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‘Run With Joy and Love’

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On a glorious evening recently, the runner Markelle Taylor — otherwise known as “Markelle the Gazelle”— entered the dark sally port and crenelated towers of a place he was once overjoyed to leave behind: San Quentin State Prison. Accompanied by volunteer coaches from the prison’s 1000 Mile Club, Taylor, who was incarcerated for 18 years for second-degree murder, couldn’t wait to see his brothers, lifers all.

Taylor, 50, fully earned his long standing nickname in 2019 at the San Quentin Marathon, where he barreled through 104 and a half laps around the prison yard with its gantlet of 90-degree turns, fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, which he ran six weeks after his release.

After he finished his sentence, Taylor sought to return as a mentor to his running buddies still inside. Three months ago, he finally got the thumbs up from state corrections officials. Now he returns to San Quentin to coach runners every other Monday.

On this visit, it took less than a minute for him to bump into an old friend in blue prison garb. “Hey!” said Sergio Alvarez, who has been incarcerated for 10 and a half years. “I see you in the paper, man, and on TV. You’re doing what’s right and speaking out, bro.”

It means a lot to Taylor to be mentoring with people who mentored him, especially Frank Ruona, who turns 78 next month and plans to retire after 18 years as the club’s head coach.

“He’s a prime example of the qualities that make a good coach,” Taylor said. “Faithful, loyal, honest, no judgment, an accomplished fast runner with records and time under his belt.”

But Taylor brings his own special qualities to his new role. “Being a lifer, or an ex-convicted person who did hard time, I bring that flavor of connection,” he said. “I want to give them hope, just be there for the guys any way I can. To help them get out and be better athletes.”

The runners filtered in across the yard’s scraggly grass, dodging a baseball game in progress, a Spanish language choral rehearsal and a smattering of Canada geese who are the prison’s feathered lifers. Track workouts begin at 6 p.m. after dinner and the mandatory daily head count.

Tim Fitzpatrick, who is stepping in as Ruona retires, called the runners together, their evening silhouettes casting long shadows on the track’s crumbly dirt. Fitzpatrick, the finisher of 28 marathons and 38 ultra marathons, is assuming Ruona’s mantel along with his wife Diana, the president of the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run and a two-time Dipsea champion, and Jim Maloney, another longtime coach and a restorative justice facilitator at the prison.

“We want a training run, not a straining run!” Fitzpatrick said of the night’s workout — six pickups, or fast paced intervals, each prompted by an exuberant loon-like whistle he concocts with his hands.

At “Ready … set … exercise!” Taylor started pacing his fellow runners around the track, the trickiest stretch being a right angle that funnels into a gap between chain link fences. During breaks he chatted with old friends like Darren Settlemyer, a fellow Jehovah’s Witness who first suggested that Taylor join the running club, knowing that he was stressed out by a close friend’s suicide and an upcoming parole hearing. When Taylor started running, “everything connected mentally and spiritually,” he said. “I was free four years before I was released.”

Taylor grew up a victim of domestic and sexual violence and was addicted to alcohol. He was 27 years old when he was sentenced to 15 years to life for assaulting his pregnant girlfriend, which led to the premature birth and eventual death of their child.

“I didn’t know how to process all that misplaced anger,” he said. “When you feel you ain’t nothing, you tend to gravitate to the negative. I feel a lot better about who I am today. I’m pretty conscious of trying to hold on to the goodness in my life.”

There’s a bounty of goodness. Taylor’s return to San Quentin is part of an extraordinary year in his life. He’s one of the subjects of “26.2 to Life: Inside The San Quentin Prison Marathon,” a documentary film by Christine Yoo. He has been zipping around the country to film festivals, walking red carpets from Santa Barbara to Woods Hole and routinely receiving standing ovations during post-screening Q. and A.’s. His naturalness and warmth as a speaker have allowed him to connect with audiences about his story and the need for prison reform.

“Markelle gives us hope, which is a blessing,” said Kirivuthy Soy, a member of the 1000 Mile Club. “Him getting out shows that just because you’re a lifer doesn’t mean you’re going to be in here forever.”

For Taylor, the enthusiastic embrace by audiences and the experience of seeing the film repeatedly is gratifying and healing. “The more I watch it, the more it helps me to process internally what I’ve been through in my lifetime and continuing to be accountable to the pain and suffering I’ve caused,” he said. “The speaking engagements give me a sense of purpose and well-being and helps with my sobriety and being clean.”

Twenty-two years sober, he continues to attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Marin County, where he lives. “I think if you don’t go it’s like forgetting where you came from and you can stumble that way,” he said.

His life as a film festival darling feels far removed from his day-to-day reality. Like many formerly incarcerated people, he struggles to find meaningful and well-paying employment: Taylor earns $17.25 an hour as a supermarket cashier. “I get along with everybody and I’m fair,” he said. “But being Black I have to work harder than anybody else, and with a criminal background it’s really tough. They will judge you and might not even be conscious they’re doing it.”

His willingness to ask for help is a strength. He is also not afraid to go after what he wants. At a screening at San Quentin on Jan. 6, he stood up at an open forum and asked the warden, Ron Broomfield, if he would allow him to come back in as a volunteer. “He kind of put me on the spot,” Broomfield recalled. “He didn’t realize that I’m a big advocate of returning citizens coming back in to mentor, because they can reach people in ways that we can’t.”

