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Time of India
7 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Sebastiao Salgado, acclaimed Brazilian photographer, is dead
Sebastiao Salgado (AP) Sebastiao Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of humanity and nature in the Amazon rainforest and beyond won him some of the world's top honours and made him a household name, died Friday in Paris. He was 81. His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded in Brazil. His family cited leukemia as the cause, saying that Salgado had developed the illness after contracting a particular type of malaria in 2010 while working on a photography project in Indonesia. "Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world," Salgado's family said in a statement. Working mostly in black and white, Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with his striking images of the natural world and the human condition, often travelling around the globe to photograph impoverished and vulnerable communities. In all, he worked in more than 120 countries throughout his career. Salgado was especially interested in the plight of workers and migrants, and spent decades documenting nature and people in the Amazon rainforest. He captured some of his most well-known images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in northern Brazil. The photo essay was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and cemented Salgado's reputation as one of the star photographers of his time. In the 1980s, Salgado also moved audiences worldwide with a series of pictures depicting the famine in Ethiopia. That work earned him worldwide recognition and won some of photography's most prestigious awards. In 1991, while on assignment in Kuwait, Salgado photographed workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein's troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq's turbulent retreat from Kuwait. "The photos were beyond extraordinary," said Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at The New York Times Magazine, who worked with him on that assignment. "It was one of the best photo essays ever made. " On another noteworthy assignment, Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination bid on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He photographed the gunman, John Hinckley Jr, moments after he was tackled to the ground. "He had an uncanny sense of where important stories were," said Ryan. Known for his intense blue-eyed gaze and his rapid way of speaking, Salgado was remembered by his colleagues as a defender of documenting the human condition who respected the people he photographed. He was at times criticised for cloaking human suffering and environmental catastrophe in a visually stunning aesthetic, but Salgado maintained that his way of capturing people was not exploitative. "Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?" he asked in an interview with The Guardian in 2024. "The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there." Over the course of his career, Salgado's work won some of photography's top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born Feb 8, 1944, in Aimores, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. An economist by training, Salgado discovered photography while working for the World Bank and traveling to Africa.
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Nahid Rachlin, novelist who explored the Iranian psyche, dies at 85
Advertisement 'There is a subtle shift in 'Foreigner' that is fascinating to watch,' Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, 'a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'What is apparent to Feri at the start -- the misery and backwardness of Iranian life -- becomes less apparent,' Tyler continued. 'Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?' In a 1990 lecture, Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, who received the Nobel Prize in 2001, noted that 'Foreigner,' 'in its subdued, unpolitical way, foreshadowed the hysteria that was to come' for Iran -- the popular uprisings that forced out the repressive Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was backed by the United States, and ushered in a theocratic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Advertisement Ms. Rachlin grew up steeped in those contradictions. In her hometown, Ahvaz, Iran, the local cinema featured American films even as the mosque across the street 'warned against sinful pleasures,' she wrote in a memoir, 'Persian Girls' (2006). Her own home 'was chaotic, filled with a clashing and confusing mixture of traditional Iranian/Muslim customs and values, and Western ones,' she wrote. 'None of us prayed, followed the hijab, or fasted.' But her parents insisted on arranged marriages for their children and reserved higher education for their sons. Ms. Rachlin's second novel, 'Married to a Stranger' (1983), explored post-revolutionary Iran. Reviewing it in the Times, Barbara Thompson said it depicted, 'better than most factual accounts, what was happening in Iran that made the Ayatollah's theocracy possible.' Nahid Bozorgmehri was born June 6, 1939, in Ahvaz, the seventh of 10 children of Mohtaram (Nourowzian) and Manoochehr Bozorgmehri. Her father was a prominent lawyer and judge. Three of her siblings died in childhood. At 6 months, Nahid was given by her mother to her Aunt Maryam, her mother's widowed sister, who longed for a child after years of infertility. But when Nahid was 9 -- the age at which girls in Iran could legally marry -- her father, most likely concerned that her more traditional aunt would follow that custom, retrieved her. (Perhaps he understood the consequences, having married Nahid's mother when she