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      Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is a Vivid Mission Statement. Let’s Discuss.

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      The pop superstar teased a move to country, then tackled so much more. Three critics and a reporter explore her new album’s inspirations, sounds and stakes.BEN SISARIO I don’t usually say this about news releases, but since Beyoncé says so little about the making of her art, the “Cowboy Carter” announcement was intriguing for noting that “each song is its own version of a reimagined Western film,” and that Beyoncé screened movies while she recorded, including “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hateful Eight,” even “Space Cowboys” (?!).My first reaction to hearing the album was surprised gawking at its range of genre and sound, after she head faked us all into perhaps more limited expectations of “country.” (Of course we should have known better.) Viewed only as a genre-hopping exercise, “Cowboy Carter” might be a confusing jumble. But the film frame puts narrative and character at the center of her message, and with that everything came into clearer focus for me.As a heroine, Beyoncé makes a big, bold statement of her quest in “Ameriican Requiem,” taking on nothing less than American history. She finds villains in Jolene and (ahem) the Grammys. Songs like “II Most Wanted” and “Levii’s Jeans” could be plot-break montages while our conquering cowgirl hangs with some sidekicks she meets along the way. By the final reel she’s recapitulating her complaints and declaring herself the victorious leader of a grand resistance (“We’ll be the ones to purify our fathers’ sins”).SALAMISHAH TILLET I’ve listened to the album so many times now — on a plane, in a spin class, and, as I think she intended, while I drove on the highway (sadly, 280, not the 405). Yes, Ben, she has gone big here! But, instead of longing for some lost past, she is taking on “History” — musical and American — with, as we say in academia, a big “H,” or those big narratives about identity, belonging and discrimination.I almost missed those lyrics, “Whole lotta red in that white and blue, ha/History can’t be erased, oh-oh/You lookin’ for a new America” because I was too busy Proud Marying, jerking and twerking to “Ya Ya.” I think that might be the point — it is as if she saying, “The times are so desperate, I am going to use all the vocal gifts and genres at my disposal to bring the country together and show you how good I am at doing them (again)!”Beyoncé onstage with the Chicks performing “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards.Image Group LA/ABC, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      LSU’s Kim Mulkey Courts Controversy in Style

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      Inside the coach’s winning fashion playbook.The smog of a Washington Post exposé may have been hanging over Kim Mulkey’s head during the L.S.U. game on Saturday afternoon, but the highest paid coach in women’s collegiate basketball wasn’t going to hide. How could you tell?Well, in part because at the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, she had given a news conference threatening a lawsuit about the article, thus calling to attention to it. In part because there she was, running up and down the sidelines and screaming her head off. And it part because … goodness, what was she wearing?A gleaming pantsuit covered in a jumble of Op Art sequined squiggles, as if Big Bird had met Liberace and they’d teamed up for “Project Runway.”Kim Mulkey, resplendent in sequins at the L.S.U. Sweet Sixteen game on March 30.Gregory Fisher/USA Today, via ReutersEven in the context of basketball, a sport in which players and coaches understood the power of personal branding through clothes long before almost any other athletes, Ms. Mulkey stands out. More than perhaps anyone else in the league — possibly in all of women’s basketball — she has made her image a talking point, a reflection of her own larger-than-life personality and a tool to draw attention to her sport. She is basketball’s avatar of the Trumpian era, offering a new version of The Mulkey Show at every game and costuming herself for the moment. As her team meets the University of Iowa again in the Elite Eight, brand Mulkey will most likely be raising the stakes once more.It would be wrong to call her clothes “fashion.” They have little to do with trends or silhouette. But love what she wears or hate it, love how she behaves or hate it, her sometimes ridiculous, always eye-catching outfits are, like her winning record, abrasive personality, problematic comments about Covid-19 and reported homophobia, impossible to ignore.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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      Paula Weinstein, Hollywood Veteran and Political Activist, Dies at 78

