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    The MAGA Youth Remind Me of the 1980s and Not In a Good Way

    When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America’s greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a “shining city on a hill” where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn’t get in the way.Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on “Family Ties,” who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn’t see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the ’80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs).Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it’s the ’80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November’s election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member’s only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump “is making it sexy to be Republican again. He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again”) or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar’s New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It’s laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread.These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late ’80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I’m talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can’t understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they’ve turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times.Mr. Trump’s ’80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published “The Art of the Deal” and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he embodied what many people who weren’t rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media’s imagination.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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    Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83

    One of the sport’s greatest players, he set a record with 4,256 career hits. But his gambling led to a lifetime ban and kept him out of the Hall of Fame.Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83. His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds, the team with which he spent most of his career. No cause was given.For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.Rose, of the Cincinnati Reds, on the field before his game against the New York Mets in 1978.Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesFew sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined 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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    Lake Elsinore Serial Killer Confesses to 1986 Murder of 19-Year-Old Woman

    William Lester Suff, 70, was already on death row for a dozen murders in Southern California. Now, he has confessed to killing a 19-year-old woman, shutting a 1986 cold case, officials said.A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.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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    Benji Gregory, Child Star on ‘ALF,’ Dies at 46

    Mr. Gregory was found dead on June 13 in his car, along with his service dog.Benji Gregory, who starred as a child in the hit television series “ALF” in the 1980s, has died. He was 46.His death was confirmed by his sister, Rebecca Pfaffinger, who said that an official cause of death was still pending.According to Mrs. Pfaffinger, Mr. Gregory and his service dog, Hans, were found dead in his car on June 13 at a bank’s parking lot in Peoria, Ariz. She said in a Facebook post that he had fallen asleep in the vehicle and had died of heatstroke.Mr. Gregory was best known for his role as Brian Tanner on “ALF,” an NBC sitcom that premiered in September 1986, when he was 8. The show featured a suburban family whose world is thrown upside down when a back-talking, pointy-eared alien from the planet Melmac crash-lands through their garage. The Tanner family calls the alien ALF, short for Alien Life Form, and he stays with them, causing mischief and voicing his observations about humankind. “ALF” was a hit and aired for four seasons.“It became quite natural to interact with ALF,” Mr. Gregory said of the experience in a 2022 interview with BTM Legends Corner, a show on YouTube.“ALF,” short for Alien Life Form, aired on NBC from 1986 to 1990. AlamyHe was born Benjamin Gregory Hertzberg on May 26, 1978, in the Los Angeles area, according to his IMDB profile.Alongside “ALF,” Mr. Gregory appeared in a string of other hit shows in the 1980s, including “The A-Team,” “Punky Brewster” and “Amazing Stories.”Mr. Gregory’s film credits include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a 1986 comedy about a lonely computer programmer in Manhattan played by Whoopi Goldberg, and the 1993 animated movie “Once Upon a Forest.”He eventually moved on from acting and in 2004 became an aerographer’s mate for the U.S. Navy stationed in Biloxi, Miss., according to IMDB.He had lived with bipolar disorder and depression and received care for both, his sister said. More

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    A Heartland Godmother of Installation Art, No Longer in the Shadows

    She is a trailblazer of the architectural sculpture movement, and her diaries rival Frida Kahlo’s. Are we ready for the unsettling clarity of Donna Dennis?One of Donna Dennis’s architectural installations — a false tunnel entrance installed on the Mad River — so confounded local Ohioans that one morning in August 1981, someone pipe-bombed it. New York’s bomb squad confiscated part of another structure, a cabin occupying City Hall Park, in 1986. The works by Dennis are so faithful to existing vocabularies of infrastructure that they defy classification as art objects.In 1970s New York, as painting and sculpture gave way to a gold rush of conceptualism, environments, performance and politics, the Ohio-born Dennis, fresh from art school in Minnesota and Paris, tuned into consciousness-raising women’s groups and devoted her craft to unsettlingly frank resemblances of buildings.First came hotel and subway facades, then houses in the round — each a combination of construction and artist materials, and slightly too small to pretend functionality. (For lights she uses appliance bulbs, and her doors terminate at her eye level.) Since the ’80s she has gone industrial: room-size lift bridges, stairways, rail platforms, pump houses and roller coaster girdings that have increased in complexity as they lessen in number.Dennis in 1981 with half of “Mad River Tunnel: Entrance and Exit,” in Dayton, Ohio.Donna DennisThis month, the gates crack on this scarce and challenging oeuvre. The bellwether art gallery O’Flaherty’s has darkened its space on Avenue A to a dramatic degree, and filled it with five Dennis works from the 1970s and ’90s, for a show called “Houses and Hotels.” Whatever else they do, these shrines to vernacular architecture, humane, seductive and commanding, make clear that a godmother of installation art has been unwisely overlooked.“Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio)” (1977-79) is a 10-foot-tall rowhouse in the style of suburban New Jersey. From a darkened first-story window, a VACANCY sign glows greenly. (A tribute to the late friend of the title.) A wallpapered room lit by ceiling bulb is just visible upstairs. As your eyes adjust in the dark, unlit details fade in: a coat of aluminum paint on the cornice, a staircase through the curtain, a tracing of mortar among stones in the foundation.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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    Dianne Brill, a 1980s ‘It Girl,’ Makes a Splashy Return

