pulse

If, by some chance, a habitué of the Caffe Adulis ventured to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and sought a beloved dish on a local restaurant menu, disappointment usually ensued. “People would ask for shrimp in Eritrea, and it doesn’t exist,” said Ghebreyesus’ widow, the distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander, who is the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The thing that was cool about Ficre as a chef is that to him it was making art. It’s like the dreaminess of the paintings. There’s something remembered and something invented.”

Ghebreyesus never exhibited his paintings publicly. “We disagreed about that,” Alexander said. “I now see that he just wanted to work. He thought that self-advocacy was inappropriate.” But she thinks he would be very pleased that Galerie Lelong in Chelsea is now representing him. “Gate to the Blue,” his first New York exhibition, was scheduled to open there in late April. Although the actual opening has been postponed until Sept. 10, the gallery has posted the images of the paintings in the show online.

One reason Ghebreyesus chose not to spend time promoting his painting was that he had lost a great deal of time already. “He went through so much with his upheaval,” Alexander said.

Born into a prominent Coptic Christian family in Asmara and educated in Catholic schools, he grew up in a strife-torn country at the beginning of Eritrea’s 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia. When he met Alexander in New Haven in 1996, they communicated their shared reverence for “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “We understood it in different ways,” she recalled. “He had soldiers breaking into his house.”

Ghebreyesus left Eritrea at 16 on a three-year odyssey, traveling to Sudan, Italy and Germany, before finding refuge in the United States. He settled in New Haven, where he and his two brothers opened Caffe Adulis in 1992. In 2000, he was admitted to the Yale School of Art. “He was certainly distinctive for how dedicated he was to painting,” said Pamela Franks, an art historian who knew him at Yale and is now director of the Williams College Museum of Art. “He was painting all the time.”

Like other refugees, he carried with him his loss, including the separation from his family and the pain of knowing the suffering in his homeland. His early paintings are often thickly painted nighttime scenes with a single source of illumination, such as truck headlights or a campfire.

“What I found in all Eritrean art is there is an element of darkness in it,” said Kassahun Checole, the publisher of Africa World Press and Red Sea Press, based in New Jersey. A native Eritrean, Checole met Ghebreyesus in New York, and they worked together politically for Eritrean war relief. “The depression that settles in all of us from our situation as exiles is expressed in the art,” Checole continued. “With Ficre, that was transformed when he met Elizabeth, moved to Connecticut, and his children were born. His art becomes more bright and hopeful.”

Indeed, Ghebreyesus’ distinctive talent as a colorist blossomed with his marriage to Alexander in 1997 and the birth of their two sons: Solomon, 22, and Simon, 20, who are both undergraduate students at Yale. As with his cooking, his sources as a painter were eclectic. The checkerboard motifs that he incorporated into many pictures bear a resemblance to the basketry and embroidery that he saw in his youth. The pinks and peachy oranges may derive from the colors of painted stucco houses in Asmara, a city that was occupied by the Italians in the 1920s and became a landmark of colonial modernism — like Ghebreyesus, a hybrid.

The saturated reds and blues of his paintings, however, seem indebted to the Western artists he loved, particularly Matisse. From Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, which he saw in Padua, Italy, to the modernist paintings and African sculptures that he studied during his frequent visits to the Yale University Art Gallery, Ghebreyesus absorbed everything he was exposed to. He was also passionate about music, with eclectic taste. “He would put together a playlist that would include music we knew and didn’t know — Nina Simone and then this incredible Ethiopian jazz mixed in,” said the musician Jason Moran, a friend.

Reticence confined Ghebreyesus’ reputation to his circle of devoted friends until his unexpected death. Complaining of feeling unwell a couple of days after his 50th birthday party, he continued working and exercising. No one recognized the seriousness of his ailment until it was too late. His younger son found him fallen off his treadmill, lying dead on the floor, of massive heart failure.

Three years later, after coping with the shocking grief and moving her family to New York, Alexander wrote a New Yorker article that was expanded in 2016 into a bestselling memoir, “The Light of the World,” making Ghebreyesus’ name more widely known. His art, though, awaited its audience.

A posthumous exhibition at a gallery in New Haven was followed by one at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in 2018. After showcasing him at its booth at the Art Dealers Association of America fair last month, Galerie Lelong is presenting a selection of works that focus on Ghebreyesus’ unsettled traveling between worlds.

The most directly autobiographical painting, “Mangia Libro,” normally hangs in the Mellon Foundation headquarters. In it, Ghebreyesus depicts himself as a child, reading a book as he walks, with a dusky rose building behind him and water teeming with fish and seaweed in front. As often in Ghebreyesus’ paintings, there are abstract sections of checks and stripes, and enigmatic details.

Allusions to Eritrean culture abound in such paintings as “Angel and Musician,” which evokes the depiction of angels in Coptic Christian churches and the stringed lyre-like krar played by traditional musicians. One of the delights of this beautiful exhibition is the evident joy that Ghebreyesus took in the deft application of paint. The watery reflections of the banded vessel in “Solitary Boat in Red and Blue” create a shimmery, ghostly presence in the foreground, and the sea shifts without clear demarcation into a crepuscular streaky green sky. The interior of the vessel (similar in its hollow form to the used coconut shells that Ghebreyesus brought by the box from the restaurant to the studio) is an opalescent blending of thinly applied acrylic paint that divides into four softly distinct sections. The picture represents a boat in the ocean; but just as much, it is a bravura demonstration of paint handling.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a huge painting, 16 feet by 8 feet on unstretched canvas, “The Sardine Fisherman’s Funeral.” A frieze of angel faces at the top, looking down on a scrum of human activity, plays against the focus of the painting: a gigantic fish propped up against a deep blue backdrop. And what are those two umbrellas doing here? Maybe their beautiful shapes are reason enough for their presence.

