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Health

Sluggish-Wheeling to the Sea – The New York Occasions

Slow-Wheeling to the Sea - The New York Times

“People will be watching,” warned Minna Caroline Smith at Lapham’s Quarterly about her groundbreaking three-wheeler tour of the North Shore in eastern Massachusetts. Not only were the adult self-propelled tricycles new, so were the women who rode them. It was 1885.

The gender shock may be gone now, but as the only person who drove a tricycle on the same streets a century and later, I knew exactly what the incisive Smith meant. My weekend travel comfort, a low recumbent tricycle that was driven with hands instead of feet, was probably even more attention-grabbing. This was a first attempt at adaptive bike touring. After riding around the world for a lifetime, I switched to a handwheel after suffering from spinal cancer and a complication that partially paralyzed my legs.

I hesitated at first as I was aware of how low the riding would look. When I finally flipped the mental switch, I went all-in. In the ultra-light performance trike I rented from a store called Northeast Passage in Durham, NH, I was on my back with my legs hanging on aluminum hangers as if they were stretched out on a low chaise longue with my head and my longue Upper body on a back pillow for my husband. The pedal handles were at eye level, the black cranks and the silver chain whirred around like a hamster wheel in front of me. A long pole with flashing LED lights and an orange flag pulled behind me to alert the rest of the world to me.

In two days as I retraced Smith’s 35-mile route from Malden Center to Cape Ann, kids raved about me and my curious device, and young adults secretly stuck their iPhones out of car windows to catch me on video. One yelled so unreservedly that it shook the quiet of the village in Manchester by the sea.

“Are you falling asleep in that thing?” an elderly man in the Magnolia neighborhood of Gloucester asked eagerly. At Singing Beach in Manchester, a driver complained that I was difficult to see and suggested safety. “You should go find a lead somewhere, ”he said.

I was happy to be able to ride again. I identified with the 19th century Smith, not as a free-thinking crusader but as part of the disenfranchised – a disabled man trying to join the fun with healthy bodies. I felt a tie. Our modern, mixed-gender, middle-aged group consisted of six riders: some experienced cyclists, some beginners. My wife Patty used an e-bike with pedal assistance, the rest of them standard racing bikes. The mood would be reserved; there was no need to rush.

Boston’s North Shore has always been a top cycling destination. In and Around Cape Ann, a popular guide book for cycling guides published in the 1880s, praised the view from the mostly well-maintained and stepped dirt roads. In 1898, in the heyday of the bicycling frenzy in front of the car, a Boston newspaper printed a richly illustrated map of our bike tour route with hand-drawn panels devoted to snapshots of bridges, churches, gates shaded by elms, and the signature of views off the coast.

The start of the modern route wasn’t a postcard from Currier & Ives – a busy Route 60 lay in front of our assembly point in the parking lot of the suburban hockey rink. But minutes later, the automotive commotion disappeared as we hit the Northern Strand Trail, a eight-mile, newly built railroad path through Everett, Malden, Revere, Saugus and the coastal town of Lynn. The trail is also part of the East Coast Greenway, a partially completed 3,000-mile cycle and pedestrian network connecting cities from Key West, Florida, to Calais, Maine.

The wide, well-marked path was a revelation, creatively lined with community gardens, living murals, public sculptures, and various green spaces and expansive salt marshes. The road surface started with asphalt and then continued on gravel and gravel (there have been several improvements to the trails since our ride in Northern Strand in 2019, including a nice new bridge over the Saugus River and pavement while).

We crossed the path under the Route 1 flyover and around the Revere Showcase Theaters. All of us, lifelong New Englanders and some who live just a handful of miles away, kept saying a variation of the same: We had no idea this was.

The Rumney Marsh Reservation, a beautiful 600 acre salt marsh that borders the trail and encompasses parts of Saugus and Revere, would have made Smith’s poetic heart beat faster. Just five miles from downtown Boston, the habitat was a stopover for migratory birds and a constant gathering place for majestic tidal giants such as great blue herons, one of which we saw flying overhead.

As expected, large oaks and birches lined the path; unlikely to have splintered shallow-rooted maples over it, the result of a recent northeast. On the eight miles of bike-to-sea path between Malden and Lynn’s winding coastal boulevard, at least half a dozen trees had fallen, triggering all sorts of inventive bypasses: under, over and basically through the roughage.

My Low Rider, which is not necessarily seen as a versatile all-terrain machine because the seat is only a few inches above the ground, was actually so low that I could roll under splintered branches. Where I couldn’t, I accepted a nudge, or even, in the case of a crumbling Saugus River footbridge, a brief transfer. I wasn’t demoralized – I needed help. It was an all-for-one, one-for-all group adventure.

We drove one last paved, car-free path into downtown Salem, which is part of a new network of protected lanes throughout the city, which are reached at the start and finish through black metal gates that are reminiscent of high bikes. Smith’s group also stopped here for lunch and for a tour portrait shot at the iconic 17th-century Salem Common.

We knew about the photo from digital reproductions, but were surprised that the Essex Institute original was framed and hung three and a half meters in the Witch City Mall. Her formal attire – long dark dresses for the women, military-style uniforms for the men – belied her unmistakable sense of self-irony.

Above all, the men were ham sitting on the ground in front of their thrown high bikes, as the high-wheel bikes of the time were called. One of the riders looked to the side, as if pondering a bewitching vision (he was looking exactly south of today’s Goodnight Fatty), the sensational mainstay of biscuit and soft serve in the brick courtyard across the street.

The 1885 ladies lost much of their party after the official photo was taken; the rest of the riders continue to an inn in Manchester. We didn’t get quite that far and ended a 20-mile day at the Wylie Inn in Beverly City. The inn (owned and operated by Endicott College) is on a historic summer estate and is one of several stately homes on the Gold Coast that sit on headlands and secluded boardwalks.

The next day we happened to meet the owners of one of the advertised properties. We were admiring a perfectly formed cove at Kettle Cove in Gloucester, about ten kilometers northeast of the Wylie Inn, when an elderly couple stepped out of a hidden, overgrown path onto the coastal road. “This is Black Beach,” offered the man, dressed practically in high waders, a shell jacket and heavy, shrub-repellent gloves. “The other is white, but we don’t call them that, we call them Pebbly and Sandy. “

My father, Oliver Balf, was one of the many New York artists who came to Cape Ann in the 1940s. Like many others, he came in the summer and stayed forever. I’m pretty sure that as a young man his gaze was drawn to the same open-air backdrops we’ve seen all weekend: the working fishing boats chugging in the pocket harbors, low banks of starchy offshore clouds against a wide, blue sky with cold water .

On the second day we cycled the long route between Beverly Farms and Gloucester, branching off Route 127 onto Ocean Street and Shore Road, each of which offers breathtaking branch routes with ocean views. We came across a sign etched in granite that said WOE TIDES and a weathered wooden arrow over a stone for Old Salem Path. In an attempt to take a shortcut back to Main Street, we bypassed Thunderbolt Hill, a steep, curving, granite-lined street near Singing Beach in Manchester, where James Fields, founder of The Atlantic Monthly, was once Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, entertained, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The tour with a hand trike, two large wheels behind me and a third in the middle in front, was surprisingly great. Of course I sat there, could relax and enjoy the passing landscape in peace. But I was entertained excitingly on the descent, leaning like a slalom driver to quickly carve corners. The pedaling power of my upper body was consistent and reliable, and as the tour continued I didn’t feel any different, even though I knew I looked different. Trikes and e-bikes ensure a level playing field. More inclusive tours and a wider variety of them are likely to follow. But it was also good to know that you can go cycling with old cycling friends, one of whom thought the whole weekend in a historic tweed vest, tie and shirt with a collar.

