• Opinion | Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Man Challenging Putin for Power
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/opinion/russia-putin-ukraine-wagner.html

    Zygar est un journaliste russe de qualité qui a choisi le camp états-unien. Son déménagement à Berlin ne semble pas avoir été accompagné des problèmes qui se posent typiquement aux réfugiés russes pacifistes et déserteurs. Ce n’est pas une voix indépendante. Si on n’oublie pas son affiliation, on peut le lire sans tomber dans le piège des malentendus et éléments obscurcis qu’il nous tend. Ses textes complètent l’image que nous avons de la Russie.

    Il a un point faible évident : comme tous les auteurs bourgeois ses textes ne proposent jamais d’analyse permettant de percer le brouillard idéologique qui les entoure. On ne le lit alors que pour sa contribution de « faits » si chers au journalisme bourgeois. Il nous permet également la découverte d’une perspective impérialiste sur les choses qu’il traite, car ses textes sont lus avec attention par les autres membres de son camp. Il a un style agréable à lire. Tant mieux. Pour une fois je découvre une source du camp impérialiste dont la lecture ne fait mal au coeur.

    https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michail_Wiktorowitsch_Sygar

    26.1.2023 by Mikhail Zygar - Guest Essay

    Mr. Zygar is a Russian journalist and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin.”

    This guest essay published in January. The mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin is now involved in what Vladimir Putin has called “an armed rebellion” against the Russian military.

    President Vladimir Putin of Russia, it seems, has finally noticed that the war in Ukraine created a dangerous competitor to his power: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the private military company, the Wagner group, whose troops fight alongside the Russian Army.

    Depending on your point of view, Mr. Prigozhin could be considered either the person of the year or the villain of the year. Mr. Putin is, according to many sources in Moscow, confident that he can weaken Mr. Prigozhin, who has clashed with the military’s general staff. However, the effect could be the opposite, with more people seeing Mr. Prigozhin as the most probable favorite to succeed Mr. Putin.

    From the very beginning of the war against Ukraine, Mr. Putin made sure that rivals to his power could not emerge and took great pains to ensure that the conflict does not create a popular military leader who could pose a threat. It worked. In the summer of 2022, for instance, the ambitious Gen. Alexander Lapin was the recipient of a small online public relations campaign glorifying him. This immediately cost him his job — and a brief but powerful media war against him was launched by Mr. Prigozhin, who controls a series of online troll factories.

    According to my sources close to the Russian administration, Mr. Putin then perceived Mr. Prigozhin solely as a counterweight to the generals. The Russian president saw Mr. Prigozhin as his man, an obedient tool and easy to use.

    Yet in recent years, Mr. Prigozhin has made a very unexpected career. At first, he was known as Putin’s chef, who managed to become a state contractor of school lunches for Russian children all across the country. Then he created the troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, and he was singled out in Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in the 2016 election. Finally, Mr. Prigozhin became famous as the founder of the Wagner group, whose contractors fought in Africa, Syria and now Ukraine.

    Those achievements alone guaranteed Mr. Prigozhin responsibility for Mr. Putin’s most delicate assignments. But this year, Mr. Prigozhin moved into another league, surpassing all of Mr. Putin’s other friends in power. These include Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu; the Russian Security Council secretary, Nikolai Patrushev; the C.E.O. of Russia’s state-owned defense giant, Rostec, Sergei Chemezov; and Mr. Putin’s closest friend, Yury Kovalchuk. Mr. Prigozhin bypassed all of them and appears to be the most important player in Russia. He is both the most popular political operator and the one who is feared by Russian high officials and businessmen.

    Mr. Prigozhin’s meteoric political rise began this summer when he started touring Russian prisons and recruiting prisoners for his private Wagner army, offering pardons to those who fight on the front lines in Ukraine: six months of service and then freedom.

    To do this, Mr. Prigozhin had to take on several key Russian security agencies at once: the Federal Penitentiary Service, a state within a state in Russia, the F.S.B., the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee. All of those groups have a special status, they report only to President Putin, and no one dares to argue with them. But then the situation changed — a joker appeared, who can beat all the aces at the same time. If Mr. Prigozhin can free any prisoner, his powers are unlimited.

