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New York Times
13-04-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Understanding A.D.H.D.
This morning, my colleagues at The Times Magazine published a remarkable cover story by Paul Tough about a surge of A.D.H.D. cases in the United States — and the way we treat them. Today, 23 percent of 17-year-old boys have received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The number of prescriptions rose nearly 60 percent in a decade. You almost certainly know people who take these stimulants. Why is this happening? One thing I love about Paul's story is that it's partly a tale about how science is made and changed. Researchers in the 1930s saw immediate benefits when they treated jumpy kids with amphetamines. Eventually, doctors crafted a diagnosis that could explain distracted and excitable personalities, and a consensus formed about how to treat them. Paul's story describes how a few scientists have come to challenge that consensus — and some of the fundamental ideas behind A.D.H.D. For today's newsletter, I spoke to Paul about his reporting. What got you interested in this story? I've been writing for decades about education and children, and I now have two boys of my own. A few years ago, I began to notice how many families I met were struggling with their kids' attention issues. Attention was something I worried about in my own children — and in myself, too. But I didn't know much about the science behind attention. So I started talking to scientists. When I did, I discovered they had a lot of big unresolved questions. What is A.D.H.D., and why is it so tricky to define? There is no biological test for A.D.H.D. So it has to be diagnosed by its symptoms, and those symptoms are sometimes hard to pin down. One patient's behavior can look quite different from another's, and certain A.D.H.D. symptoms can also be signs of other things — depression or childhood trauma or autism. Take a child who is constantly distracted by her anxiety. Does she have A.D.H.D., an anxiety disorder or both? So A.D.H.D. may not be a clear, distinct medical disorder with defined boundaries — something you either have or don't have? Increasingly, the science shows that the condition exists on a continuum, and there is no clear dividing line between people who have A.D.H.D. and people who don't. For many kids, A.D.H.D. symptoms fluctuate over time — worse one year, better the next — and those fluctuations may depend on their external environment as much as their internal wiring. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Pilar Viladas Dies at 70; Journalist Chronicled Trends in Design
Pilar Viladas, a veteran writer and editor whose human touch and encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, design and art history gave her work a quiet authority, died on March 15 at a hospital near her home in Southbury, Conn. She was 70. The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, her sister Luisa Viladas said. Starting at Interiors magazine, a trade publication, in 1979, Ms. Viladas's decades-long career traced the whipsaw design trends of the past half-century, including the arch whimsy of the Memphis movement in early 1980s Italy, the gilded excesses of late-1980s interiors, the minimalism of the '90s and the swaggering era of star architects at the turn of the last millennium. Ms. Viladas was an editor at Progressive Architecture, HG and The New York Times Magazine, and a contributor to Town & Country and Architectural Digest, among many other magazines that documented, with anthropological zest, the totems of privilege and lives well lived. But Ms. Viladas wasn't interested in fads or fetishes, although she noted them with amusement. Her taste was for enduring expressions of good design. Holly Brubach, a former style director of The Times Magazine, hired her in 1997, after Ms. Viladas had completed a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies at Harvard. 'It was the era of the starchitect, and all those sleek, slick, glitzy buildings,' Ms. Brubach said in an interview. But Ms. Viladas, she said, 'was more interested in the way people lived and the role design played in their lives — and I don't mean the aerodynamic shape of a chair.' 'It was how people arranged their homes and made a place for the things they loved,' Ms. Brubach added. 'She brought a human perspective to it that I really admired.' At The Times Magazine, Ms. Viladas covered a who's who of design stars. She wrote about the modernist architect Deborah Berke and the eclectic domestic interiors of Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown. She visited the apartment, at the San Remo, on Central Park West, of the fashion designer Donna Karan and her husband, the sculptor Stephen Weiss. And she chronicled the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando for fashion designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani. Her favorite house, Ms. Viladas often said, was the Houston showplace of John and Dominique de Menil, the Schlumberger oil family scions and art collectors — a low-slung glass and brick house designed by Philip Johnson, with interiors by the fashion designer Charles James. When she visited in 1999, a few years after Ms. de Menil's death, she marveled at the home's 'material splendor — suave modern architecture, jaw-dropping art and serious furniture — and its casual down-to-earth aura.' Ms. Viladas also wrote about her favorite apartment: 'the impossibly chic London flat' belonging to Ingrid Bergman's character in 'Indiscreet,' the 1958 romantic comedy that co-starred Cary Grant as a man pretending to be married to escape commitment. Ms. Viladas loved the riot of color and texture in the apartment's elegantly proportioned living room (not to mention the film's tart dialogue). 'Because she was so educated, she could recognize intention in design and, for her, that was always good,' said the writer William Norwich, a former colleague at The Times Magazine. 'She was a discerner, and she was a gatekeeper, but she was not a snob.' The photographer William Abranowicz, who shot the de Menil house for Ms. Viladas's 1999 piece (and for many more of her articles) said of her: 'She trusted you to walk into a space, to feel what she could articulate and to make an image. The other thing I loved about Pilar was sometimes when you did a story with a designer, they would try and steer the story. That's when her teeth came out — and she had some good teeth.' Maria Pilar Viladas was born on May 6, 1954, in Greenwich, Conn., the eldest of four children of Angeline (Schimizzi) Viladas and Joseph M. Viladas, a marketing research consultant. She attended Greenwich High School and studied art history at Harvard University, graduating in 1977. In addition to her sister Luisa, Ms. Viladas is survived by another sister, Mina Viladas. Their brother, Jordi, died in 2022. Ms. Viladas was the author of and a contributor to many design and architecture books, including 'Los Angeles: A Certain Style' (1995) and 'Domesticities: At Home with The New York Times Magazine' (2005). 'I have an idealistic view of design,' she told Whisper Editions, the former art and design auction site, where she was a consultant, in 2014. 'Design is a much bigger idea than how a lamp works. It's a way of looking at the world.'
