New York Time

2023 - 1 - 1

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'Can I Please Use Your Phone?' (The New York Times)

An evening of people-watching is complicated by a stranger asking the question no one wants to hear.

I walked Shannon to the subway, trying to hide the tension in my stomach. What if she had hidden the money and said that I had stolen it? I felt vulnerable as I hung my head to keep a low profile on the normally breezy two-block walk to my apartment. I imagined a meth lab hidden in the woods, run haplessly by the cast of “Deliverance.” She leaned in close to me and whispered, “I have a hundred-thousand dollars cash in these bags.” Her eyes widened, awaiting my impressed reaction. Then, just as Shannon and I stood up, the persistent vibration of my phone rattled the metal park table. I had a drink,” the woman confessed to Shannon. When I asked if he lived on the north side of the park, his assault continued: “I don’t know what the north side of the park is. I explained that I was just a stranger whom she had asked for directions. Now I was in my 40s and excited to host Shannon in my Brooklyn neighborhood for a pint of goat cheese and red cherry ice cream. Her brown hair had gone mostly gray, but she had every bit of the energy and snappy wit I remembered. I presumed that she was tired from shopping all day in Manhattan and anxious to relax at her brother-in-law’s apartment.

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Remembering a Revered, No-Nonsense Editor of Culture (The New York Times)

Andrea Stevens, a Times editor, died this month at 83. She was a loved and feared presence in the theater world. In an essay, Ben Brantley explores her ...

I trusted her to take the full measure of what I was doing, what I was trying to do and what I hadn’t yet done.” [Arthur Laurents](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/arts/arthur-laurents-playwright-and-director-dies-at-93.html), the acid-tongued librettist of “Gypsy” and “West Side Story,” wrote of her in his memoir “Original Story By”: “Andrea loves the theater like a woman who knows everything about her faithless lover but loves him anyway.” [Al Hirschfeld’s immortal caricatures](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/theater/al-hirschfeld-99-dies-he-drew-broadway.html) into the Sunday Times, who arranged the interviews with leading actors and playwrights that appeared in the newspaper. From an email she sent to Jason Zinoman in 2010, not long before she left The Times:“As the culture diffuses further, as distractions grow, as internet toys increase, it’s not going to be about taste,” she wrote. I figured ‘suggestions’ meant a couple of contacts, maybe a paragraph about the theme. Nonetheless, when I picked her up at her apartment building the next day, she was wearing freshly picked flowers, with leaves, in her hair. Peter Marks, now the chief theater critic of The Washington Post, recalled being assigned to write a piece when he was working in The Times’s Long Island bureau in the early 1990s: “‘I’ll send you some suggestions for the story,’ she said, managing somehow to sound at once encouraging and deeply skeptical. After discoursing briefly on the lot of serfs in feudal times, she concluded: “The majority of politicians are today’s priests in the temples. “It was exhilarating to be edited by Andrea,” said Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and former Times writer. Okay, the golden calf now wears a necklace of flowers, a nod to the natural world. She could be relied upon to be unfailingly supportive and rigorously demanding of any writer she worked with, whether journeyman reporter or laurel-wreathed dramatist. “And wouldn’t you know,” she wrote.

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71 of Our Favorite Facts of 2022 (The New York Times)

Each day, Inside The Times Times Insider editors scour the newspaper for the most interesting facts to appear in articles. Here are facts that surprised, ...