    The next sign of Mr. Prigozhin’s new status was his open confrontation with the Ministry of Defense and the military’s general staff.

    This conflict was a new phenomenon for the Russian political system. In the past, some subordinates of Mr. Putin usually did not allow themselves to publicly attack subordinates. But, in 2022, that changed. When the invasion started, Mr. Putin was obsessed with the war. It’s his only interest, sources claim. Only those people who are on the front lines have direct access to Mr. Putin and former members of the inner circle who ended up in the rear became less significant.

    Mr. Prigozhin managed to create for himself the image of the most effective warrior. He is not subordinate to the Ministry of Defense, he is not included in the system of military bureaucracy, and he determines his own tasks, goals and time frames. According to my sources, Mr. Putin was fine with this arrangement. And he allowed Mr. Prigozhin to rudely and publicly criticize other generals. Mr. Putin has a low opinion of them, so he didn’t scold the Wagner founder.

    Last fall, Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former Russian prisoner who defected to Ukraine after being recruited by the Wagner group and ended up back in Russia after a prisoner swap, was killed with a sledgehammer. A video of this massacre emerged in November and was most likely intended as a warning to all future deserters.

    Surprisingly, this barbarity has a lot of fans. Stores in Russia began to sell “Wagner Sledgehammers,” as well as souvenirs and car stickers with Wagner symbols. Mr. Prigozhin, who put out a statement supporting Mr. Nuzhin’s killing, became somewhat of a folk hero.

    The most radical politicians and businessmen have been drawn to Mr. Prigozhin. Those I speak with tell me that the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, who previously had a direct line to Mr. Putin, now reports to Mr. Prigozhin. The businessman Konstantin Malofeev, owner of the ultraconservative channel Tsargrad TV, who supported Russia’s attack on Donbas in 2014, as well as the ideologist of modern Russian fascism, the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, also praised Mr. Prigozhin. In addition, his group of influence includes the leaders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk republics. In general, this is the most influential clan in modern Russia, since it is those who are at the front who carry the most weight in the eyes of Mr. Putin.

    Mr. Prigozhin has also become the hero for “patriotic” military reporters (those who work for propagandist media and express openly fascist views).

    But Mr. Prigozhin already seems like a completely independent political player. He started fighting against the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, a longtime associate of Mr. Putin. “People like Mr. Beglov will be crushed by our society like bugs, sooner or later,” he recently wrote.

    By the end of 2022, many Moscow businessmen and officials strongly believed that Mr. Prigozhin was a real threat. “The sledgehammer is a message to all of us,” one oligarch told me. For several months last year questions swirled about why Mr. Putin would not put Mr. Prigozhin in his place, as he did to so many others.

    On Jan. 10, Mr. Prigozhin reported on his company’s Telegram channel that Wagner militants had taken the Ukrainian city of Soledar. This was his most powerful propaganda victory and convincing proof that Wagner is one of the most combat-ready Russian units. My sources in Moscow say some high-ranking officials started discussing — supposedly half-jokingly — if it was the right time to swear allegiance to Mr. Prigozhin before it was too late.

    The Ministry of Defense claimed that the seizure of Soledar was their achievement, which was immediately denied by Mr. Prigozhin and numerous military correspondents. For propagandists, such an insignificant victory caused absolute rapture. Here is one of the characteristic comments: “Wagner PMC stormed the Russian city of Soledar and killed all the occupants. Not exchanged, namely killed. Like mad dogs. Therefore, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin is a real Russian politician. He says what the good Russian people want to hear and does what they expect from their army.”

    It was presumably at this moment that Mr. Putin realized that Mr. Prigozhin might be a bit too popular. So he elevated Mr. Prigozhin’s main enemies, Generals Lapin and Valery Gerasimov, and appointed General Gerasimov as commander of the operation in Ukraine. This is Mr. Putin’s traditional bureaucratic game, which has been effective but may not work this time.

