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    Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81

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    Brad Holland, an idiosyncratic artist who upended American illustration in the 1970s with his startling imagery for Playboy magazine and The New York Times’s opinion page, spawning a generation of imitators, died on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 81.His brother, Thomas Holland, said he died in a hospital from complications of heart surgery.Mr. Holland was in his late 20s and contributing to Playboy and a few of New York City’s underground papers, including The New York Review of Sex and Politics and The East Village Other, when he was invited to be part of an experiment at The New York Times.In 1970, the paper had introduced what it called an Op-Ed page — the name referred to its placement opposite the editorial page — as a forum for essays and ideas. The art director of this new page, Jean-Claude Suares, was another veteran of the underground presses; while working at The Times, he was also designing Screw magazine.For The Times, Mr. Suares wanted to commission standout art to accompany the writing, but he didn’t want to illustrate the themes of the articles literally. He was an admirer of Mr. Holland’s work and recruited him, along with other notable insurgents, including Ralph Steadman, the British caricaturist who had been illustrating Hunter Thompson’s gonzo adventures, and a coterie of European political cartoonists.One of three illustrations for a 1968 essay by P.G. Wodehouse, “The Lost Art of Domestic Service,” that were Mr. Holland’s first assignment for Playboy magazine. He would work for the magazine for a quarter-century.Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkMr. Holland had already attracted attention with the gorgeous rococo images he made to illustrate Playboy’s “Ribald Classics,” a series that reprinted erotic stories by the likes of Ovid, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. His work could be surreal, grotesque and beautiful, and it was often inscrutable. It recalled the satirical engravings of the 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Nast and the more terrifying paintings of Francisco Goya.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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      Bob McManus, Blunt Editorial Voice of New York Post, Dies at 81

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      As the editor of the tabloid’s editorial page and as a columnist, he skewered those he considered phonies and symbols of failed progressivism.Bob McManus, the trenchant editorial page editor of The New York Post and a columnist for other conservative publications who prided himself on his unambiguous common-sense commentary about public policy and other topics, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 81.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of bile duct cancer, said his wife, Mary McManus.An influential and respected editorialist, Mr. McManus pulled no punches but still managed to be widely liked.He could unleash a fusillade of zingers against public officials and other prominent targets he branded phonies or hypocrites. But he could also leaven his caustic criticism with wit.“His prose style might best be described as a punchy amalgam of Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and — a particular McManus favorite — Red Smith,” Edmund J. McMahon, a friend who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said in an interview.After a police officer was assaulted in Times Square last year by a group that included some migrants, Mr. McManus contrasted “a time when slugging a cop would get you bumps on your head” with what he described as the current anarchic system of justice.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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      Farage reportedly met Cummings for ‘friendly chat about the general scene’

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      Nigel Farage has reportedly met Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser turned nemesis, after the Vote Leave founder suggested voters should back Reform UK at the local elections.Cummings, who was once a sworn enemy of Farage during the EU referendum as he battled to keep control of the leave campaign, is reported to have met the Reform leader to discuss Whitehall changes, which allies said was the strongest sign yet that Farage was taking seriously the idea of becoming prime minister.Cummings and Farage were at odds for years in the run-up to the referendum and during Cummings’s time at No 10, with Farage calling him a “horrible, nasty little man”. Cummings’s Vote Leave won the official campaign designation during the referendum.According to the Sunday Times, the pair met recently for a “friendly chat about the general scene” including subjects such as US politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as “how No 10 and the Cabinet Office really work, about the catastrophe of the Tory party and about what Reform has to do to replace the Tories”. A Reform spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.Cummings was said to be in advanced talks to launch his own new party – the Start-Up party – but in February he posted on X that he believed voters should now back Reform UK.Asked by one X user on Sunday who he would vote for at the next general election, Cummings wrote: “Dunno yet but obviously everyone should vote Reform this spring … No downsides, just upsides.”In a post on his Substack, Cummings claimed Britain needed a significant political realignment including a merger of the Conservatives with Reform. He wrote: “Shove out Kemi [Badenoch] ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a third force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 … break the coalition supporting [Keir] Starmer, take over No 10, do regime change.”Farage’s party is on course for a number of gains at the local elections in May, including potentially winning control of eight local councils, according to Electoral Calculus.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNevertheless, Reform has been in turmoil for the past fortnight due to a significant rift between Farage and Rupert Lowe, one of his former MPs who has been thrown out of the party in a battle over bullying allegations and referred to the police. Lowe had criticised Farage in a Daily Mail interview and since claimed he had been censored by the party on immigration issues. More