was 9 years old and he was 34.) The separation devastated Nahid. Feeling 'kidnapped,' Ms. Rachlin wrote in a 2002 essay for The New York Times Magazine, she had a strained relationship with her birth mother and would never call her Mother. Advertisement A childhood photo of Ms. Rachlin, then Nahid Bozorgmehri (far left), with her parents and siblings in Iran. VIA RACHLIN FAMILY/NYT Over time, she grew close to her older sister Pari, who fought their father over her pursuit of acting and her resistance to arranged marriage -- battles she lost. Determined to avoid such a fate, Nahid implored her father to send her to America to attend college, like her brothers. She enlisted her brother Parviz to persuade him: She was first in her high school class, and her writing showed promise. Her father adamantly refused. But as political tensions escalated -- both Nahid's outspoken feminist teacher and the bookseller who sometimes slipped her banned literature had disappeared -- her father, who had resigned his judgeship after interference from the government, feared a servant or neighbor might tattle about Nahid's stories and her 'white jacket' books to the Savak, the shah's notorious secret police. When Parviz found her a women's college near St. Louis, where he was studying medicine, their father allowed Nahid to apply, hoping his headstrong daughter would cause less trouble abroad -- though not without stipulating that she return home after graduation to marry. While attending Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., on a full scholarship, Ms. Rachlin discovered that though she had escaped the 'prison' of her home, as she wrote in her memoir, she felt utterly isolated in America. 'Late at night I turned to my writing, my long-lasting friend,' she wrote. She had quickly developed fluency in English -- though she had taken only hasty lessons in Iran before her departure -- and had begun writing in her adopted tongue about the difficulty of feeling neither Iranian nor American. 'Writing in English,' she said, 'gave me a freedom I didn't feel writing in Farsi.' Advertisement She majored in psychology and, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1961, resolved not to return to Iran. She curtly informed her father in a letter; he would not speak to her for 12 years. With only $755, she took a Greyhound bus to New York City, where she picked up odd jobs -- babysitting, waitressing -- and, to maintain her student visa, enrolled at the New School, where she met Howie Rachlin. They married in 1964. Their daughter, Leila, was born in 1965. In addition to her, Ms. Rachlin leaves a grandson. Rachlin died in 2021. After a few years in Cambridge, where Howie Rachlin studied for a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, and then in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he taught, they moved to Stanford, Calif., in the mid-1970s. There, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she worked on 'Foreigner.' Her novel would never find a home in Iran. Censors blocked its publication in Farsi, arguing that Nahid Rachlin's descriptions of dirty streets and hole-in-the-wall hotels suggested a failure of the shah's modernization plans. Her literary agent, Cole Hildebrand, said as far as he knows, none of her books was ever translated into Farsi. In 1981, she received devastating news: Her sister Pari had died after a fall down a flight of stairs. For decades, Ms. Rachlin could not bear to write about the tragedy; she did not turn to the subject until her memoir, in 2006. 'Yes, dearest Pari,' the last line of that work reads, 'it is to bring you back to life that I write this book.' Advertisement Her other works, all of which explore Iranian social and political life, include two short-story collections, 'Veils' (1992) and 'A Way Home' (2018); and three novels, 'The Heart's Desire' (1995), 'Jumping Over Fire' (2006), and 'Mirage' (2024). Her last novel, 'Given Away,' which will be published next year, is the story of an Iranian child bride. It draws from the life of her birth mother, who gave birth to her first child at 14. The mother-daughter connection featured prominently in Ms. Rachlin's work and in her life. She dreamed of living near her Aunt Maryam, whom she always called Mother, but Maryam felt that life in America would be too jarring and preferred to stay in Iran. With her own daughter, however, Ms. Rachlin found the tight mother-daughter bond that had always eluded her. 'Even in our rare disagreements,' Leila Rachlin wrote in an email, 'she would gently reassure me afterward, 'We're still best friends, right?'' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Get Ready for the Well Festival
How can you live a healthier, more fulfilling life? That question is at the heart of what we do in the Well section. And on May 7, the first-ever Well Festival will bring that mission to live conversations with some of the most thoughtful minds in health, science and wellness. Times journalists will interview a lineup of influential doctors, psychologists, relationship experts, athletes, celebrities, academics, chefs, podcasters and best-selling authors. A livestream will be available for Times subscribers. Sign up for access and you will receive an email link to the video feed on the morning of the event. The festival will include: Our reporters and editors will host these conversations, including some of the people behind Well bylines — like Jancee Dunn, Dani Blum and Lisa Miller. They'll be joined by colleagues from around the The Times, including the food reporter Kim Severson, the national politics reporter Astead Herndon and Susan Dominus from The New York Times Magazine. Sign up for access to the livestream now, and read more about the Well Festival.