    “I’m back,” she says at her 66th birthday party. “Maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I am.”When Dianne Brill arrived at the Soho Grand Hotel for her 66th birthday party on Saturday night, she did so with the same sense of spectacle that made her an icon of Manhattan nightlife in the 1980s.People stopped and stared as she stepped out of a black S.U.V. Standing 6-foot-3 in white platform boots, Ms. Brill was wearing a silver satin wraparound dress and holding a glittering wand in one hand. Her hair was big and blonde, and she wore a big necklace that read “B-R-I-L-L.”“I’m back,” she said. “Maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I am, and that’s why I’m having this birthday party. To show everyone I’m back.”The party was billed as “One in a Brillion.” The dress code on the invitation was “Strictly Brill,” meaning the kind of thing Ms. Brill might have worn at nightclubs like Area and Danceteria four decades ago.She came to New York at age 22 from the suburbs of Tampa, Fla. Soon she seized the mantle once occupied by Edie Sedgwick and Bianca Jagger as downtown’s reigning “It” Girl. She also became a muse to Andy Warhol, who once stated, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party.”Ms. Brill poses for Andy Warhol in 1984.Roxanne LowitWe 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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    When Richard Serra’s Steel Curves Became a Memorial

    The sculptor had a breakthrough in the late 1990s with his torqued metal rings. Then the attack on the World Trade Center, which Serra witnessed, gave them a sudden new significance.After the yelling, the hearings, the lawsuit, the dismantlement, Richard Serra entered the last decade of the last century with his mind cast toward the classics.He was happy to see the end of the ’80s. The American sculptor, who died Tuesday at 85, got caught up in the Reagan-era culture wars with “Tilted Arc,” a 120-foot plate of curved Cor-Ten steel that sliced across Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. It drew outrage almost as soon as it was installed in 1981. His fellow New Yorkers shouted at him on the street. People called his loft on Duane Street with death threats. (This newspaper, too, was not always kind.) The work was finally removed — in Serra’s estimation, destroyed — in March 1989. You could see the appeal of a trip to Italy.In Rome, he visited San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: a chapel designed by Francesco Borromini that’s one of the prizes of Baroque architecture, topped by an oval dome. “The central space is simply a regular ellipse, and the walls that surround it are vertical,” he would later recall. “I walked in and thought: what if I turn this form on itself?”Serra’s “Tilted Arc” (1981), in Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. After a yearslong battle it was dismantled in 1989.Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesBack in New York, after consulting with engineers and trying out new computer-aided design software, he created a sculptural form that had not existed before: free-standing plates of weatherproof steel whose top and bottom edges form two identical, misaligned ellipses. The rolled steel weighed some 20 tons, but had a finesse that belied their mass. They had the can-you-top-this confidence of an artist who saw Borromini as his peer, but they were more inviting than Serra’s previous steel works, beckoning you to explore their warmly patinated expanses.The torqued ellipses, quite literally, shifted the axis of Serra’s career: from solid to space, from process to perception, from the artist’s actions to the viewer’s bodily experience. Their enclosing volumes provided this once controversial, always gruff artist an unexpectedly congenial third act; the ellipses at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, N.Y., have become a reliable venue for second dates, an ideal backdrop for cultured flirtation. Whereas for me the ellipses have remained these past decades something more like empty tombs, wedded in my mind to another site of deformed steel, and to the life of an artist who experienced Sept. 11, 2001, with horrible immediacy.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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    Running San Francisco Made Dianne Feinstein