“I don’t look at them as biographical,” the Ethiopian-born American artist Julie Mehretu said of Ghebreyesus’ works. “They’re experiential paintings. They are explorations in paint. ”

Especially in these later paintings, he created an autonomous universe through the flattened picture planes, in which figures, fish, trees and geometric patterns jostle against one another in freewheeling abandon.

“With a lot of artists from the continent, the work is read as a history of the past and the time, and I don’t experience his painting that way,” Mehretu said. “It’s not tethered to who he was. There was a possibility that he imagined. And that is super interesting to me — that he untethered himself.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/arts/design/ficre-ghebreyesus.html" id="02236589-6105-341d-a49a-8a9b6982a419"> The New York Times </a> .

The Inventive Chef Who Kept His 700 Paintings Hidden

Mixing memories of his North African childhood with his day-to-day life as a husband and father in New Haven, Connecticut, Ficre Ghebreyesus conjured up an imaginary space of his own. He created this multilayered world in his studio, where, after his sudden death at 50 in 2012, he left behind more than 700 paintings and several hundred works on paper. And he performed a similar magic in the popular Caffe Adulis, where he earned his living by cooking hybrid recipes that drew on the culinary he...

His death, at a residential care facility, was caused by complications of the new coronavirus, his wife, Robin Kennedy, said. He had suffered a severe stroke in 2015.

Stanford had been Kennedy’s life since 1960, when, not yet 30, he joined its faculty as an assistant professor of biology. And except for a stint in the late 1970s as head of the FDA under President Jimmy Carter, he remained wedded to the university, becoming provost and then president in 1980, beginning an 11-year tenure.

It was a productive one. During his presidency, the university opened the Stanford Humanities Center and campuses in Oxford, England; Kyoto, Japan; and Washington; diversified the Western culture curriculum; and raised $1.2 billion in a five-year centennial campaign, although by the end of the decade the university was facing deficits.

His tenure also coincided with fiery debates over anti-war protests and academic freedom by both professors and students, divestiture of the university’s holdings in companies doing business in South Africa, and $160 million in damage inflicted by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989.

A would-be writer who had become a neurobiologist in college adventitiously, Kennedy found his leadership under the microscope in the early 1990s, when the university was accused — and later cleared — of improperly billing the Navy for research expenses.

The accusations were aired by federal auditors and Rep. John D. Dingell Jr., a tenacious Michigan Democrat, who said that Stanford may have billed the government for as much as $200 million in improper expenses on research contracts for more than a decade.

By 1994, Stanford had agreed that a total of about $3 million had been inadvertently billed to the government, but the federal auditors concluded that there was no evidence of misrepresentation by the university.

Still, the damage was done to Stanford’s reputation, and Kennedy resigned in 1991, attributing the government accusations to political and personal vendettas and acknowledging that they had contributed to his decision to step down.

“It is very difficult, I have concluded, for a person identified with a problem to be the spokesman for its solution,” he said in announcing his resignation. He went on to edit the journal Science.

But he had his ardent supporters on the Bay Area campus, where he was known to bike to work and engage with students. Among them was his protégé Cory Booker, the future senator from New Jersey, whom Kennedy had encouraged to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship.

“To watch him lead through the indirect cost crisis, through professional and personal attacks, under tremendous stress and strain, with clouds amassed over his head and challenges raining on him," Booker wrote in the foreword to Kennedy’s memoir, “A Place in the Sun” (2017), “was a study in leadership, character, and discipline, always better shown in times of crisis than when all is going well.”

Donald Kennedy was born Aug. 18, 1931, in Manhattan to William and Barbara (Bean) Kennedy. His father was a writer, an editor and an assistant dean of the Harvard Business School. His mother was a teacher and journalist.

As his father repeatedly switched jobs, Donald was raised in about a half-dozen locales, including Greenwich, Connecticut, by the time he was 15.

After graduating from the Dublin School in New Hampshire, he enrolled in Harvard University intending to major in English and be a writer; at one point he received an A on a 5,000-word final paper in creative writing. But, as he recalled in his memoir, his professor, perhaps pointing him toward a more profitable profession, asked him over sherry one night: “ Tell me, Don. What else interests you?’”

“Surprised by the question, I gathered my wits and responded, ‘Well, biology and natural history, I guess.’ ”

“ ‘Biology,’ he said. ‘That sounds like a wonderful choice.’ ”

He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1952, followed by a master’s and a doctorate, all three from Harvard. And all in biology.

Kennedy was recruited to the FDA in 1977 by Joseph A. Califano Jr., the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. During his tenure there the agency’s proposed ban on saccharin, the artificial sweetener, was defeated, but overall his record won plaudits from industry representatives and consumer advocates alike.

He returned to Stanford briefly as provost before he was named president.

Kennedy was a familiar presence on campus, not only biking to the quadrangle but also inviting students to join him on his morning runs up to the Dish, the radio antenna in the foothills of the campus.

“Kennedy is not someone whom students hear once when they arrive and then once when they graduate,” The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, editorialized in 1991.

A former student, Ingrid Schwontes Jackoway, was quoted as saying in an alumni publication: “I will never forget Donald Kennedy getting up on the lab table at the front of the lecture hall and assuming a quadruped position to demonstrate to us the concepts of dorsal, ventral, cephalo and caudal. His first concern was always with teaching effectively, not preserving his dignity.”

