Month: May 2021

Half of U.S. adults now absolutely vaccinated

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

Brigadier General Janeen Birckhead of the Maryland National Guard visits a woman as she receives her modern coronavirus vaccine from specialist James Truong (L) at CASA de Maryland’s Wheaton Welcome Center in Wheaton, Maryland on May 21, 2021.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Half of adults in the United States are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday.

The milestone in the U.S.’s sweeping effort to vaccinate its way out of the pandemic is as Covid infections and deaths fall to lows the nation hasn’t seen in nearly a year.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden set a goal of getting 70% of adults to get at least their first dose of a Covid vaccine by July 4th. The president said his hope is that the US will “celebrate our independence as a nation and our independence from this virus” by Independence Day.

With almost six weeks until Biden’s self-imposed deadline, at least nine states have already reached this 70% threshold.

The CDC’s vaccine tracker showed Tuesday afternoon that 50% of the US population aged 18 and over had been fully vaccinated by Monday, and 61.6% of that group had received at least one dose.

Among the people in the United States aged 65 and over who are at a far greater health risk from Covid, nearly 74% have been fully vaccinated, the CDC tracker shows.

Tags Adults, fully, Vaccinated

Entertainment

‘Myths and Hymns,’ a Theater Cult Favourite, Adjustments Form Once more

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Post date May 25, 2021

Listening to Adam Guettel’s song cycle “Myths and Hymns,” after a year of pandemic isolation and cautiously hoping for vaccinated freedom, you might feel of a pang of recognition in the lyric “So get me up, and get me out, and let me never return,” swelling to “I’m out of here/I am going there/I am gone!”

A little timelessness is to be expected in Guettel’s songs, a genre-hopping clash of ancient Greek tales and hymnal texts that debuted in 1998 (with a brief run at the Public Theater that has taken on a mythic status of its own) and has since inspired artists to take it up in a variety of forms as simple as a recital showpiece, and as elaborate as a book musical adaptation.

The latest iteration reunites Guettel with Ted Sperling — the music director of that original production at the Public, and now the artistic director of MasterVoices, which is presenting “Myths and Hymns” as an online mini-series whose four thematically organized episodes conclude Wednesday with the premiere of “Faith.” (The whole production will remain on YouTube through June.)

In a typical season, MasterVoices marshals luminaries of Broadway and opera for concerts and semi-staged performances of both classic gems and newer works. But no production has been as starry as this “Myths and Hymns,” whose nimble eclecticism opens it up to diverse casting. (Stephen Holden, reviewing the Public performances for The New York Times, wrote that Guettel had “created a kaleidoscopically heady musical-theater piece in which Gabriel Fauré meets Stevie Wonder, Caetano Veloso embraces Earth, Wind and Fire, and they all dance together around the tribal hearth.”)

Each of the piece’s 24 songs was treated as a discrete project — with its own cast and creative team — which made it easy for performers to contribute compared with, say, a weekslong timeline for something at Carnegie Hall. Sperling cast a wide net, not getting everyone on his wish list (like James Taylor) but gathering, among many others, Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, Joshua Henry, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jennifer Holliday, John Lithgow and the group Take 6.

“It’s a pretty incredible roster,” Guettel said in a recent joint interview with Sperling. “It might be damn near impossible to get all these people together for one night onstage.”

It’s unsurprising that so many singers were willing to join the production. Guettel’s music isn’t the material of Broadway blockbusters, but it is widely beloved for its originality, even for its difficulty, leaning toward the tradition of American art song — or even the high-level writing of golden age musical theater composers like his grandfather Richard Rodgers.

O’Hara, who starred in Guettel’s 2005 musical, “The Light in the Piazza,” as well as in workshops for his work in progress “Days of Wine and Roses,” said that the word that always comes to mind with his music is “satisfying.”

“It’s so rich, and there’s so much work to it, but it begs us to take in and understand it,” said O’Hara, whose appearances in the MasterVoices production include a luxuriously cast “Migratory V” adapted as a trio for her, Fleming and the soprano Julia Bullock. “I don’t want to be spoon-fed easy melodies and things I can hum. I want ones that get inside and kill me, really. And that’s what ‘Myths and Hymns’ does for me.”

This “Myths and Hymns” is a rare opportunity to hear Guettel’s music, which has been absent on Broadway since the lushly sensuous score of “The Light in the Piazza” resounded from the pit of the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Not that he hasn’t been busy; in fact, he’s written entire musicals.

“Two of them are finished, and they’re circling La Guardia,” Guettel said, “for understandable reasons, between the pandemic and some other complications that have come up, in terms of how and where the shows were meant to be produced.” (The embattled megaproducer Scott Rudin had been attached to “Days of Wine and Roses.”)

For now, though, Guettel has been able to revisit some of his earliest music, and in a new medium. Over lunch, he and Sperling talked more about the genesis of “Myths and Hymns,” then and now, and what may be in store for the piece’s future. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Was this conceived as a virtual production from the start?