    Many Russians, zombified by propaganda, are frustrated that the army is not winning. Kyiv was not taken in a few days as promised. By appointing General Gerasimov supreme commander, Mr. Putin assumes responsibility for all subsequent defeats. And it doesn’t weaken Mr. Prigozhin, who did not criticize this appointment.

    This means that, in the near future, Mr. Prigozhin may challenge the president, and Mr. Putin may no longer be able to oppose his former chef.

    #Russie #guerre #état #gouvernement #politique #mafia

  • Opinion | Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/opinion/mass-tech-layoffs-email-google.html

    Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently announced that it would lay off around 12,000 people, 6 percent of its work force. Employees who were let go, some of whom had worked for the company for decades, got the news in their inbox. “It’s hard for me to believe that after 20 years at #Google I unexpectedly find out about my last day via an email,” a Google engineer, Jeremy Joslin, tweeted. “What a slap in the face.”

    That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.

    Employees at a tech company called PagerDuty received notices last week that set a new low bar for a layoff announcement, starting off with a few hundred words of cheery blather and rounding out with a Martin Luther King Jr. quotation about overcoming adversity.

    As someone who’s managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It’s reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won’t have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.

    Since then I’ve hired and trained first-time managers, and taught them how to do this in a way that respects the dignity of the people who are losing their job: Look people in the eye. Answer questions. If someone is upset, show some sympathy. Treat people the way we ourselves would wish to be treated. At the very least this demands an actual human conversation. It is more effort than sending a platitude-laden mass email, but it demonstrates respect.

    Perhaps the most appalling aspect of termination by email is the asymmetry between what corporations expect of their workers and how they treat them in return. Employees in all kinds of jobs are routinely pressed to give the maximum that they can. In low-wage service jobs that can mean insane, unpredictable hours with no benefits. At higher-paying tech jobs it can mean sacrificing any semblance of a life outside of the office, a requirement that is often justified by high-minded rhetoric about changing the world or the promise of some pot-of-gold reward in an unspecified future.

    The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they’ve earned.

    But when it’s the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that’s not nailed down.

    #Travail #Violence_capitaliste #Licenciement

  • Anthropic Said to Be Closing In on $300 Million in New A.I. Funding - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/technology/anthropic-ai-funding.html

    Silicon Valley has been gripped by a frenzy over start-ups working on “generative” A.I., technologies that can generate text, images and other media in response to short prompts. This week, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that kicked off the furor in November with a chatbot, ChatGPT. ChatGPT has wowed more than a million people with its knack for answering questions in clear, concise prose.

    Even as funding for other start-ups has dried up, investors have chased deals in similar A.I. companies, signaling that the otherwise gloomy market for tech investing has at least one bright spot.

    Other funding deals in the works include Character.AI, which lets people talk to chatbots that impersonate celebrities. The start-up has held discussions about a large round of funding, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

    Replika, another chatbot company, and You.com, which is rolling out similar technology into a new kind of search engine, said they, too, had received unsolicited interest from investors.

    All specialize in generative A.I. The result of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI, these technologies are poised to remake everything from online search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing to photo and graphics editors like Photoshop.

    The explosion of interest in generative A.I. has investors and start-ups racing to choose their teams. Start-ups want to take money from the most powerful investors with the deepest pockets, and investors are trying to pick winners from a growing list of ambitious companies.

    #Intelligence_artificielle #Nouveaux_marchés #Economie_numérique

  • How a Drug Company Made $114 Billion by Gaming the U.S. Patent System - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/business/humira-abbvie-monopoly.html

    By Rebecca Robbins

    Jan. 28, 2023

    In 2016, a blockbuster drug called Humira was poised to become a lot less valuable.

    The key patent on the best-selling anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat conditions like arthritis, was expiring at the end of the year. Regulators had blessed a rival version of the drug, and more copycats were close behind. The onset of competition seemed likely to push down the medication’s $50,000-a-year list price.

    Instead, the opposite happened.

    Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. For the next six years, the drug’s price kept rising. Today, Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history.

    Next week, the curtain is expected to come down on a monopoly that has generated $114 billion in revenue for AbbVie just since the end of 2016. The knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market in the United States, and as many as nine more Humira competitors will follow this year from pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer. Prices are likely to tumble.