Kennedy’s marriage to Jeanne Dewey ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Robin Hamill, who was associate counsel at Stanford when they married in 1987, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Page Kennedy Rochon and Julia Kennedy Tussing; two stepchildren, Cameron Kennedy and Jamie Hamill; his brother, Dorsey; and nine grandchildren.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Kennedy was the editor-in-chief of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, from 2000-08. But even there he was not immune to controversy. Researchers had fabricated their findings in several articles, and a reported sighting of an extinct ivory-billed woodpecker appeared to have been mistaken.

Among his other books were “The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War” (1984) with Carl Sagan and Paul R. Ehrlich, and “Academic Duty” (1997). At his death he was Bing professor for environmental science emeritus at Stanford.

Shortly after he became president, Kennedy told the student radio station, KZSU, that he intended to keep his perspective despite the pressures of the job.

“The president is ultimately the person to whom the problems come,” he said. “What you need then is to walk around, or visit a dormitory, or to give a class, or to meet a student who wants to come in and talk about a career choice. I find those occasions very uplifting because they’re not automatically negative. They’re not the kind of problems that are programmed for the president’s desk because they haven’t been solved by anybody else. Instead, they’re the kinds of things that go on around here day by day, and make this a terrific place.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/donald-kennedy-who-led-stanford-in-1980s-dies-at-88.html" id="162641c8-7ff0-3307-ae71-53a7467eb41a"> The New York Times </a> .

Donald Kennedy, Who Led Stanford in 1980s, Dies at 88

Donald Kennedy, a neurobiologist who headed the Food and Drug Administration before becoming president of Stanford University, where he oversaw major expansions of its campus and curriculum and weathered a crisis over research spending, died April 21 in Redwood City, California. He was 88.

The brothers, Matt Colvin and Noah Colvin, donated the supplies last month to people in Tennessee and Kentucky, which the authorities said Tuesday was acceptable as restitution and was a factor in the settlement terms in the highly publicized case.

The siblings, who live outside Chattanooga, were widely vilified after Matt Colvin 36, told The New York Times last month that he and his brother, who is 21, had canvassed dollar stores and other retailers across Tennessee and Kentucky for hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

Colvin said at the time that he had sold 300 bottles of hand sanitizer on Amazon for $8 to $70 each, multiple times higher than what he had paid. The next day, Amazon pulled the additional items that he had listed from its retail platform, along with those of thousands of other sellers.

“Disrupting necessary supplies during an unprecedented pandemic is a serious offense,” Herbert H. Slatery III, Tennessee’s attorney general, said in a statement Tuesday. “It became clear during our investigation that the Colvins realized this, and their prompt cooperation and donation led to an outcome that actually benefited some consumers.”

Clay T. Lee, a lawyer for the brothers, said in an email Wednesday that his clients had agreed to donate all the supplies to their church for distribution to local emergency responders before the state began its investigation. He said the brothers appreciated the swift resolution of the matter.

Matt Colvin, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said last month that he had received hate mail and death threats after The Times published an article about the stockpile.

In Tennessee, a state price-gouging law prohibits individuals or businesses from charging “unreasonable” prices for essential goods or services in direct response to a disaster, whether it occurs in the state or elsewhere.

Under the settlement terms, the brothers agreed not to engage in any further price gouging during the coronavirus health crisis.

A week after the brothers first made headlines, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that directed the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute cases of price gouging and hoarding of critical supplies that included face masks and sanitizing products.

Last month, a Brooklyn man was charged with lying to federal agents about price gouging. The authorities said the man, Baruch Feldheim, 43, had stockpiled 192,000 N95 respirators, 130,000 surgical masks and nearly 600,000 medical-grade gloves, which were redirected to medical workers in New York and New Jersey.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/hand-sanitizer-matt-colvin-noah-coronavirus.html" id="41f2803c-0491-3a0c-afff-174933a5080b"> The New York Times </a> .

Brothers Who Hoarded 17,700 Hand Sanitizer Bottles Avoid Fine After Donating Supplies

Two Tennessee brothers who stockpiled 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer have avoided prosecution and a fine, but will not recoup the thousands of dollars they spent on the supplies under the terms of a price-gouging settlement that the state attorney general announced this week.

But for the past two months, listeners to Savage’s conservative radio show have heard him howl with unabated contempt about another menace: “The pimps” in the right-wing media “who tell you what you want to hear.” They are “intellectual dwarfs” and “science illiterates,” he says, who spent weeks downplaying the threat from the coronavirus epidemic and accusing President Donald Trump’s opponents of exaggerating it to hurt him politically.

On Savage’s broadcast, which has one of the largest audiences in talk radio with 7.5 million listeners each week, the virus has never been a hoax or a bad case of the sniffles. He has lectured his fans on the research in detail: How it is transmitted; which treatments are proving effective; and the difference between morbidity and mortality rates.

With no small amount of self-satisfaction, Savage reminds people of his credentials — a Ph.D. and training in epidemiology — and of the fact that he was one of the few voices in conservative media who had warned them all along.

Much of the time, Savage still sounds like any other right-wing shock jock — making fun of Nancy Pelosi and doubting the validity of the #MeToo movement. But on the subject of the coronavirus, Savage has become one of the loudest voices of dissent on the right.

His views are a striking departure from the accepted version of events among Trump’s loyalists in the media, who have made a concerted effort to deny that they downplayed the epidemic — and have helped fuel support for protests against stay-at-home orders in states like Michigan. Savage has attacked the credibility of the conservative media, accused its biggest stars of being too rote and unthinking in their defense of the president, and demanded that they be held accountable for misleading millions of Americans.

“We’re living in a terrible time in America where truth has died,” Savage, who was one of the first conservative media stars to urge Trump to run for president, told his audience. “This is crazy,” he added, pointing to the way the president’s defenders always accuse the left of spreading “fake news.”