TED SPERLING From the very beginning. My concept was that it should be kaleidoscopic. I wanted a lot of directors, a lot of input, a lot of difference. I didn’t even want the directors to know what they were doing.

That reflects the music’s range. Adam, can you explain how “Myths and Hymns” took this form to begin with?

ADAM GUETTEL I had been writing these myths just because I was just starting out as a writer, and you don’t know what to write. I did stuff that was tried and true. That was enough to keep me busy. Then I came across this book in an old antique shop, and it was a tiny book, the size of an iPhone. And it was just the words to a bunch of hymns. And for some reason out of this Upper West Side Jew comes all of this music to these hymn lyrics.

So there were these two stacks of things. And Tina Landau came over one day and said, “What are you working on?” and I said, “Well I’ve got these two stacks of things,” and she listened to a bunch of them and said, “Well, why wouldn’t they work together?” And we realized in some ways that the hymns are who we would have ourselves be, and the myths are basically who we are, and that they can kind of antiphonally talk to each other.

What has it been like revisiting this music?

GUETTEL I’ve gone to see a few productions, but I hadn’t listened to it in a long time. I might have had a small case of the usual “Oh my God, I did go on a bit”; “Jesus, that needs help”; “boy, those lyrics are over couplet-y.” There’s stuff that I was a little embarrassed by at first. But I let go of my vanity and let it be what it was. And there’s the honor of being a composer who wrote something 22 years ago that’s getting done again. That’s really what you write for, so that you leave something behind.

SPERLING I imagine every writer feels with more experience that their craft grows. My impression is you have to acknowledge that you were a certain person of a certain age when you wrote a piece and you keep changing, but the piece is a record of who you were then. If you try to monkey with it too much from a later perspective you run the rusk of muddying the waters.

GUETTEL You’re operating on a patient whose anatomy you’re not familiar with anymore.

In this form, “Myths and Hymns” is probably reaching its largest audience yet.

SPERLING We’re at over 50,000 now, which is way more than we would get in a season. We are planning to package it as a single work and re-edit it, and it will be broadcast on PBS.

And with such a starry cast, will there be an album, too?

GUETTEL There are six songs that are not on the Nonesuch record [released in 1999] that no one’s ever heard, except the people who saw it at the Public.

SPERLING And one of them not even that! One of my impulses to do this was that I wanted a more complete recording. People on YouTube have been asking, “Can we please have this as audio?” It would be lovely to have a little more time with it.

Tags Cult, Favorite, Hymns, Myths, Shape, Theater

Health

CDC Will Not Examine Delicate Infections in Vaccinated People

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

She still hasn’t returned to her daily three-mile runs with her dog because of shortness of breath. “I’m young, 43, healthy, with no pre-existing conditions, but you can often find me now resting on the couch,” said Ms. Cohn.

“Don’t people want to know about it?” She asked. “Where do people like me go? What happens next? Practitioners in my life have been shocked and are trying to figure out how to move forward, but there are so many questions. And if nobody studies that, there are no answers. “

Another reason not all breakthrough infections are tracked is that they are unlikely to result in further spread of the virus. However, the scientific evidence for this is inconclusive, say some experts.

At Rockefeller University, which regularly tests students and staff for the coronavirus on its New York City campus, breakthrough infections were found in two women who were fully vaccinated and developed robust immune responses after inoculation, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Both vaccinated women, a 51-year-old and a 65-year-old, developed mild symptoms of Covid-19; Viral sequencing revealed that they were infected with variants. “One of the people had an extraordinarily high viral load,” said Dr. Robert B. Darnell, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior author of the newspaper.

The patient is not known to have passed the disease on to others, he said. Even so, he said, “She had twice the transmittable viral load in a pindrop of saliva.”

Diana Berrent, founder of the Survivor Corps, a group of people with Covid-19, has called for a national registry of all people with Covid-19 to be set up, including those with mild and asymptomatic cases, in order to collect as much data as possible for future research .

Tags Americans, CDC, infections, investigate, Mild, Vaccinated

Business

How Meals Vans Endured and Succeeded Throughout the Pandemic

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Post date May 25, 2021

This article is part of Owning the Future, a series on how small businesses across the country have been affected by the pandemic.

The Covid pandemic hit California hard. It has seen well over 3.5 million cases and over 60,000 deaths. Scores of businesses have closed. But for Ana Jimenez, the owner of Tacos El Jerry, a small fleet of food trucks in Santa Cruz County, it provided an opportunity to bring her business into the 21st century.

Ms. Jimenez’s four trucks began taking orders through an app and a website, delivering directly to customers, and cultivating a customer base through a new social media presence. All of that added up to a significant increase in sales.