Broomfield, now the director of adult prisons statewide, is also a co-chair of a committee set up by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California charged with transforming the prison into the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, a concept modeled on campuslike Scandinavian prisons. The initial plans call for revamping a furniture factory where Taylor stained and finished chairs for 50 or 60 cents an hour into a $380 million education center, with more space for restorative justice and other programs.

The documentary has led to droves of runners asking to be volunteer coaches; at the evening workout, there were 15 runners and 14 coaches, a teacher-student ratio most schools would envy. Among the newbies was Peter Goldmacher, vice president of investor relations at Dolby Laboratories, who saw the film about a year ago “and thought I definitely want to get in on that,” he said.

Taylor is rebounding from a torn meniscus and other injuries. He took some time off and felt lonely when he didn’t run. Between traveling and his job, he hasn’t been able to train as consistently as he’d like. “When I’m running, I’m much more focused,” he said. “It helps lift me up.”

This fall he plans to run the Chicago Marathon and the New York Marathon. After running three marathons in a row in under three hours, most notably a 2:52 in Boston two years ago, he would like to hit the mark again. But his mission right now is “to be an ambassador for lifers,” he said. “What’s important is to run with joy and love and a sense of purpose and not chasing my own personal goals.”

With newfound confidence, he’s batting around possibilities — maybe a TED Talk or expanding his Markelle the Gazelle athletic gear line.

“I can’t change the minds of the masses,” he said. “All I can do is to live the best possible self I can. Doing that can radiate like a light — so that everyone else can see.”

Carrying a Torch for the Liberty

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Liberty fans have waited 27 seasons for a W.N.B.A. title, and on Friday night, it showed. The atmosphere at Barclays Center was electric for New York’s opening postseason game against the Washington Mystics.

Fans waved white playoff towels, booed every call that didn’t go their way and cheered for each celebrity featured on the scoreboard, including Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner; the tennis great Billie Jean King; and Teresa Weatherspoon, the former Liberty star. Members of the team’s N.B.A. counterparts, the Brooklyn Nets, were also in attendance.

Those fans were rewarded with a Liberty win, 90-75, behind 29 points from Sabrina Ionescu and 20 from Jonquel Jones. The game started as a tense back-and-forth affair, but the Liberty took a narrow lead into halftime, and they never relinquished it. Ionescu set a postseason franchise record with seven 3-pointers in the game.

After the Liberty wrapped up the regular season with a 32-8 record, expectations were high that they could take the championship. They are seeded second in the playoffs, with the Las Vegas Aces seeded first.

A win on Tuesday in Brooklyn, in Game 2 of this best-of-three series against the Mystics, would send the Liberty to the semifinals — and get them one step closer to that elusive title.

Supporters of Aid in Dying Sue N.J. Over Residency Requirement

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Judy Govatos has heard that magical phrase “you’re in remission” twice, in 2015 and again in 2019. She had beaten back Stage 4 lymphoma with such aggressive chemotherapy and other treatments that at one point she grew too weak to stand, and relied on a wheelchair. She endured several hospitalizations, suffered infections and lost nearly 20 pounds. But she prevailed.

Ms. Govatos, 79, a retired executive at nonprofit organizations who lives in Wilmington, Del., has been grateful for the extra years. “I feel incredibly fortunate,” she said. She has been able to take and teach lifelong learning courses, to work in her garden, to visit London and Cape Cod with friends. She spends time with her two grandchildren, “an elixir.”

But she knows that the cancer may well return, and she doesn’t want to endure the pain and disability of further attempts to vanquish it.

“I’m not looking to be treated to death. I want quality of life,” she told her oncologist. “If that means less time alive, that’s OK.” When her months dwindle, she wants medical aid in dying. After a series of requests and consultations, a doctor would prescribe a lethal dose of a medication that she would take on her own.

Aid in dying remains illegal in Delaware, despite repeated legislative attempts to pass a bill permitting it. Since 2019, however, it has been legal in neighboring New Jersey, a half-hour drive from Ms. Govatos’s home.

But New Jersey restricts aid in dying to terminally ill residents of its own state. Ms. Govatos was more than willing, therefore, to become one of four plaintiffs — two patients, two doctors — taking New Jersey officials to federal court.

The lawsuit, filed last month, argues that New Jersey’s residency requirement violates the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause and its equal protection clause.

“The statute prohibits New Jersey physicians from providing equal care to their non-New Jersey resident patients,” said David Bassett, a lawyer with the New York firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, which brought the suit with the advocacy group Compassion & Choices.

“There’s no justification that anyone has articulated” for such discrimination, he added. The suit also contends that forbidding New Jersey doctors to offer aid-in-dying care to out-of-state patients restricts interstate commerce, the province of Congress.

The New Jersey Attorney General’s office declined to comment.

“I’d like not to die in horrible pain and horrible fear, and I’ve experienced both,” Ms. Govatos said. Even if she enrolls in hospice, many of the pain medications used cause her to pass out, hallucinate and vomit.

To be able to legally end her life when she decides to “is a question of mercy and kindness,” she said.

It’s the third time that Compassion & Choices has pursued this route in its efforts to broaden access to aid in dying. It filed similar suits in Oregon in 2021 and in Vermont last year. Both states agreed to settle, and their legislatures passed revised statutes repealing residency requirements, Oregon in July and Vermont in May.

The plaintiffs hope New Jersey, another blue state, will follow suit. “We hope we never have to go before a judge. Our preference is to negotiate an equitable resolution,” Mr. Bassett said. “That’s what’s important for our patient plaintiffs. They don’t have time for full-fledged litigation.”