“How can we not let our side be called on the carpet when they lie to the people?”

At the time, coronavirus outbreaks were largely limited to a handful of countries like China, South Korea and Italy. Only a few dozen cases had been reported in the United States. The same day, Rush Limbaugh likened the coronavirus to the common cold on his radio program. But it spread aggressively in America just as Savage had warned it would — a prediction that earned him the ire of people who called him a hysteric and a sellout.

His contempt for hosts like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, whose top-rated radio shows draw more than 30 million listeners each week, is especially searing. He mocks them as “Dr. Hannity” and “Rush Limbaugh, M.D., Ph.D.,” belittles their lack of education compared with his, and berates people who took their claims seriously.

During one program in early March, for instance, Savage asked why anyone would continue to believe that the virus was being hyped by the president’s enemies when Trump himself was taking aggressive steps to slow its spread. Referring to the president, Savage fumed, “Is it because he doesn’t know as much as Sean Hannity does? Is it because he doesn’t study at the same medical school as Dr. Limbaugh?”

“Do you understand the danger you’re in by listening to these people and just following them blindly over a cliff?” he implored his audience.

Hostilities among the bold personalities and big egos of talk radio are nothing new. Savage has always been the misfit of conservative radio who relished taunting his higher-rated rivals. But his background in science, and a recent heart attack that has reduced his schedule to three days a week, have given him a unique perspective.

Still, anyone tempted to think that Savage is fundamentally gentler and milder needs only to listen to a few minutes of his program.

“I just saw that San Francisco’s homeless population are being given hotel rooms, so they can crap on the floor and throw the sheets out the window,” he said on a recent show, reacting to the news that some cities were trying to limit the spread of the virus among people who sleep on the streets.

On another day, he questioned whether Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer, should have been convicted of criminal sexual assault. Referring to the women who accused him, Savage said: “They all went into his apartment. What were they going there for?”

These kinds of provocations will be familiar to fans and critics of Savage, who was once was barred from entering Britain after making inflammatory comments about Islam, including calling the Quran a “book of hate.”

In a series of interviews over the phone and on Skype as he recorded his radio show from a home studio overlooking San Francisco Bay, Savage, who is 78, echoed his conservative colleagues on some aspects of the virus. He has sharply attacked the federal government’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, dismissing him as “a grandstander” and “a showman.” He criticized sweeping quarantine measures and lockdowns as a threat to individual liberty, and called for them to be eased in places with lower infection rates.

He said he had pressed this point personally over email with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whom he knows socially through his son, the billionaire founder of Rockstar Energy Drink, Russell Weiner. Savage has also made his case on selectively lifting quarantine orders directly to the White House, which announced last month that it would nominate him to the board of the Presidio Trust, the oversight body for San Francisco’s famed national park. (The announcement was easy to overlook because it listed Savage by his legal name, Michael A. Weiner.)

Savage’s coronavirus crusade is partly a reflection of his training as a scientist. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in nutritional ethnomedicine, a field that examines how various cultures and ethnicities use natural products for health purposes. As part of his training, he studied epidemiology. He is a germaphobe and has a survivalist streak. One of the houses he owns in Marin County has its own reservoir.

But his persistence on the issue is also a reaction to his own recent death scare. The heart attack he had in December made the life-or-death nature of a pandemic personal. “I would like to believe that God has kept me here for this reason,” he said, calling this “the defining moment of our lives.”

At one point he turned to his producer, Jim Verdi, and asked, “When was I this wound up?”

Savage’s wife, Janet Weiner, said in an interview that she had noticed more compassion in her husband since his heart attack. And she sees him taking on responsibility for waking people up to what parts of American conservatism, especially in the media, have become. “This culty hero worship of the uneducated, it’s very depressing,” she said. “It makes me ashamed to be a conservative,” she added, before stopping herself. “I don’t want to identify with the conservative movement anymore.”

Her husband is not willing to go that far. And one thing his listeners do not hear much of is direct criticism of the president for his uneven response to the virus.

The host, who for years has argued that immigration should be limited for public health reasons, has praised Trump’s actions, such as limiting travel from China. When Trump called to congratulate him on the Presidio appointment last month, he told Savage he was considering shutting down travel to Europe. Savage responded that he didn’t think it was necessary at the time. “Obviously I was wrong,” he said.

Savage’s criticism of the conservative media allows him to sidestep the bigger questions about Trump’s leadership. Nicole Hemmer, a scholar at Columbia University and author of a book on the history of right-wing media, “Messengers of the Right,” said that Savage was letting the president off the hook by arguing that people in his inner circle like Hannity are giving him bad advice.

“In a way, he inoculates Trump from criticism by saying it’s not necessarily Trump that has bad instincts — it’s that he’s been misinformed,” Hemmer said. She added that Savage was still a lot like other hosts in that “they are all trying to find ways to protect Donald Trump, they just disagree about the method to do that.”

The only serious point of disagreement between Trump and Savage is in treating the virus with hydroxychloroquine, which the president has hailed as a potential miracle drug. “Almost every day now,” Savage said in the interview, “I’ve been warning people about the dangers of this drug.” He said he was appalled after hearing that Trump boosters like Hannity and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, were citing the unverified findings of a doctor outside New York City. “That’s not a controlled study,” he said, adding that “Dr. Giuliani” had no business talking about it.

Faced with his own mortality and the slowing down of his professional life, Savage has sounded sentimental at times. Earlier this month, he told his listeners, “My career will be defined by how I’ve treated you, my audience, during this epidemic.”

