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      Exploring the World Beyond Queens

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      Shariff Bukari, 25, gravitated toward math and science as a child. One of his dream careers was paleontology, which combined his love for dinosaurs with the hands-on work of combing through artifacts. His parents nurtured his curiosity, encouraging him to read books and newspapers. They yearned to give him more opportunities to explore his passions beyond their life in Queens.That wasn’t always easy when both parents worked late shifts. So when a neighbor told his parents about the Fresh Air Fund’s Career Awareness Program, in which children attend camp during the summer and participate in career training sessions during the school year, they filled out an application for him.Mr. Bukari’s parents treasured the time they spent outdoors growing up in Ghana and hoped that their children, who didn’t have the same access to natural escapes in New York City, could discover the joy of swimming in lakes, too.Mr. Bukari was 12 when he spent his first summer in upstate New York, at the Fresh Air Fund’s Camp Mariah. Leaving home for the first time made him feel more mature and aware of how big the world was. Being at camp “raised my eagerness to want to do more things on my own,” he says.He remembers the rush of trying each new summer camp activity: building campfires, jumping into the water, listening for the birds in the trees. But what left the most lasting impact was the career training part of the program, which gave him a new perspective on his ambitions and interests.One day, dancers arrived to talk about their training and the cultures they drew from in their choreography. The creativity and physical demands of the job impressed him, but Mr. Bukari wrestled with the idea of pursuing dance. Hearing people talk about the details of their careers, “you really get to understand and decide whether it’s something you can see yourself doing or not,” he explained. Ultimately, he set dance aside.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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      Billionaire Donor Barry Sternlicht Assails Brown’s Deal With Protesters

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      One of Brown University’s major donors, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht, on Friday sharply criticized the school’s agreement to hold a board vote on cutting investments tied to Israel, calling it “unconscionable” and saying he had “paused” donations to the school.Brown is among a small number of universities that have agreed to discuss their investments in companies that do business in Israel, in order to persuade student protesters to dismantle encampments. Mr. Sternlicht, in a scathing email to The New York Times, which he copied to Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, said the arrangement amounted to sympathy for Hamas, which attacked Israel in October, and described students protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza as “ignorant.”“There should never be a vote when people do not have the facts,” he wrote. “It’s not education, it’s propaganda.”Mr. Sternlicht, 63, said no deal with protesters could be fruitful because the two sides did not agree on “facts and moral clarity,” as well as the scale of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, in which about 1,200 were killed and another 250 were taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent intense bombardment of the tightly packed area has left more than 34,000 dead and drawn international condemnation.He cited the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in wars in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, asking: “Where were the protests?”“As far as wars go, Israel has been quite muted,” Mr. Sternlicht wrote.The blowback from Mr. Sternlicht, who has described himself as a political independent and whose name is on a Brown residence hall, shows how quickly the issue of divestment from Israel may vex universities. Until a week ago, even discussing the subject was widely considered a nonstarter, as it was sure to divide a large swath of students and faculty from many of the businesspeople whose donations fill university endowments.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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      Esther Coopersmith, Washington Hostess and Diplomat, Dies at 94

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      A place at her dinner tables, which sat 75, provided access to networks of money, influence and power across cultural and political divides.At a private fund-raising reception last year, the president of the United States introduced himself this way: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a friend of Esther Coopersmith’s.”Mrs. Coopersmith’s name has been a calling card in Washington for seven decades. As one of the longest-reigning hostesses, best-connected diplomats and top fund-raisers in the nation’s capital, she greased the machinery that helped keep political, diplomatic and journalistic circles spinning; a place at her dinner tables, which sat 75, (with room for many more elsewhere and outside) provided access to networks of money, influence and power across cultural and political divides.Among her many matches, she introduced Bill Clinton, who was then the governor of Arkansas, to Boris Yeltsin on a trip to Moscow. She introduced Jehan Sadat, the wife of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, to Aliza Begin, the wife of Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, before the Camp David peace accords. Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, had his first Thanksgiving at her table.“People need a place out of the public spotlight to meet and talk,” she told The New York Times in 1987.Mrs. Coopersmith, who had multiple affiliations with the United Nations but who also reveled in her role as a freelancing citizen diplomat, died on Tuesday at her home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington. She was 94.The cause was cancer, said Janet Pitt, her longtime chief of staff. Rather than seek treatment that might have only postponed the inevitable and made her miserable, Ms. Pitt said, Mrs. Coopersmith “wanted to live her life.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On Covering the Arts in California