“It’s not the traditional process of trying to convince a state legislature that this is a good idea,” said Thaddeus Pope, a law professor at Mitchell-Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who tracks end-of-life laws and court cases.

Dropping residency requirements in New Jersey could have a far greater impact than it will in Oregon or Vermont. The sheer population density along New Jersey’s borders — there are almost 20 million residents in the New York metropolitan area alone — means medical aid in dying would suddenly become available to vastly more people, and much more quickly than it would through legislation.

With a major airport and direct flights, “it’s easier to get to Newark than Burlington, Vermont,” Mr. Pope pointed out.

Many states where aid in dying is legal have relaxed their statutes because of findings like those in a 2017 study, in which about a third of California patients who asked a doctor about aid in dying either died before they could complete the process or became too ill to continue it.

But New Jersey still uses the stricter series of steps that Oregon first codified in 1994. That means two verbal requests to a doctor at least 15 days apart, a written request with two witnesses, and a consultation with a second physician; both must confirm that the patient is eligible. There’s a 48-hour wait after the written request before a prescription can be written.

Even without having to establish residency, “it won’t be a walk in the park,” Mr. Pope said. “You can’t just pop over to New Jersey, pick up the drugs and go back.”

Finding a doctor willing to prescribe can take time, as does using one of the state’s few compounding pharmacies, which combine the necessary drugs and fill the prescription.

Although no official would check to see whether patients travel home with the medication, both Mr. Bassett and Mr. Pope advise that the lethal dose ought to be taken in New Jersey, to avoid the possibility of family members facing prosecution in their home states for assisting in a suicide.

Still, preventing dying patients from having to sign leases and obtain government IDs in order to become residents will streamline the process. “Not everyone has the will, the financial means, the physical means” to establish residency, said Dr. Paul Bryman, one of the doctor plaintiffs and hospice medical director in southern New Jersey. “These are often very disabled people.”

Bills recently introduced in Minnesota and New York don’t include residency requirements at all, Mr. Pope noted, since they seem likely to be challenged in court.

“I think the writing’s on the wall,” he said. “I think all the residency requirements will go, in all the states” where aid in dying is legal. There are 10, plus the District of Columbia (though the legality in Montana depends on a court decision, not legislation).

Despite the often heated wrangling over aid-in-dying laws, very few patients actually turn to lethal drugs in the end, state records show. Last year, Oregon reported that 431 people received prescriptions and 278 died by using them, just .6 percent of the state’s deaths in 2022.

In New Jersey, only 91 patients used aid in dying last year. Roughly a third of those who receive prescriptions never use them, perhaps sufficiently reassured by the prospect of a swift exit.

Fears of “death tourism,” with an onrush of out-of state patients, have not materialized, said John Burzichelli, a former state assemblyman who helped steer New Jersey’s statute through the legislature and now favors allowing eligible nonresidents to participate.

“I don’t see lines of people at the tollbooths coming to take advantage of this law,” he said.

If her cancer returns and New Jersey has balked at allowing out-of-staters to legally end their lives there, Ms. Govatos contemplates traveling to Vermont. She envisions a goodbye party for a few friends and family members, with poetry reading, music and “very good wine and lovely food.”

But driving over the Delaware Memorial Bridge would be so much simpler. “It would be an incredible gift if I could go to New Jersey,” she said.

Windows Installed in Skulls Help Doctors Study Damaged Brains

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Tucker Marr’s life changed forever last October.

He was on his way to a wedding reception when he fell down a steep flight of metal stairs, banging the right side of his head so hard he went into a coma.

He’d fractured his skull, and a large blood clot formed on the left side of his head. Surgeons had to remove a large chunk of his skull to relieve pressure on his brain and to remove the clot.

“Getting a piece of my skull taken out was crazy to me,” Mr. Marr said. “I almost felt like I’d lost a piece of me.”

But what seemed even crazier to him was the way that piece was restored.

Mr. Marr, a 27-year-old analyst at Deloitte, became part of a new development in neurosurgery. Instead of remaining without a piece of skull or getting the old bone put back, a procedure that is expensive and has a high rate of infection, he got a prosthetic piece of skull made with a 3-D printer. But it is not the typical prosthesis used in such cases. His prosthesis, which is covered by his skin, is embedded with an acrylic window that would let doctors peer into his brain with ultrasound.

A few medical centers are offering such acrylic windows to patients who had to have a piece of skull removed to treat conditions like a brain injury, a tumor, a brain bleed or hydrocephalus.

“It’s very cool,” Dr. Michael Lev, director of emergency radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said. But, “it is still early days,” he added.

Advocates of the technique say that if a patient with such a window has a headache or a seizure or needs a scan to see if a tumor is growing, a doctor can slide an ultrasound probe on the patient’s head and look at the brain in the office. That way a patient can avoid costly, time-consuming and onerous CT scans or M.R.I.s. Instead of waiting for a radiologist to read the scan, a patient and a doctor can know right away what the patient’s brain looks like.

Dr. Mark Luciano, a professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, is using ultrasound to monitor hydrocephalus patients, who have shunts in their brains to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid. Patients need regular CT scans to see if the fluid is draining properly.

In an attempt to assess the windows, Dr. Luciano recently published a study of 37 patients who had the windows placed in their skulls, compared with a larger group of similar patients from the year before the method was developed.