Minna Caroline Smith had originally planned that her trip should end in Magnolia, but a growing craving for Gloucester clams brought her another six kilometers to a hotel near Pavilion Beach. We thought the trip would end in downtown Gloucester as well, but after a perfect fried fish and chowder lunch at the Causeway Restaurant, a local lunchtime eatery, we drove on a total of 12 miles to circumnavigate Cape Ann and complete the day.

Todd Balf is the author of several non-fiction books and most recently a memoir about his disability journey entitled Complications.

THE WORLD OPENS AGAIN. LET’S GO SAFE. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: every week you will receive tips on smart travel, stories about hot travel destinations and access to photos from all over the world.

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Health

Gradual-Wheeling to the Sea – The New York Occasions

Slow-Wheeling to the Sea - The New York Times

“People will look,” warned Minna Caroline Smith in Lapham’s Quarterly about her pioneering tricycling touring of the coastal North Shore in eastern Massachusetts. It wasn’t just that the self-powered adult tricycles were novel, but so, too, were the women riding them. It was 1885.

The gender shock may now be gone but as the only person steering a tricycle on the same roads a century plus later, I knew exactly what the incisive Smith meant. My weekend travel convenience, a low-riding recumbent trike powered by hands instead of feet, was arguably even more attention-getting. This was a first try at adaptive bike touring. After a lifetime of riding around the world, I was changing to a hand cycle after spine cancer and a complication that left my legs partially paralyzed.

I had hesitated initially, aware of how low-riding would look. When I finally flipped the mental switch, I went all in. In the ultralight, performance trike I had rented from a shop called Northeast Passage in Durham, N.H., I was supine with my legs suspended in aluminum stirrups as if stretched on a low chaise longue with my head and upper torso propped up with a back-cradling husband pillow. The pedal hand grips were eye level, the black cranks and silver chain whirring around in front of me like a hamster wheel. A long pole with blinking LED lights and an orange flag trailed behind me to alert the rest of the world to notice me.

In two days retracing Smith’s 35-mile route from Malden Center to Cape Ann, I had kids gush at me and my curious rig, and young adults clandestinely stick their iPhones out car windows to catch me on video. One person whooped so unreservedly it shattered the village quiet in Manchester by the Sea.

“Do you fall asleep in that thing?” an older man in the Magnolia section of Gloucester asked covetously. At Manchester’s Singing Beach, a motorist complained I was hard to see and offered a safety suggestion. “You should go find a track somewhere,” he said.

I was glad to be riding again. I identified with the 19th-century Smith, not as a freethinking crusader exactly, but as part of the disenfranchised — a disabled man trying to join able-bodied fun. I felt a tie. Our modern, mixed-gender, middle-aged party consisted of six riders: a few experienced cyclists, others first timers. My wife Patty used a pedal assist e-bike, the rest standard issue road bikes. The vibe would be low key; there was no need to rush.

Boston’s North Shore has always been a premier cycling destination. “In and Around Cape Ann,” a popular wheelman’s guidebook published in the 1880s, lauded the views from the largely well-tended and graded dirt lanes. In 1898, in the heyday of the pre-car bike riding mania, a Boston newspaper printed a lavishly illustrated map of our bike touring route, devoting hand-drawn individual panels to snapshots of bridges, churches, elm tree-shaded gateways and signature offshore views.

The modern route’s start was no Currier & Ives postcard — a bustling Route 60 fronted our suburban hockey rink parking lot gathering point. But minutes later the automotive tumult disappeared as we set out on the Northern Strand Trail, an eight-mile, newly constructed rail trail through Everett, Malden, Revere, Saugus and coastal Lynn. The trail is also part of the East Coast Greenway, a partially completed 3,000-mile bike and pedestrian network linking towns and cities from Key West, Fla., to Calais, Maine.

The wide, well-marked trail was a revelation, creatively bordered with community gardens, vibrant murals, public sculpture and assorted green spaces and sprawling salt marshes. The road surface began with pavement then continued on gravel and dirt (since our Northern Strand ride in 2019 there have been several trail improvements, including a handsome new bridge across the Saugus River, and pavement throughout.)

We traversed on the trail beneath the Route 1 overpass and around the Revere Showcase cinemas. All of us, lifetime New Englanders and some living only a handful of miles away, kept saying some variation of the same thing: We had no idea any of this was here.

The Rumney Marsh Reservation, a gorgeous 600-acre salt marsh bordering the trail and spanning parts of Saugus and Revere, would have sent Smith’s poetic heart soaring. Only five miles from downtown Boston, the habitat was a stopover for migratory birds and a permanent hangout for majestic tidal giants like great blue herons, one of which we saw flying overhead.

Large oak and birch trees, as expected, lined the path; not expected were shallow-rooted Norway maples splintered across it, the result of a recent nor’easter. Over the eight miles of the Bike-to-Sea path between Malden and Lynn’s winding seaside boulevard there were at least a half dozen trees down, precipitating all types of inventive bypasses: under, over and basically through the roughage.

My low rider, not necessarily viewed as a versatile all-terrain machine because the seat bottom is mere inches from the ground, was actually so low I could roll beneath splintered tree limbs. Where it couldn’t, I accepted a nudge, or even in the case of a then-crumbling Saugus River footbridge, a brief portage. I wasn’t demoralized — I needed help. It was an all-for-one, one-for-all group adventure.

We rode a final paved, auto-free path into downtown Salem, part of a new network of protected lanes throughout the city, this one accessed at start and finish by black metal gates resembling high wheelers. Smith’s group stopped here, too, for lunch, as well as for a touring portrait taken at the iconic, 17th-century Salem Common.

We knew about the photograph from digital reproductions, but were surprised to find the Essex Institute-owned original framed and hung in three-and-half by two-and-half-foot glory at the Witch City Mall. Their formal attire — long dark dresses for the women, militarylike uniforms for the men — belied their unmistakable sense for self-satire.

The men in particular were hams, sitting on the ground before their thrown-down penny farthings, as the high-wheel bikes of the day were known. One of the riders looked off sideways, as if ruminating on an entrancing vision (he was looking in the exact southerly direction of present day Goodnight Fatty), the sensational cookie and soft serve mainstay in the brick courtyard across the street.

The 1885 ladies lost much of their party after the official photo was taken; the remaining riders continuing on to an inn in Manchester. We didn’t get quite as far, ending a 20-mile day at the Wylie Inn in the city of Beverly. The inn (owned and operated by Endicott College) is on the grounds of a historic summer estate and is one of several magnificent Gold Coast homes dotting headlands and secluded waterfronts.

We happened to meet the owners of one of the heralded estates the next day. We were admiring a perfectly sculpted Kettle Cove bay in Gloucester, about six miles northeast of the Wylie Inn, when an older couple emerged from a hidden overgrown trail onto the shoreline street. “This is Black Beach,” offered the man, practically dressed in high wading boots, shell jacket and heavy briar-repelling gloves. “The other one is White, but we don’t call them that, we call them, Pebbly and Sandy.”

My father, Oliver Balf, was one of the numerous New York City artists who came to Cape Ann in the 1940s. Like many others he came for the summers and stayed for good. I am pretty sure as a young man his eye was drawn to the same en plein-air backdrops we saw throughout the weekend: the working fishing boats chugging about pocket harbors, low banks of starchy offshore clouds against a wide, cold-water blue sky.

On the second day, we cycled the long route between Beverly Farms and Gloucester, detouring off Route 127 onto Ocean Street and Shore Road, each stunning spur routes to ocean views. We came across a sign, etched in granite, that read, WOE TIDES and a weatherworn wooden arrow above a stone for “Old Salem Path.” On one attempt to take a shortcut back to the main road, we bypassed Thunderbolt Hill, a steeply curving, granite-lined drive near Singing Beach in Manchester where James Fields, the founder of The Atlantic Monthly, once entertained Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Touring with a hand trike, two big wheels behind me and a third centered in front, was surprisingly great. I was sitting, of course, able to relax and leisurely take in the passing countryside. But I was thrillingly entertained on downhills, leaning like a slalom skier to carve corners at speed. The pedal power from my upper body was steady and dependable, and as the tour continued, though I knew I looked different, I didn’t feel different. Trikes and e-bikes help level the playing field. More inclusive tours, and a greater variety of them, are likely to follow. But it was also good to know you can set off with old cycling friends, one of whom saw fit to ride all weekend in a period tweed vest, tie and collared shirt.