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      A conversation with Robin Pogrebin, a Los Angeles-based arts writer for The New York Times.The Frieze Art Fair at Paramount Studios in 2019.Graham Walzer for The New York TimesThough New York is often thought of as the center of the art world, there’s plenty going on in California.The New York Times has been covering California’s ambitious museums, top-notch art schools and adventurous galleries for years. Some of my favorite recent articles discussed how the Los Angeles art scene is eclipsing the Bay Area’s, how old San Francisco theaters are rethinking the size of their seats and how San Diego is finally getting its answer to the Hollywood Bowl.Robin Pogrebin, a longtime arts writer for The Times, moved to Los Angeles from New York last fall to bolster the coverage, reporting on art, architecture, music, theater and cultural institutions in California.Just this week, she published an article on the Resnicks, an L.A. couple who have made big donations to cultural organizations but have come under scrutiny for their water use, and another on the increasing recognition of Asian artists at the Frieze Art Fair, which opens today in Santa Monica.I spoke to Robin about her impressions of the West Coast art scene. Here is our conversation, lightly edited:In such a big state, how do you think about what to focus on?I had always considered the West Coast an important part of our cultural coverage, given that many important museums and galleries are here and that Los Angeles has a long tradition of producing artists. Hollywood also has the potential to feed the theater and dance worlds, and classical music as well as opera have their own vibrant followings here.Now that I’m based here, I’m exploring, discovering, learning and responding to what strikes me as newsworthy or interesting. I am out for lunches and dinners every day with people who can help me understand the cultural ecosystem here, attending events almost every night in many different arts disciplines. I’m keeping track of potential trends worth noting and individual stories worth telling.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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      $1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School

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      Dr. Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward.The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.While her husband ran an investment firm, First Manhattan, Dr. Gottesman had a long career at Einstein, a well-regarded medical school, starting in 1968, when she took a job as director of psychoeducational services. She has long been on Einstein’s board of trustees and is currently the chair.In recent years, she has become close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, the pediatrician who oversees the medical college and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, as the chief executive officer of the health system. That friendship and trust loomed large as she contemplated what to do with the money her husband had left her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.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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      Democratic Group Plans $10 Million Push to Protect Election Officials

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      The group is starting a new venture that will focus on five battleground states: Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin.A group that works to elect Democrats as the top election officials in states around the country is planning a $10 million venture to pay for private security for election officials of both parties, register new voters and try to combat disinformation.The group, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, is starting a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization called Value the Vote that will initially focus on five battleground states: Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin.“We’ve seen our election officials come under threat while they’re just trying to do their jobs, and they’re doing a fantastic job,” said Travis Brimm, the executive director of the Democratic group, who will also serve as president of Value the Vote. “They deserve the ability and the right to feel safe while they’re doing their job.”Mr. Brimm said the new group had raised $2.5 million so far of its $10 million pledge.Since the 2020 election, once-uncontroversial matters of election administration have increasingly become entangled in partisan politics.Election officials have faced increased threats in recent years, and they have been resigning at an alarming rate. Elections for secretary of state also became far more politicized last year, as several Republicans who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 vote sought the office in critical battleground states before ultimately falling short.In turn, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State grew rapidly after the 2020 election, when former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results drew attention to the importance of the position. The group went from raising a few million dollars each election cycle to raising and spending more than $30 million in the midterms last year.Officials at the group say they will provide equal funding opportunities to both Democratic and Republican election officials, but how the distribution will work in practice is unclear. Republican officials may hesitate to take money from a Democratic organization, fearing political fallout from fellow conservatives.Mr. Brimm said that election officials could request grants to pay for private security themselves, and that Values the Vote would also proactively offer private security.The introduction of private security with a loose affiliation to a political group could carry risks, however, especially in an era of extreme polarization and partisan distrust in the mechanics of voting.The safety funding is also likely to serve as an early test of new bans on outside funding of elections in Georgia and Arizona, which passed laws after the 2020 election prohibiting private groups from providing financial help to election officials. The bans were rooted in conservative criticism of grants made by an organization with ties to the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — money frequently called “Zuckerbucks” by right-wing news outlets.Republicans in the North Carolina legislature, who have veto-proof majorities, are currently seeking to pass a bill that would also ban outside money for election officials.Campaign finance experts note that the new laws are untested, and say they include some gray areas that could allow for the security donations.“The 501(c)(4) could theoretically provide security services directly to state election officials or at voting or vote-counting sites without charging for them,” said Brett Kappel, an campaign finance lawyer at the firm Harmon Curran. “It will take a court to decide if that is prohibited donation of services or whether it falls within the exception for services provided without remuneration.”Mr. Brimm said the group was working with a legal team to make sure it was “navigating those laws correctly.”“In some ways, it’s going to be a little bit of a new frontier,” he said.The rest of the initiative hews more closely to traditional campaign tactics and organizing. The group will look to counter election misinformation, including with paid digital advertising, and will begin a voter registration program.And though the group says it will be apolitical, its voter registration efforts align with typical Democratic efforts, focusing heavily on Black and Latino communities, which have tended to back Democrats in greater numbers.“The voter registration piece is about actually getting more people into the process,” Mr. Brimm said. “The people who are not getting access to voter education and voter registration are typically rural communities, typically lower-income communities and Black and Latino or Hispanic communities.” More

