Author: NY TIMES

“Swept Away,” a new musical featuring songs by the Americana band the Avett Brothers, is planning to open on Broadway this fall, following productions in California and Washington.The musical is inspired by a once-famous shipwreck: In 1884, a British yacht called the Mignonette was wrecked at sea, and the four-man crew’s desperate efforts to survive, which included cannibalism, led to a protracted and influential legal battle. The details of the ordeal have been changed for “Swept Away,” which is set in 1888 on a whaling ship off the coast of New Bedford, Mass.Much of the musical’s score is drawn from…

The conger eel was the favorite, weighing at least three times more than its eight-armed opponent. But by the time the video footage begins, the underdog octopus had already asserted its toughness, blocking off the eel’s eyes and stuffing arms into its mouth and out the gill hole.“I thought that with such difference in size it would be hard for the octopus to avoid death,” said Jorge Hernández-Urcera, a marine ecologist at the Institute of Marine Research of the Spanish National Research Council.The common octopus not only defended itself, but also seemed to come out on top. The divers who…

Sixty years ago, baseball commissioner Ford Frick received a telegram from a Wisconsin congressman. Rep. Henry Royce is concerned that the Milwaukee Braves will defect to Atlanta for a more lucrative television deal and has proposed a solution: If all MLB teams shared their television rights , then the Warriors may stay.According to the Associated Press, Frick responded in the summer of 1964 that “…a plan to centralize all television revenues is not currently feasible or acceptable” but “is worthy of future consideration.”Now, in 2024, that conversation has arrived. Commissioner Rob Manfred and some of the sport’s owners are talking…

Molly Baz, the cookbook author, and her pregnant belly, rhinestone bikini and breasts will be back up in Times Square, uncensored.A week after The New York Times reported that her billboard for lactation cookies had been “flagged for review” and swapped out for a more conservative image by the company that powered the billboard, Clear Channel, the ad has found a new home. The probiotics supplement and microbiome research brand Seed has donated their billboard to Swehl, the breastfeeding start-up that created the cookie campaign with Ms. Baz. Clear Channel still has not responded to requests for comment.The original imagery,…

Regulatory wars The Supreme Court lifted the existential threat hanging over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rejecting a challenge to the agency’s funding.The decision could have huge consequences for a raft of conservative-led lawsuits involving administrative authority — but business groups and Republicans are vowing to fight on.A recap: Payday lenders had sued the C.F.P.B. over a rule that would limit the number of times they could withdraw money from a customer’s account for repayment.The companies and conservative groups argued that the practice wasn’t harmful, and said the way the regulator is funded — via annual allocations from the Fed’s…

He remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor for a decade after that, appearing on a wide range of both comedies and dramas on TV and in small parts in big movies like “The Towering Inferno” (1974). Then, in 1976, he landed the role that would set the tone for much of his career: Merle Jeeter, the underhanded stage father of a child evangelist (and later the mayor of the fictional town of Fernwood), on Norman Lear’s satirical soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”Mr. Coleman later said of the series, “It had a very strange, off-the-wall type of humor,…

Trucks of humanitarian aid began moving ashore into Gaza early Friday via a temporary pier built by the U.S. military, the first supplies of aid to be sent into the enclave by sea in two months. But the new shipments of food and other supplies fall far short of what humanitarian groups say is needed to meet the staggering levels of hunger and deprivation in Gaza.A day earlier, the U.S. military said it had anchored the floating pier and causeway to the beach in Gaza, a key step in completing a maritime corridor that the Pentagon announced in March. U.S.…

Matthew Burroughs and Diana McDermott married on May 4, which the bride referenced in her vows by saying, “May the force be with us.” Source link

Workers at two Mercedes-Benz factories near Tuscaloosa, Ala., voted on Friday against joining the United Automobile Workers, a stunning blow to the union’s campaign to gain ground in the South, where it has traditionally been weak.The defeat came after Kay Ivey, Alabama’s governor, and other Republican leaders argued that a pro-union vote would choke off the investment that has transformed the state into a major auto producer. Hyundai and Honda also have large factories in Alabama that the U.A.W. is trying to organize.The vote took on national significance as a test of whether the U.A.W. could build on a string…

The ever-surprising bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding persuaded the mystical and ingeniously tuneful Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento, 81, to collaborate on a full album that was recorded in 2023 and is due in August. Its preview single is “Outubro” (“October”), a song that Nascimento originally wrote and recorded in the 1960s. Its asymmetrical melody carries lyrics that reflect on solitude, mortality and the possibility of joy. Nascimento no longer has the pure, otherworldly vocal tone of his youth, but Spalding bolsters him, singing in Portuguese alongside him and probing the harmonies with springy bass lines. Near the end, she comes…