Tiffany May

If the video showing her dancing and twirling barefoot on a rooftop was meant to be an embarrassing leak, it backfired badly.

The dance video — a mash-up of 1980s dance moves from the movie “The Breakfast Club” and the music of “Lisztomania,” by the French band Phoenix — proved to be too endearing to many social media users. Some also saw a right-wing effort to undermine Ocasio-Cortez, a liberal Democrat known as “AOC” among her fans.

A Twitter user identified as Richard Burr, a former contestant on “The Great British Bake Off,” wrote: “I love how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has turned American politics into a live action Footloose. People dancing!? Oh the horror! Where will it end?”

Since Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Puerto Rican “girl from the Bronx,” was elected in New York in November, she has been a target of conservatives and far-right groups. She won political notice after jolting the Democratic establishment by defeating an incumbent congressman to win the primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District in a virtual landslide in June.

But her origin story, which saw her go from being a bartender to a lawmaker, has been dismissed by some on the right. Her clothes have come in for particular scrutiny, with a conservative journalist criticizing a fitted coat and jacket she wore as “too nice for a girl who struggles.”

The hosts of “Fox and Friends” have mocked her for saying she could not afford an apartment in Washington until she received her salary, disputing the menial savings she cited. She has been something of a lightning rod in her own party as well. Claire McCaskill, the departing Democratic senator from Missouri, called her a “thing” and “a bright shiny new object” in a recent CNN interview.

When Ocasio-Cortez, dressed in white in homage to suffragists and pioneering women in politics, was sworn in on Thursday, Republicans booed her.

To which she replied on Twitter: “Over 200 members voted for Nancy Pelosi today, yet the GOP only booed one: me. Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

When the dance video emerged, many internet users wondered what exactly was incriminating about a windswept Ocasio-Cortez twirling enthusiastically. The footage was from a 4-minute-20-second dance video made by Boston University students in 2010, when Ocasio-Cortez was an undergraduate.

A dubbed and edited version of the original footage surfaced when a Twitter account called AnonymousQ1776 published it online. “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” read the tweet from AnonymousQ1776, which incorrectly described it as a video from her high school days. The account has since been deleted.

The lyrics speak of watching mania “grow like a riot.” Eric Calvin Baker, who can be seen dancing in the video with Ocasio-Cortez, wrote on Twitter that the scrutiny on the new lawmaker echoed the “mania” after which the song is named.

Many social media users came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, and the video has inspired memes.

Molly Ringwald, one of the stars of “The Breakfast Club,” declared on Twitter that she was “in the club.” The actress Ally Sheedy, whose dance moves Ocasio-Cortez imitates in the video, also endorsed the homage.

A brand-new Twitter account called “AOC Dances to Every Song” mashed Ocasio-Cortez’s joyous dance moves with music as varied as “Gangnam Style,” China’s national anthem and Selena Gomez’s “Kill Em With Kindness.” (But perhaps it aligns best with Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”)

“I figure if I can’t campaign for her in New York, I can make funny videos in Arizona,” Valentina Rodgers, 18, the account’s creator said.

The musician Jonathan Mann overlaid the video with lyrics in support of universal health care, a core campaign issue for Ocasio-Cortez, a former community activist, member of the Democratic Socialists of America and Bernie Sanders campaign organizer.

And Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, had been using Ocasio-Cortez’s video among other “Lisztomania” and “Breakfast Club” mash-ups to illustrate the concept of fair use in his lectures, he said in an email Friday.

“That may explain why she seemed so familiar to me when she appeared on the national stage,” he wrote, adding, “Obviously, her coolness long predates her political brilliance.”

Alluding to the culture of reckoning that followed the “Me Too” era and the double standards that affect women and men in the public sphere, the comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani tweeted:

“Man sexually assaults women in high school: ‘That was so long ago!’ Woman dances in high school: ‘We must set her ablaze.'”

Ocasio-Cortez addressed the issue Friday, as she often does, on Twitter, writing: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dance-video.html" id="ce5e4b2f-1862-395c-a04b-0cecdc4380f9">The New York Times</a>.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Video Was Meant as a Smear, but It Backfired

Days before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, officially took office in Washington as the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives, video footage from her college days suddenly appeared on the internet.

The panda was photographed in April with an infrared camera at the Wolong National Nature Reserve in the southwestern province of Sichuan, local authorities said in a statement.

Li Sheng, who belongs to the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said it was the first recorded image of a wild giant panda that is fully white. (There have been sightings of brown-and-white pandas in Qinling, a mountainous region in the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi.)

The white panda’s appearance is caused by albinism, a rare genetically inherited condition that prevents the normal synthesis of melanin, resulting in white hair or pale skin, as well as reddish eyes. Giant pandas are one of eight bear species, and albinism has been recorded in many other species of bears, though rarely.

“I personally think it’s quite random for it to be discovered, since albinism manifests itself so infrequently,” Li said in a telephone interview. “This was recorded just in time.”

Aside from sensitivity to sunlight, albinism does not usually have a negative effect on the anatomy or life functions of animals, but their unusual appearance can make them easier to detect in the wild.

“Based on the photo, albinism has not affected the life of the white panda much,” said Li, who is also a researcher at Peking University. “It looks quite well, quite strong.”

Duan Zhaogang, the Communist Party secretary of the Wolong district, said in the statement that the reserve would increase its use of infrared cameras to track the growth and movements of the panda, which is estimated to be 1 or 2 years old, and its potential offspring. (The mutation, which comes from a recessive gene, can be passed down.)

