he can always say that he was misinterpreted and recognizes that directors owe their duties to all the shareholders.”THE SPEED READ DealsBed Bath & Beyond ended a deal to take money from the hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital after reporting another quarter of declining sales, and will instead try to raise $300 million by selling new stock. (WSJ)Apollo Global Management reportedly plans to bid nearly $2.8 billion for the aerospace parts maker Arconic. (Bloomberg)Marshall, the maker of guitar amps favored by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, will sell itself to Zound, a Swedish speaker maker that it had partnered with. (The Verge)PolicyFinland cleared its last hurdle to joining NATO after Turkey approved its entry into the security alliance. (NYT)The F.T.C. is reportedly investigating America’s largest alcohol distributor over how wine and liquor are priced across the U.S. (Politico)“Lobbyists Begin Chipping Away at Biden’s $80 Billion I.R.S. Overhaul” (NYT)Best of the restNetflix revamped its film division, as the streaming giant prepares to make fewer movies to cut costs. (Bloomberg)“A.I., Brain Scans and Cameras: The Spread of Police Surveillance Tech” (NYT)A jury cleared Gwyneth Paltrow of fault in a 2016 ski crash and awarded her the $1 she had requested in damages. (NYT)“Do We Know How Many People Are Working From Home?” (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More