Author: NY TIMES

at last! It’s here. I’m excited to share this year’s draft guide with you. I can’t remember who first called it “The Beast,” but I used that moniker as motivation to make sure this annual primer lived up to it—and I don’t think I’ve let you down this year.Every NFL rookie is an enigma. The scout’s job is to find the pieces of the puzzle and paint as clear a picture as possible of each player’s situation. These puzzle pieces include everything from the player’s physical characteristics to his mental makeup to details of his upbringing and everything in between.This…

Rumi Missabu, an avant-garde drag performer who was best known as a member of the anarchic, glitter-encrusted, hippie-drag troupe known as the Cockettes, which bloomed briefly at the turn of the 1970s in San Francisco, died on April 2 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 76.His death, from complications of chronic respiratory disease, was announced by Griffin Cloudwalker, a friend.For a moment, the Cockettes were the bohemian darlings of San Francisco. Their members were a diverse collective that included Rumi, a voluble drama student from Los Angeles. Like many in the group, he went by his adopted first…

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, learned about a new board game that was becoming popular in small circles, he asked his friends to type up the rules and help him jazz up the graphic design. In 1933, he copyrighted the game, Monopoly, as his own invention and began selling it in toy stores and department stores.The real-estate trading game would go on to sell more than 275 million copies, has been licensed in hundreds of…

The weekend after a jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murder, the comedian Norm Macdonald opened Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” at his desk next to a photo of the defendant. “Well, it is finally official,” he said. “Murder is legal in the state of California.”The 1995 trial of Simpson, who died Wednesday at 76, didn’t just dominate and revolutionize the media. It also became an unlikely staple of comedy. The details of the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman were daily fodder for punchlines on talk shows, sitcoms and stand-up stages. And Macdonald cemented…

Israeli forces were on high alert on Friday in anticipation of a retaliatory strike by Iran or its proxies, which analysts and officials warned could spur an Israeli reaction and potentially provoke a broader conflict in the region.Iran is expected to launch an attack as soon as this weekend in retaliation for an April 1 airstrike, in which warplanes struck an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus, killing three generals and other commanders, U.S. and Iranian officials said on Friday.Military analysts said neither Israel nor Iran appeared interested in provoking a full-blown war that could draw in the United States, but…

Movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced in a news conference on Thursday.New films by Jacques Audiard, Paul Schrader and Andrea Arnold will also appear in competition at this year’s event, the festival’s 77th edition, which opens May 14 and runs through May 25.The most eagerly anticipated film on the lineup is likely to be Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — the director’s first movie in over 10 years.During Thursday’s news conference, Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, revealed little about that movie’s plot,…

Yesterday, I was primarily focused on charting out the updated NBA pre-playoff player tiers before revealing Tier 3 (players between 24th and 42nd) and Tier 4 (43rd-80th).Today, I’ll take a closer look at some of the more interesting and/or challenging positions and point out some general trends.First, the consistent feedback I’ve gotten from multiple sources since the release of Tiers 3 and 4 is that it’s difficult to evaluate which player is more valuable between elite role players and good but passable role players. -Great primary or secondary creator. One senior analyst within the league even claimed that they prefer…

Three security guards stood along a leafy street in the West Village of Manhattan on Thursday evening, watching as a procession of writers, editors and publishing industry veterans entered the Waverly Inn restaurant for a book party.The security team was present because this wasn’t just any book party.It was a gathering for the release of “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” a new memoir by Salman Rushdie, in which he examines how his life was altered by a violent stabbing nearly two years ago, when he was attacked onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.The episode temporarily placed…

Stocks slumped to a second consecutive weekly loss on Friday, as intensifying tension in the Middle East prompted caution among investors, adding to concerns about lingering inflation that had set off a retreat earlier in the week.The S&P 500 fell 1.5 percent on Friday in its worst day of trading since January, and ended the week with a drop of 1.6 percent, its worst weekly decline of the year.Other major indexes, including the Nasdaq Composite and Russell 2000, also fell on Friday. The Vix Volatility Index, a measure of investor expectations for market swings over the next 30 days —…

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had been in Lauderhill on vacation.Dr. Braun gained renown in the early 1980s as an expert in two of the most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed memories and multiple…