Over a one-year period, he saw no risk of infection. The challenge now, he said, is to make the images from ultrasound scans better and to quantify what they show, he said, as well as to monitor their safety for several years.

But not everyone is won over.

Dr. Ian McCutcheon, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said the window “is an intriguing idea.” But, he said, before he uses it to assess brain tumor patients he’d need evidence from a rigorous clinical trial that ultrasound is as accurate as an M.R.I. in detecting changes, like a growing tumor.

That trial, he said, “has not been done yet.”

Others, like Dr. Joseph Watson, director of the brain tumor program at Georgetown University, called the technique “frivolous.”

“You are going through a small port,” he said. “It doesn’t give you enough of a picture of the whole brain” that he gets with a CT scan or M.R.I.

But Mr. Marr’s doctor, Netanel Ben-Shalom, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, disagrees. In his experience, he said, “as long as the window is located above the tumor, the cavity is clearly demonstrated.”

Dr. Ben-Shalom was won over from the moment he tried implanting a window a few years ago. He was a resident at Johns Hopkins, and his patient had a brain tumor.

“It was amazing,” Dr. Ben-Shalom said. He could see the entire brain, he said, and all its structures.

He moved to Lenox Hill in January 2022, became a consultant for Longeviti, the company that makes the windows, and has been implanting and using its clear polymethylmethacrylate windows ever since.

On an afternoon earlier this year, Mr. Marr sat on a wooden chair in a tiny office at Lenox Hill, grinning as Dr. Ben-Shalom slid an ultrasound probe over the window in his skull. A cluster of medical students looked on.

For Mr. Marr, life was difficult after the removal of the piece of his skull to treat his swelling brain. His head was distorted, with a large dent. He was left with fatigue and dizziness because his brain was inadequately shielded from atmospheric pressure.

During the scan, Mr. Marr’s brain looked perfect, Dr. Ben-Shalom said. The midline that separates the two hemispheres — and which had been pushed to one side after Mr. Marr’s injury — was exactly where it should be. The structures of his brain looked normal, Dr. Ben-Shalom said. The ultrasound even showed his brain’s pulsing.

Mr. Marr is young and healthy but, Dr. Ben-Shalom said, anyone who has had brain surgery needs surveillance. If Mr. Marr comes in one day with nausea and vomiting or a severe headache, or if he had a seizure, his doctors would need to look at his brain. The acrylic window makes it easy, Dr. Ben-Shalom said.

At the University of Southern California, Dr. Charles Liu and his colleagues are taking the ultrasound idea a step further. In a research project, he is studying the use of ultrasound as a simpler and cheaper way to do the sort of studies now done with f.M.R.I., a method that uses M.R.I. scanners to examine the brain’s activity.

For the study, he needed a patient who required a skull restoration for medical reasons and who would volunteer to have one with a specially designed window. If the idea succeeded, he and the team thought they might some day be able to use the method on intact skulls.

The hope is to detect tiny signals from changes in blood flow in different parts of the brain as patients perform different activities. That, Dr. Liu said, “could give unprecedented insights into brain functions.”

He found such a patient — Jared Hager, 39, who had a traumatic brain injury when he crashed his skateboard. He had spent two and a half years with a large piece of his skull missing.

Dr. Liu met Mr. Hager when he was admitted to Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, Calif., part of the Los Angeles County public safety net health system.

When Dr. Liu met Mr. Hager, he was uninsured and homeless — he and his brother were living in a van. And Mr. Hager was missing a large chunk of skull. He was scheduled to have his skull restored, but Dr. Liu offered him a choice: a standard prosthesis or one with a specially designed window optimized for brain studies.

Before his surgery, the Rancho Los Amigos Foundation provided free housing at a facility next to the hospital for patients and their families. But Dr. Liu worried about what would happen after Mr. Hager was discharged.

“When you do this kind of surgery, it’s a big operation,” he said. “My goodness, what if we do surgery on this guy and he ends up in a van in downtown L.A.?”

Through the Rancho Los Amigos Foundation Dr. Liu got Mr. Hager an apartment in Long Beach.

Mr. Hager has become a regular presence in Dr. Liu’s lab, working with its scientists to discover as much about his brain as they can.

“I’m never going to stop helping with anything Dr. Liu needs,” he said.

Formula 1 Schedule Continues to Grow With New Races

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There are more Formula 1 races than ever, and next season there will be even more, with 24 races, the most in the sport’s history.

This year’s Formula 1 schedule, at 23 events, should have set the record, but the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was canceled because of the extreme rainfall that devastated the region. That event, at the Imola circuit in Italy, will return on May 19, 2024, and will be the seventh race of the year.

Also returning to the calendar is the Chinese Grand Prix, which was last held at the Shanghai International Circuit in 2019. Formula 1 and the Chinese race’s promoter have a contract through 2025, and next year’s Grand Prix will be on April 21, the season’s fifth race.

“Now there’s a lot of people really into racing and Formula 1 who can’t wait to go back there — also myself — for the Grand Prix,” said Zhou Guanyu of China, who drives for Alfa Romeo.

The other 22 Grands Prix from the 2023 calendar have all been retained, with 15 outside of Western Europe, where the majority of the sport’s personnel are based. The season will begin on March 2 in Bahrain and conclude on Dec. 8 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

“There is huge interest and continued demand for Formula 1, and I believe this calendar strikes the right balance between traditional races and new and existing venues,” said Stefano Domenicali, the chief executive of Formula 1.