“We’re at war with an invisible enemy,” he said. “And we’re not going to win this war by attacking each other. We’re not going to win this war by lying to the people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/politics/michael-savage-trump-coronavirus.html" id="7d2ac410-c98c-3ed8-a7a6-738e5197aae9"> The New York Times </a> .

Why Michael Savage Is Blasting Hannity and the Right-Wing Media on the Virus

There are a lot of people who are ruining the country right now, according to Michael Savage. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Liberal mayors in big cities like San Francisco. Undocumented immigrants. Homeless people.

Richard Passman, an aeronautical engineer whose wide-ranging career took him through the early stages of supersonic flight, spy satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, died April 1 in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was 94.

The cause was complications of the new coronavirus, his son William said.

Passman was involved in crucial space-age projects, many of them secret — unlike the work of the civilian space program, which made public figures of those who blasted into space and some of those whose work got them there, Dwayne Day, a space historian, said.

“There was a classified space program and there were people equally smart,” Day said, “and yet we don’t know their names.”

Richard A. Passman was born June 30, 1925, in Cedarhurst, New York, on Long Island, to Matthew and Ethel Passman. (The middle initial didn’t stand for anything, his son William said.) His father co-owned an insurance company, and his mother was a homemaker.

At the University of Michigan, he earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1944, a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1946 and a master’s in aeronautical engineering in 1947.

He joined Bell Aircraft as the company was creating the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound, or Mach 1 (about 770 mph). He served as chief aerodynamicist on its successor, the X-2, which reached Mach 3. He was aircraft designer for Bell’s X-16, a spy plane, but the government instead chose Lockheed’s U-2.

He then moved from Bell to General Electric and raised his horizons from aircraft to spacecraft. He was a manager in a part of the company responsible for creating systems that allowed objects sent plunging through the atmosphere to withstand the blazing heat of re-entry.

There was the Corona, the first spy satellite: The orbiter took high-resolution photographs and ejected the film in a heat-shielding “bucket.” The container re-entered the atmosphere, deployed a parachute and was snagged out of the air by military aircraft. GE was responsible for the bucket.

He also helped lead efforts to create heat shielding technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles and multiple-warhead missiles. He continued to work on projects for the space program; he was GE’s general manager for space activities and was developing the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, an Air Force project that would have put a manned spy satellite into orbit, when it was canceled during the Nixon administration.

William Passman said that he knew very little of his father’s secret work; the Corona system wasn’t declassified until 1995. “These guys could keep a secret,” he said. “They were old school.”

In retirement, Richard Passman volunteered to work with John D. Anderson, the curator of aerodynamics at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He and Anderson co-wrote “X-15: The World’s Fastest Rocket Plane and the Pilots Who Ushered in the Space Age,” which was published in 2014 by the Smithsonian.

In addition to his son William, Passman is survived by his wife of 70 years, Minna (Hocky) Passman; two other sons, Henry and Don; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Passmans were living in a retirement community in Florida when the coronavirus began its spread. Their family, based in the Washington area, persuaded them to relocate to a retirement home closer to them, in Silver Spring, on March 15.

“They locked it down the same day,” William Passman said. Two weeks later, his father was dead. The family held a virtual shiva via Zoom.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/obituaries/richard-passman-dead-coronavirus.html" id="ce212b3a-4762-3cf0-a869-5f723d582c89"> The New York Times </a> .

Richard Passman, Space-Age Engineer Who Kept His Secrets, Dies at 94

(Those We’ve Lost)

NEW YORK — It’s a metaphor for Manhattan, a synonym for “Mad Men,” the apex of midcentury modernist New York. It supplanted some of the city’s stateliest mansions with corporate palaces in blue glass and bronze. The Park Avenue School of Architecture is the term critic Ada Louise Huxtable employed to define the “sleek and shiny” postwar skyline, which moved the concept of elegance, as she put it, “from domestic to professional life, from the apartment house to the office building.”

During the coronavirus, New York endures and awaits. This latest entry in a series of (condensed and edited) walks around town with architects and others is the first of two exploring, Rashomon-like, some of the city’s most famous midtown skyscrapers and commercial landmarks. As with paintings or people, there’s no one correct way to look at buildings or the city. The two walks take different perspectives: an architect’s, then an engineer’s.

Annabelle Selldorf moved to New York from Germany after falling in love with the towers of Park Avenue as a teenager. She founded Selldorf Architects in 1988. The firm has transformed the historical Miller House on Fifth Avenue into the Neue Galerie, designed the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn and is currently expanding the Frick Collection.

While New Yorkers are self-quarantining, I’m conducting the walks virtually, over the phone. They’re also intended to be consumed virtually. Selldorf suggested a stroll along Park Avenue with a short jog to what used to be called the Citicorp Center a block away. She proposed we “meet” at 52nd Street on the pink granite plaza in front of the Seagram Building, the storied bronzed monolith from 1958 by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Michael Kimmelman: Why Seagram?

Annabelle Selldorf: It made a big difference in my life as an architect. When I first came here from Germany, it epitomized for me New York as a modern city.

Kimmelman: When was that?

Selldorf: In 1978 or ’79 — I can’t remember the exact date. I had just finished high school. A friend picked me up at the airport, and that same day we visited Park Avenue, which I knew only from pictures. In Germany, when you finish high school, you go straight on to study for the profession that you want to pursue, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an architect. My father was an architect, and he worked so damn hard all the time. The work didn’t always seem that much fun, nor did it seem that you could be sure of making a living.

Kimmelman: What kind of architect was he?