“Our business grew,” said Ms. Jimenez, 50. “We even added a new truck. Credit goes to my son, Jerry, who is 23. We didn’t have anything on social media. He said, ‘we’re going digital on all of this, Mom.’” Half of her orders are now placed online, she said.

Ms. Jimenez’s son created Facebook and Instagram pages for the food trucks and a social media advertising campaign, and the trucks began accepting credit card purchases. “Each truck is now serving around 300 people per day, which translates to roughly $5,000 in sales daily,” Ms. Jimenez said.

Food trucks — kitchens on wheels, essentially — are flexible by design and quickly became a substitute during the pandemic for customers who couldn’t dine indoors and coveted something different than their mainstream carryout options. That, in turn, has delivered a new client base to add on to an existing cadre of loyal followers. In a very real sense, food trucks are vehicles for equality in the post-pandemic world.

“While the pandemic has certainly hurt the majority of small businesses, it has also pushed many to be more innovative by looking for new revenue streams and ways to reach customers,” said Kimberly A. Eddleston, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University.

Like Ms. Jimenez, some businesses have “focused on ways to maintain their customer base by, for example, delivering products directly to customers,” Prof. Eddleston said. “While others have created products and services that attract new customers.”

Luke Cypher, 34, for instance, expanded the already eclectic selections at his Blue Sparrow food trucks in Pittsburgh, adding pizza, four-packs of local beer, gift cards and five-ounce bottles of housemade hot sauce.

Mr. Cypher’s main fare since he hit the streets in 2016 has been global street food. His menu carries a heavy Asian inspiration. There’s made-from-scratch kimchi on the menu daily. Dishes can include rice bowls, Vietnamese banh mi, falafel burritos, and a burger made with a ramen bun.

During the pandemic, Mr. Cypher’s business took a hit when 24 festivals and over a dozen weddings where he was booked were canceled. “I switched gears to keep things as lean as possible,” Mr. Cypher said.

He temporarily shut down a second food truck — a retrofitted 35-foot, 1956 Greyhound bus that he used for the big parties — and introduced a website to interact with his customers and an online ordering system for his smaller truck, which he usually parked at a neighborhood brewery.

“I switched the menu to focus on soups, noodles, burritos and pressed sandwiches, so that the things that we were handing our customers would make it home and still be a good experience after they opened up the bag and took it out,” he said.

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May 25, 2021, 12:48 p.m. ET

And he began to make and sell pizza one day a week at the kitchen where he used to do his prep work for the trucks before the pandemic. (The pizza, too, has an international flair: a banh mi pie, for example, made with pork or tofu, miso garlic sauce, mozzarella, pickled carrots, cucumbers, and cilantro.)

Customers can order and pay online or by phone and schedule a time to pick up; they receive a text or an email when their order is ready.

The kitchen “was already in place, so we turned around and said, well, what can we offer our customers in this unknown time that would be comforting,” Mr. Cypher said. “We had a wood-fired oven there that we use for bread baking, but basically it wasn’t being utilized.”

Before the pandemic, Mr. Cypher was serving roughly 1,500 customers a week from his food truck. A weekly festival on weekends, with 5,000 people stopping by the bus, of course, ramped up that number.

“The cool part is I was able to stay afloat because, unlike a restaurant with traditional seating, it was just myself, my sous-chef and his wife, who worked part-time,” he said. “We ended up serving roughly a hundred people a day, four or five days a week. So it wasn’t the numbers that we did before, but our lights were able to stay on because we had reduced a lot of costs that we had involved in running multiple rigs.”

Mr. Cypher, however, opted not to use delivery apps like Uber Eats or Grub Hub. “I don’t want to hand my food off to somebody else,” he said. “If we weren’t going to have the one-on-one conversations with our customers, we were at least going to give it to them directly.”

And like Tacos El Jerry, social media became a huge part of his marketing platform. “The pictures that we take and post on Instagram and Facebook let people feel like they’re a part of our truck family,” Mr. Cypher said.

“Food trucks were well-equipped to withstand pandemic restrictions, as they’re naturally to-go and socially distanced businesses,” said Luz Urrutia, chief executive of Accion Opportunity Fund, a nonprofit organization providing small-business owners with access to capital, networks and coaching. “Many food truck owners stepped forward to seize opportunity during a time of great uncertainty,” she said.

As Pittsburgh emerges from the pandemic, Mr. Cypher is adding a twist at his kitchen location. “We have licensing to offer beer on draft from our local breweries, so we’re going to have a small beer garden,” he said. “And that’s a revenue stream that we’re going to kind of lean into that we probably never would have done if not for Covid.”

In 2020, Mr. Cypher’s food trucks had $200,000 in gross sales, down about 40 percent from the previous year, he said. “But with the new offerings, more efficiency and only running one rig, we were actually able to net enough to keep the business moving forward,” he said. “This year we’re already up about 30 percent from where we were at last year at this time.”