New York Times
08-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
5 Things to Know About the Rise and Fall of Eric Adams
Mayor Eric Adams won his office four years ago pledging to deliver New Yorkers from chaos and calamity — a former lawman entrusted to tame a proudly unruly city. It hasn't happened that way. Over nearly 100 interviews with aides, allies and adversaries spanning Adams's life and career, The Times Magazine found a mayor and a city unmoored, their fates entwined whether or not residents want them to be. Long before his indictment last fall on federal corruption charges, Adams became the avatar of New York's day-to-day disorder, a volatile leader to match (and contribute to) volatile times. His chosen path out of his personal crisis, many details of which have not been previously reported, involved cozying up to a new president whom most of Adams's constituents oppose — and offering those constituents, federal prosecutors have said, as human collateral to the Trump White House. Here are five takeaways from our reporting: Adams (and Trump) have played the long game President Trump and Adams, two sons of Queens, seemed to understand each other from the start. When Trump encountered the mayor at a charity dinner in October, weeks before the presidential election, he put his arm around him in private. Adams's friend, former Gov. David Paterson, said that Adams was quiet for the rest of the night. 'Almost like he's thinking about it,' Paterson said. 'Like: 'Is this possible? Boy.'' Trump urged Adams to 'hang in there' before publicly suggesting that both men had been persecuted by the Biden Justice Department. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump's 'idiot behavior' during the president's first term, has not said a cross word about him since. By January, he was flying to Florida to dine with Trump days before the inauguration. And Trump had acquired a useful new friend in his native city: a mayor straining to cling to both his office and his freedom. Adams is a political shape-shifter Adams has always been an adaptable politician, comfortable flip-flopping between the two major parties as the winds shifted. He was a Democrat, then a Republican in the 1990s, then a Democrat again. He briefly considered running in 2021 as a Republican. And he has considered it again in 2025. In an interview, Tucker Carlson suggested Adams had formerly been 'intimidated into supporting things he doesn't believe' and said he and the mayor 'have a lot of gut-level agreements.' Adams was so open to Trump world that he even considered attending Trump's October campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Carlson told us, before deciding against the idea. 'Eric always was more right of center,' the Rev. Al Sharpton told us. 'He was not a fellow traveler.' The migrant crisis was Adams's first major test as mayor The city's migrant influx became a defining management crisis of Adams's term, decisively shaping his relationship with two presidents. 'Joe Biden is trying to hang me out to dry,' the mayor told members of Congress visiting City Hall in 2023, according to an attendee. By 2025, the Trump administration, pushing for a dismissal of Adams's corruption charges, said the mayor needed to be uninhibited in assisting the new White House's deportation agenda. But Adams's views on immigration are more complicated than is widely understood. He has greeted asylum seekers personally upon their arrival to New York and slept on a cot in a tent shelter. He also predicted, long before his indictment, that the issue would 'destroy' the city, amplifying fears about migrants' committing both petty and violent crimes. Adams is often loyal to a fault 'I'm going to make sure my people are taken care of,' Adams said privately just after his win in the primary, noting that the white mayors before him did the same. And so rather than choose a cabinet based solely on expertise, he created a City Hall divided between technocrats and cronies. The fallout has devastated City Hall and rendered it rudderless. By his fourth year in office, nearly all of Adams's most trusted aides had left amid investigations and scandal, including Adams's chief adviser, police commissioner, interim police commissioner, first deputy mayor and schools chancellor. Bill Bratton, a police commissioner under two previous mayors, diagnosed the problem: 'Too many friends with too many problems in too many high places.' Adams has long tied his own story to the city's Adams has repeatedly told his audiences 'I am you.' At his most effective, he has woven his biography — as a scofflaw youth who became an officer who became the mayor — into New York's own tumultuous and resilient history. 'The mayor must fit the characteristic of the city,' Adams said last year. He does, especially now: self-regarding, sleepless, fast and loose, saddled with knotty crime problems. His legal duress has unfolded against the backdrop of a city that can feel as if it is losing its collective mind, unsettled by a reel of semi-surreal scenes, from the subways to the streets, that New Yorkers encounter every day. Maybe Adams is New York. But New York might not be his for long.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Elon Musk Zeroes In on the I.R.S.
