For the Record - Feb. 19, 2025
'SNL50': In the Feb. 18 Entertainment section, an article on 'SNL50: The Anniversary Special' misstated actor Aidy Bryant's first name as Andy. Also, Will Forte appeared as Elmo, not Cookie Monster.
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On Wednesday, The Times announced that Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are the new chief restaurant critics, filling — and expanding — the role Pete Wells left in 2024. This appointment is one of a few changes we're making as our food criticism becomes more national, and as we bring it to life in new ways. Who Are the Critics? Both Rao and Mishan are longtime reporters and critics for The Times, though this is the first time either has been chief critic. Most recently, Rao has been a California-based critic at large, writing broadly about food culture. Mishan was an Eat columnist for the Times Magazine and a writer at large at T magazine. She also wrote the Hungry City restaurant column from 2012 to 2020. Why Does The Times Need Two Critics? For decades, the restaurant critic for The Times focused almost exclusively on New York City, writing weekly reviews and notebooks and awarding star ratings to individual restaurants. But with subscribers in every state, and great restaurants in each of them, we'll now use two critics to deliver starred reviews of restaurants all over the country. The idea is to expand upon the work we started with the Restaurant List, our annual national roundup of the 50 places our staff is most excited about, and our lists of the best restaurants in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Austin, Texas. Who Does What? Rao will be dedicated entirely to the national dining scene. Mishan will split her time between reviewing the best and most newsworthy restaurants in New York City and covering the rest of the country with Rao. The goal is to capture particular moments in American dining — the restaurants that are most interesting, exciting and emblematic of our times. With All That Travel, Will There Be Fewer New York Reviews? New York is one of the world's great restaurant cities. It's where The Times built its authority on the subject of where best to eat. We have no plans to back away from that, and in fact will offer even more New York restaurant coverage. In the coming months, we'll start publishing brief, starred reviews from other Times critics. The Where to Eat newsletter will continue to send restaurant recommendations to subscribers' inboxes every week. And, of course, we'll keep producing The Times's annual list of the 100 Best Restaurants in New York City. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
43 minutes ago
- New York Times
New York Times Names Co-Chief Restaurant Critics
The New York Times has appointed Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao as co-chief restaurant critics, the first time that the news organization will have more than one, the company announced on Wednesday. The change is part of an effort to expand starred restaurant reviews across the country, instead of focusing them almost exclusively in New York, The Times said. Ms. Mishan and Ms. Rao, who have written about food for The Times for years, take over a role that Pete Wells held for over a decade before stepping down last year. Emily Weinstein, the editor in chief of Food and Cooking, and Sam Sifton, an assistant managing editor, said in a statement that they had an 'ambitious new plan' to cover the nation's restaurants in a more visual, personal and transparent way. Ms. Rao will work from California, while Ms. Mishan will be based in New York, and both will travel frequently. The editors said they were not 'backing away from covering New York' and would add brief starred reviews from other writers to recommend more restaurants to readers. 'We've tasked both Tejal and Ligaya with capturing this moment in American dining — the restaurants that are most interesting, exciting and emblematic of our times,' the statement said. It added, 'Both will award stars wherever they go, breaking our tradition of awarding star ratings almost entirely in New York.' That won't be the only change: The chief critics are forgoing anonymity, and will not try to hide their faces publicly. The editors said that while Ms. Rao and Ms. Mishan would do everything they could to eat at restaurants undetected, including making reservations under aliases, 'we are more or less 86'ing wigs, fake glasses and TV appearances with faces blurred.' 'Maintaining that level of anonymity — a policy that goes back decades — is just not possible anymore,' the editors said. Ms. Mishan has been a contributor to The Times for 21 years. She wrote the Hungry City column from 2012 to 2020, as well as a variety of columns and articles for the Food section and T Magazine. Ms. Rao, currently a critic at large, joined The Times in 2016. She was previously a restaurant cook and a critic for The Village Voice and Bloomberg.