Minna Caroline Smith had initially planned for their trip to end in Magnolia, but a deepening craving for Gloucester clams brought her another four miles to a hotel near Pavilion Beach. We figured the trip would end in downtown Gloucester, too, but after a perfect fried fish and chowder lunch at the Causeway Restaurant, a noontime local favorite, we went farther, 12 miles in all, keen to round Cape Ann and thoroughly use up the day.

Todd Balf is the author of several nonfiction books and most recently, a memoir about his disability journey called Complications.

THE WORLD IS REOPENING. LET’S GO, SAFELY. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you’ll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.

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Entertainment

With Venues Reopening Throughout New York, Life Is a Cabaret As soon as Once more

With Venues Reopening Across New York, Life Is a Cabaret Once Again

“Thank you for risking your life by coming out tonight,” joked Joe Iconis, welcoming a socially distant crowd to the Feinstein’s / 54 Below cabaret reopening in Manhattan in June.

Iconis, a composer, lyricist and performer popular with young music theater fans, joked before diving into an alternately silly and poignant set with actor and singer George Salazar – a star of Iconis’ first Broadway production, “Be More Chill”. He seriously added, “It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real people, not computer screens.”

Wet-eyed meetings between artists and fans have been held across the city as Covid-19 restrictions gradually eased. “I hope you are prepared for how emotional it will be when you are on stage because it will be emotional for us to support artists we love again,” said a fan of the band Betty. In the intimate spaces that house these shows, the interaction between artists and those who love them is an integral part of what downtown Sandra Bernhard calls “the instant, visceral experience.”

Traditional eateries such as the Birdland and Blue Note jazz clubs, newer eateries such as Green Room 42 and the City Winery in Hudson River Park (both reopened in April) as well as the old cabaret oases Pangea and Club Cumming in the East Village are back with food, drink and carnal entertainment, while veterans of cabaret – along with other jazz and pop acts and drag performers – return to the work that is their bread and butter.

“Seeing people react physiologically to music again – tapping toes, shaking heads – that’s almost better than applause,” said pianist and singer Michael Garin, one of many who used social media to connect with fans during the pandemic to keep in touch, and to resume the performances for the live audience initially.

However, Garin noted, “It’s not like we flip a switch and get things back to normal.” Especially in the spring, not everyone was ready to pick up where they left off. “Some musicians were willing to book as soon as possible and others said, ‘Let me see – I don’t know if I want to be indoors now,'” said Steven Bensusan, President of Blue Note Entertainment Group.

Producer and host Scott Siegel, creator of the virtual Scott Siegel’s New York Nightclub, said some guests are still anxious: “Everyone is hopeful, but I hear people are nervous. There are also many who come from outside the Tristate area and it is more difficult to get in. “

With regulations still in flux, both vigilance and adaptability are vital. Before Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced in mid-June that the state could reopen almost entirely, Birdland had planned to return on July 1 with only 50 percent capacity. Instead, all 150 seats were accessible from the start, with Diversity show hosts Jim Caruso and Susie Mosher returning with theater and cabaret luminaries like Chita Rivera and Natalie Douglas returning in the first week. (The club’s lower room, the Birdland Theater, will remain closed until September.) The Blue Note, which reopened in mid-June with about two-thirds capacity, has since made all of its 250 seats available. Proof of vaccination against the coronavirus is not required in either club, although masks are recommended for unvaccinated in Birdland.

In contrast, a vaccination certificate is necessary at 54 Below, where a full crowd of around 150 is to be gradually built up, as the 60-seat cabaret hall in Pangea still has a capacity restriction of 80 percent. Both venues were among those developing streaming series while they were closed. “We originally tried to stay active, but it became a way to pay staff and expand the audience,” said Richard Frankel, one of the owners of 54 Below, who is responsible for the new “Live From Feinstein’s / 54” series. will start below, ”with live streams straight from the venue on July 11th. “Right now we’re focused on reopening live, but it’s definitely something we should explore further after the dust settles.”

Ryan Paternite, Director of Programming at Birdland, was similarly encouraged by the response to Radio Free Birdland, though he added, “My feeling is that people are pretty burned out watching shows on their computer or phone – especially when they did it to pay for tickets. “

Artists generally remain optimistic about what technology can do. “I’m very pro-streaming,” said Tony Award-nominated singer and actress Lilli Cooper, who will appear on 54 Below on July 28 and August 15, that’s so important. “Caruso plans to keep his” Pajamas “weekly Cast Party ”; he noted that the virtual program enabled him to explore both his audience (“It’s literally and figuratively more colorful”) and talent pool (“I’ve been looking at TikTok and Instagram and discovered some exciting new artists”) ).

Many hope that diversity and inclusivity will be emphasized even more in an art form that includes colorful artists like Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short as historical icons. “My art is often based on what I’ve been through, and being black is part of it,” said Broadway veteran Derrick Baskin, who put R&B classics on his setlist for recent 54 Below dates.

Justin Vivian Bond, slated to reopen Joe’s Pub in October, said: “The great thing about cabaret is that if you can do it, you can react to what’s going on in the world.” For Bond, the pandemic posed equally sobering challenges like that of the LGBTQ community during another plague: “When AIDS happened, even when people died, you could be with them. What we just went through was a very isolating trauma. I don’t know if I’ll get any brilliant insight on this, but hopefully what I’m saying will resonate with the audience. “

Bernhard, who will return to Joe’s Pub in December for the annual vacation engagement she missed in 2020, is still unsure of the insights she will offer. “In the headspace I’m in, I don’t even know what the next two months will bring,” she said. “I just want to perform like everyone else is doing right now.”

Artists and fans are greeted with renovations at specific venues and other enticements. Birdland cut its admission price to 99 cents in July, the fee when the club opened in 1949. 54 Below is a new menu created by “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle. The Laurie Beechman Theater in the West Bank Café is getting a “facelift,” said its owner Steve Olsen – fresh paint, new carpet and bar furnishings, improved sound and lighting technology – in preparation for a reopening after Labor Day. The Triad Theater also used its forced downtime to “upgrade, repaint, and get new equipment,” said Booking Director Bernie Furshpan.

But it’s the love of the performance itself and the perspective gained after a year of lost shows that drives many artists’ emotional response to returning to the stage. Michael Feinstein, the American multitasking songbook champion and namesake for clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York, believes “that everyone who is a performer comes out in a completely different place, with a deeper sense of connectedness and joy and gratitude. “

“I can’t imagine an artist taking a moment of what we’re doing for granted,” he added.

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World News

Your Friday Briefing – The New York Occasions

Your Friday Briefing - The New York Times

The Trump Organization, the family real estate business that catapulted Donald Trump to prominence, was charged Thursday with running a 15-year tax fraud scheme. The charges open up an aggressive new phase in a long-running criminal investigation into the former president and his company.

While the former president himself was not charged, his long-serving and trusted chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, surrendered to the authorities. He is accused of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in income and faces grand larceny, tax fraud and other charges.

The charges stem from the Manhattan district attorney’s ongoing inquiry into the business practices of Trump and his company. Prosecutors have been looking into whether Trump and the Trump Organization manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits, among other potential financial crimes.

Test of loyalty: Weisselberg is coming under increasing pressure to turn on the Trump family.

Analysis: The charges may hurt Trump’s finances, because indictments can jeopardize relationships with banks and Trump has large outstanding loans.

Digital vaccine cards went into effect in the E.U. to allow residents of member states to travel more freely. But there has been friction over which vaccines qualify — only those made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca — and how the certificates are used.