Wild pandas can be difficult to study because they mostly live alone, often in remote areas. To facilitate research, a Chinese conservation center has developed a facial recognition app that can distinguish one panda from another, the state news media said this month. Nearly 10,000 images of pandas from a database have been analyzed since 2017.

There are about 1,900 giant pandas living in the wild, according to a 2016 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Citing an increase in the panda population that was credited to the Chinese government, the group changed the panda’s conservation status at that time from “endangered” to “vulnerable.” But Chinese officials opposed the move, arguing that pandas still struggle to reproduce in fragmented patches of wilderness.

Also this month, a rare Asiatic black bear was caught on camera in the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea. Flora and fauna thrive in the region, also known as the DMZ, because it is rarely disturbed by humans.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7809cd15-3cba-3cc2-ad10-fabd0857e462" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/world/asia/china-white-panda.html">The New York Times</a>.

White Panda Is Spotted in China for the First Time

HONG KONG — An all-white, albino panda has appeared in a natural reserve in China, the first of its kind to be documented, an expert said this week.

White panda is spotted in China for the first time

His death was confirmed by his longtime representative, Sarah Greene, and his studio manager, Pierfrancesco Celada. They did not specify a cause but said he had died in his sleep.

In photographs he likened to “supermarket bar codes,” Wolf captured Hong Kong’s high-rises — dizzying stretches of pink, green and orange — in a 2005 series titled “Architecture of Density.”

“He took a building that is very three-dimensional and compressed it into a surface in a way that would make one feel breathless and lost in scale,” said Tugo Cheng, an architect and fine-art photographer based in Hong Kong.

By tightly framing high-rises in a way that showed neither sky nor horizon, Wolf created architectural photographs that gave the viewer the impression of infinity and repetition.

“This building is only as big as it is, but it could be 10 times as big, because you don’t know where it ends,” he said of his photos in a 2009 talk at the Aperture Foundation.

A closer look at one of his pictures reveals minuscule details that intrude on the uniformity of a building’s facade: laundry dangling from a window, poles jutting over a ledge, a child’s flower-shaped windmill spinning below a grate.

Wolf later spent time inside homes, documenting small, square-shaped public-housing apartments for a series called “100 x 100.” But to some critics he began revealing too much.

From a rooftop in Chicago, Wolf used a telephoto lens to capture both the scale of condominium units and the particulars of private lives, glimpsed through illuminated windows, for “The Transparent City.”

Later, for “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” he placed a camera on a tripod in front of a computer screen and, from blurry Google Street View footage in Paris, captured images of cars burning, dogs defecating, couples kissing and cyclists falling onto the streets.

The project, which won honorable mention in the World Press Photo awards of 2011, was lauded for its innovative use of technology, but it was also questioned as to whether it should be considered photojournalism.

Wolf was aware of how intrusive his camera could be, as when he photographed Tokyo commuters in packed train cars pressed against the glass of the doors. “It’s a bit aggressive, what I’m doing,” he said, “because these people cannot defend themselves.”

The project won a World Press Award in the daily life category. Wolf surmised that some subjects closed their eyes at the sight of the camera. “The thinking is, ‘If I don’t see you, you don’t see me,’” he said.

He called himself an “obsessive” worker who returned to subjects repeatedly until a project was complete.

Greene, his longtime representative, said Wolf’s “intensity” gave his work its impact. For instance, he spent 13 years photographing objects found in back alleys and published them as “Informal Solutions,” a 264-page book subdivided by chapters on mops, boots, carts and gloves.

He also collected hundreds of chairs and thousands of used toys that he incorporated into gallery installations of his photography.

Michael Wolf was born July 30, 1954, in Munich. Both his parents were artists: His mother painted and did pottery, and his father did calligraphy.

Wolf studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and, under photojournalist Otto Steinert, at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany. He worked as a photographer for Stern, a weekly newsmagazine in Europe, until he was 39, when he moved to Hong Kong in what he called “the throes of a midlife crisis.”

Though he would occasionally take on projects in other cities, he honed his photographic style largely in Hong Kong.

Wolf is survived by his wife, Barbara, and their son, Jasper.

In 2005, he won a World Press Photo award for his series on workers at a toy factory in mainland China.

By then he had begun wading into fine-art photography, looking for quirky details of life in crowded Hong Kong. He photographed, for example, the tools that workers stored in back alleys connected to kitchens and gloves hanging from industrial pipes and bamboo scaffolding, ballooning in the breeze as if they were disembodied hands reaching across the city.

“When foreign photographers come to Hong Kong, they often capture things they consider to be typically Hong Kong: red lanterns and the like,” said Lam Yik-Fei, a photographer who published the book “Hong Kong Umbrella” with Wolf in 2015. “But he would go to back alleys and photograph things that maybe even Hong Kong locals wouldn’t notice.”

After years of photographing buildings without the context of sky and horizon, Wolf spent two hours every morning shooting what he titled “Cheung Chau Sunrises,” his final tribute to Hong Kong.

Before moving there, he said, he had spent a long time pondering where to go. “The globe of the world turned in my head, and I stopped at many places and none of them somehow resonated,” Wolf said in 2009. “And at the very end I stopped in Hong Kong and everything in me said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Michael Wolf, who photographed skyscrapers minus the sky, dies at 65

HONG KONG — Michael Wolf, a photographer who was known for his vertiginous depictions of rainbow-hued skyscrapers in Hong Kong as well as the minutiae of everyday life there, died Thursday at his home in Cheung Chau, an outlying island near the city. He was 65.

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Tiffany May

Articles written by the author

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Video Was Meant as a Smear, but It Backfired

White panda is spotted in China for the first time

Michael Wolf, who photographed skyscrapers minus the sky, dies at 65