    The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs.

    AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year.

    The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers.

    AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie’s success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.

    “Humira is the poster child for many of the biggest concerns with the pharmaceutical industry,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”

    Following AbbVie’s footsteps, Amgen has piled up patents for its anti-inflammatory drug Enbrel, delaying a copycat version by an expected 13 years after it won regulatory approval. Merck and its partners have sought 180 patents, by one count, related to its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, and the company is working on a new formulation that could extend its monopoly further.

    Humira has earned $208 billion globally since it was first approved in 2002 to ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. It has since been authorized to treat more autoimmune conditions, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Patients administer it themselves, typically every week or two, injecting it with a pen or syringe. In 2021, sales of Humira accounted for more than a third of AbbVie’s total revenue.

    In 2010, the Affordable Care Act created a pathway for the approval of so-called biosimilars, which are competitors to complex biologic drugs like Humira that are made inside living cells. Unlike generic equivalents of traditional synthetic medications, biosimilars usually are not identical to their branded counterparts and cannot be swapped out by a pharmacist.

    The hope was that biosimilars would drastically drive down the cost of pricey brand-name biologics. That is what has happened in Europe. But it has not worked out that way in the United States.

    Patents are good for 20 years after an application is filed. Because they protect patent holders’ right to profit off their inventions, they are supposed to incentivize the expensive risk-taking that sometimes yields breakthrough innovations. But drug companies have turned patents into weapons to thwart competition.

    AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market.

    Some of Humira’s patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents.

    For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016.

    #Big_Pharma #Humira #Brevets #Santé_publique

  • Fine Dining and the Ethics of Noma’s Meticulously Crafted Fruit Beetle - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/dining/noma-fruit-beetle-fine-dining.html?te=1&nl=from-the-times&emc=edit_ufn_2023

    By Tejal Rao

    Jan. 24, 2023

    Since I read this month that Noma would pivot from a full-time restaurant to a kind of food laboratory and pop-up, I’ve been thinking less about the chef René Redzepi and more about Namrata Hegde, an unpaid intern who worked in his Copenhagen kitchen for three months, making fruit beetles.

    Every day, as she told The Times, she spread the jam out, let it set and carved it into various shapes using stencils. She assembled those shapes to form a trompe l’oeil beetle: a glossy, three-dimensional creature made out of fruit leather. Most days, before dinner service, she assembled 120 perfect specimens and pinned each one in a glass box, ready to serve to diners. All the while, she said, she was “forbidden to laugh.”

    In the past, Ms. Hegde’s labor might have been obscured or even dismissed, but in the middle of what felt like a shifting sentiment against the cult of fine dining, it became a crucial detail. It illustrated the unglamorous drudgery of high-end restaurant kitchens, and sounded more like another tedious day at the factory, another lonely shift on the assembly line.

    Maybe it’s not what most people imagined when they thought of this supposedly glamorous world. But at the most extreme and competitive end of fine dining — let’s say, 100 or so restaurants around the world — there’s a fruit beetle on every menu. Not an actual fruit beetle but a number of mind-boggling, technique-driven, labor-intensive dishes. Trophy dishes.

    How do they do it?

    There’s no way around it. This kind of endless grind requires an immense amount of labor. The more workers in the back, willing to do the grunt work necessary, the more elaborate that vision of fine dining can be, like a large-scale art studio.

    Many fine-dining restaurants rely on free labor to compete at this level — and have faced criticism for it. Reporting last June in The Financial Times detailed the immense power that Copenhagen restaurants hold over an unpaid, international work force, drawn to the city’s constellation of star restaurants and vulnerable to dangerous working conditions and bullying.

    It seemed impossible — if one of the best restaurants in the world couldn’t make their business work, then what restaurant could? Over a decade later, after spending the maximum years possible at the top of the list and earning three Michelin stars, Mr. Redzepi called the old fine-dining model “unsustainable” and left many wondering the same thing about his restaurant. Does its pivot mean the end of fine dining? Probably not, no.