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      The Future of News Looks Niche

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      The media entrepreneur Jessica Lessin chats with DealBook about the news landscape and her latest media bet.In 2013, Jessica Lessin, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, left the paper to start a competing publication, The Information.A few years later, her fledgling newsroom had grown to nearly two dozen reporters and editors and booked more than $20 million in sales, as she revealed in a profile I wrote for The Times’s Sunday Business. She says she has since doubled her editorial staff and continued to stay profitable, with revenue growing 30 percent in 2024 over the previous year.But it’s her investments outside of The Information that are gaining attention these days.Her company Lessin Media has put money into Semafor, The Ankler, the former Business Insider editor Nicholas Carlson’s Dynamo, Kevin Delaney’s Charter Works and other titles at a time when the news business appears bleaker than before. Lessin, however, is optimistic.I caught up with the entrepreneur about her latest media bet, the tennis publication Racquet magazine, and what she thinks about the changing news landscape. This interview has been edited and condensed.This investment seems different from your others. How did you come to it?I actually got introduced to Racquet by a number of fans of the magazine. And it was like the weirdest experience, because I was reading the magazine, and then I wanted to buy, like, all the clothes in the magazine. I went to the website, and I wanted to buy all the merch. And they’re hosting an event at the U.S. Open. And I was like I want to go to that. And I want to read this great profile about the mental coach behind the world No. 1 tennis player.This sounds like it was something that just struck you personally. I assumed you’d be more focused on sales and market size and margin.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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      Washington Post Opinion Editor Exits as Bezos Steers Pages in New Direction

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      Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, said that the newspaper’s opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”The Washington Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, is exiting as the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, steers the section in a libertarian direction.In an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Shipley was stepping down amid a narrowing of the opinion section’s focus to defend “personal liberties and free markets.”“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’ Mr. Bezos wrote.In a note to opinion staff members, Mr. Shipley said that he decided to step down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession I love.”“I will always be thankful for the opportunity I was given to work alongside a team of opinion journalists whose commitment to strong, innovative, reported commentary inspired me every day,” Mr. Shipley wrote.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      Matea Gold Named Washington Editor of The New York Times

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      Ms. Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post, is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the paper.Matea Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post who until recently was a contender for the newspaper’s top editing role, is joining The New York Times as a senior editor in its Washington bureau.Ms. Gold will be Washington editor for The Times, reporting to its newly appointed Washington bureau chief, Dick Stevenson, the company said on Monday. She starts in January.Since May 2023, Ms. Gold, 50, has been a managing editor overseeing The Post’s political, local and investigative coverage. She was previously the newspaper’s national editor, leading a staff of 150 journalists. Ms. Gold joined The Post more than a decade ago from The Los Angeles Times and has served in a variety of roles, covering politics as a reporter and shepherding ambitious political investigations.Under Ms. Gold’s supervision, The Post’s national staff contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Post’s national staff also won a Pulitzer for a feature article on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutionally protected right to abortion.Her departure is the latest in a series of high-profile exits from The Post news and opinion departments in recent months.The newsroom has been in turmoil since Will Lewis, the company’s chief executive, abruptly forced out the paper’s top editor, Sally Buzbee, in June. Matt Murray, the former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, has led the newsroom on an interim basis since then. Several journalists from the opinion section stepped down from their positions after Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, decided shortly before the U.S. presidential election that the paper would not endorse a candidate for president.The Post is searching for a permanent top editor for its news department. Ms. Gold had been considered a candidate for executive editor of The Post, according to two people familiar with the search process. Other candidates include Clifford Levy, a former deputy managing editor of The Times and now the deputy publisher of Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation site, and The Athletic, its sports site, the people said. Mr. Murray is also a candidate, the people said.One of the final hurdles is an interview with Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, who weighs in on hiring decisions for top positions.Ms. Gold joins The Times amid changes in the top ranks of its Washington bureau. The Times announced in November that Elisabeth Bumiller, who had led the bureau since 2015, would be stepping down from that role and returning to reporting. Mr. Stevenson, who has worked at The Times in various reporting and editing jobs for nearly 40 years, will be taking over for her in January. More