For Ronicca Whaley, the chef behind the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based truck Shiso Crispy, timing was much tricker: she opened her first truck in November 2019, just a few months before the pandemic. And yet Ms. Whaley, 35, who offers handmade gyozas, bao buns and their signature dish, dirty rice, now has two trucks because of a strategy of regularly parking in certain neighborhoods and offering discounted and free meals outside a nearby Ronald McDonald House. (She added the second truck in January.)

One challenge: “The internet here is shoddy. And cellphone service in different areas out here just doesn’t work,” she said. “During the height of the pandemic, I was consistently losing two or more transactions at my point of sale every shift.”

Luckily, she was offered a special initiative for small business owners by Verizon Business: a year of complimentary connectivity and a 5G iPhone, as well as tools such as the Clover Flex point of sale program for touchless transactions. “It has digitally transformed my business,” Ms. Whaley said.

She also signed on to an app, called Best Food Trucks, that allows customers near her to pre-order once they know her location for the day.

“The inextricably connected stories of food trucks and Covid are a perfect microcosm of the undeniable reality that women, immigrants and people of color, historically relegated to the edges of the economy, are actually the foundation upon which the next economy must be built,” said Nathalie Molina Niño, author of “Leapfrog: The New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs.”

But the silver lining from the pandemic for some operators is more personal — including bringing families together. “I have a ton of wisdom about how to operate food trucks and cooking,” Ms. Jimenez said. “It’s the coming together of the generations that made the business stronger now and for the future.”

Tags Endured, food, Pandemic, Succeeded, trucks

Politics

Greene Attracts Rebuke for Evaluating Vaccine Mandate to Nazi Acts

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Post date May 25, 2021

Georgian Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was convicted Tuesday by the House of Representatives Republican chief for a series of comments she made comparing mask and vaccine mandates to the treatment of Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust.

In a number of posts on Twitter, Ms. Greene, A right-wing provocateur, who previously advocated a number of violent and racist conspiracy theories, has opposed decisions by private companies to issue vaccine mandates or to issue mask requirements only for vaccinated individuals. Their comments came amid an increase in anti-Semitic attacks on Jews across the country.

“Vaccinated employees receive a vaccination logo, just like the Nazi Jewish people were forced to wear a gold star,” she wrote in a post Tuesday.

In another, relating to a university that banned unvaccinated students from attending classes in person, she wrote, “It appears that the Nazi practices have already begun in our youth. Show your VAX papers or any personal class for you. That’s exactly what I said about the golden star. “

After encountering a swift wave of public criticism, Ms. Greene refused to apologize, arguing that she never specifically compared mask mandates to the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews, “just the discrimination against Jews in the first years “.

Republican Kevin McCarthy, California Republican and minority leader, who largely did not criticize Ms. Greene despite controversial discussion, issued a statement condemning her language.

“Marjorie is wrong and her deliberate choice to liken the horrors of the Holocaust to wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said in a statement. “The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity in human history. The fact that this needs to be ascertained today is deeply worrying. “

His reprimand came after one of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a prominent organization whose political action committee generously contributes to the GOP

Matt Brooks, the group’s executive director, pissed off Ms. Greene on Twitter, describing her as “an embarrassment to herself and the GOP”.

“Please educate yourself so you can see how utterly wrong and inappropriate it is to compare vaccination records with the 6 million Jews exterminated by Nazis,” Brooks wrote.

Greene’s comments created another problem for the House Republican leaders who recently sought to take control of their political message by removing Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from her post as conference chair, citing their refusal to ignore former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of a stolen election. And they messed up an issue that Republicans have been trying to highlight in recent days when they have tried to label Democrats as inadequate supportive of Israel and the American Jewish community.

Mr McCarthy declined to take action against Ms. Greene on her previous fire testimony earlier this year, including one advocating the killing of spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, although he denied the statements himself.

“Previous comments by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene do not reflect the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” McCarthy said in February.

Some Republicans have argued that it would be unfair to blame Ms. Greene for comments she made prior to serving in Congress. But after it was discovered that the newcomer to Georgia had also suggested that a devastating wildfire devastating California was triggered by a “laser” broadcast from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family, the Republican Jewish Coalition entered and said she was “working closely with the Republican leadership of the House on the next steps. “

Mrs. Greene was never disciplined.

Tags Acts, Comparing, Draws, Greene, mandate, Nazi, Rebuke, Vaccine

Business

Retailers’ variety pledges put extra Black-owned manufacturers on cabinets

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

Cora and Stefan Miller started a hair care company after they had their son, Kade, and struggled to find hair products for him. Young King Hair Care is now sold by Walmart and Target.

When Cora Miller had her son, she discovered the baby had a full head of hair — and found few products on the market to style it.

A lot of gels, mousses and creams smelled like fruit and flowers or came in pink bottles. That search inspired Cora Miller and her husband, Stefan, to start their own company, Young King Hair Care. They designed the line of plant-based, natural hair products with little Black boys like their son in mind, and launched the product just before his third birthday.