[‘The Crown’ and the Appeal of a Royal TV Interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/arts/television/the-crown-royals-television.html) [Jacques Pépin, in Search of Lost Cars and Cuisine](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/business/jacques-pepin-french-cars-cuisine.html) [Can’t Talk, I’m Busy Being Hot](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/style/self-care/hot-girl-megan-thee-stallion-tik-tok.html) [When Motherhood Is a Horror Show](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/arts/motherhood-horror-movies-tv.html) [Cooking Online, Arab Women Find Income and Community](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/dining/arab-women-youtube-cooking-videos.html) [two million people annually — a 500 percent increase since 1970](https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration). Wright](https://kellywright5.wixsite.com/raciolinguistics). [A Two-Year, 50-Million-Person Experiment in Changing How We Work](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/business/remote-work-office-life.html) [one in three American adults](https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/barriers-to-work-individuals-with-criminal-records.aspx) have criminal records. [California Air Resources Board](https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/topics/lawn-garden-landscape-equipment). [In Glitter and Leotards, They Took a Stand: Carnival Must Go On](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/americas/brazil-carnival.html) I leave you with that.” [Oscars Rewind: When Rita Moreno Made History and Thanked No One](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/movies/rita-moreno-oscar-west-side-story.html)

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Education Dept. Logs Record Number of Discrimination Complaints (The New York Times)

Some of the highest-profile complaints show how America's culture wars are affecting the nation's children.

McSwain unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor of the state last year and came under fire during his campaign for [calling a middle-school gender and sexuality alliance group](https://www.inquirer.com/news/bill-mcswain-pa-governor-candidate-gender-sexuality-school-20220310.html) “leftist political indoctrination.” [heightened visibility of the population](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/us/transgender-teenagers-how-many.html) and the backlash over laws that are designed to protect them. student, but said in a statement that the district “takes allegations of discrimination very seriously,” and is conducting its own investigation. complaint](https://www.smore.com/6xyu5-the-central-bucks-board-note?ref=email) as a “partisan, political tool” and announced the board had hired a high-powered legal team led by Bill McSwain, a former Trump-appointed U.S. Among the programming they asserted violated the laws was a [“Families of Color Playground Night”](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-denver-elementary/fact-check-denver-elementary-school-says-families-of-color-event-was-open-to-all-families-idUSL1N2T1207) in Colorado and an advertised “Students of Color Field Trip Opportunity” in Illinois. Another [complaint](https://www.aclupa.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/cbsd_administrative_complaint_-_final_10-6-22_redacted3.pdf) filed by the state chapter of the A.C.L.U. “But I was concerned that I would be complicit if I became aware of this information and allowed it to sit.” “At the same time, the scope and volume of harm that we’re asking our babies to navigate is astronomical.” “We cannot underestimate the normalizing of intolerant behaviors,” said Liz King, the senior program director of educational equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 civil rights groups. “It reflects the confidence in the Office for Civil Rights as a place to seek redress,” Ms. In both cases the reforms included educating students to recognize and report discrimination, and training school staff in how to respond to it. The surge reversed the decline in complaints filed to the office under the Trump administration, which

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Opinion | Being Short is Better Than We're Told (The New York Times)

Short people don't just save resources; as resources become scarcer owing to overpopulation and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term ...

“It’s not the height in and of itself that determines the outcome.” The future I envision is different: I want my children’s children to know the value of short. “Everything is big,” he said, “the buildings, the businesses,” and went on to explain that parents reflect the mind-set that bigger is better when envisioning their offspring. “Don’t be overly confident when you are tall because you are probably going to die younger, have more health problems and you are polluting more.” On average, [short people live longer](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12586217/) and have [fewer incidences of cancer](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25991828/). Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash). “There are some short people who thrive and do phenomenally well and lead fantastic lives, and there are some tall people who are miserable,” Dr. I understand why they felt that way, given how short people are treated in our society — a song with the lyric “Short people got no reason to live” was No. Now I have twins who are among the smallest in their kindergarten class, but instead of preparing to medicate them because of an antiquated societal bias, I’m going to let them be as they are: tiny. There is an ongoing debate about the stature of a population and what it means for the prosperity and fairness of a nation, but I’m interested in shortness on an individual level. [tall candidates](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/02/19/in-politics-height-matters) assuming that they are better leaders and often choose tall people as partners with no definitive data that they make better spouses. Even if it did, in an era of guns and drones, being tall now just makes you a bigger target.

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