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      Raised by a McCarthy-era rebel, the producer and journalist Hannah Weinstein, she followed her mother’s path into movies and television, advocacy and action.Paula Weinstein, a movie producer, studio executive and political activist who became a fierce advocate for women in her industry, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the death. She said the cause was not yet known.In the boy’s club of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the rare female top executive: Over her long career, she was president of United Artists, a vice president of Warner Bros. and an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox. She was just 33 when she was hired at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vice president a year later, The Los Angeles Times called her “the highest-ranking woman in the motion picture industry.”“A man can be mediocre in almost everything, but a women’s got to be perfect,” she told Life magazine that year, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Young Tycoons.”But Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues said possessed a wicked sense of humor — her sister described her laugh as an infectious cackle — and a steely commitment to social justice, was unusual in Hollywood beyond her gender. As Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations consultant and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a phone interview: “Unlike so many, she didn’t play at politics. To her, social and political change was paramount. She was the antithesis of a phony Hollywood activist looking for good P.R. or a career boost. She was unique in a sea of pretenders.”Ms. Weinstein accepted the Emmy Award for the HBO movie “Recount” in 2008. She was an executive producer on the film, which was based on the 2000 presidential election.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesActivism was the family business: Her mother, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 took her three young daughters to live in Paris and then London, fleeing the grim and punitive politics of the country’s McCarthy era. In Britain, where the family lived for more than a decade, Hannah Weinstein produced movies and television series using blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly told her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “If you believe in something, you have to be willing to get up off your ass and do something, and if you don’t get up off your ass, you really didn’t believe in it.”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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      After R.B.G. Awards Go to Musk and Murdoch, Justice Ginsburg’s Family Objects

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      The children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who championed liberal causes and women’s rights, said the choice of recipients this year was an “affront” to the memory of their mother.When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said.Even as he declined to specify any of the recipients who he believed undermined the spirit of the award, Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, expressed concern that not all of them reflected the justice’s values.“Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said in a letter addressed to the organization that confers the awards, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.”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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      Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Names New Director

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      Elizabeth C. Babcock, the chief executive of Forever Balboa Park, will start this summer, after Nancy Yao’s withdrawal.Second time’s the charm?A year after the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum in Washington named its founding director — only to have the candidate withdraw before her official start date — the museum is trying again.It has chosen Elizabeth C. Babcock, the president and chief executive of Forever Balboa Park in San Diego, a nonprofit, as its new director. An anthropologist, museum educator and experienced administrator, Babcock will take over an institution that is still very much in formation. Although Congress approved plans for the museum in 2020, it is about a decade away from opening and does not have a site or a permanent collection yet.The museum’s original choice, Nancy Yao, resigned after an investigation into her handling of sexual harassment claims while leading the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan.After Yao’s appointment was announced, The Washington Post reported that her former workplace had settled three wrongful-termination lawsuits from employees who said they were fired in retaliation for reporting sexual misconduct. A Smithsonian spokeswoman said in 2023 that Yao had cited “family issues that require her attention” when she withdrew. (The Smithsonian used a different search firm this time around, according to the spokeswoman.)In an interview, Babcock said her priorities for the museum include expanding into digital media and supporting scholarly research. “We are going to listen and learn and work hard to ensure that the material we cover represents diverse communities across the country,” she said. She declined to specify whether the museum would include the work of transgender women, but said that “our museum will not shy away from discussing controversial topics.” She will begin her new role in June.Babcock has been the chief executive of Forever Balboa Park since 2022. Before that, she was dean of education at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and vice president of education and library collections at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.The American Women’s History Museum, which has been led by an interim director, Melanie A. Adams, since last summer, has a staff of 22, with six more to begin this year. Its annual operating budget is $7 million.Fund-raising will be a key part of Babcock’s agenda. The museum needs to raise half its total budget, which is expected to exceed the $540 million it cost to open the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. (The other half of the budget comes from the federal government.) So far, it has amassed $65.5 million from donors.Babcock said that she intends to cultivate support from both women and men. “I think the power here for this museum is that it represents all of us — its intention is to be inclusive,” she said. More

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      PCOS Diets Are Unlikely to Ease Symptoms