Selldorf: Mostly interiors. Modernist. In Germany, there was an urgent need to break with the past, so nearly every postwar architect was a modernist. But tall steel buildings like Seagram weren’t common there yet. Cologne, where we lived, had been reduced to rubble during the Second World War, and the speed with which it was rebuilt made it an ugly, haphazard place. There was much bemoaning about the lack of planning and quality architecture.

So Park Avenue looked the opposite to me. It had a kind of intelligence. It was a clean slate.

Kimmelman: In the midst of a city that, during the ’70s, was exciting but in shambles.

Selldorf: New York was a tough place. But that duality, the contradiction, made me fall even more in love. I was bowled over by how these two conditions existed simultaneously: the potholes and graffiti and boomboxes along with the gleaming, heroic towers of Park Avenue, like Seagram, with its elegance and hierarchy.

Kimmelman: What do you mean, hierarchy?

Selldorf: A simple example: If we cross the plaza and look at the gray mosaic ceiling of the entry canopy and the lobby, you see how Seagram sets up a kind of hierarchy of materials. Mies could have clad everything in travertine, but the contrast with the mosaic enhanced the building’s refinement; it made the marble look more luxurious. The building is all about these refinements. I got to see how Mies orchestrated them from the inside years ago, when I started my firm. The second job I got was renovating Daimler-Benz’s offices on the 30th floor of Seagram.

Kimmelman: How karmic.

Selldorf: That’s what I felt. It turned out there was nothing in the building too minor that Mies hadn’t thought it out entirely. It’s not an architecture that asks your opinion. Today we talk about whether architecture makes people feel welcome. That’s a good question. Somebody could argue that Seagram represents the opposite, a kind of authoritarianism.

I don’t know that I can disagree with that. Every tenant at Seagram has to maintain the ceiling treatment he prescribed — a 4-by-4 aluminum grid of Mylar sheets illuminated with one kind of fluorescent fixture. Over the years tenants have tried installing colored fluorescents, but the Seagram police always comes around to stop them. You see the logic when you drive by at night, and all the different floors are illuminated the same way.

I find the rigor and formality calming. It’s a building in which you feel you can breathe because the spaces are so perfectly resolved.

I wanted to point out another very fine International Style building just south, 270 Park; it used to be called the Union Carbide Building. It’s being demolished, which is truly sad. But on the way I have to mention the Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building, because it’s unavoidable.

Kimmelman: Completed in 1963, partly inspired by the superrefined Pirelli tower in Milan by Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi. Alas, Pan Am is not as elegant, squatting on top of Grand Central Terminal. It was once voted the building New Yorkers most wanted to demolish.

Selldorf: Designed by Walter Gropius, Pietro Belluschi and Emery Roth &amp;amp; Sons. When I saw the building on that first trip, I couldn’t believe anybody would have the audacity to stick such a monstrosity in the middle of Park Avenue. It seemed like such a crazy, preposterous, brazen, terrible gesture — but at the same time, astonishing, like New York. I still find there is something unabashed and undeniable about it, which, after all these years, makes me feel almost a little sentimental.

Anyway, a much better building is 270 Park, always attributed to the architect Gordon Bunshaft, the great hero of Skidmore, Owings &amp;amp; Merrill, but which, thanks to all the protests around the demolition, we now know involved the work of a woman.

Kimmelman: Natalie Griffin de Blois. Who was instrumental in two other SOM landmarks farther up Park: Lever House and the former Pepsi-Cola building.

Selldorf: We’ll go to those next. I think Union Carbide opened after Seagram.

Kimmelman: During the early 1960s. Then in the ’70s, what’s now JPMorgan Chase took the building over and eight years ago completed one of the biggest renovation projects in ages, turning the place into an eco-conscious, LEED Platinum headquarters for 3,000 employees.

Selldorf: Only to decide to tear the building down.

Kimmelman: Right, and assuming nothing changes now, replace it with what will be a massive tower designed by Norman Foster, half again as tall, for 15,000 employees — one of the biggest new buildings in the city and the biggest voluntary demolition project ever, which seems like environmental malfeasance, not to mention a real loss because of de Blois.

Selldorf: I’m ashamed that I hadn’t known more about her before the protests over the demolition. It fills me with pride to know that she worked on all these fantastic buildings. She was doing this amazing work when extreme sexism made it very hard for women in architecture.

Kimmelman: In an interview she remembered, once, how Bunshaft felt free to tell her to go back home and change her outfit because he didn’t like the color of her dress. As a young mother, she said, she was also ordered to join him on a site visit over a weekend, then told to leave the kids in the car.

Selldorf: I recognize the power of real estate in this city. We live in a capitalist society; the Landmarks Preservation Commission can only protect so many buildings, which means some children are left behind, and Union Carbide is one of them. But it’s a loss.

Kimmelman: So we’re circling back north on Park, to 53rd Street. Completed in 1952, a pioneer of the curtain wall in New York, Lever House is a glass tower levitating over a glass pavilion hovering over a plaza. My mother used to exhibit her sculpture in the plaza.

Selldorf: It’s a wonderful place for art. Lifting that pavilion up from the ground gave the plaza a kind of border along the avenue while opening the space up to the street. Everything about Lever House feels open, light, exuberant, with those colorful spandrels of blue-green glass and thin stainless fittings.

At the same time, it’s a highly disciplined building, in the same rigorous vein of thinking about steel and glass and the grid as Seagram and Union Carbide. It was especially clever to position the tower not facing Park but stretching east to west, which guarantees people inside the offices less-obstructed views north and south, over the pavilion. This transparency, the floating, you see it carried to perfection in the Pepsi building.

Kimmelman: At 59th Street, 500 Park. A 10-story gem. De Blois worked on it with Bunshaft and Robert Cutler at SOM.

