Latest news with #NancyReagan
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At the Kennedy Center, Trump Puts His Pop Culture Obsession on Display
The president of the United States was talking about Gloria Gaynor, Rambo, Kiss, 'The Phantom of the Opera' and Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' campaign. It was not 1986 and the president was not Ronald Reagan. It was 2025 and it was Donald Trump. He was standing on the plush, red-carpeted grand foyer of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, unveiling his own personal choices for the next class of Kennedy Center honorees. He also announced his plans to host the award ceremony himself, and then began to hold forth more generally about the nature of show business and his own tortured relationship with celebrity. 'I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,' Mr. Trump said proudly at one point. 'If you can believe that one.' There is something about the Kennedy Center that seems to bring this out in him — a kind of yearning for a simpler time when he was thought of as a tabloid rascal turned reality television maestro, a mostly in-on-the-joke figure who symbolized greed and commercialism and who appeared in everything from 'Home Alone' to 'Sex and the City' to a Pizza Hut commercial. Whatever else he is or has become, Donald J. Trump is at heart a pop culture obsessive. A fame junkie of the highest order. Us Weekly in human form. That piece of him did not just fade away because he became the leader of a populist political movement and a two-time president. It's all still wound up in there, as was evidenced by so much of what he said on Wednesday. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Beloved TV Personality's Gaunt Appearance Worries Fans: 'Looks Terribly Ill'
Beloved TV host Sharon Osbourne was spotted out running errands in Los Angeles on May 14, and her very thin appearance has a lot of her fans concerned. See the photos here. A lot of the commenters on the article are voicing concerns about Osbourne's drastic weight loss, with one writing, "And people still think this is preferable to exercising and eating in moderation?" Another added, "She looks terribly ill." "She looks as if she has terminal cancer. I hope she is OK," wrote a third fan. A fourth wondered if "something else must be going on." "Poor lady, I hope she will be ok and that this is a warning to the rest of us!" wrote another fan. And many comments were less than kind, with one commenter writing, "Very sad because she was looking fantastic a few years ago. Now she looks like a Corpse Bride cartoon." Another wrote, "Melted candle," and a third chimed in with, "She destroyed her face." But some fans were sticking up for Osbourne, with one writing, "She's in her 70s. I don't think we need to rake her over the coals for her appearance. She's not even in the public eye anymore." Osbourne has been candid about her use of Ozempic, the weight loss drug typically prescribed for diabetics. On Howie Mandel's podcast in April 2024, she said that she worries she took things too far. "I can't put on weight now, and I don't know what it's done to my metabolism, but I just can't seem to put any on, because I think I went too far," said Osbourne. She also told The Guardian that she lost 42 pounds in four months and her husband, Ozzy Osbourne, told her she looked like the famously thin Nancy Reagan. "I was injecting myself with Ozempic and I lost three stone in four months. Too much. I now weigh seven stone and can't put on weight. Ozzy says I look like Nancy Reagan.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Carpe Diem, Harvard
Harvard University and Hillsdale College have a lot more in common than you might expect: Both are home to many good and serious students and faculty, neither is very much like the cartoon of itself outsiders see, and they both have the one big important thing that kept Donald Regan from getting bossed around by Nancy Reagan—it is, after all, to Ronald Reagan's irascible treasury secretary that we reportedly owe the popularization of the term 'f—k-you money.' 'Why does Harvard need such a big endowment?' people used to ask. 'Why is Hillsdale so insistent about not taking government money?' others demanded. Now you know. Harvard's endowment was right around $64 billion at last count, equal to about 10 years of the school's operating expenses. Those investments produce billions of dollars in income for the university, which uses some of the proceeds for operating expenses and reinvests the rest. Endowment income is Harvard's largest source of revenue. It's a little complicated, of course: Harvard's 'endowment' isn't a fund but some 14,000 individual funds, most of which are restricted to certain uses in certain programs. But it is a big pile of money, and there's a great big stream of revenue from tuition and other sources, too. It is not that Harvard isn't going to miss the $2.2 billion in grants and contracts the Trump administration has frozen on account of … pretexts for its pique and resentment and vindictiveness. But Harvard can adapt. So can Yale University ($41 billion) Stanford University ($36 billion), Princeton