    We’ve been here before. What feels different this time is the seismic cultural shift in our tolerance for the idea of auteur-chefs who make cooks suffer for their art. In The Atlantic, the chef Rob Anderson wrote that “the kind of high-end dining Noma exemplifies is abusive, disingenuous, and unethical.” And in a story for Bon Appétit magazine, Genevieve Yam wrote that it was a good thing if the Nomas of the world were closing because “if restaurants can’t figure out a business model where they pay and treat their staff fairly, they simply shouldn’t exist.”

    #Ethique #Restauration #Travail #Sur-exploitation #1% #Marché_de_riches

  • Tom Verlaine, Influential Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 73 - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/arts/music/tom-verlaine-dead.html

    He first attracted attention with the band Television, a fixture of the New York punk rock scene. But his music wasn’t so easily categorized.

    Tom Verlaine, a thin man wearing dark clothes, onstage playing an electric guitar while staring intensely at the instrument.
    The guitarist Tom Verlaine performing at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan in 2006.Credit...Rahav Segev for The New York Times
    Tom Verlaine, a thin man wearing dark clothes, onstage playing an electric guitar while staring intensely at the instrument.

    By Peter Keepnews
    Jan. 28, 2023

    Tom Verlaine, whose band Television was one of the most influential to emerge from the New York punk rock scene centered on the nightclub CBGB — but whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting were never easily categorizable as punk, or for that matter as any other genre — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73.

    His death was announced by Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Mr. Verlaine’s fellow musician Patti Smith. She did not specify a cause, saying that he died “after a brief illness.”

    Although Television achieved only minor commercial success and broke up after recording two albums, Mr. Verlaine — who went on to record several solo albums and reunited with the band periodically — had a lasting influence, especially on his fellow guitarists.

    “Tom Verlaine is the guitarist to mention these days if you’re a young rocker with some pretense to intelligence and originality,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1987.

    Reviewing a performance by Mr. Verlaine’s band at the Bowery Ballroom in 2006, the Times critic Jon Pareles wrote: “Mr. Verlaine’s guitar leads didn’t flaunt virtuosity by streaking above the beat. They tugged against it instead: lagging deliberately behind, clawing chords on offbeats, trickling around it or rising in craggy, determined lines.”

    The layered, often ethereal sound that Mr. Verlaine and the other members of Television developed was a far cry from the stripped-down approach of the Ramones and other leading lights of the punk scene. But that scene — which also included bands as disparate as Blondie and Talking Heads — was never as one-dimensional as it was often portrayed.

    Mr. Verlaine, who was also the band’s lead singer and did most of the songwriting, studied piano and saxophone as a child, and his music had roots in everything from the free jazz of John Coltrane to the Rolling Stones’ hard-driving “19th Nervous Breakdown.” His often impressionistic lyrics reflected the influence of poets like Paul Verlaine, from whom the man born Thomas Miller took his stage name.

    Television had its roots in Mr. Verlaine’s friendship with Richard Meyers, later known as Richard Hell, when they were both students at a boarding school in Delaware. After they moved to New York, they formed a band, the Neon Boys, which in 1973 evolved into Television, with Richard Lloyd on second guitar, Mr. Hell on bass and Billy Ficca on drums. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

    After building a devoted following in New York, Television was signed by Elektra Records and in 1977 released the album “Marquee Moon.” Sales were disappointing, but critical acclaim was nearly unanimous, and “Marquee Moon” now regularly shows up on lists of the greatest rock albums.

    #Tom_Verlaine #Television #Marquee_Moon

  • JPMorgan Paid $175 Million for a Business It Now Says Was a Scam - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/business/jpmorgan-chase-charlie-javice-fraud.html

    All along, Ms. Javice was making frequent media appearances. In December 2017, she wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times with the headline “The 8 Most Confusing Things About FAFSA.” The piece contained so many errors that it required an eight-sentence correction.

  • U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/us/politics/ukraine-crimea-military.html

    The new thinking on Crimea — annexed illegally by Russia in 2014 — shows how far Biden administration officials have come from the start of the war, when they were wary of even acknowledging publicly that the United States was providing Stinger antiaircraft missiles for Ukrainian troops.