There are already discrepancies in how member states are using the system, with some countries denying airlines access to the vaccine cards because of privacy concerns.

A month after Greece reopened to tourists, coronavirus cases in the country reached a record low while the numbers of visitors, especially from the U.S., continued to climb. But in Portugal, the government is set to reintroduce nighttime curfews in certain cities — including some tourism hubs — as it struggles to cope with the spread of the Delta variant.

Other travel news: The top executive of the airline holding company Air France-KLM has called on the U.S. to relax restrictions on visitors from the E.U. The Biden administration is considering lifting its ban, the press secretary said.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

A total of 130 nations have agreed to a blueprint in which multinational corporations would pay tax rates of at least 15 percent wherever they operated. The plan would generate $150 billion in additional tax revenue each year, the O.E.C.D. said.

The conceptual framework also includes rules that would force Big Tech companies and other global businesses to pay taxes in countries where their goods or services are sold, even if they have no physical presence there.

Despite earlier wariness, China, Russia and India are among the signatories. But some major tax havens, including Ireland and some Caribbean nations, still have not signed on to the deal, which could weaken its effectiveness.

Details: The Irish government has said that a deal would need to allow small countries to continue to compete with large ones to make up for the loss of any tax advantage.

Statement: “Today marks an important step in moving the global economy forward to be more equitable for workers and middle-class families in the U.S. and around the world,” President Biden said in a statement.

Activists slammed the TV show “In the Dark” for casting a sighted actress in a blind lead role. The protests invite the question: Is there a right way to act blind?

The most authentic performance of blindness is by turns precise and fumbling, writes Andrew Leland, who has been steadily losing his sight. “For most of the day, blind people are simply people, until they encounter an obstacle or someone says something that returns them to awareness of their difference.”

In the 1950s, the hamlet of Cherry Grove, on New York’s Fire Island, was a refuge for gay men and lesbians. See dozens of enlarged photos from the era.

China yesterday celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of its ruling Communist Party. Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, delivered a defiant speech in which he declared China’s rise unstoppable, as a crowd of 70,000 people waved flags, sang and cheered in unison.

The event was staged to convey a powerful nation at ease while the rest of the world struggled with the pandemic. “The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us,” Xi said, clad in a Mao suit. “Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

The party’s longevity has baffled its critics, and as The Economist reports, no other dictatorship has transformed so much — from a famine crisis in the Mao Zedong era to the world’s second-largest economy. Economic growth and a sharp decline in rural poverty in many places, more than ideology, have won the hearts of many citizens.

For this week’s event, officials are rewriting parts of history and clamping down on criticism in order to glorify the party’s contributions to Chinese citizens. But some party members wonder if Xi is doing enough to move the country forward. They also worry that he has done away with the checks and balances, introduced under Deng Xiaoping, that helped the party avoid embarrassing mistakes and left the economy to flourish.

Related: We compiled pictures showing the improbable rise of a party born in the rubble of dynasty. The anniversary has also inspired a wave of state-approved art.

Categories
Politics

New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Pulls Again Outcomes

New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Pulls Back Results

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.

For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale. Skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process, though it is used successfully in other cities.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.

The Board of Elections released preliminary, unofficial ranked-choice tabulations on Tuesday afternoon, showing that Mr. Adams — who had held a significant advantage on primary night — was narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia in the ballots cast in person during early voting or on Primary Day. Maya D. Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, was close behind in third place. The board then took down the results and disclosed the discrepancy.

The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.

Some Democrats, bracing for an acrimonious new chapter in the race, are concerned that the incremental release of results by the Board of Elections — and the discovery of an error — may stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and of the city’s electoral system more broadly.

In a statement late Tuesday night, Ms. Wiley laced into the Board of Elections, calling the error “the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed,” and adding: “Sadly it is impossible to be surprised.”

“Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times,” she said. “The B.O.E. must now count the remainder of the votes transparently and ensure the integrity of the process moving forward.”

Ms. Garcia said the release of the inaccurate tally was “deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation.”

“Every ranked choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government,” she said. “I am confident that every candidate will accept the final results and support whomever the voters have elected.”

And Mr. Adams noted the “unfortunate” error by the Board of Elections and emphasized the importance of handling election results correctly.

“It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time,” he said in a statement released on Tuesday night. “We appreciate the board’s transparency and acknowledgment of their error. We look forward to the release of an accurate, updated simulation, and the timely conclusion of this critical process.”

If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.

Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers; Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a Black or Latino candidate from winning the race.

In the final days of the race, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang campaigned together across the city, especially in neighborhoods that are home to sizable Asian American communities, and appeared together on campaign literature.

To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it.

By Tuesday night, though, it was the Board of Elections that was attracting ire from seemingly all corners.

Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s former public advocate who now runs Citizens Union, a good-government group, warned that “the entire country is watching” the Board of Elections. “New Yorkers deserve elections, and election administrators, that they can have the utmost faith in,” Ms. Gotbaum added.

A comparison between first-place vote totals released on primary night and those released on Tuesday offered some insight into how the 135,000 erroneous votes were distributed. The bottom four candidates received a total of 42,000 new votes, roughly four times their actual vote total; the number of write-in ballots also skyrocketed to 17,516 from 1,336. Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang received the highest number of new votes.

It was not known, however, how the test votes were reallocated during the ranked-choice tabulations, making it impossible to determine how they affected the preliminary results that were released and then retracted.

When accurate vote counts are in place, it is difficult, but not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.

The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.

According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise.

After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.8 percentage points. Asked if she had been in touch with Ms. Wiley’s team, Ms. Garcia suggested there had been staff-level conversations.

“The campaigns have been speaking to each other,” Ms. Garcia said in a phone call on Tuesday afternoon, saying the two candidates had not yet spoken directly. “Hopefully we don’t have to step in with attorneys. But it is about really ensuring that New York City’s voices are heard.”

Ms. Wiley ran well to the left of Ms. Garcia on a number of vital policy matters, including around policing and on some education questions. Either candidate would be the first woman elected mayor of New York, and Ms. Wiley would be the city’s first Black female mayor.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain and a relative moderate on several key issues, was a non-starter for many progressive voters who may have preferred Ms. Garcia and her focus on competence over any especially ideological message.

But early results suggested that Mr. Adams had significant strength among working-class voters of color, and some traction among white voters with moderate views.

City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, an Adams supporter who is pressing for a new referendum on ranked-choice voting, suggested in a text message on Tuesday that the system had opened the door to “an attempt to eliminate the candidate of moderate working people and traditionally marginalized communities,” as he implicitly criticized the Yang-Garcia alliance.

“It is incumbent on us now to address the issue of ranked voting and how it is being weaponized against a wide portion of the public,” said Mr. Miller, the co-chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus on the City Council.

Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.

“There is real danger that voters will come to believe a set of facts about the race that will be disproven when all votes are in,” said Ben Greenfield, a senior survey data analyst at Change Research, which conducted polling for a pro-Garcia PAC. “The risk is that this could take a system that’s already new and confusing and increase people’s sense of mistrust.”

Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays, Anne Barnard, Andy Newman and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting.

Categories
World News

Your Wednesday Briefing – The New York Instances

Your Wednesday Briefing - The New York Times

We cover new restrictions as Asia and Australia battle the Delta variant and as rebels recapture Tigray’s capital.

Asia-Pacific countries with slow vaccination campaigns are trying to slow the spread of the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus by resorting to a new round of restrictions.

Bangladesh and Malaysia are urging residents to stay home, and Bangladesh is sending soldiers to patrol the streets to make sure no one is outside. In Australia, authorities in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin have imposed strict curfews.

Tired residents become frustrated as in some cases they have already gone through multiple locks. “My restaurant is known for its hospitality and communal dishes, the opposite of social distancing,” said a restaurant owner near Kuala Lumpur. For his business, this lock could be “the last straw,” he said.