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
With federal employees under ‘grievous' threat, CIA office drama ‘The Agency' pushes back
The spy is the most devoted of employees. His or her line of work demands utter commitment, if not active contempt for the very concept of a 'personal life.' Cunningly, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth's 'The Agency' — a remake of the French series 'Le Bureau des Légendes'— pushes its central character to question that arrangement. Michael Fassbender stars as Martian, a CIA spy who's recalled to London after years of living deep undercover in Ethiopia. Once a free agent, he's now constrained by the rigid bureaucratic machinations of desk work and office politics, often pitting him against his boss, Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright), and London Station bureau chief James 'Bosko' Bradley (Richard Gere). As escalating geopolitical tensions bubble up around them all — in Belarus, Sudan and beyond — Martian wonders what he might be willing to risk when his former lover, Samia Fatima Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith), reappears in his life. Stoic and self-aware, Fassbender's Martian is a slippery figure whose sense of self begins to unravel as the show's thrilling first season unfurls. 'He's really addicted to the juice of the job,' Fassbender tells The Times, sitting between Gere and Wright. 'That's where he gets his kicks from. He has this loving relationship that is the only real thing for him that will connect him to his humanity. But he's great at his job and he's kind of addicted to it. That's where I wondered, 'Does Bosko miss being out in the field?'' 'Oh, yeah,' Gere says, nodding. 'He does. He was good at it. It was the trench-warfare mentality of it. The danger. The addiction to the energy and the adrenaline of it. He's an alcoholic for it. They all are. There's no one who walks away from this safely.' The job of the actor is to reveal, that of the spy to withhold. It's why Gere pushed for Bosko to be even more of a cipher than he was on the page. 'I felt like I instinctively knew this guy,' Gere says, recalling his initial conversations with Joe Wright ('Atonement,' 'Darkest Hour'), who directed the first two episodes of the Paramount+ With Showtime series. 'We weren't totally on the same wavelength of who this character was. I think I was positing a more unknowable, nuanced character than he was. I even removed mentions of my own home life, of my backstory. 'It's in here,' he says, gesturing at his temples. 'I know it. And that's enough.' As the agency struggles to contain an increasingly volatile situation involving a missing asset on the front lines of Russia's war in Ukraine, the former field agents in London find that their preferred tactics can create friction in an office environment, where politicking requires a defter touch. 'For Martian, it's about being the sharp end of the stick and being out there,' Fassbender says. 'And being your own boss. Martian has an ego. He has his own set of rules. He does everything his own way.' Henry, in tweed suits and suitably nebbishy glasses, feels more like a company man than his two colleagues. Jeffrey Wright, an Emmy winner for 'Angels in America' in 2004, channeled the Washington, D.C., world he grew up in to create a portrait of a dutiful government employee. 'I have a great deal of respect for federal employees, particularly more so now in a time when they're under such grievous and biased attack,' Wright says. 'I think we conflate, at times, our criticism of the government with criticism that should be leveled at the politicians. But I have a great deal more respect for the people who go to work every day to be a part of the government than I do for many of the politicians who are playing theatrics in the public eye.' The London office where much of 'The Agency' takes place captures the contradictions of this contemporary espionage drama. With wall-to-wall windows that look out over the city — re-created on soundstages with the use of giant LED screens — and a glassed-in conference room at the heart of the floor, the environment itself suggests the possibility of omnipresent surveillance. The space reminds viewers and characters alike how precious and precarious privacy is in this world. Such immersion helped the trio of actors lose themselves in 'The Agency's' high-stakes workplace drama, where government secrets and transactional dynamics rule day-to-day operations. 'There's an argument to be made that the only time that you could unconsciously have an artistic experience with a piece is through architecture,' says Wright, 'walking through spaces where we're taking in this design but where we're not necessarily conscious of it. I was thinking about it in terms of what we do as actors, that we actually have an opportunity to experience art in a very intimate way, in a way that no other profession does. We get to live inside this literary experience and place ourselves inside of it.' It's not hard to see parallels between what agents like Martian go through when going deep undercover and what actors are called to do. Just don't ask Fassbender to be up for the job. 'It is terrifying, pretending to do this,' Fassbender points out. 'Constantly I'm thinking, 'Jesus, the reality of it is just terrifying.' And I would be so bad at it.'