“I really wanted my son to see himself in the products he uses,” said Cora Miller, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “It was a bugging, nagging feeling about this that wouldn’t go away.”

Young King is now on the shelves of two of the country’s largest retailers, Walmart and Target. It is among the growing number of Black-owned brands that national retailers have begun to sell over the past year in a push to better reflect diverse customers and a commitment to advancing racial equity after the murder of George Floyd.

Companies have made pledges and earmarked donations over the past year. Yet the expanding assortment of Black-owned goods on national retailers’ shelves and websites has become one of the most visible signs of change in the corporate world.

Floyd’s murder one year ago Tuesday not only cast a harsh light on police treatment of Black Americans, said Americus Reed, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School. It led to a reckoning about how Black businesses have been boxed out of economic opportunities and reflected by offensive brands, such as Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben’s.

By seeking more Black suppliers, retailers have combined “social change and economic savviness” and made a move that can boost companies’ reputations and sales, he said.

“It’s an investment,” he said. “It’s a long-term play to signal to a community that ‘We’ve got your back.'”

More space on shelves

Four days after Floyd’s murder, Aurora James challenged companies in an Instagram post.

“So many of your businesses are built on Black spending power,” she wrote. “So many of your stores are set up in Black communities. So many of your posts seen on Black feeds. This is the least you can do for us. We represent 15% of the population and we need to represent 15% of your shelf space.”

A year later, 25 companies — including prominent retailers like Macy’s, Sephora and Gap — have pledged to do that. James, a Black entrepreneur with a luxury brand called Brother Vellies, leads the 15 Percent Pledge.

James said she has seen progress made by the companies firsthand. A company that joins the pledge signs a contract with the nonprofit, which audits it each quarter. She said the nonprofit looks at its purchase orders and tracks representation of products on shelves. The group also shares resources, such as a database of Black-owned businesses and suggests strategies that companies can use to grow a diverse base of suppliers.

Beyond growing the number of products, retailers are becoming stronger and more supportive business partners, James said. For instance, she added, companies are not only reaching out to Black entrepreneurs who have historically been left out, but are guiding them through common challenges experienced by early-stage businesses. Examples she cited include assisting with package or logo design or paying deposits to businesses when orders are placed to provide upfront capital.

James recently met on Zoom with a group of entrepreneurs who are part of Sephora’s accelerator program. All were women and people of color who are developing makeup and skin-care products for women who look like them.

“Every day, I am hearing messages from Black-owned businesses that are scaling into these opportunities,” she said. “It’s a real game changer. … Ultimately, when we actually empower entrepreneurs, who are in many cases living and working in Black communities, that’s when we’re really going to start to see a big difference across this country,” she said.

Other retailers have announced similar commitments and new approaches.

Lowe’s had a “Shark Tank”-like competition to identify promising products from entrepreneurs of diverse backgrounds and reward them with shelf space, marketing support and small business grants. Ulta Beauty plans to spend more than $4 million on marketing to help Black-owned brands gain traction. Target is launching a new eight-week accelerator program for Black-led start-ups, Forward Founders, as part of a commitment to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by the end of 2025. And Walmart featured some Black-owned beauty brands in a recent TikTok streaming event.

James has criticized some companies that have declined to take the 15 Percent Pledge, such as Target, saying its initiatives do not go far enough and don’t come with the same level of accountability.

“Whether or not Target wants to take the pledge or any of these other companies want to take the pledge, we’re still going to keep holding their feet to the fire and pushing them to do more,” she said.

Creamalicious Ice Creams founder Liz Rogers took her Southern roots into consideration when crafting her recipes.

Source: Bobby Quillard

Breaking in

Those efforts have already begun to help minority-owned brands get onto shelves.

Creamalicious Ice Creams, founded by the Black chef and restaurateur Liz Rogers, made its way into Walmart stores in February. Its pints arrived in the freezer aisle several months after Walmart CEO Doug McMillon sent a letter to employees last summer pledging to advance racial equality within its business.

“It’s very hard to get into the [ice cream] category because it’s extremely competitive, there’s no room on the shelves, … and when you’re new, they’re not very open to making room,” Rogers said. “As a minority business, breaking into the frozen dessert category, you have to be a lot more innovative. You have to have a brain and a story, and you have to speak different and stand on your own.”

Rogers said being authentic and true to her Southern roots is what ultimately helped her succeed. “People told me, ‘Don’t call Walmart because they’re going to say no.’ And I said, ‘Well they can say no.’ But they ended up saying yes. And now I’m trying to work with other retailers.”