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
‘Gauri Lankesh built movements': interview with author Rollo Romig
Rollo Romig, American journalist, essayist and critic, has been reporting on South India, mostly for The New York Times Magazine from 2013. He also writes for the New Yorker. His first book, I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, is an investigation into the life and death of slain editor-activist Gauri Lankesh, a prism through which he captures the rise of what he calls an 'electoral autocracy' in India. Edited excerpts from an interview. In the Introduction, you say you wanted to write a book on South India. Why did you then choose to write about the life and death of Gauri Lankesh? I have been writing about South India for over a decade now, covering the region from various angles. The story of Gauri Lankesh touched on what interests me about South India, its literary scene, language cultures, character of its cities and legacy of communal harmony which was Gauri's signature cause as an activist. I really felt Gauri's story illustrated for me so much of what I love about South India and what is presently under threat. Investigation into who killed Gauri Lankesh also becomes an investigation into who she was in the book. As someone who did not meet Gauri in her life, what was your impression of her? It is odd to write a book about someone whom you have never met. Trying to know her through her friends, I was struck by how people who knew her when she was young could never imagine what she became before she died -- very political, passionate and outspoken. She had metamorphosed so much. Actually, her work as a journalist is not as important as her work in connecting people. The outpouring of grief following her death, showed how she connected with such diverse sets of people. Even those who turned up did not know how many more people she had connected with. Her talent to connect people really matured into movement building talent, the kind of talent that often goes underappreciated. People realise it's important only when a person who has been doing it is gone. The book also dives into another investigation as to why Gauri Lankesh was killed. Tell us more about that. There was a lot of speculation that slain scholar M. M. Kalburgi and her advocacy for the Lingayat cause may have led to them being killed. But investigations have now shown that the primary motive for both their murders are single quotes from single speeches. The killers seem to have decided that they can't allow the person who said this to live. Maybe who Gauri Lankesh was and what she did also came into play. But both the statements of Gauri Lankesh and Kalburgi were taken out of context. They fell victim to the contemporary sound bite culture, where you seize on a single sentence and the viewers always give them the least positive explanation, a sign of extreme polarisation. This also shows how Hindutva has been making a concerted effort to narrow down what is acceptable as Hinduism, trying to introduce an element like blasphemy, completely absent in Hinduism which is essentially a vast constellation of cultures. Gauri Lankesh openly rejected neutrality, that traditional journalism swears by. As a journalist, how do you assess her journalistic work? Gauri really made me think about this question of neutrality and she has influenced me a lot on this question. Her father P. Lankesh, an English professor and a modern Kannada fiction writer, was also a non-traditional journalist. Gauri then was a more traditional neutral journalist. But once she took over the paper after her father's death, she became more and more non-traditional in another way and took it to activism. She rejected many traditional practices, like she did not fact check, never used allegedly, did not seek the version of the other side. In these aspects, I think I will stick to the traditional practices of journalism. But I have come to see neutrality as a defensive false position, essentially favouring the status quo. I have an opinion and I won't pretend that I don't. Should I strive to listen to all viewpoints, yes. But I have realised that some ideas are dangerous and cruel and I am now less hesitant to say so any more. You have included two interludes unrelated to Gauri Lankesh's story in the book, but still interact with the way we perceive her story. Why did you write these two interludes? These are two different stories in the neighbouring states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which I had been covering simultaneously. It was an instinctive decision to include these. In ways that I am not able to articulate it yet, having them has made the book more complete, I feel. However complicated your storytelling is, you can't capture the sense of a place and time without telling multiple stories. The interludes are also a tribute to the Indian form of epic storytelling as a mesh of multiple stories. I Am on the Hit List; Rollo Romig, Context, ₹799.
Associated Press
21-04-2025
- Health
- Associated Press
New York Times Exposé Vindicates CCHR: ADHD Isn't Biological, Says Watchdog
LOS ANGELES, Calif., April 21, 2025 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — A recent exposé in The New York Times Magazine will send shockwaves through the psychiatric community, affirming what the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has warned for decades: there is no medical proof that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a biological disorder.