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      DeSantis, With a Subtle Maneuver, Hides His Small-Dollar Donations

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      The campaign of the Florida governor, who is known to be reliant on rich donors, worked with a Republican fund-raising powerhouse to prevent the disclosure of information on small contributors.When WinRed, the company that processes nearly all online Republican campaign contributions, recently released its enormous trove of donor data for the first half of the year, donations were conspicuously absent for one presidential candidate: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.It was no technical glitch. The DeSantis campaign worked with WinRed in a way that prevented the disclosure of donor information, ensuring that the campaign’s small donors would remain anonymous, according to a person familiar with the campaign.The arrangement appears to be the first of its kind for a presidential campaign since WinRed’s founding four years ago and could presage a return to an era in which far less information on small donors is made public, at least for Republicans.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis declined to describe details of the arrangement. The person familiar with the campaign said the aim was to prevent other campaigns from poaching Mr. DeSantis’s donors.But the move has other effects, including obscuring exactly how many — or how few — online donations Mr. DeSantis has received.His dependency on larger contributors has been a source of concern for his campaign, after his first financial report last month revealed that less than 15 percent of his $20 million haul had come from donors who gave less than $200. News emerged on Tuesday that Mr. DeSantis had replaced his campaign manager as part of a broad shake-up.Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant based in Texas, said he was not convinced of the value of concealing small donors — “Generally, small donors don’t care about disclosure,” he said — but he also did not see much of a threat to transparency in the campaign’s arrangement.“To me, the single most important aspect of the transparent philosophical debate is: Is somebody buying influence?” Mr. Mackowiak said. “You’re not going to buy anyone with a $200 or less donation.”Until recent years, he noted, small donations were never broken out in federal campaign finance disclosures. In a sense — and to the all but certain dismay of those who push for transparency — the move by the DeSantis campaign suggests a return to a previous era when those contributions remained anonymous.WinRed was set up in 2019 as a conservative answer to ActBlue, a nonprofit group that since 2004 has served as the central platform to process online donations for Democratic candidates and causes. ActBlue has been widely credited with establishing Democratic dominance in small-dollar fund-raising, and Republicans had long been eager for their own version.Unlike ActBlue, the heart of WinRed is a for-profit company. But its political action committee, like ActBlue’s, has served as a conduit for contributions to campaigns. Donors would give to the campaign through a webpage run by WinRed, which then distributed the money to it.In the 2020 election cycle, WinRed received and forwarded over $2.2 billion in online contributions; ActBlue was a conduit for more than $4.2 billion.While political campaigns are not required to itemize contributions under $200, the PACs for WinRed and ActBlue have to provide information on every donor. Their filings offered the public the only details about campaigns’ small-dollar contributions.WinRed has fought the requirement that it disclose every donor. It is currently in litigation with the Federal Election Commission and seeks to raise the threshold to $200, arguing that the requirement is burdensome and is not in keeping with the drastic growth of small-dollar donations.A spokesman for WinRed did not respond to requests for comment.WinRed recently started offering “merchant” accounts, in which the company acts not as a conduit, but as a typical payment processor. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign chose this option, the person familiar with the campaign said, cutting WinRed’s PAC and its disclosure requirements out of the picture.It appears to be the first time a presidential campaign has opted for this arrangement. The former chief executive of WinRed, Carl Sceusa, is currently the chief financial and chief technology officer of the DeSantis campaign.The difference in disclosure is vast.WinRed’s filing last week showed that Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising committee processed 1,328,930 donations in the first six months of the year. It showed nothing about Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign reported only 15,462 donations above $200 on his campaign’s Federal Election Commission filing. There was no information about the donors who gave less than $200. His campaign has said he has topped the 40,000 donors needed to make the first debate stage, but only a fraction of them are now disclosed.“Using the payment processor model allows them to not have to itemize those donors,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign ethics group. “That’s a business question, not a legal question.”The vendor arrangement raises some legal questions, Mr. Noti said: First, whether WinRed’s merchant arm is, itself, a de facto political group, which would have to register as a political action committee.“F.E.C. rules are pretty clear that payment processors can’t be partisan,” Mr. Noti said.The strategy may be most notable for what it could suggest to competitors about Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.“To the extent that unitemized contributions could tell you something about a candidate that might be valuable, it’s that they are regional, in one place,” Mr. Mackowiak, the strategist, said. “The only thing I can think of is that their small donor base may be primarily Florida-based, and they didn’t want to appear like a regional candidate.” More