Author: NY TIMES

In the world according to Mike Repole, everyone involved in horse racing is a dummy. Except him, Mike from Queens or the Commish, as some of his followers on X call him.Stuart S. Janney III, chairman of the nonprofit Jockey Club, is clueless and tone deaf and has run the sport into the ground, Repole says. Churchill Downs Inc., which hosts the Kentucky Derby, is cheap: The $5 million purse for America’s most famous race should be much more, and the racetrack treats Repole and other owners badly.Forget about John Stewart, a new owner bringing fresh energy and big money…

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube3. Spoon: “I Turn My Camera On”“Challengers” volleys back and forth from recent past to present so dizzyingly that sometimes the musical cues are the easiest way to remember if we’re in 2006 or 2019. This Spoon track, from the 2005 album “Gimme Fiction,” offers some temporal grounding and millennial nostalgia when it plays in the background of a scene at the 2006 U.S. Open Junior Championships. Guadagnino certainly loves himself a persistent bass line!▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube4. The Psychedelic Furs: “Love My Way”In “Call Me by Your Name,”…

While the votes in local elections in England and Wales were still being counted on Friday, a picture has begun to emerge of significant losses for the governing Conservative Party.The voting on Thursday to elect councilors, mayors and police commissioners in local elections, seen as a last test of public opinion before a general election expected later this year, portends a difficult road ahead for the party.Here are four takeaways.The Conservatives could be in serious trouble.Leading up to the local elections, the question was not whether the Conservatives would suffer, but just how bad the blow might be. The party…

Although the Met Gala serves as a branding event for Vogue, it has long accepted sponsorships from the tech giants that have threatened the very survival of legacy media publications.Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, appeared as the ball’s honorary chair in 2012. Four years later, when Apple was a Met Gala sponsor, its chief executive, Tim Cook, showed up in tux and tails. And Instagram supplied cash in 2022.The 2024 event is sponsored, in part, by TikTok, the social media goliath whose future looks murkier than that of Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker and other magazines,…

An accounting firm that audits the financial statements of hundreds of public companies including former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company can no longer do so, U.S. securities regulators said on Friday.The Securities and Exchange Commission charged the firm, BF Borgers, with fraud, saying that it had failed to comply with accounting rules. In settling with the S.E.C., the firm agreed immediately stop filing audited statements on behalf of its clients.The regulator held BF Borgers and its owner, Benjamin F. Borger, responsible for “deliberate and systemic failures” to comply with accounting rules. The accompanying settlement requires both the firm…

Hundreds of marketers and ad agency types flocked to TikTok’s annual sales presentation after a new law put its future in question. Source link

Beefs make rappers productive. Earlier this week, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new salvo in his recently rekindled feud with Drake: a six-minute, multipart rejoinder to Drake’s recent “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” It starts with Lamar rapping quickly but calmly over a smooth-jazz backdrop, taunting, “I make music that electrify ’em, you make music that pacify ’em.” But after he warns, “Don’t tell no lie about me/And I won’t tell truths about you,” the track changes to a tolling, droning trap dirge and Lamar’s delivery becomes biting, nasal and percussive. He switches from flow to flow with an accelerating…

About 80 miles southeast of Louisiana’s coast, 100,000 metric tons of steel floats in the Gulf of Mexico, an emblem of the hopes of oil and gas companies.This hulk of metal, a deepwater platform called Appomattox and owned by Shell, collects the oil and gas that rigs tap from reservoirs thousands of feet below the seafloor. Equipment on the platform pipes that fuel to shore.Political and corporate leaders have pledged to reduce planet-warming emissions to net-zero by 2050. But oil companies like Shell are betting that the world will need oil and gas for decades to come. To serve that…

“They were like hysterically crying,” Ms. Bonito said.Liz Dent and Corey Sunstrom found the open communication that a nontraditional proposal offers alluring as well. Mr. Sunstrom initially wanted to surprise Ms. Dent. But the more they thought about it, the more they found themselves questioning that route.“We’ve both been married before, and we both have sort of been through the proposal,” Ms. Dent, 34, said. “And I think for us it was like, well, the other way didn’t really work — let’s do something that makes sense for both of us. And I think we both view ourselves as really…

Desperate to stem protests that have convulsed campuses across the country, a small number of universities have agreed to reconsider their investments in companies that do business with Israel.The deals, which have eased tension on campuses with only a few days left before students break for the summer, would have been unthinkable even a week ago. And they’re a gamble, potentially putting universities on a collision course with influential donors, politicians and students who support Israel.The schools are still far from pulling money: Brown University, the liberal Ivy League institution, agreed this week only to hold a board vote this…