The fire hose of Elon Musk news continues: We've got more on the controversy over the access to sensitive I.R.S. data that Musk's cost-cutting team is seeking and the resignation of a senior official at the Social Security Administration over a similar issue. And in case you missed it, there were two revealing long reads about the Murdoch family's internal battles: one in The Times Magazine based on more than 3,000 pages of secret court transcripts, and another in The Atlantic that included intimate details directly from James Murdoch. Finally, here's a great watch from over the weekend: Adam Sandler's tribute on 'Saturday Night Live' to Lorne Michaels, whom we profiled last year, during the show's 50th anniversary special. Who gets access? Elon Musk's cost-cutting team is continuing to burrow deeper into the federal bureaucracy in search of what the tech mogul says are trillions in potential cost cuts. But the organization's latest accomplishments, including the potential gaining of access to sensitive I.R.S. and Social Security Administration data, have raised yet more concerns about how much power Musk is amassing — and what the consequences could be. The latest: The I.R.S. is preparing to give Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer working with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, access to sensitive taxpayer information as a senior adviser to the I.R.S.'s acting commissioner. The I.R.S. is still working out the terms of his assignment, but as of Sunday evening, he hadn't yet gained access to the data. Separately, the top official of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, resigned after Musk's team sought access to an internal database that contains personal information about Americans. Critics worried such moves would give the Musk operation extraordinary oversight. Lily Batchelder, a Treasury Department official in the Biden administration, wrote on X that she couldn't recall political appointees having access to the I.R.S. database. A big concern is whether that might lead to the potential punishment of political opponents, as well as potential leaks of private citizens' data. Batchelder wrote that such a move could violate federal law that prohibits the executive branch from interfering with taxpayer audits, while the Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts demanded more information about the access granted. The issue of access to I.R.S. data has come up in recent years, with a Musk angle: The billionaire's returns for 2014 to 2018 were leaked to ProPublica by an I.R.S. consultant. The White House remains on Musk's side. 'Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,' Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. 'It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.' But it remains unclear why the cost-cutting initiative needs access to this information. (White House officials wouldn't give The Wall Street Journal a reason.) Critics have worried that Musk's team is operating off of faulty assumptions and online misinformation. New York's governor casts doubts on Mayor Eric Adams's future after another exodus. Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to convene a meeting on Tuesday to discuss 'the path forward,' after four top New York City officials said they would resign following the Justice Department's move to drop a case into the mayor in apparent exchange for help with deportations. Hochul has the authority to remove Adams, though it's unclear how the Trump administration would respond should she do so. OpenAI is reportedly weighing measures to maintain control. The ChatGPT creator may adopt corporate governance measures including special voting rights for the board of its nonprofit arm, The Financial Times reports. Such provisions would most likely contain the say of powerful investors in OpenAI including Microsoft and SoftBank, and deter hostile bids such as the one made by Elon Musk, should OpenAI succeed in converting into a for-profit company. Chip manufacturers are said to consider deals that could break up Intel. TSMC and Broadcom are deliberating bids for pieces of the embattled processor giant, according to The Wall Street Journal, though no proposal has been submitted to Intel yet. The idea is to remake Intel as a specialist in designing or manufacturing chips, but not both. Tesla reportedly faces a major obstacle to its self-driving ambitions. Musk's electric vehicle maker is bracing for a delay in getting a permit from China to run its 'full self-driving' technology there, after promising investors it would get approval in the second quarter, The Financial Times reports. The potential delay comes as President Trump vows to increase his trade war against Beijing, aggravating already strained economic relations. President Javier Milei of Argentina faces impeachment calls over his crypto ties. Opposition leaders and others cried foul over Milei's endorsement on Friday of $LIBRA, a little-known cryptocurrency that quickly lost almost all of its value. Milei deleted his original post and called for an investigation, but opponents said the scandal had put his ability to lead into question. Europe on the sidelines Senior American and Russian officials have gathered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday for a high-stakes meeting. Atop the agenda: ending the fighting in Ukraine, Europe's deadliest war in generations. Not there are representatives from Europe or Ukraine, and that absence is raising questions about cracks in the Western alliance. The latest: The State Department is playing down the talks as exploratory. But Russia has cast the meeting as an opportunity to break Moscow's isolation and rebuild business ties with the West. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund who is in Riyadh, invited American oil giants to return to the country. He dangled 'access to Russian natural resources,' perhaps trying to appeal to President Trump's fondness for 'liquid gold.' Investors are watching closely. European defense stocks soared on Monday, as Trump's threats to reduce American military support to the continent and to NATO raised the prospect of increased military spending. That helped push the Pan-European Stoxx 600 to a record; the Stoxx Europe Total Market Aerospace & Defense index is up 19 percent this year. More may be in store: 'I think there's a little bit more to go here,' Sharon Bell, an equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg Television about the rally. The surge belies a pervading sense of gloom in Europe. Even before being shut out of the Ukraine negotiations, Europe was feeling increasingly sidelined. Vice President JD Vance stunned attendees at the Munich Security Conference last week by taking aim at European allies. (He said little about Trump's vision for the Ukraine talks.) In WhatsApp message groups, in email chains and in opinion articles, experts and commentators have raised questions about the future of U.S.-European relations. Their big fear is President Vladimir Putin of Russia gaining the upper hand in Ukraine talks — especially if Trump looks to secure a windfall of mineral resources — putting Europe at risk. Europe was already bracing for a bruising Trump trade war. Tariffs are seen as keeping the region in a low-growth rut. They could also drive a wedge between E.U. members, including if America plays favorites with ideological allies, Alessandro Penati, an economist and the president and founder of Quaestio Capital Management, told DealBook. 'I think the strategy of Trump is just to break up Europe,' Penati said, adding, 'he has already been very successful in doing that.' Delaware lawmakers take on the courts Delaware has long been corporate America's capital. But growing frustration among companies over recent judicial decisions has led to threats to leave, endangering crucial business incorporation revenue for the First State. Now Delaware lawmakers have delivered their response to that threat — and it has drawn a range of responses from the business world and observers, DealBook's Lauren Hirsch reports. What's happening: A group of Delaware state senators proposed a bill that would reshape how much leeway managers of companies with controlling shareholders have to run their businesses. It would effectively override years of case law by the Delaware Court of Chancery, including divisive ones like last year's decision rejecting a big compensation package for Elon Musk at Tesla. Normally, select members of the Delaware bar draft changes to the corporate code that lawmakers approve. But legislators — who didn't appear to consult with those practitioners, at least publicly — said on Monday that they had moved quickly to address 'specific concerns that lawmakers have received since late January's flurry of reincorporation.' They added that the legislation would be open to review, comment and recommendation. The bill would relax the standards for scrutinizing deals with controlling shareholders. It proposes narrowly defining who is a controlling shareholder and loosening requirements for deals involving such an investor. (If the measure is retroactive, it could help Musk in his compensation fight, according to Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law School.) The legislation would also limit the kinds of internal communications that shareholders could request in a lawsuit. Formal documents including board meeting minutes would be allowed; emails and other internal communications most likely wouldn't be. It could put a damper on shareholder litigation. While that may stem companies' rush to reincorporate elsewhere, it would probably limit the number of lawsuits brought in Delaware courts. 'While shareholder litigation has its excesses, it's not great for normal shareholders when controlled boards are required to do less and get more protection from scrutiny,' Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School, told DealBook. 'It's a step backwards for public shareholders and a major concession in favor of controlling shareholders' It raises questions about corporate America's power. Did Delaware lawmakers override case law in favor of business interests? Or did they try to correct for overactive courts? Deals Politics, policy and regulation Best of the rest
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pedro Almodóvar Confronts Death in ‘The Room Next Door' and ‘The Last Dream.'
At the age of 75, Pedro Almodóvar continues to experiment. In the past year, the Spanish director has done two things he's never done before: He made his first English-language film, 'The Room Next Door, ' and he published 'The Last Dream,' a collection of writing, which he refers to not as a memoir but as a 'fragmentary autobiography.' Both the film and the book point to a new chapter in Almodóvar's life and career. Nicholas Casey, a writer for The Times Magazine, spoke with the director about his relationship to aging and mortality, and his 'problem with death.' The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven't already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.