Creamalicious’ flavors of ice cream, sold online and in some Meijer grocery stores, include “Slap Yo’ Momma Banana Pudding,” “Uncle Charles Brown Suga Bourbon Cake,” and “Porch Light Peach Cobbler.” All of them come with family recipes and draw on African American culture and childhood memories, Rogers said

“Doug McMillon didn’t just write a letter,” she said. “They welcomed me with open arms. … They taught me how to navigate through the system, and mentor me. They were very sincere in wanting me to win.”

Rebecca Allen launched in 2018 as a shoe for women of color who were struggling to find the right version of nude footwear for them.

Source: Rebecca Allen

A footwear brand that caters specifically to Black and Brown women, Rebecca Allen, debuted on Nordstrom’s website this week, and its styles will head to select Nordstrom stores later this year.

The department store announced last fall its goal to bring in $500 million in retail sales from brands owned, operated or designed by Black and/or Latinx individuals by 2025. It was one of a series of diversity and inclusion goals the company set last August. Separately, it committed to include more Black-owned beauty brands in the merchandise mix.

Nordstrom’s buying team has since received a flood of Instagram messages and emails from Black-owned businesses, said Teri Bariquit, its chief merchandising officer.

“There was this momentum and this call to action that gave a platform for more change, faster,” she said. “There has been a lot of very organic outreach directly to us. People see an open door, and we always take those calls.”

Allen, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, founded the company because of her own struggles when shoe shopping. The company’s assortment of heels, flats and sandals come in a wider range of shades, including those that match the skin tone of women of color.

Allen said retailers not only can put brands in front of consumers but can also reverse many years of Black businesses not getting access to the capital they needed to grow.

“It is certainly not enough just to say we’re going to bring these brands on. But it’s really: How are we supporting them to actually be successful, and how are we defining that success?” she said.

Allen has facilitated conversations among other Black-owned brands with Nordstrom to share stories of success and failure, and learn from each other, she said.

“For any of these companies, it’s not going to help anybody if they’re just saying, well, we did it, we hit this 15% quota — or whatever it is,” Allen said.

For so many Black entrepreneurs, just getting a call or email back from a buyer has often been a struggle, Young King’s Miller said. The company’s story shows how getting noticed by a national retailer “changes the trajectory of your company,” she said.

Young King began selling products online in 2019. Yet its business accelerated after its curling cream and conditioner got picked up by Target in January and at Walmart in March. Sales have approximately tripled from a year ago, she said. That has given the company runway to launch new styling products and enter a category outside of hair care, she said.

Target, for instance, mentored the company in its beauty accelerator. It also offered the company endcap displays at nearly 200 stores at a discounted price, she said.

She said she often walks the store aisles with her son, Kade, now 4. The couple has “paid it forward” by hiring other Black-owned businesses, including the manufacturer of the hair-care products and the fulfillment company that ships orders.

“It’s been a long time coming, to be honest,” she said. “It’s kind of crazy to think that there weren’t a lot products for Black or Brown people. There just wasn’t. And so I always get so excited to learn and see other emerging Black-owned brands and see them filling in spaces and gaps.”

Tags Blackowned, Brands, diversity, Pledges, put, retailers, Shelves

Health

Fauci testifies earlier than U.S. Home on NIH finances

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

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Officials from the National Institutes of Health testified before Congress Tuesday the agency’s annual budget as the nation battles the Covid-19 pandemic.

Witnesses include the White House Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also directs the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases within the NIH, and directors of the country’s top medical institutions.

NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins also testifies before the House Committee on Appropriations and the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, along with Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, the director of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development by Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Other witnesses are Dr. Gary H. Gibbons, the director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; Dr. Norman E. Sharples, the director of the National Cancer Institute, and Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Read CNBC’s live updates for the latest news on the Covid-19 outbreak.

Tags budget, Fauci, House, NIH, testifies

Business

Electrical Automobile Begin-Up Cuts Outlook as Funding Runs Low: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Shares of Lordstown Motors, a start-up aiming to make electric pickup trucks, dropped 13 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company said that it would “at best” make just 50 percent of the vehicles it had previously hoped to this year, unless it is able to raise additional capital.

“What we are saying is that if we don’t get any funding, we might only make half of what we thought,” Lordstown’s chief executive, Steve Burns, said Monday during a conference call.

Mr. Burns said the company was still on track to begin making trucks by September.

Lordstown has had discussions with some strategic investors who could pump money into the company, he said, and it has looked into borrowing money by using its plant or other assets as collateral.

He also said the company was looking into borrowing from a federal government program meant to support the development of electric vehicles, but it was unclear if it had any funds left.

Lordstown would be able to make as many as 2,200 trucks by the end of the year if it gets funding, Mr. Burns said. Without additional capital, it would probably make fewer than 1,000.

Mr. Burns has been hoping Lordstown would be the first to produce an electric pickup truck aimed at commercial fleets such as large construction and mining companies, but it will soon face some formidable competition. Ford Motor last week unveiled an electric version of its F-150 pickup that is supposed to go on sale next spring.