    When I was interviewing Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2011 for a book about San Francisco’s tumultuous history from the 1960s to the ’80s, she suddenly began to tear off her microphone and terminate the exchange. My offense? I asked about her decision as mayor of the city to veto a 1982 ordinance that would have extended health insurance benefits to live-in partners of municipal employees, including lesbians and gay men. I managed to coax the irate Ms. Feinstein back into her chair, but she had clearly drawn a line: I’m ready to leave whenever I don’t like the direction this is headed.Ms. Feinstein could be imperious, thin-skinned and intolerant. She was also the leader that San Francisco sorely needed on Nov. 27, 1978, when she was abruptly thrust, at the age of 45, into City Hall’s Room 200 after Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by another colleague, Dan White.“This will not be a rudderless city,” she firmly told the shellshocked public after the murders, even though she was shaken by them. When she met with the hastily assembled press soon after the killings, her skirt was stained with Mr. Milk’s blood.During her nine plus years as the first female mayor of the famously cantankerous metropolis, Ms. Feinstein won the grudging respect of the old boys’ network that had always run City Hall. She managed to steer San Francisco between the liberal, freewheeling future that Mr. Moscone aimed toward — the era of San Francisco values — and its older, more conservative traditions, including its downtown business interests. As mayor, she opposed rent control on vacant housing and some demands from the gay community, like domestic partner legislation. But she also pushed through a tough gun control ordinance, environmental regulations and pro-labor laws and hosted a wedding ceremony of lesbian friends in her backyard.All the while, she kept a strong hand on the rudder, emphasizing law and order and putting more cops on the streets but also drawing the line against police mayhem after the White Night riot and violent police sweep of the gay Castro district after the stunningly lenient verdict for Mr. White.“This city has to be managed,” she said. “If you don’t manage, it falls apart.”The Chinatown activist Rose Pak witnessed Ms. Feinstein’s hands-on approach one day when she was riding with her in the mayoral limousine. Spotting an older man collapsed on the sidewalk, Ms. Feinstein ordered her chauffeur to stop, jumped out, wiped foam from the stricken man’s lips and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him. People later commented that this incident proved she was not a cold fish.“But I didn’t see it that way,” Ms. Pak recalled. “I saw her as a doctor’s daughter and a doctor’s widow, doing the proper clinical thing.”Most important, Ms. Feinstein became a national face of AIDS compassion when President Ronald Reagan was ignoring the growing suffering and conservative activists like Patrick Buchanan were crowing that the disease was nature’s “awful retribution” on gay men. When the gay progressive supervisor Harry Britt, who often clashed with the mayor, brought Ms. Feinstein the city’s first AIDS proposal in 1982, she told him simply, “Fund everything.”Other cities dumped their AIDS patients on San Francisco, including a notorious incident in 1983 when hospital officials in Gainesville, Fla., put a dying man on a plane to the city, miles from his loved ones. San Francisco took care of the sick men, but Ms. Feinstein denounced the practice as “outrageous and inhumane.”“Dianne spent more time visiting AIDS patients in hospitals than I did,” Mr. Britt remembered. “She was a giver. She was a very compassionate person. I don’t want to say ‘queenly,’ because that sounds negative, but she was a good queen.”Led by Ms. Feinstein — and the city’s gay and lesbian activists and frontline medical workers — San Francisco wrapped the sick and dying men in its arms and finally became the city of its eponymous friar, St. Francis, who cared for the needy.San Francisco made Dianne Feinstein, but until the gunfire that exploded at City Hall, she had concluded that her political career as a city supervisor was over. After returning from a challenging trek through the Himalayas that month with her future husband, the investment banker Richard Blum, she recalled, “I was firmly convinced I was not electable as mayor.”Ms. Feinstein was widely perceived as too starchy, a goody-goody, the Margaret Dumont in a wacky city filled with Marx Brothers. She was raised to be a political animal; her paternal uncle Morris Goldman, a clothing manufacturer and Democratic Party wheeler-dealer, took her as a girl to “board of stupidvisors” meetings and pointed out how the flick of a city boss’s cigar could change the vote tally. But later, as a young civic reformer, when she visited a hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury district that had been trashed by a police raid or seedy porn theaters or the down-and-out Tenderloin neighborhood (where she posed as a prostitute in a wig), Ms. Feinstein came off as slightly ridiculous.Newly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Ms. Feinstein addressed the hard-luck worshipers at Glide Memorial Church, lecturing them about the importance of good hygiene and hard work — and predictably got a tepid response from the congregation. “Dianne,” Glide’s minister, the Rev. Cecil Williams, told her later, “you don’t talk that way to these folks. If they had a place to get cleaned up, most of them would get cleaned up. If they could get a job, they’d get a job.”But Ms. Feinstein — a daughter of privilege, educated at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and Stanford University — did her political homework. She was ready to lead when history came calling.One day in 1979, when Ms. Feinstein, then the interim mayor, was campaigning for election, she went door to door in the city’s rough and redeveloped Fillmore district. Suddenly she was approached by a man who pointed a silver pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. She froze in fear; the City Hall assassinations happened the year before. Out of the man’s gun shot a butane flame instead of a bullet. She quickly gathered herself and went on campaigning. She won the election, even though The San Francisco Chronicle and key political establishment figures supported her more conservative opponent.“She ran the city with an iron fist,” Mike Hennessey, a progressive who served as San Francisco’s sheriff for 32 years, told me. “Of all the mayors I’ve worked with, she was the best. That’s because she took responsibility for this city. San Francisco is a very hard city to run. It’s very politically fractious. It takes a lot of work to hold it together. And that’s what Feinstein did.”In her three decades in the U.S. Senate, to which she was elected in 1992 (four years after her last term as mayor), Ms. Feinstein turned in a more mixed record. Over the years, she gained wide respect, even across the political aisle, for her hard work and political wisdom. But her success at banning assault weapons was undone, and her legislative record is uneven at best.In 2017, as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, I warned Ms. Feinstein not to run again the next year for the Senate, writing that she would then be 85 and too old for the rigors of the job. But she didn’t listen — and neither did California’s voters.When I think of Dianne Feinstein, I think of her as San Francisco’s mayor. She may not have been the leader many San Franciscans (including me) wanted, but she was the one we needed.David Talbot is the author of, among other books, “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.” The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More