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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘What have they done…Again?’: What the UK papers say after Trump’s momentous political comeback

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      Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the US presidential election saw the former president securing an unexpected majority in the popular vote, control of the Senate, and at least 295 electoral college votes – defeating vice-president Kamala Harris in a contest that dominated UK front pages on Thursday.The Guardian led with two words: “American Dread”, a play on the American dream, alongside a close up portrait of the president-elect.Americans awoke to a “transformed country and a rattled world” as the realisation of Trump’s stunning return to power started to sink in, wrote the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, summing up the mood.The Mirror highlighted a question lingering on many minds around the world about what Trump 2.0 might bring, with the headline: “What have they done…Again?Trump’s victory, it said, had ushered in fears the Republican leader would be even “more divisive and brutal than in his first spell in the White House”.“A comeback to Trump all comebacks” ran the Daily Mail, noting that in the end “it wasn’t even close”.Trump’s electoral victory is unprecedented in many ways. For one, he is the first convicted felon to win the US presidency, a point highlighted by the front page of the Express, and one that did not stop Americans choosing him to lead once more.“He’s been shot, convicted of a crime and branded a fascist… but he’s still the people’s choice.”The Times opted for a different tone, choosing the headline: “Trump promises Golden Age after sweeping Harris aside.”Trump was returning to the White House more “powerful than ever” the Times said.The paper also included on its front page the headline of an opinion piece, titled: “Face it, liberals, this is what millions wanted.”The Sun riffed off one of Trump’s signature lines from his reality TV show The Apprentice, running with the snappy headline: “You’re Rehired”.“Trump’s back for Season 2”, the paper wrote, despite being “shot, sued, tried, insulted and written off”.“Trump is back”, echoed the Financial Times on its front page, adding that American democracy and alliances were “poised for turmoil”, with stocks opening at new highs despite fresh fears over tariffs.Featuring an arresting photo of a confident-looking Trump pointing his finger at the viewer, an image that mirrors the iconic Uncle Sam cartoon, the Telegraph said Trump had won with a powerful mandate, as he took control of the Senate, popular vote and “every swing state”.“Trump’s clean sweep”, its headline read.In Scotland, the Daily Record, featured a smirking Donald Trump alongside the line “The star-spangled spanner”.The paper summed up his forthcoming second term in a witty pun, dubbing it: “A Grave New Don”. More

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      How Uvalde’s Newspaper Kept Going, Despite Unimaginable Loss

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      Craig Garnett, the publisher of The Uvalde Leader-News, opens up about covering a tragedy that was — and is — too close to home.Craig Garnett played many roles as he drove around Uvalde, Tex. in his white pickup truck.He was a proud father, pointing to the stadium where his son played football before switching to golf. He was a local historian, describing how farmers sold angora fiber to be spun into mohair at a mercantile near the main drag. He was an amateur lepidopterist, gently waving away swarms of monarch and snout butterflies that were migrating through town for the second time this year.But, approaching Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were gunned down in their classrooms on May 24, 2022, Garnett slipped into the role he’s best known for, as publisher and owner of The Uvalde Leader-News.Calmly, candidly, with a journalist’s eye for detail and a citizen’s disbelief, Garnett narrated the view: There was the drainage ditch where the shooter crashed his grandmother’s Ford F-150 before firing through the windows of the fourth grade wing. There was the door he walked through. The funeral home survivors fled to. The driveway where 376 law enforcement officers mobilized for 73 minutes before ending the carnage. The street where parents waited. The white crosses, one for each victim.“Devastating,” Garnett said. He pulled away from the gated, partially boarded-up building in silence.The offices of the Uvalde Leader-News are on the town square, across from a small park with a fountain.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesA memorial in a central plaza is bedecked with flowers, mementos and pictures of victims.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