[1] Yet, over 3.4 million American children are labeled with ADHD and prescribed powerful, mind-altering stimulants. According to Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International, The Times' revelations 'should prompt federal lawmakers and public health officials to investigate how millions of children could be drugged under a false premise—and why dissenting voices were ignored.' The New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough details how ADHD was long marketed as a neurobiological disorder requiring medication, despite lacking any objective test. Tough writes that the entire system rests on shaky assumptions: 'that ADHD is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children's brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits.' But many of those once involved in building this narrative are now disowning it. As the article concedes: 'Unlike with diabetes, there is no reliable biological test for ADHD,' and diagnosis often relies on 'subjective judgment.' Eastgate underscores the damage: 'Millions of parents were led to believe their children had a brain disorder—one that science now admits it cannot medically confirm. That's not mental healthcare. That's institutional betrayal.' EXPERTS RETREAT FROM ADHD'S SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION Among the most striking revelations is the reversal of leading researchers who once championed the disorder and its treatments. Dr. James Swanson, a research psychologist and one of ADHD's early proponents, was central to efforts in the 1990s that drove public acceptance of the diagnosis. At that time, CCHR was actively protesting the mass drugging of children, warning that the supposed science behind ADHD was fundamentally flawed. Their concerns are now echoed by Swanson himself. After three decades of research, Swanson told the Times: 'I don't agree with people who say that stimulant treatment is good. It's not good.' He also found that children taking the drugs were still symptomatic years later and were shorter than their peers. Other prominent scientists quoted include: Sonuga-Barke went further, calling the search for a biological marker a 'red herring,' and admitting: 'There literally is no natural cutting point where you could say, 'This person has got ADHD, and this person hasn't got it.' Those decisions are to some extent arbitrary.' THE HUMAN TOLL: WHY KIDS QUIT THE DRUGS The exposé also reveals how teens themselves reject ADHD stimulants. Swanson notes the high dropout rate among young users—many of whom said the drugs made them feel worse. 'If it's so effective, why do people stop?' he asked. Eastgate responds: 'For decades, parents were told by doctors, 'If you don't medicate your child, you're a bad parent.' But when children themselves report the drugs made them feel bad, it's psychiatry that refuses to listen.' In response to the widespread overuse of ADHD diagnoses and stimulant prescribing—even in children under five—the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched a federal review. CCHR welcomes this as long overdue. For over 40 years, CCHR has maintained that psychiatric labels such as ADHD are not rooted in biological science but are voted into existence through panels of psychiatrists—not discovered through medical testing. As far back as the 1980s and 1990s, CCHR was on record opposing the mass diagnosis of ADHD and the marketing of stimulants to schoolchildren. 'This investigation must look at how pseudoscience became policy,' said Eastgate. 'And why the system ignored watchdogs, parents, and even the United Nations, until some of the same researchers who created the mess began to admit their mistake.' In 2017, Dr. Dainius Pūras, a psychiatrist and then UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, urged governments to move away from the biomedical (drug-based) model of mental health.[2] CCHR had already submitted evidence to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), documenting psychostimulant prescribing in 14 countries. The UNCRC responded by recommending strict monitoring of ADHD drug use in children and criticized the 'medicating' of children without addressing root causes or offering alternative supports.[3] More recently, the World Health Organization and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights jointly declared that 'legislation on mental health must… move away from the narrow traditional 'biomedical paradigm.''[4] The New York Times exposé represents a landmark moment in pediatric mental health. It exposes how ADHD's 'biological' foundations were misleading, and the harms of its treatments were undersold. CCHR says it validates what the group has long stood for: that millions of children were mislabeled and drugged. 'This is a reckoning,' concludes Eastgate. 'But it must become a reform. It's not enough to admit the science was wrong. The system must now be held accountable for what it did with that false science—and ensure it never happens again.' About CCHR: Mental health industry watchdog established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late professor of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz. CCHR has achieved hundreds of reforms, including bans on minors being electroshocked and federal protections against forced drugging of schoolchildren. To learn more, visit: Sources: [1] Paul Tough, 'Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?' The New York Times Magazine, 13 Apr. 2025, [2] 'World Needs 'Revolution' in Mental Health Care, U.N. Health Rights Expert Reports,' CCHR International, 14 June 2017, 'World needs 'revolution' in mental health care – UN rights expert,' United Nations, 6 June 2017, [3] 'Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 44 of the Convention,' UNCRC, 17 Sept. – 5 Oct. 2012, p. 15, [4] 'New WHO Mental Health Guideline Condemns Coercive Psychiatric Practices,' CCHR International, 18 Sept. 2023, 'Guidance on Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation,' World Health Organization, OHCHR, 9 Oct. 2023, p. xvii, MULTIMEDIA: Image link for media: Image caption: 'This is a reckoning. But it must become a reform. It's not enough to admit the science was wrong. The system must now be held accountable for what it did with that false science—and ensure it never happens again.' – Jan Eastgate, President CCHR International. NEWS SOURCE: Citizens Commission on Human Rights Keywords: Religion and Churches, Citizens Commission on Human Rights, CCHR International, mental health, LOS ANGELES, Calif. This press release was issued on behalf of the news source (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) who is solely responsibile for its accuracy, by Send2Press® Newswire. Information is believed accurate but not guaranteed. Story ID: S2P125617 APNF0325A To view the original version, visit: © 2025 Send2Press® Newswire, a press release distribution service, Calif., USA. RIGHTS GRANTED FOR REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART BY ANY LEGITIMATE MEDIA OUTLET - SUCH AS NEWSPAPER, BROADCAST OR TRADE PERIODICAL. MAY NOT BE USED ON ANY NON-MEDIA WEBSITE PROMOTING PR OR MARKETING SERVICES OR CONTENT DEVELOPMENT. 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