Selldorf: I sometimes dream about living there. The detailing, the flatness of the spandrels, the geometry of the vertical mullions in relation to the horizontal paneling. The building looks like it’s suspended in midair. You can see the supporting structure through the curtain wall windows, but you don’t immediately notice it because your eye is concentrated on this smooth, immaculately proportioned envelope, which looks easy to design but is not. When you build a building, you have to put in floors — and columns to hold up those floors — so at some point or another, a building obviously can’t be transparent. Part of what gives the illusion of transparency at Pepsi are the wide bays, with those huge windows that create this seamless skin. If the facade had been divided up into even one more bay, I think it would have looked crowded.

As an architect, you know that achieving such an effect is not something you just draw one morning and there it is. Arriving at the result is a slow, iterative process. You also need to have the ability to recognize the right result when you get there. All that takes work.

Kimmelman: It’s a gift.

Selldorf: Certainly a gift. All the buildings we’re looking at depend on the most precise decisions coming together to produce what seems effortless. All these years later, I find this architecture inspiring every time I drive down Park Avenue.

Kimmelman: We could end there, but you wanted to look at the (formerly named) Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Ave., the silvery, striped behemoth on stilts with the sliced top that cantilevers over St. Peter’s Church. Some people may remember it as the skyscraper that was occupied when a student discovered a wind could knock it over, so they put thousands of Red Cross volunteers on standby and, without informing the public, spent months reinforcing vulnerable joints during the dead of night. I think of it as where my wife and I took our older son to see the model train show at Christmas.

Selldorf: It seemed very un-New Yorkish when I saw it on that first trip — with that awkward, 45-degree angle on the skyline and that crazy cantilever. I still find the gesture of the angle loud and brash.

Kimmelman: William LeMessurier was the engineer; Hugh Stubbins, the architect. The building was completed during the 1970s, so it’s a generation later than the ones we’ve been talking about. There was also a cascading fountain in the atrium by Hideo Sasaki that was sadly demolished a few years ago.

Selldorf: It’s not my favorite building aesthetically, probably because it is such a ’70s design, but there is something about the boldness of it that I might still come to appreciate at some point.

What I found new and fascinating on that first trip was that the upper floors were corporate offices, while the lower few floors around the tall atrium were open to the public with shops, including — this was really exciting to me then — the design shop called Conran. I was struck by the building’s attitude, urbanistically: this idea of inviting the general public inside, not just restricting access to the people who worked in the offices.

The building somehow works in a neighborhood of old buildings and stores on Lexington Avenue. It’s an example of how adaptable New York is.

Kimmelman: You appreciate it for overcoming its adversity.

Selldorf: Now that the city is shut, that seems like an encouraging message, no?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/arts/design/nyc-skyscrapers-virtual-tour.html" id="616ece2f-eb93-30db-a0f7-119f0f26a11d"> The New York Times </a> .

Classic Skyscrapers Define New York. Take a Virtual Tour.

(Critic’s Notebook)

The movie industry was already on a precipice. Did the pandemic just give it a push?

With theaters shuttered all over the world and hundreds of millions of people ordered to stay at home, it’s unclear when the movie industry can resume business as normal, or even whether that “normal” will look anything like Hollywood wants it to. Pivotal pieces of the film calendar — including the summer-blockbuster season and the year-end awards gantlet — have been thrown into disarray, and in their absence the gulf between streaming media and the theatrical experience may only widen further.

How will the movie industry cope with these disruptions, and what will happen to the rest of 2020 if fearful audiences can’t be coaxed back to the theater? Season by season, the outlook is bleak.

Summer: Blockbuster Season Evaporates

If a magic wand could be waved that would eradicate the coronavirus and free people from their homes, the most lucrative summer movie season ever would surely follow.

But there is no magic wand. A potential vaccine for the coronavirus will take at least a year to become available, and in that time, it’s hard to imagine a feasible way for movie theaters to reopen and turn a regular profit. Even if plans were drafted to deep-clean theaters between screenings and limit attendance so moviegoers could still keep a safe distance, will studios still want to screen their would-be blockbusters for such a decimated crowd? These movies often need to make hundreds of millions of dollars simply to break even, an impossible task for a world where only a sliver of the population gets to see them.

Though Universal delayed the Vin Diesel-led “Fast 9” nearly a full year, from May 2020 to April 2021, other studios have been more cautious about making changes to their schedules. Warner Bros. has not yet announced a new release date for Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” currently parked on July 17, and though the studio moved “Wonder Woman 1984” off its June 5 berth, that superhero sequel is still set to come out in August. Both films are intended to be billion-dollar grossers, but that hardly seems realistic if people remain discouraged from gathering en masse, especially in hard-hit markets like China.

Still, many in Hollywood are taking a wait-and-see approach to the pandemic. Disney postponed early-summer films like the Marvel entry “Black Widow” and the Pixar title “Soul,” but the studio’s live-action take on “Mulan,” already bumped from its spring slot, is currently scheduled to come out July 24. Is it because the movie is aimed at a young audience, the demographic that has so far proven most resistant to the coronavirus? Or will Disney need every part of its empire projecting confidence in order to get people back into its theme parks and onto its cruise ships by the end of summer?

Some studios have pivoted to digital debuts or shifted smaller and already-released films onto streaming services. Paramount sold its imminent Kumail Nanjiani-Issa Rae comedy, “The Lovebirds,” to Netflix, while Universal just released the pricey animated film “Trolls: World Tour” on demand for $19.99. The studio bragged that “Trolls” set an all-time digital record but declined to release figures, leaving it still unclear how profitable a digital-only release can be for a big-budget tentpole.