Context: Studies have shown that Covid-19 vaccines against the Delta variant are still largely effective, although protection is significantly lower for those who are partially vaccinated. “If we can get a really high vaccination rate, it will change the game completely,” said an epidemiology expert in Melbourne.

Eight months after the attack by the Ethiopian army on the Tigray region, the civil war takes a turn: Tigrayan fighters recapture the regional capital Mekelle. Local residents celebrated in the streets. Here are the latest updates.

The rebels have signaled that they have little desire for a ceasefire. Senior rebel members said they would continue to fight and be ready to pursue Eritrean troops who have joined Ethiopian forces on their territory.

The dramatic turnaround was a blow to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who launched an offensive last November that he promised would be over in a few weeks. After eight months of violence accusing Eritrean troops of atrocities, the war now looks like it could drag on.

Turn the tide: The war began with Tigrayan troops clearly on the defensive. But the rebels have managed to regroup. In addition, the invasion and human rights violations have drawn numerous recruits into the arms of the group.

The toll: Almost two million people have been displaced from their homeland. The region faces a long list of crises, including water and education shortages, and a famine that leaves millions of people starving.

The commander of the US-led mission in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin Miller, warned that the country could be on the path to a chaotic, multi-layered civil war as US and international forces prepare to withdraw in the coming weeks.

“Civil war is certainly a path that can be imagined if it continues on its way,” Miller said during a rare press conference in Kabul. “That should concern the world.”

He did not provide a timeline for completing the withdrawal, but said he had reached a point where he would soon end his command, which began in September 2018.

New York’s dining scene has changed due to the creative outdoor table settings made necessary by the pandemic. But how does the city keep the romance alive while the outbreak subsides and the rules are relaxed? Our food reviewer has a few answers.

In 1897 invading British soldiers stole thousands of artifacts from the Kingdom of Benin, now part of Nigeria. In the UK, the events are known as the Punitive Expedition. In Nigeria, they are known as the Benin massacres because of the residents who killed British troops.

Activists, historians and royals in Nigeria have called for the art to be returned, but museums resisted, arguing that their global collections served “the people of every nation.”

However, given Europe’s grappling with its colonial history, some institutions are changing their position. Germany has announced that it will return a significant number of Benin bronzes (as the items are called) over the next year, and the National Museum of Ireland is planning to return 21 items. The work is expected to move to a new museum in Benin City due to be completed in 2026.

That’s it for today’s briefing. Until next time. – Melina

PS Christina Goldbaum, a reporter at the Metro desk who reported from East Africa, strengthens our Afghanistan team.

The latest episode of “The Daily” is about the building collapse in Miami.

Claire Moses wrote the arts and ideas. You can reach Melina and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

Categories
Health

J&J commits to finish sale of opioids nationwide in $230 million New York settlement

J&J commits to end sale of opioids nationwide in $230 million New York settlement

New York State Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press conference to announce criminal justice reform on May 21, 2021 in New York City, United States.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Johnson & Johnson has reached a $ 230 million settlement with New York State that prevents the company from promoting opioids and has confirmed that sales of such products have ceased in the United States.

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office said in a statement Saturday the agreement prohibits J&J from promoting opioids by any means and prohibits lobbying for such products at the federal, state or local levels.

Johnson & Johnson has not marketed any opioids in the US since 2015 and completely ceased business in 2020.

As part of the settlement, the company will settle opioid-related claims and spread payments over nine years. It could also pay $ 30 million more in the first year if the state executive board signs a new law creating an opioid settlement fund, according to the press release from James’ office.

The settlement follows years of lawsuits filed by states, cities, and counties against large pharmaceutical companies over the opioid crisis that killed nearly 500,000 people in the United States over the past few decades.

Governments have argued that companies have prescribed the medication too often, causing people to become addicted and abuse other illegal forms of opioids, while companies have stated that they have distributed the required amount of the product to people with medical problems help.

“The opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc in countless communities in New York state and the rest of the nation, and millions are still addicted to dangerous and deadly opioids,” James said in a statement.

“Johnson & Johnson helped start that fire, but today they are pledging to leave the opioid business – not just in New York but across the country,” she said. “J&J no longer makes or sells opioids in the United States.”

The New York opioid lawsuit against the rest of the defendants will begin this week, according to the announcement. Other defendants in the New York lawsuit include Purdue Pharma; Mallinckrodt LLC; Endo health solutions; Teva Pharmaceuticals USA; and Allergan Finance LLC.

In a statement on Saturday, Johnson & Johnson said the settlement was “not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the company” and “in line with the terms of the previously announced $ 5 billion settlement agreement in principle for opioid settlement “. and claims from states, cities, counties, and tribal governments. “

The company also said it will continue to defend itself against lawsuits that the definitive deal won’t resolve.

James said the state will focus on funding opioid prevention, treatment and education efforts to “prevent any future devastation”.

Categories
Health

Cryonics In the course of the Pandemic – The New York Instances

Cryonics During the Pandemic - The New York Times

When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical protocols were being upended across the country.

A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.

Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer liquids.

It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had been declared legally dead more than a day earlier.

He had arrived in the operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation — located in an industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. — packed in dry ice and ready to be “cryopreserved,” or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be brought back to life.

As it turns out, the pandemic that has affected billions of lives around the world has also had an impact on the nonliving.

From Moscow to Phoenix and from China to rural Australia, the major players in the business of preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures say the pandemic has brought new stresses to an industry that has long faced skepticism or outright hostility from medical and legal establishments that have dismissed it as quack science or fraud.

In some cases, Covid-19 precautions have limited the parts of the body that can be pumped full of protective chemicals to curb the damage caused by freezing.

Alcor, which has been in business since 1972, adopted new rules in its operating room last year that restricted the application of its medical-grade antifreeze solution to only the patient’s brain, leaving everything below the neck unprotected.

In the case of the Californian man, things were even worse because he had died without completing the normal legal and financial arrangements with Alcor, so no standby team had been on hand for his death. By the time he arrived at Alcor’s facility, too much time had elapsed for the team to be able to successfully circulate the protective chemicals, even to the brain.

That meant that when the patient was eventually sealed into a sleeping bag and stored in a large thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen that cooled it to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), ice crystals formed between the cells of his body, poking countless holes in cell membranes.

Max More, the 57-year-old former president of Alcor, said that the damage caused by this patient’s “straight freeze” could probably still be repaired by future scientists, especially if there was only limited damage to the brain, which is often removed and stored alone in what is known in the trade as a “neuro” preservation.

“I have always been signed up for a neuro myself,” Mr. More said. “I don’t really understand why people want to take their broken-down old body with them. In the future it’ll probably be easier to start from scratch and just regenerate the body anyway.”

“The important stuff is up here as far as I am concerned,” he said, pointing to his sandy-blond crop of hair in a Zoom call. “That is where my personality lives and my memories are … all the rest is replaceable.”

Supporters of cryonics insist that death is a process of deterioration rather than simply the moment when the heart stops, and that rapid intervention can act as a “freeze frame” on life, allowing super-chilled preservation to serve as an ambulance to the future.

They usually concede there is no guarantee that future science will ever be able to repair and reanimate the body but even a long shot, they argue, is better than the odds of revival — zero — if the body is turned to dust or ashes. If you are starting out dead, they say, you have nothing to lose.

During the pandemic, a heightened awareness of mortality seems to have led to more interest in signing up for cryopreservation procedures that can cost north of $200,000.

“Perhaps the coronavirus made them realize their life is the most important thing they have and made them want to invest in their own future,” said Valeriya Udalova, 61, the chief executive of KrioRus, which has been operating in Moscow since 2006. Both KrioRus and Alcor said they had received a record number of inquiries in recent months.