Lordstown gained attention because it bought an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that General Motors had closed. It was also once hailed by former President Donald J. Trump for saving manufacturing jobs.

It became a publicly traded company last year by merging with a special purpose acquisition vehicle, a company set up with cash from investors and a stock listing. Several other electric vehicle and related businesses have gone public through similar mergers in recent months, taking advantage of investors’ desire to find the next Tesla.

Lordstown, which is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it lost $125 million in the first quarter of 2021, but ended the period with $587 million in cash.

Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Global stocks

Stocks continued an upswing on Tuesday, pushed higher by strength in Asian markets and growing confidence in a European economic recovery. And Bitcoin steadied.
The S&P 500 index was set to open 0.4 percent higher when markets begin trading in the United States. It gained 1 percent on Monday.
The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 0.4 percent, the fourth-straight day of increases. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong closed 1.8 percent higher and the CSI 300 in China rose 3.2 percent, the biggest one-day increase since July. Overseas investors bought a record amount of Chinese shares on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported, amid a crackdown on rising commodity prices by Chinese officials.

Elsewhere in markets

Oil prices fell. Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropped 0.7 percent to $65.61 a barrel.
After a turbulent weekend, the price of a Bitcoin was above $37,000 on Tuesday morning. The cryptocurrency had dropped as low as about $31,000. Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, said Bitcoin’s “greatest risk is its success.” Speaking at a CoinDesk conference in a video released on Monday, Mr. Dalio said that as Bitcoin becomes a “bigger deal and more of a threat,” it could become an existential risk to other financial markets and governments unable to control it. He added he’d rather own Bitcoin than government bonds.
Lordstown Motors, the start-up aiming to make electric pickup trucks, dropped more than 12 percent in premarket trading after it said on Monday that it would “at best” make half of the vehicles it had hoped to this year, unless it is able to raise additional capital.
An improving outlook for the German economy is taking hold. A survey of German business managers on their expectations for the economy over the next six months showed increasing optimism in May, with the ifo Institute’s index rising to 102.9 points, the highest since 2011. Separately, the national statistics office confirmed that gross domestic product fell 1.8 percent in the first quarter, a period during which Germany was in different degrees of lockdown, compared with the previous quarter.

Credit…Shira Inbar

After years of hype, billions of dollars of investments and promises that people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now, the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset.

Expectations are that tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic, The New York Times’s Cade Metz reports.

So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most prominent companies.

Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; auto industry giants; and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game

Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary called Woven Planet in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgets over the past year.

Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

President Biden and congressional Democrats went to the mat this winter to secure $350 billion in assistance for state and local governments in their $1.9 trillion stimulus package. The aid was meant to help them rehire laid off government workers, invest in infrastructure projects and repair balance sheets damaged by the pandemic.

But it increasingly looks like many states — especially ones run by Democrats, with relatively high taxes on high earners — don’t need the money. California officials expect a $15 billion surplus this fiscal year. Virginia has seen nearly $2 billion in unanticipated revenues. In Oregon, economists recently upgraded the state’s revenue forecasts, moving the state from projected deficits to surplus.

The tax revenues are coming from a rebounding economy and soaring stock market, and raising pressure on Mr. Biden to repurpose hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending approved earlier this year, The New York Times’s Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport report.

Republicans in Congress have urged Mr. Biden to redirect assistance for state, local and tribal governments to instead pay for roads, bridges and other portions of a potential bipartisan agreement on upgrading America’s infrastructure. Some economists and budget experts support that push. White House officials haven’t said whether they would be willing to redirect that spending, mindful that some states, like tourism-dependent Hawaii, still face large budget shortfalls.

Credit…Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

The advent of legalized adult-use marijuana in New York and New Jersey is an entrepreneur’s dream, with some estimating that the potential market in the densely populated region will soar to more than $6 billion within five years.

But the rush to get plants into soil in factory-style production facilities underscores another fundamental reality in the New York metropolitan region: There are already shortages of legal marijuana, The New York Times’s Tracey Tully reports.

Within New Jersey’s decade-old medical marijuana market, the supply of dried cannabis flower, the most potent part of a female plant, has rarely met the demand, according to industry lobbyists and state officials. At the start of the pandemic, as demand exploded, it grew even more scarce, patients and business owners said.

The supply gap has narrowed as the statewide inventory of flower and products made from a plant’s extracted oils more than doubled between March of last year and this spring. Still, patients and owners say dispensaries often sell out of popular strains.

Because marijuana is illegal under federal law and cannot be transported across state lines, marijuana products sold in each state must also be grown and manufactured there.

Federal banking law also makes it nearly impossible for cannabis-related businesses to obtain conventional financing, creating a high hurdle for small start-ups and a built-in advantage for multistate and international companies with deep pockets.

Oregon, which issued thousands of cultivation licenses after legalizing marijuana six years ago, has an overabundance of cannabis. But many of the other 16 states where nonmedical marijuana is now legal have faced supply constraints similar to those in New York and New Jersey as production slowly scaled up to meet demand.