And while families will pay less for a “Trolls” rental than they would on several movie tickets, the price still compares unfavorably to a monthly Netflix subscription ($8.99 to $15.99). The streaming behemoth is well-suited to ride out the pandemic, and its summer slate remains unaffected. Audiences’ allegiance to Netflix and other new streaming services will probably grow even more entrenched the longer theaters are closed.

Fall: Film Festivals Are in Doubt

You’ll never hear more coughs than at a film festival screening.

The attendees are typically tired, overscheduled and stressed out — a trade-off for the privilege of seeing great films in advance — and they only grow more worn-down as the festival continues. It is the lucky few who make it to the end without contracting some sort of cold. Now, they’re up against something far worse.

It’s hard to imagine how the finely calibrated calendar of film festivals can continue as planned. South by Southwest was the pandemic’s first major event cancellation in March and the Cannes Film Festival, initially postponed from its usual May slot, looks to be the next, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has extended a ban on public events in the country until mid-July.

Films like Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” which was intended to premiere at Cannes in May before a summer release, have already been pushed to later in the year. Organizers admitted this week that Cannes can’t be held the way it was originally intended: Even if the festival was bumped to a late-summer date, it would face interference from three key film festivals that begin in September and are meant to kick off the prestige movie season.

But will any of those fests still happen? The Venice Film Festival is up first, on Sept. 2, and while a premiere there is usually coveted — last year, “Joker” began its juggernaut run on the Lido — Italy is still reeling from a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 20,000 of its citizens so far. Will this devastated country really be ready to throw a glamorous film festival a few months from now? And will Hollywood stars be eager to travel to it?

Subsequent festivals in Telluride, Colorado, and Toronto are considered even more important to launching year-end films. Still, some experts have warned of a potential coronavirus resurgence in the fall, and many may balk at going even if protective measures are taken and capacity is reduced. And if it looks like the 2020 awards season may be compromised, many prestige films could opt to sit out this festival year entirely.

Winter: Will Oscar Season Crumble, Too?

This was supposed to be an afterglow year for the Oscars, a time to bask in the good will generated from Bong Joon Ho’s popular “Parasite” and its triumph in the best-picture category.

Now, just a few months after that history-making moment for a Korean film, the motion picture academy may be pushed into another forward-thinking decision before it’s quite ready: Will the Oscars allow films to be eligible if the pandemic prevents them from receiving a theatrical release?

Some streaming movies have previously earned Oscar attention with only a minimal, obligatory dip into theaters, but the prospect of no theatrical release at all is a bridge the academy has never been willing to cross. After winning recent concessions from Netflix to commit to a longer theatrical release window for the company’s awards titles, the academy may now be especially reluctant to allow mass exceptions. Loosen the rules just this once, and it could prove difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

Another possibility that’s been floated is extending Oscar eligibility so that the next show will include films released in both 2020 and 2021, something the academy has not done since several double-decker ceremonies in the 1930s. If academy bigwigs embrace that scenario, major Oscar contenders like this December’s “West Side Story” are in danger of becoming old news by the time voters fill out their ballots, and even Netflix might be tempted to push year-end awards films like David Fincher’s “Mank” and Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy” into 2021.

The academy had planned a board meeting for this week where these issues were almost certain to come up, though it was recently postponed to April 28. In the meantime, some acclaimed films that were set to come out over the next few months are already on hold: Until the academy offers further guidance, these filmmakers and casts don’t want to forsake their Oscar eligibility for a digital release. The only thing that’s certain right now is that many more dominoes have yet to fall.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/movies/hollywood-new-films-coronavirus.html" id="283360ee-1834-3842-a68e-1192239c26bf"> The New York Times </a> .

The Future That Hollywood Feared Is Happening Now

(The Carpetbagger)

“We felt it was important to show his face, not to give him any credit, but to show people how normal he was,” said Kari F. Watkins, the museum’s executive director, “It could be anybody. The terrorist among us.”

Aside from his picture, there is his rusty, yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis getaway car. The curators also included a copy of “The Turner Diaries,” a bigoted novel popular on the far right — he had a copy on the front seat of the Marquis — whose white supremacist hero blows up the FBI headquarters.

The bombing remains something of an anomaly. Between Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Oklahoma City was the deadliest deliberate attack on the United States, yet it has not been similarly woven into the tapestry of American history.

Sunday marked the bombing’s 25th anniversary, with both historians and those who experienced the attack directly worried that the memory is fading even as the violent ideology that inspired McVeigh grows ever more prevalent.

“In today’s political environment, I hear echoes of the kind of rhetoric that I think inspired the perpetrators of the bombing,” said David F. Holt, 41, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City. “I think that we all have an obligation to look at Oklahoma City — to look at that scar we have in our downtown — and remember where this all leads when you call other people your enemy, when you try to foster division and difference.”

Most anniversary events were canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak. The annual reading of the names was prerecorded, along with brief remarks by various political figures. Local television stations broadcast the hourlong remembrance video, which was also available online.

Homegrown terrorism is the main factor setting Oklahoma City apart.

“Americans forgot it pretty fast,” said David Neiwert, whose book “Alt-America” chronicles the spread of far-right extremism. “It is a difficult story to tell. It runs up against the whole narrative of American exceptionalism because that was an American terrorist, and Americans like to think that they don’t do that sort of thing, only guys in turbans do that.”

Convicted of murder and other crimes in federal court in 1997, McVeigh was executed three months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Timothy J. McVeigh slaughtered 168 people, including 19 children, by gutting a federal office building with a massive truck bomb on April 19, 1995, yet he features only fleetingly in the Oklahoma City National Memorial &amp;amp; Museum.

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