Jim Yount, who has been a member of the American Cryonics Society for 49 years, said he has often seen health crises or the death of a loved one bring cryonics to the front of people’s minds.

“Something like Covid brings home the fact that they are not immortal,” said Mr. Yount, 78, during a recent stint working in the organization’s office in Silicon Valley.

The American Cryonics Society has been offering support services since 1969 but stores its 30 cryopreserved members at another organization, the Cryonics Institute, near Detroit.

Alcor, the most expensive and best-known cryonics company in the United States, said the pandemic forced it to cancel public tours of its Scottsdale operation. It has also been harder to reach clients quickly, both because of travel restrictions and limitations on hospital access.

“Usually we like to get to the hospital beforehand if we have advance notice that the patient is terminal so we can talk to the staff, get to know the layout and how we are going to get the patient out of there as quickly as possible,” said Mr. More, who is now a spokesman for Alcor.

The company stocked up on chemicals at the start of the pandemic, he said, “but actually we dodged a bullet for our members because fortunately we have had very few deaths.”

After averaging about one cryopreservation a month in the 18 months before the pandemic, Alcor has dealt with just six since January 2020, perhaps through a combination of luck and clients heeding the company’s plea to avoid risky activities during the pandemic.

KrioRus, the only operator with cryostorage facilities in Europe, was busier than ever and performed nine cryopreservations during the pandemic, according to Ms. Udalova, with some of the deaths caused indirectly by Covid.

Visa and quarantine rules threatened delays of up to four weeks to reach their bodies, and the company often had to rely on small local associates to deal with its clients, who died in South Korea, France, Ukraine and Russia.

Different problems have emerged in Australia, which has had some of the world’s most restrictive Covid border controls.

Southern Cryonics, a start-up, was unable to fly in foreign experts to train its staff, forcing it to delay by a year the planned opening of a facility capable of storing 40 bodies.

In China, the newest major player in cryonics, the Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute had to stop public visits to its facility in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, which has made it difficult to recruit clients.

More than 50 years after the first cryopreservations, there are now about 500 people stored in vats around the world, the great majority of them in the United States.

The Cryonics Institute, for instance, holds 206 bodies while Alcor has 182 bodies or neuros of people aged 2 to 101. KrioRus has 80, and there are a handful of others held by smaller operations.

The Chinese performed their first cryopreservation in 2017, and Yinfeng’s storage vats hold only a dozen clients. But Aaron Drake, the clinical director of the company, who moved to China after seven years as head of Alcor’s medical response team, noted that it took Alcor more than three times as long to reach that number of preserved bodies.

Yinfeng has priced itself at the top of the market alongside Alcor, which charges $200,000 to handle a whole body and $80,000 for a neuro.

Alcor has the largest number of people who have committed to paying its fees: 1,385, from 34 countries. (Fees are often funded with life insurance policies.) The Chinese have about 60 customers who have committed, while KrioRus said it has recruited 400 customers from 20 countries.

The Cryonics Institute has a different business model, charging basic fees as low as $28,000 with up to $60,000 more required if the members want transport and rapid “standby” teams like Alcor’s.

KrioRus is even cheaper, although it plans to raise its fees when it completes its current move from a corrugated metal warehouse 30 miles northeast of Moscow to a much larger facility being built in Tver, 105 miles northwest of the capital.

Alcor’s fees are so much higher mostly because the company places $115,000 of its “whole body” fee in a trust to guarantee future care of its patients, such as topping up the liquid nitrogen. That trust is managed by Morgan Stanley and is now worth more than $15 million.

Mr. Drake said he believes the Chinese are “hopeful that they will be able to outpace the American companies and they have built a program capable of doing that.”

The strongest reason for believing China will come to dominate the field is not just its population of 1.4 billion people but its domestic attitude toward cryopreservation. Far from being confined to the scientific fringe, Yinfeng is the only cryonics group that is supported by government and embraced by mainstream researchers.

“Our little business unit is owned by a private biotech firm that has about 8,000 employees and partners with the government on a lot of projects,” Mr. Drake said. He added that it is “well integrated into the hospital systems and cooperates with research institutes and universities.”

The cooperation in China is a long way from the situation in Russia, where Evgeny Alexandrov, the chair of a Commission on Pseudoscience started by the official Academy of Sciences, has derided cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis.”

In the United States, the Society of Cryobiology, whose members study the effects of low temperatures on living tissues for procedures such as IVF, adopted a bylaw in the 1980s threatening to expel any member who took part in “any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation.”

The society’s past president Arthur Rowe wrote that “believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow,” while another past president said the work of cadaver freezers edged more toward “fraud than either faith or science.”

The society has since eased off, and while its formal position is that cryonics “is an act of speculation or hope, not science,” it no longer bans its members from the practice.

Mr. More at Alcor said there is much less hostility from the medical and scientific establishments now than just five years ago, when there was often tension between rapid response teams and hospitals.

“It was quite common for us to show up at a hospital, try to explain what we’re doing and they would say, ‘You want to do what? Not in my hospital you don’t!’” he said.

“They wouldn’t let us in, so we would have to wait outside and it would slow things down, but that just doesn’t happen anymore. Usually the staff have seen one of the documentaries on science channels and they know something about what we do.”

“Typically the reaction now is: ‘Oh, this is fascinating, I’ve never seen this happen.’”

Peter Tsolakides, 71, a former marketing executive for Exxon Mobil and a founder of the Australian start-up Southern Cryonics, said he is grateful that people in the country “tend to have an open mind about new things.”

“I don’t think any public resistance will crop up here, and the state department of health has been really positive and helpful,” he said.

An important difference between Yinfeng and most other operators is the Chinese firm’s greater willingness to preserve people who die without having expressed any interest in being put on ice.

This is seen as an important ethical question in the West, given that it could come as quite a shock for somebody to die, perhaps after coming to peace with their fate, only to wake up blinking at the ceiling lights of a laboratory a few decades or centuries later.

“We don’t like to take third-party cases,” Mr. More said. “If someone phones up and says, ‘Uncle Fred is dying, I want to get him cryopreserved,’ we need to ask a bunch of questions before we even consider accepting that case.”

“Is there any evidence that Uncle Fred actually was interested in being cryopreserved? Because if not, we don’t want to do it. Are there any family members who are really opposed to it? Because we don’t want to have to go into a legal battle.”

The litigious bent in the United States make its cryonics firms especially twitchy. There have been many lawsuits by relatives of the deceased trying to stop the expensive cryonics procedure.

“You have relatives who think, ‘Now you’re dead, I can overrule your wishes and just take your money,’” Mr. More said. “It’s amazing how often people try to do that.”

The relatives of one client failed to inform Alcor that he had died and instead had him embalmed and buried in Europe. When Alcor found out a year later, it confirmed that his contract said he wanted to be cryopreserved no matter how much time had elapsed, so the company got a court order and had the body returned to Arizona.

Mr. Drake said that the primacy that Western society places on an individual’s choice in such cases is “a big difference with Eastern culture.”

“In China it has to do with what the family members want, just like with medical treatments,” he said. “Let’s say Grandpa gets cancer in China. Many times they won’t even tell Grandpa he has cancer, and the other family members will decide what treatments should be done.”

“They might then say, ‘Let’s have Grandpa cryopreserved,’ and it has to be a unanimous agreement of the whole family — but not including the individual who actually goes through it.”

Ms. Udalova said the Russian system is somewhere in the middle. Somebody who dies without leaving written proof of their intentions can still be cryopreserved if two witnesses testify that is what the deceased wanted.

That may help explain an intriguing difference in the gender balance of people who have been preserved.

Men outnumber women by almost three to one among Alcor’s clients, and the imbalance is even greater among people registered with the Australian start-up. But there is an almost even gender balance among KrioRus’s 80 patients.

“That is because of a cultural situation here in Russia,” Ms. Udalova said from her office in northern Moscow.