University ($33 billion), and the University of Pennsylvania ($21 billion), etc. Hillsdale does things a little differently. It has a respectable endowment, too, right around $1 billion. Tuition represents a relatively small share of its revenue; instead, the school has developed real proficiency at fund-raising and generating its own income over the years. Hillsdale has a reputation for conservatism, but conservatism is a slippery thing: Hillsdale was open to black and female students from its founding in 1844 (doing so was part of the point of its founding as a Christian college) whereas Harvard didn't graduate its first African Americans until a generation later and didn't admit female undergraduates until the 1970s. I taught a seminar at Hillsdale a few years back, and I was surprised (and pleased) to learn that while there were a lot more young people walking around with pictures of Margaret Thatcher there than at the typical campus, that was a minority enthusiasm, while most of the students were there to learn history and read philosophy and to be, in a word, educated. What Hillsdale's independence from government funding has enabled is not conservatism or sectarianism but independence. Does that sound good to anybody else right now? And by anybody, I mean anybody sitting in a university's president's office. There's an old story about two brothers, one an alcoholic and the other a teetotaler. The alcoholic explains himself: 'My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?' And the teetotaler explains himself: 'My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?' Hillsdale is a teetotaler when it comes to government money, but other institutions may be getting the message that it is time to sober up. They should take advantage of the moment. It is easy to find a lot of inane, insane, or counterproductive stuff being done with public money at universities. (There's a whole weird little galaxy of right-wing media that employs telegenic 22-year-olds to do almost nothing else.) On the other hand, university-based (and most often government-supported) work in 'basic science'—pure research into the fundamental questions—is an excellent use of the modest public resources involved. And, yes, the resources are modest: A typical year's worth of federal support of basic science amounts to about 11 days of Social Security spending. A smart political hustler, understanding that the road from pure research to commercialization is not as long and winding today as it was a generation ago, might propose some modest entitlement reform, using most of the savings for deficit-reduction but kicking in enough to, say, triple federal funding for basic science, which could have real benefits for the areas in which the United States actually excels, which isn't 20th-century manufacturing but cutting-edge information technology, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, other medical technologies, aerospace, robotics, energy, agriculture, etc. The graduate students and captains of industry you'd bring into your camp may not be a huge voting bloc, but Americans have, historically, enjoyed living in the country that keeps inventing the future, and we had a pretty good run of it from the Manhattan Project through the birth of the Internet. Unfortunately, our current generation of political hustlers is peopled by those who aren't even smart enough to see the most obvious kinds of opportunity. There is much to be said for government support of university research, as the Pentagon and NASA et al. have known for a long time. The case against the universities is the same as the case against other elite institutions: They are too fat and lazy, too smug and self-satisfied, too insulated from market pressures and democratic accountability, too keen on niche enthusiasms and voguish ideological jihads—too far removed from the people they are supposed to serve and the people who pay the taxes that support so much of their work. That case often is overstated, but it does not come out of nowhere, and it is not entirely without merit. Harvard has an opportunity to set an example, to refocus itself on its most worthwhile work and to do a little pruning of the unfruitful and the meretricious. And maybe make a little bit of a show out of it—and drive home the point. Other universities—the ones that do not have Harvard's resources—would benefit from Harvard's taking the lead. Government money is always going to come with political strings, but there are better and worse ways to play the politics, and Harvard has enough in its rainy-day funds to enjoy some flexibility: Thanks to its endowment, Harvard doesn't have to kowtow to this administration or to the next one. But the moment does call for action: This is one of those cases where good policy is good politics: Husbanding university resources more prudently would be a better practice and would also assuage some of the populist irritation that has made a political target of higher education. Sure, there will be some howls down at the sundry grievance-studies departments, but what's the point of having 'f—k-you' money if you never say the words and do the thing?