There has been movement toward regionalizing the calendar to reduce travel and aid in sustainability, with some events, notably in Japan, Azerbaijan and Qatar, moving in the schedule to ease travel.

However, there are still some awkward trips. The three events in the United States remain separated, with Miami the sixth round on May 5; Austin, Texas, the 19th round on Oct. 20; and Las Vegas the 22nd round on Nov. 23. Australia, the third round on March 24, is far from other events, but Japan is the next race, on April 7. Canada, the ninth round on June 9, is, like Australia, by itself amid a string of European events.

Some drivers are resigned to the expanded schedule.

“It’s too many [races] for me, but we just have to deal with it,” said Max Verstappen of Red Bull after the calendar’s release in July. “I think it’s a bit more logical the way it’s planned at least, so I guess that’s better for everyone.”

Lando Norris of McLaren also noted the amount of races.

“I’d say 24 is a lot,” he said. “If I had to put like a perfect number, I would say it’s probably closer to 20. For the lives of mechanics, engineers, everyone that travels, they’re away from their families, kids and so on, for so many days, more days than us as drivers are away, so it’s tougher for them.”

Fernando Alonso of Aston Martin first raced in a Grand Prix in 2001, when there were 17 events, six of which were outside of Europe.

“I understand the benefits of 24 races, the reasons behind it, there’s a lot of interest in Formula 1, a lot of demand, so it’s good to go to new countries, new races, and there is new revenue,” he said. “But I think for team members 18 is a good number. More than 18-19, and you start stressing the mechanics, the media. Everyone is just on the back foot from February to December.”

Teams rotate staff members when possible to give them some time off. There is also a nine-day winter factory shutdown when the sites that work on the cars must be mostly closed, as well as a 14-day August recess. Drivers and others are also conscious about oversaturation, particularly with the addition of the sprint races that have been held the day before the main race at six Grands Prix this year.

There is also the balance between retaining the historic venues, such as Monaco and Silverstone in England, and seeking new ones. Formula 1’s events in the Middle East all have contracts stretching into the 2030s, but many older European events are on shorter deals and others, such as France and Germany, have been discontinued. Monaco and Italy have contracts expiring after 2025, while Belgium’s contract expires at the end of this year.

The sport is “looking to expand their calendar more and more, and you can see a lot of the new venues that are coming to Formula 1 are quite commercial venues, like Miami, or Vegas this year,” said Stoffel Vandoorne, who raced in 2017 and 2018 for McLaren and is now an Aston Martin and McLaren reserve driver. “They’re big places that they’re going to, and I think that’s fine, absolutely fine, but I still think there needs to be a combination of both on the calendar, to retain these races, like Spa [in Belgium], like Suzuka [in Japan], that are the proper old-school tracks.”

Adding races is nothing new. Saudi Arabia and Qatar were added in 2021, Miami in 2022 and Las Vegas this year. Each promoter pays a hosting fee to Formula 1, boosting its revenues, which in turn increases prize money for teams.

Under the Concorde Agreement, which binds together Formula 1, the F.I.A. and the teams, the annual limit for Grands Prix is 24, but other venues are still being explored.

Formula 1 has long been seeking a return to Africa as it strives to have a round on most continents. The Kyalami circuit in South Africa last hosted a Grand Prix in 1993.

Whales, From Above – The New York Times

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Sutton Lynch rises most days before the sun, arriving at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett, New York., for the early-morning calm. It’s the same beach he’s been going to since he was a child, and where he worked as a lifeguard for years as a teenager. Now 23, he spends his mornings surveying the horizon. When he spots activity on the water’s surface, he sends out his drone.

Mr. Lynch has earned a devoted following on Instagram for his remarkable footage of marine life off the coast of the East End of Long Island. Alongside images and videos of humpbacks, hammerheads, dolphins, bluefish and many other species, he writes captions that range from childhood memories and research on the effects of fishing policy to explanations of animal behavior. Across the board, his work exudes a reverence for the ocean and the creatures that call it home.

Mr. Lynch’s followers often express surprise that this abundance of species exists just out of sight. The truth is, the resurgence is fairly new. And so the photographer is documenting a dramatic turning point in the East End’s environmental and cultural history — a renewal of sea life after decades of depletion.

As recently as 10 years ago, a whale or dolphin sighting was an uncommon occurrence on the East End. The overfishing of Atlantic menhaden — a keystone species that is essential to a healthy ecosystem — led to a huge drop in marine life off the coast of Long Island in the latter part of the 20th century. (Bony and oily, menhaden are harvested for their nutrient-rich oil and are rarely eaten by humans; they feed on plankton and algae and serve as prey to dozens of larger animals.)

In 2012, in response to menhaden’s numbers having fallen about 90 percent in three decades, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission enacted the first coastwide catch limits on the fish. Populations soon rebounded, improving water quality and bringing more whales, sharks, rays, seals, dolphins and other animals closer to the beach than they’ve been since the middle of the last century.

“It’s very rare that you have a conservation gain that is so visible in such a short time,” said John Gans, a northeast field representative for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “And it’s 100 percent attributed to the 2012 catch limits put in place on menhaden.”

The return of larger animals that feed on menhaden coincided with Mr. Lynch’s coming-of-age as a photographer. He got his first drone at 17 and began filming from his home shores.