“Our clients are mostly men, but they often cryopreserve their mothers first, because Russian men are brought up only by their mothers.”

When those male clients eventually join their mothers in the firm’s metal vats, the gender balance will likely tip toward more men, she said.

The Chinese, like the Russian men who want to embark on any new life with their mothers by their side, are also baffled by the tendency of American men to plan a solo journey into the future.

“In the States you get some family members signing up together, but you get a lot more individuals signing themselves up and the Chinese don’t really get that,” Mr. Drake said.

“I think in almost all the cases in China so far, you’ve had a family member signing up their loved one who is near death.”

If waking up alone in the future does not appeal, there is a growing trend in the United States of people paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to cryopreserve their pets, with the cost based largely on the animal’s size.

“If you want us to do your horse it is going to be different from your cat’s brain,” Mr. More said. “We seem to be having more pets than humans at the moment, and that’s fine with dogs but it’s kind of tricky for cats and anything smaller because of their tiny blood vessels.”

“If you want to store a whole big dog, that’s going to cost about as much as a human because of its size. My wife and I had our dog Oscar cryopreserved. He was a large golden doodle, but we basically just had his brain stored to make it more affordable because I’m in neuro anyway.”

In Russia, KrioRus’s preserved cats and dogs have been joined by five hamsters, two rabbits and a chinchilla.

To smooth the jolt of trying to resume life in the future, most cryonics firms offer to store keepsakes, “memory books” and digital discs to help a revived patient rebuild memories or simply cope with nostalgia. Alcor uses a salt mine in Kansas for storage and is also working on options for putting money into a personal trust to finance a future life.

A final edge the Chinese cryonicists enjoy is a more accommodating cultural environment, as Western religions tend to be more focused on the concepts of heaven and hell, and the body and brains being merely the repositories of an eternal soul rather than machines that can be switched off and on.

Mr. More, for one, has little patience with religious critics of cryonics. “Where in the Bible or the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita does it say, ‘Thou shalt not do cryonics’? It doesn’t. In fact in the Bible there are some people living for centuries.”

“Remember,” he added, “we are not talking about letting people live forever, just maybe a few hundred years more, and that’s nothing compared to eternity.”

When Christians complain that they would not like to be dragged back from heaven by having their body revived, Mr. More reminds them that they may be traveling from the other direction.

“Are you sure you’re not going downstairs?” he asks. “And if so, don’t you want an escape clause? Cryonics might give you a chance to come back and do some good works so you will have a better chance of getting to heaven.”

Ms. Udalova in Moscow said some of her clients cover their bases by opting for both cryonics and a church funeral.

“Russian priests always agree to do the religious service,” she said. “You just have dry ice in the coffin in the church.”

Categories
Politics

Rising From Pandemic, New York Seeks a New Mayor to Face Looming Crises

Rising From Pandemic, New York Seeks a New Mayor to Face Looming Crises

The New York City mayor’s race began in the throes of a pandemic, in a shuttered city convulsed by a public health catastrophe, economic devastation and widespread protests over police brutality.

Now, with voters heading to the primary polls on Tuesday, New York finds itself in a very different place. As the city roars back to life, its residents are at once buoyed by optimism around reopenings, but also anxious about public safety, affordable housing, jobs — and the very character of the nation’s largest city.

The primary election marks the end of an extraordinary chapter in New York’s history and the start of another, an inflection point that will play a defining role in shaping the post-pandemic future of the city. The leading mayoral candidates have promoted starkly divergent visions for confronting a series of overlapping crises, making this primary, which will almost certainly determine the next mayor, the most significant city election in a generation.

Public polling and interviews with elected officials, voters and party strategists suggest that on the cusp of Tuesday’s election, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is the front-runner, fueled by his focus on public safety issues and his ability to connect in working- and middle-class communities of color.

Yet even on the last weekend of the race, the contest to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio appears fluid and unpredictable, and credible polling remains sparse.

Two other leading candidates, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, campaigned together on Saturday in Queens and Manhattan, a show of unity that also injected ugly clashes over race into the final hours of the election, as Mr. Adams accused his rivals of coming together “in the last three days” and “saying, ‘We can’t trust a person of color to be the mayor of the City of New York.’”

Mr. Yang, at a later event, noted that he had been “Asian my entire life.” (Mr. Adams later clarified that he meant that Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia were trying to prevent a Black or Latino candidate from becoming mayor.)

The primary election will ultimately offer a clear sense of Democratic attitudes around confronting crime, a major national issue that has become the most urgent matter in the mayoral primary.

The outcome will also show whether New Yorkers wanted a political outsider eager to shake up City Hall bureaucracy, like Mr. Yang, or a seasoned government veteran like Ms. Garcia to navigate staggering challenges from issues of education to evictions to economic revival.

And it will reveal whether Democrats are in the mood to “reimagine” a far more equitable city through transformational progressive policies, as Maya D. Wiley is promising, or if they are more focused on everyday municipal problems.

In recent polls and last-minute fund-raising, Ms. Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio, seem to be gaining late traction, while Mr. Yang, a former presidential candidate, remains a serious contender even amid signs that his momentum may have stalled.

But other factors may muddy the outcome.

For the first time in New York City, the mayoral nominee will be determined by ranked-choice voting, which allows New Yorkers to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Some New Yorkers remain undecided about how to rank their choices, and whether to rank at all.

And with many New Yorkers accustomed to a primary that usually takes place in September, it is not at all clear what the composition of a post-pandemic June electorate will look like.

For such a high-stakes election, the contest has felt at once endless and rushed. For months, it was a low-key affair, defined by dutiful Zoom forums and a distracted city.

But if there has been one constant in the last month, it has been the centrality of crime and policing to the contest.

“Public safety has clearly emerged as a significant issue,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s highest-ranking House member, when asked to name the defining issue of the mayor’s race. “How to balance that aspiration with fair, respectful policing, I think has been critical throughout the balance of this campaign.”

Six months ago, few would have predicted that public safety would be the top issue of the race, only a year after the“defund the police” movement took hold in the city. Crime rates are far lower than in earlier eras, and residents are confronting a long list of challenges as the city emerges from the pandemic.

But amid a rise this spring in shootings, jarring episodes of violence on the subways, bias attacks against Asian Americans and Jews — and heavy coverage of crime on local television — virtually every public poll shows public safety has become the biggest concern among Democratic voters.

Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia, Mr. Yang and Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citi executive, vigorously disagree with the “defund the police” movement. But no one has been more vocal about public safety issues than Mr. Adams, a former police captain who has declared safety the “prerequisite” to prosperity.

Mr. Adams, who had a complex career at the Police Department and battled police misconduct as a leader of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group, says that he was once a victim of police brutality himself, and argues that he is well equipped to manage both police reform and spikes in violence.

In recent weeks, however, Mr. Adams has come under growing scrutiny over questions of transparency and ethics tied to taxes and disclosures around real estate holdings. That dynamic may fuel doubts about his candidacy in the final days, as his opponents have sharply questioned his judgment and integrity.

If he wins, it will be in part because of his significant institutional support, as a veteran politician with union backing and relationships with key constituencies — but also because his message connects at a visceral level in some neighborhoods across the city.

“Mr. Adams! You got my vote!” Blanca Soto, who turns 60 on Monday, cried out as she walked by an Adams event in Harlem on Thursday.

“I am rooting for him because he’s not going to take away from the police officers,” said Ms. Soto, a health aide, who called safety her top issue. “I do want to see more police, especially in the subways. We had them there before. I don’t know what happened, but everything was good when that was going on.”

Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller; Shaun Donovan, a former federal housing secretary; Ms. Morales, a former nonprofit executive; and Ms. Wiley have taken a starkly different view on several policing matters. They support varying degrees of cuts to the Police Department’s budget, arguing for investments in communities instead. The department’s operating budget has been about $6 billion. Ms. Wiley, Mr. Stringer and Ms. Morales have also been skeptical of adding more police officers to patrol the subway.