Tags Cuts, electric, funding, Live, outlook, Runs, startup, Updates, vehicle

World News

Moderna says shot is 100% efficient in teenagers, plans to hunt FDA OK in June

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

A young man receives his Covid-19 vaccination in a vaccination clinic. People are receiving the Moderna vaccine in Milford, Pennsylvania.

Preston Ehrler | LightRocket | Getty Images

Moderna said Tuesday that its Covid-19 vaccine was 100% effective in a study in adolescents ages 12 to 17. This makes it the second attempt after Pfizer that has demonstrated a high level of effectiveness in younger age groups.

The company plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration to expand emergency use of its Covid-19 vaccine to teenagers early next month. If approved, it would likely dramatically increase the number of recordings available to middle and high school students before the next school year. Pfizer and German partner BioNTech were approved to use their vaccine for 12 to 15 year olds earlier this month.

“We are encouraged that mRNA-1273 is highly effective in preventing COVID-19 in adolescents,” said Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in a press release. “We continue to strive to do our part to end the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The two-dose vaccine, given four weeks apart, is already approved for adults.

The phase 2/3 study the company cited on Tuesday included more than 3,700 teenagers. No cases of Covid-19 were observed in participants who received two doses of the vaccine, while four cases were observed in the placebo group, according to the company.

No significant safety concerns have been identified to date, with side effects generally in line with a previous study in adults, the company said. The most common side effects after the second dose were headache, fatigue, muscle pain, and chills, Moderna said.

The new data comes less than three weeks after the company announced in an earnings report that early data showed the shot was 96% effective against Covid in teens ages 12-17. These data were based on those who had received at least one dose of the vaccine.

The company said Tuesday that the shot in the study was 93% effective after one dose. For this it used the definition of Covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which only requires one symptom and a positive Covid test.

US regulators are expected to approve Moderna’s application for teenage use. The approval process could take about a month, in time for some summer activities and fall Classes if Moderna submits the data by the beginning of June. Pfizer and BioNTech, for example, filed for expanded use of their shot in teenagers on April 9th and were approved by the FDA on May 10th.

Vaccinating children is seen as critical to ending the pandemic. The nation is unlikely to achieve herd immunity – if enough people in a given community have antibodies to a given disease – until children can be vaccinated, health officials and experts say.

According to the government, children make up around 20% of the total US population. According to medical experts, between 70% and 85% of the US population must be vaccinated against Covid to achieve herd immunity, and some adults may refuse to get the shots. Although now more experts say herd immunity becomes less likely as variants spread.

According to health experts, vaccinating children can also accelerate the return of personal learning and enable after-school activities such as sports, arts, and other personal activities after school.

Tags effective, FDA, June, Moderna, plans, Seek, shot, Teens

Health

Scientists Drove Mice to Bond by Zapping Their Brains With Mild

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

From ghosts to bats

When research on so-called interbrain synchrony emerged in the 2000s, some scientists dismissed it as parapsychology, a trippy field of the 1960s and ’70s that claimed to find evidence of ghosts, the afterlife and other wonders of the paranormal.

In 1965, for example, two ophthalmologists published in the prestigious journal Science an absurd study of 15 pairs of identical twins. Each twin, with electrodes on their scalps, was placed in a separate room and asked to blink on command. In two of the pairs, the study reported, one twin showed distinctive patterns of brain activity while the sibling was blinking in the other room. The doctors called it “extrasensory induction.”

“The paper is hilarious,” said Guillaume Dumas, a social physiologist at the University of Montreal who has studied brain-to-brain synchrony for more than a decade. In that far-out era, he said, “there were many papers with methodologically questionable conclusions claiming to demonstrate interbrain synchronization with two people.”

Since then, however, many sound studies have found brain synchronies emerging during human interactions, starting with a paper in 2002 that described how to collect and merge data from two brain scanners simultaneously as two people played a competitive game. This enabled researchers to observe how both brains were activated in response to each other. In a Science paper in 2005, this “hyperscanning” technique showed correlations of activity in two people’s brains when they played a game based on trust.

In 2010, Dr. Dumas used scalp electrodes to find that when two people spontaneously imitated each other’s hand movements, their brains showed coupled wave patterns. Importantly, there was no external metronome — like music or a turn-taking game — that spurred the pairs to “tune in” to each other; it happened naturally in the course of their social interaction.

“There’s no telepathy or spooky thing at play,” Dr. Dumas said. Interacting with someone else is complicated, requiring an ongoing feedback loop of attention, prediction and reaction. It makes sense that the brain would have some way of mapping both sides of that interaction — your behaviors as well as the other person’s — simultaneously, although scientists still know very little about how that happens.

Tags Bond, Brains, drove, Light, Mice, Scientists, Zapping