It’s fitting that his career would hinge on a humble fish. In a region, the Hamptons, and on a platform, Instagram, known for exclusivity and superficiality, Mr. Lynch’s work is both accessible and authentic. “There’s nothing pretentious about him,” said Victoria Cooper, an Amagansett resident and a professed superfan, while visiting one of his photography sales this summer. “You can get caught up in being out here; there’s lots of parties and things. I love that Sutton is taking a deeper look behind the scenes of the nature that we’re all part of.”

Long Island is particularly vulnerable to global warming, owing to its susceptibility to sea-level rise, the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, and the growing incidence of algal blooms, among other phenomena. (The region recently appeared near the top of a list by Moody’s Analytics of U.S. metro areas that will be worst hit by climate change.)

Mr. Lynch is partly motivated by documenting those changes. Some complex combination of frustration and conviction characterizes his — and much of Gen Z’s — attitude. “It’s hard for older generations to understand how we feel,” he said. “My parents’ generation often says, ‘You guys are going to fix this,’” he continued. “But they’re the ones in control, and everything needs to be done now.”

But he also sees his art as a kind of longitudinal study of a seascape — a way to track the subtler, and in his view more insidious, changes that happen over years, increments that add up to a transformed ecosystem. If his practice continues for a decade, he said, he’ll have compiled a sizable portfolio of visual information. “Ideally I would love to work with scientists who could study that data,” he said.

Mr. Lynch’s fan base includes not just environmentalists but also artists and fishermen, locals and out-of-towners. “Nobody likes being told what to think,” Mr. Lynch reflected, when asked how he approached the educational aspect of his work. “I don’t want to alienate any of my followers. I just want to give them the facts.” Wary of scare tactics or blame, he chooses instead to appeal to people’s shared admiration for their landscape. “Fear is not helpful, in my opinion,” he said.

And while the recent uptick in shark activity may be cause for concern among beachgoers trying to enjoy a Hamptons getaway, to Mr. Lynch it’s a thrill. In July, after filming spinner sharks, he wrote: “They’re wild animals, and the ocean is their home. They certainly can be frightening, but it’s important to remember that humans pose a much greater threat to them than they do to us.” A great white sighting is at the top of his bucket list. And the East Hampton lifeguards who count on his shark patrol — the city pays him hourly to look for the animals while he’s perusing the coast with his drone — will certainly be grateful for the report if he ever spots one.

Arthur Kopelman, an ecologist and the president of the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, reflected on the value of public environmental education. “It’s critically important,” Dr. Kopelman said, adding that knowledge about their surroundings helps people “become active stakeholders in terms of protecting their coastal ecosystems.” Mr. Lynch is part of that effort, bringing us close to the action and urging his followers to share in his admiration for nature.

Against a backdrop of the stereotypical opulence and excess of the Hamptons, Mr. Lynch’s work is a refreshing reminder of why the New York elite started visiting these now-iconic shores in the first place. Celebrities, tycoons and tenacious weekenders aren’t the only ones flocking to the endless miles of sandy beaches and rolling dunes — a growing society of sea life makes its home here, too, just offshore.

Paris Wine and Ice Cream Bar Folderol Takes Back Control After TikTok Fame

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“They don’t even taste the ice cream,” Jessica Yang said of the social-media-conscious crowd that descended this summer on Folderol, a natural wine bar and artisanal ice cream parlor in Paris that she owns and operates with her husband, Robert Compagnon. “They just let it pool into a bowl of melting liquid and die in the sun.”

In late April, a daily line began to form outside Folderol’s red storefront as the business grew in popularity, thanks in large part to TikTok. As the spring bloomed into a summer that saw a record number of tourists traveling to Europe, the lines became longer.

Throughout June and July, tourists and content creators flocked to Folderol, waiting for hours on its otherwise quiet 11th arrondissement street so that they, too, could recreate what they had seen online: fashionable folk sitting on Parisian curbs, eating ice cream from steel coupes, smoking cigarettes and swigging wine.

Both 37-year-old chefs, Ms. Yang and Mr. Compagnon met in Paris in 2010 while working in the kitchen of the highly acclaimed restaurant Guy Savoy. Mr. Compagnon, who is French American, and Ms. Yang, who is Taiwanese American, spent the next few years between Paris and New York City, working at restaurants including Le Jules Verne, Momofuku Ko, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and Per Se.

The couple opened Folderol in December 2020, one door down from their intimate Michelin-star-winning restaurant, Le Rigmarole. As new parents, they were inspired to start a family friendly business. “We wanted it to be a place where parents and kids could go and have fun,” Ms. Yang said about their hopes for Folderol. “Parents could have a glass of wine; kids could have some ice cream.”

Because of coronavirus restrictions, when Folderol opened, it was takeout-only. Customers would pick up a bottle from the bar’s curated selection of small-batch natural wines or a pint of seasonally inspired ice cream, hand-churned by Ms. Yang in a labor-intensive, 48-hour process.

As the pandemic eased, customers were allowed inside Folderol, but given its limited indoor seating and the al fresco dining culture of Paris, many patrons chose to eat and drink outside. This gave rise to Folderol’s curbside aesthetic, which garnered mass appeal on TikTok.

“So I keep seeing people post photos and videos from this place in Paris called Folderol, and I’ve honestly never felt like I needed to go someplace more than I do right now,” Anna Hyclak, a 35-year-old American living in London, said in a TikTok video in June. “Spiritually, it is calling to me. Like, I feel like it would cure my depression to sit on these sidewalks.”