Ms. Wiley argues that the best way to stop violence is often to invest in the social safety net, including in mental health professionals, violence interrupters and in schools.

Understand the N.Y.C. Mayoral Race

Ms. Wiley, who has been endorsed by some of the most prominent left-wing leaders in the country, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, is seeking to build a coalition that includes white progressives as well as voters of color across the ideological spectrum.

Rival campaigns have long believed that she has the potential to build perhaps the broadest coalition of voters in the race, but polls suggest that she has not yet done so in a meaningful way.

Mr. Jeffries, who has endorsed Ms. Wiley and campaigned with her, said that she offers change from the status quo, “a fresh face” who is both prepared “and is offering a compelling vision for investing in those communities that have traditionally been left behind.”

Mr. Jeffries has said that he is ranking Mr. Adams second, and that if Mr. Adams were to win, it would be on the strength of Black and Latino communities “who have increasingly felt excluded from the promises of New York City, as it has become increasingly expensive.”

A number of campaigns and political strategists see Latino voters as the crucial, late-breaking swing vote, and the leading candidates all see opportunities with slices of that diverse constituency, with candidates including Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley airing new Spanish-language ads in recent days — an Adams spot criticizes Ms. Garcia in Spanish — and Mr. Yang spending Thursday in the Bronx, home to the city’s largest Latino population.

Mr. Yang, who would be the city’s first Asian American mayor, is betting that he can reshape the electorate by engaging more young, Asian American and Latino voters as he casts himself as a “change” candidate.

Mr. Yang was a front-runner in the race for months, boosted by his strong name identification and air of celebrity, as well as a hopeful message about New York’s potential and an energetic in-person campaign schedule.

But as New York reopened and crime became a bigger issue in voters’ minds — and as Mr. Yang faced growing scrutiny over gaffes and gaps in his municipal knowledge — he has lost ground.

His tone in the homestretch is a striking departure from the exuberant pitch that defined his early message, as he sharpens his criticism of Mr. Adams and tries to cut into his advantage on public safety issues. Mr. Yang, who has no city government experience, has also sought to use that outsider standing to deliver searing indictments of the political class.

Ms. Garcia has moderate instincts — she was one of the few leading mayoral candidates to favor President Biden as her first choice in the presidential primary — but she is primarily running as a pragmatic technocrat steeped in municipal knowledge.

She has been endorsed by the editorial boards of The New York Times and The New York Daily News, among others, and has generated palpable traction in politically engaged, highly educated corners of the city, like the Upper West Side, even as Mr. Stringer and Mr. Donovan have also vied for the government experience mantle.

“I don’t think New York does that well, as progressive as I am, with a series of progressives who think that we should spend more time dealing with those kinds of issues rather than actual stuff that needs to be done,” said William Pinzler, 74, as he prepared to vote for Ms. Garcia at Lincoln Center. “Kathryn Garcia picked up the garbage.”

But Ms. Garcia, who has struggled to deliver a standout moment during several televised debates, is in many ways still introducing herself, and it is not yet clear whether she can attract the same kind of support citywide.

Asked what lessons national Democrats may take from the results of Tuesday’s contest, Representative Grace Meng, who has endorsed Mr. Yang as her first choice and Ms. Garcia as her second, and appeared with them on Saturday, pointed to questions of both personal characteristics and policy visions.

“How much people prioritize a leader with experience or vision to get us out of the pandemic, but also to address issues like public safety and education — I think that it’ll kind of be a filter through which we see the next round of elections nationally,” she said. “Wherever they may be.”

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Entertainment

Juneteenth: 7 Occasions for Celebrating the Vacation in New York

Juneteenth: 7 Events for Celebrating the Holiday in New York

As New York reopens, its cultural rhythms are creeping back in, with museums and music venues filling up and outdoor concerts popping up in parks. The city is emerging just in time for Juneteenth on Saturday.

The holiday — a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth” — began on June 19, 1865. Almost two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, union troops arrived in Galveston, Tex., to notify enslaved African Americans there that the Civil War had ended — and that they were free.

On Thursday, President Biden signed legislation that made Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, a federal holiday. This will no doubt please Opal Lee — the 94-year-old Texan activist known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth.”

“So, the 4th of July? Slaves weren’t free. You know that, don’t you?” Lee told The New York Times last year. “I suggest that if we’re going to do some celebrating of freedom, that we have our festival, our educational components, our music, from June the 19th — Juneteenth — to the 4th of July. Now that would be celebrating freedom.”

Here’s a selection of events — both in-person and virtual — for New Yorkers to celebrate that freedom this year.

The hip-hop musician Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson directed the documentary “Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which releases in theaters on July 2. Part music film, part historical record, the film captures the previously untold story of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Stars like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone performed in the six-week festival celebrating Black history, culture and fashion. Thanks to a presentation by SummerStage, New Yorkers can see the award-winning film in the park where much of it was filmed on Saturday at 5 p.m. Free tickets are required for entry.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater emerged in 1958, when its founder, Alvin Ailey, recognized the power of dance as a tool for social change. Ailey described African-American cultural heritage as “sometimes sorrowful, sometimes jubilant, but always hopeful,” viewing it as one of America’s richest treasures. On Saturday, 12-1:15 p.m., the choreographer Maguette Camara will host a free, virtual dance class featuring live drumming, teaching the basics of traditional West African dance and rhythms.

It’s not a performance. It’s a service. The composer, director and actor Troy Anthony made sure to clarify the difference for “The Revival: It Is Our Duty,” his commission for the Shed in Manhattan. “Juneteenth is not about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. It’s not about Black people finding out that they were free late,” Anthony said. “It’s about the fact that Black people found a path to liberate themselves.” The gospel musical event, includes a community choir and band, is part of The Shed’s “Open Call” series, “The Revival” starts on Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are free online.

From MTV star to hip-hop guru to international ambassador, Kevin Powell has seen it all. And he’ll bring that experience to Brower Park in Brooklyn on Saturday, performing an original poetry suite. The rock-jazz-folk band the Soulfolk Experience composed and arranged music to accompany Powell’s performance at 12 p.m. behind the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The event, presented by the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, is in partnership with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and part of the Friends of Brower Park’s free Juneteenth celebration. Instrument making and other activities will accompany the music, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. The event is free.

On the hit Netflix show “High on the Hog,” the food writer Stephen Satterfield traces African American cuisine from Benin to the Deep South. The show is based on a book by the same name by food historian Jessica B. Harris, who will appear at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn on Saturday. The virtual event, “Meals as Collective Memory,” 12:30-4 p.m., explores Black foodways in New York and beyond. The schedule includes learning to make a delicious family dinner at home and a lesson on food deserts; sessions are free online — just be sure to RSVP.

The Bell House in Brooklyn will host its third annual “Emancipation After Party” on Saturday at 6 p.m. — a stacked deck of music and comedy. Hosted by Chinisha S., a self-proclaimed “certified Prince super-fan, nerd/geek-girl, and cheerful nihilist,” the lineup includes DJ Monday Blue; the sketch-comedy team To Karen, With Love; and the comedians Alex English, Aminah Imani, Dave Lester and Jatty Robinson ($18.65 for tickets). Stick around for the after-after party: Brandon Collins and Gordon Baker-Bone will host a Juneteenth edition of their interactive show, “Black Drunk History,” also at the Bell House ($20 for advance tickets).

Come for the jerk chicken and waffles food truck. Stay for the Black beauty bazaar. “Juneteenth in Queens” was planned by Assemblywoman Alicia Hyndman, who also sponsored the legislation that made Juneteenth a state holiday in New York. The festival, which includes a virtual panel series this week, culminates with an in-person event on Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., in Roy Wilkins Park in Queens. Start your day with yoga for Black liberation, check out the Black art party and try an African dance master class in the afternoon. Register for the event and activities on Eventbrite.