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      Patients were told for years that cutting calories would ease the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome. But research suggests dieting may not help at all.For years, people who had polycystic ovary syndrome and were also overweight were told that their symptoms would improve if they lost weight via a restrictive diet. In 2018, a leading group of PCOS experts recommended that overweight or obese women with the hormonal disorder consider reducing their caloric intake by up to 750 calories a day. That guidance helped to spawn questionable diet programs on social media, and reinforced an impression among people with PCOS that if only they could successfully alter their diets, they would feel better.But the recommendations were not based on robust PCOS studies, and researchers now say that there is no solid evidence to suggest that a restrictive diet in the long-term has any significant impact on PCOS symptoms. Dieting rarely leads to sustained weight loss for anyone, and for people with PCOS, losing weight is particularly difficult. Beyond that, the link between sustained weight loss and improved symptoms is not very clear or well-established, said Julie Duffy Dillon, a registered dietitian specializing in PCOS care.In 2023, the same group, called the International PCOS Network, revised its guidance based on a new analysis of the research and dropped all references to caloric restriction. The group now recommends that people with PCOS maintain an “overall balanced and healthy dietary composition” similar to the Mediterranean diet, which is associated with a reduced risk of the health issues that are linked to the disorder, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It’s not known whether eating this way might improve symptoms of PCOS. The changes in the guidelines reflect “the PCOS literature and the lived experience of people with the condition,” said Dr. Helena Teede, an endocrinologist at Monash Health in Australia and lead author of the 2023 guidelines. “It’s no longer about blaming people or stigmatizing them, or suggesting that it’s their personal behavioral failure that they have higher weight.”What is PCOS?PCOS is a hormonal disorder that affects as many as five million women in the United States. It’s characterized by irregular periods, infertility, excessive facial hair growth, acne and scalp hair loss — symptoms that are common with other health conditions, too, making diagnosis tricky. People with PCOS usually ovulate less than once a month and often also have higher levels of androgens (male sex hormones) or multiple underdeveloped follicles on their ovaries (not, as the name suggests, cysts) or both.Typically, when a woman is experiencing symptoms, a doctor will either scan the ovaries to look for those follicles or draw blood to test hormone levels. There is no cure for PCOS; the first line of treatment is often some form of birth control to help regulate the menstrual cycle.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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      MLB The Show Will Include Women Players for the First Time

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      MLB The Show 24 will feature a career mode that allows gamers to create a female player and steer her journey to the big leagues. The game draws on the experiences of female baseball players.For the first time, women will don Major League Baseball jerseys in MLB The Show, the long-running popular video game.MLB The Show 24 will debut the option to create and play a female player in a reinvented version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which gamers direct a custom character’s ascent from the minors to the big leagues. The game’s developer, Sony San Diego Studio, announced the new mode Tuesday.The game, which comes out March 19, calls the new career mode Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way. It includes a storyline that follows the ascendence of two women into the major leagues and touches on the unique challenges they face, according to Sony San Diego Studio.MLB The Show joins other high-profile sports video game franchises that have moved to include women, such as FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and NBA 2K. But the gender dynamics in baseball are far more complicated, because most women and girls play softball instead.Some hoped MLB The Show 24 would help change that.“I think that in the United States especially, we’re brainwashed to think that boys play baseball and girls play softball, when in reality both exist in both worlds,” said Veronica Alvarez, manager of the U.S.A. Baseball Women’s National Team, which will compete in this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup.Ms. Alvarez, a former national team player herself, and some of her players provided Sony with input for the game’s development.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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      Global Warming Is Particularly Bad for Women-Led Families, Study Says

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      New U.N. research shows that climate change disproportionately erodes income in households led by women in poorer countries. But there are ways to fix it.Extreme heat is making some of the world’s poorest women poorer.That is the stark conclusion of a report, released Tuesday, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on weather and income data in 24 low- and middle-income countries.The report adds to a body of work that shows how global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, can magnify and worsen existing social disparities.What does the report find?The report concludes that while heat stress is costly for all rural households, it is significantly more costly for households headed by a woman: Female-headed households lose 8 percent more of their annual income compared to other households.That is to say, extreme heat widens the disparity between households headed by women and others. That’s because underlying disparities are at play.For instance, while women depend on agricultural income, they represent only 12.6 percent of landowners globally, according to estimates by the United Nations Development Program. That means women-headed households are likely to lack access to essential services, like loans, crop insurance, and agricultural extension services to help them adapt to climate change.The report is based on household survey data between 2010 and 2020, overlaid with temperature and rainfall data over 70 years.The long-term effect of global warming is also pronounced. Female-headed households lose 34 percent more income, compared to others, when the long-term average temperature rises by 1 degree Celsius.The average global temperature has already risen by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial age.Flooding similarly suppress the incomes of female-headed households more than it does other kinds of households, according to the report, but to a lesser degree than heat.“As these events become more frequent, the impacts on peoples’ lives will deepen as well,” said Nicholas Sitko, an economist with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the lead author of the report.Why does it matter?There’s been growing attention in recent years to the disproportionate harms of extreme weather, sometimes aggravated by climate change, on low-income countries that produce far less greenhouse gas emissions, per person, than wealthier, more industrialized countries.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