Ms. Hyclak’s reel garnered over 20,000 likes and 167 comments, most lamenting Folderol’s viral fame. One TikTok user wrote: “I live really close to this place and it’s totally impossible to go now. The line is huge and full of teenagers/TikTokers at all times.” Another commented: “I went and it felt like a photo shoot set. Like I’m sure it was amazing before but now it’s all the fashion girlies going there for content.”

Many of Folderol’s longtime customers were put off by the crowd. “Last summer I used to come in all the time,” said Samantha Luevano, a 27-year-old copywriter in Paris. “I used to sit outside and eat my ice cream and drink wine casually. There’d be like five people here.” This summer, Ms. Luevano chose to pick up pints of ice cream and bottles of wine at Folderol instead of dining in because, she said, the hectic atmosphere caused her “anxiety.”

Mr. Compagnon likened the situation to “running a marathon in flip flops.” Their small operation struggled to keep up with demand. Frustrated clients started leaving the business negative reviews. The pretty ice cream coupes, which the owners found at Parisian flea markets, began to go missing. On four occasions, neighbors called the police about the crowd.

“We wanted our reputation to be based on the quality of the food and what we produce,” Mr. Compagnon said. “We didn’t see this coming.”

In late May, Ms. Yang and Mr. Compagnon began instituting a series of measures, which they call “roadblocks,” in an attempt to regain control of Folderol.

First, they decreased the number of wine glasses they had available to put a cap on the number of customers they could serve at once. Then they hired a bouncer to help their staff with crowd control. Next, they put up signs to the right of Folderol’s front door that read, in English: “No TikTok” and “Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.”

In July, they banned guests from sitting outside entirely — an unpopular measure with those who had come just to pose. “‘Oh, we can’t sit outside and take pictures?’” Mr. Compagnon said, imitating customers who were not aware of Folderol’s new rules. “And so they just leave.”

While Folderol was on its annual August break, the pop star Dua Lipa named Folderol as one of her “favorite French restaurants” in a Vogue France video. Despite Ms. Lipa’s shout-out, the atmosphere was noticeably calmer when Folderol reopened on August 30. “We’re feeling better,” Mr. Compagnon said. “People seem to be much more understanding.”

Bianca de la Luna, a 25-year-old model from Germany, visited Folderol the day it reopened. After admitting that she had learned about Folderol on TikTok, Ms. de la Luna whispered, “I don’t want to say that too loud in here.”

“I’d love to take the Instagram picture with the ice cream and wine,” said her friend Huy Nguyen, an 18-year-old art student. “But now it’s forbidden.”

Latest Russia-Ukraine War News: Live Updates

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From left, Evan Gershkovich’s father, Mikhail Gershkovich; sister, Danielle Gershkovich; and mother, Ella Milman, with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations, in New York on Wednesday.Credit…Michelle Nichols/Reuters

The family of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in Russia since March, appealed on Wednesday for the United Nations’ help in bringing him home, urging world leaders who will soon be attending the U.N. General Assembly to join the call for his release.

“Next week, world leaders will gather here to discuss many important issues,” Mr. Gershkovich’s father, Mikhail, said at a briefing in New York alongside the American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

He called on those leaders to stand with his son, saying Evan Gershkovich represented “the basic right to free press and freedom of expression” and that “these rights are bedrock principles of the United Nations.”

The United States “will not rest until Evan and Paul and all wrongfully detained Americans are home safe and sound,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said, referring to Paul Whelan, a former Marine serving a 16-year sentence on what U.S. officials say are bogus espionage charges.

Mr. Whelan was able to have a consular visit on Wednesday with the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters. “We believe Paul continues to show tremendous courage in the face of his wrongful detention,” Mr. Miller added.

Lawyers filed a petition on Tuesday asking a group of U.N. experts to side with the U.S. government and agree that Evan Gershkovich was being arbitrarily detained by Russia in violation of his human rights, the family said.

The petition was submitted to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, a panel of five human rights and international law experts. The group has previously evaluated the detentions of several journalists, including the Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who spent 544 days imprisoned in Iran before he was released in a prisoner swap in early 2016.

The U.N. group does not have any enforcement authority, but its determination that Mr. Gershkovich is being arbitrarily detained would further raise pressure on Russia, already isolated from the West, to free him.

Mr. Gershkovich is the first American journalist to be detained on accusations of spying in Russia since the end of the Cold War. The United States government considers him wrongfully detained, and along with The Journal, has categorically denied the accusations against him.

“If this can happen to my brother, it can happen to any journalist trying to report the news,” Mr. Gershkovich’s sister, Danielle Gershkovich, said at the briefing.

His mother, Ella Milman, said she missed her son every day, and that he had teased in letters that the food in the notorious Lefortovo prison where he is being held reminds him of her cooking. “We’re glad he’s kept his sense of humor,” she said.

Mr. Gershkovich’s pretrial detention will extend at least until Nov. 30, a Moscow court ruled last month after a secret proceeding that was closed to the news media.

Gridlock, Confusion and Waiting: On the Road With Spanish Rescuers in Morocco

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new video loaded: Gridlock, Confusion and Waiting: On the Road With Spanish Rescuers in Morocco

transcript

transcript

Gridlock, Confusion and Waiting: On the Road With Spanish Rescuers in Morocco

Our video journalists embedded with a team of Spanish military rescuers in Morocco as they attempted to save lives after the earthquake. They spent much of the day waiting for orders.

We set out early Tuesday morning to try and catch one of these rescue crews that had recently arrived. And we found a Spanish military professional rescue crew that was just heading out up into the mountains to these remote villages that are extremely difficult to access. The Spanish team arrived on Sunday and they just got the green light to go into the mountains on Tuesday. We were hoping to see a miracle to see them rescue someone. But we quickly realized that with the logistics, they weren’t able to do what they came to do. As you keep going deeper, you notice the damage gets more and more extensive and starts to make it near impossible to move and access these villages. We arrive at this village, Ijoukak, and the Spanish team is getting out their dogs. They’re starting to jump out of the truck. And then, everything kind of stops. And we’re wondering what’s going on. There was no clear direction. It was a really frustrating and bizarre sense of inaction because they’re waiting to be directed by the Moroccan military and government, who are heading up all the operations. And they were just sitting and waiting. We had a few moments to speak with one of the lieutenants. I try and ask him about the government’s role in all this, the disorganization. And then his captain interrupts me and goes, “No political questions. We can’t talk about this.” When I spoke with another crew who was volunteering, he was able to speak a lot more candidly about what was going on. Has the military been helping with fuel and logistics? Tell me how they’ve been assisting. Slowly. The things here in Morocco is very slowly. So you were in the Turkish earthquake, too. How does this compare to the earthquake in Turkey? In Turkey is the help arrived so fast and the government let people work so fast. Maybe the first day you can work. It’s all free for everybody. Here its trouble is very slow. In the government’s defense, more rescue crews would have likely caused even more gridlock and even more of a delay in reaching these villages. Also, we’ve come to notice that most of these remote villages, because they’re so small, the villagers actually recovered most of their dead within the first day or two. The volunteer texted us later and said they had made that same assessment, and actually were packing up and concluding their whole rescue operation in Morocco. They said they simply could not do what they came here to do.

Recent episodes in Africa

Venice Keeps Off UNESCO World Heritage Danger List

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Venice will not be included on UNESCO’s list of “World Heritage in Danger” after a panel voted on Thursday to reject the recommendation of experts at the agency who had raised concerns that Italy had not done enough to protect the fragile city, which is threatened by climate change, mass tourism and development.

Still, representatives of countries upholding the World Heritage Convention, which seeks to protect and preserve cultural sites, said in a statement that “further progress still needs to be made” to properly conserve Venice. During a debate on Thursday afternoon at a World Heritage Committee session in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, several delegates said Italy should host a new advisory mission in Venice in the coming months to monitor the efficacy of the measures that Italy has taken so far and to make suggestions.

“Venice is not at risk,” Mayor Luigi Brugnaro wrote on social media Thursday evening, describing the result as a “great victory.” Posting on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, he added: “The world has understood all the work we have done to save our city.”

Italy was warned in July that Venice, a World Heritage Site since 1987, was being considered for UNESCO’s “in danger” list, even though the state and city have made significant changes to try to protect Venice.

Large cruise ships have been banned from entering Venetian waters. Massive barriers at the mouths of the lagoon hold seawater at bay and stop high tides from flooding the city. And officials have begun tracking tourists via their cellphone data to monitor their movements.

This week, City Council voted that, starting next year, day-trippers to Venice will be expected to pay 5 euros on days when the city is extremely crowded with tourists. City officials hope that the measure will curb some of the millions of tourists who throng to the city each year — five million so far in 2023. Those who stay overnight won’t be charged.

Venice almost made the danger list in 2021, but then, too, member countries rejected the proposal.

Despite the changes in Venice, UNESCO experts who have been closely monitoring the city felt that Italy and the local government had not done enough. Once a site is placed on the danger list, it can lose its World Heritage status, which acknowledges its outstanding universal value.

But the 21 member states thought Italy’s efforts were to be commended, and several said that it was “premature” to put Venice on the list. Several pointed out that climate change was a global issue, affecting many cultural heritage sites, and said Italy should not be singled out.

Some citizen groups had hoped that the city would be recognized as endangered. Nearly 5,000 people signed a petition addressed to the UNESCO general director, Audrey Azoulay, on Change.org, asking that Venice be on the list, because of the problems caused by excessive tourism. “The out-of-control tourism machine makes big financial gains for few, against the common good and those who want to live in the city,” the petition said.

In his report to the session on Thursday, Nicholas Clarke, an expert with the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which advises UNESCO on World Heritage sites and had urged putting Venice on the list, said that efforts to tackle heavy tourism “come very late and more urgent action is required.”

For years, visitors to Venice have easily outnumbered the residents of the historic city center, the number of which dropped a year ago to under 50,000 from nearly 175,000 in 1951.

Speaking before the vote Thursday, Berta de Sancristobal of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, which had called for the city to be listed as in danger, cited “the negative impacts of mass tourism reflected in the continued decline in local residents, leading to the alteration of the spirit of place and the loss of historic authenticity.”

Last week, a local group announced that the number of beds for visitors had surpassed those for residents.

The aim of the UNESCO list, which includes 55 endangered sites like the Old City of Jerusalem and Timbuktu, is to spur conservation, according to the agency. When a site is on the list, the United Nations commits to develop a corrective plan alongside national authorities and to monitor the results.

Matteo Secchi of the citizens’ group Venessia.com said that locals did not need UNESCO to tell them what was wrong with the city, even though a spotlight on the problems was welcome if it made the world take notice.

“We are only trying to carry on our culture, our life, and we see that it’s in danger. That’s why we get mad, why we make appeals to the world,” he said, adding of the tourists: “They’re not happy, we’re not happy, everyone isn’t happy.”

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