    But over the course of the conflict, the United States and its NATO allies have been steadily loosening the handcuffs they put on themselves, moving from providing Javelins and Stingers to advanced missile systems, Patriot air defense systems, armored fighting vehicles and even some Western tanks to give #Ukraine the capacity to strike against Russia’s onslaught.

    Now, the Biden administration is considering what would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.

    [...] Still, despite the additional weaponry, the Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take #Crimea militarily — and indeed, there are still worries that such a move could drive Mr. Putin to retaliate with an escalatory response. But, officials said, their assessment now is that Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.

    [...] “It feels to me like increasingly, the administration is recognizing that the threat of Russian escalation is perhaps not what they thought it was earlier,” General Hodges said.

    While Ukrainian strikes inside Russia proper still bring escalatory concerns from U.S. officials, Moscow’s reaction to periodic Ukrainian special operations or covert attacks in Crimea, including against Russian air bases, command posts and ships in the Black Sea fleet, has been tempered.

    “There is more clarity on their tolerance for damage and attacks,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.”

    Still, Mr. Putin and the Russian public view Crimea as part of Russia, so strikes there could solidify Russian support for the war.

    [...] Ms. Massicot said none of Ukraine’s handful of attacks on Crimea so far have threatened Russia’s ability to maintain its claim on the peninsula. “So they may not be an accurate test of Russia’s resolve on this point,” she said.

  • Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/dining/noma-closing-rene-redzepi.html

    The decision comes as Noma and many other elite restaurants are facing scrutiny of their treatment of the workers, many of them paid poorly or not at all, who produce and serve these exquisite dishes. The style of fine dining that Noma helped create and promote around the globe — wildly innovative, labor-intensive and vastly expensive — may be undergoing a sustainability crisis.
    ImageTwo chefs cooking in an open-air kitchen, decorated with leaves.
    A signature of Noma and its cuisine is its luxurious, modern-rustic aesthetic.Credit...Ditte Isager for The New York Times
    Two chefs cooking in an open-air kitchen, decorated with leaves.

    Mr. Redzepi, who has long acknowledged that grueling hours are required to produce the restaurant’s cuisine, said that the math of compensating nearly 100 employees fairly, while maintaining high standards, at prices that the market will bear, is not workable.

    “We have to completely rethink the industry,” he said. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.”
    Critic’s Notebook
    Noma Spawned a World of Imitators, but the Restaurant Remains an Original
    As the renowned Copenhagen destination prepares to end its regular service, Pete Wells examines its complicated legacy.
    Jan. 9, 2023

    The chef David Kinch, who last week closed his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Manresa, in Los Gatos, Calif., said, “the last 30 years were a gilded age,” when ambitious restaurants multiplied and became less formal and more exciting. His casual restaurants will remain open, but he said fine dining was no longer something he wanted to do himself, or to inflict on his staff, calling the work “backbreaking.”

    “Fine dining is at a crossroads, and there have to be huge changes,” he said. “The whole industry realizes that, but they do not know how it’s going to come out.”

    The Finnish chef Kim Mikkola, who worked at Noma for four years, said that fine dining, like diamonds, ballet and other elite pursuits, often has abuse built into it.

    “Everything luxetarian is built on somebody’s back; somebody has to pay,” he said.

    A newly empowered generation of workers has begun pushing back against that model, often using social media to call out employers. The Willows Inn, in Washington State, run by the Noma-trained chef Blaine Wetzel, closed in November, after a 2021 Times report on systemic abuse and harassment; top destinations like Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Eleven Madison Park have faced media investigations into working conditions. Recent films and TV series like “The Menu,” “Boiling Point” and “The Bear” have brought the image of armies of harried young chefs, silently wielding tweezers in service to a chef-auteur, into popular culture.

    In a 2015 essay, Mr. Redzepi admitted to bullying his staff verbally and physically, and has often acknowledged that his efforts to be a calmer, kinder leader have not been fully successful.

    “In an ideal restaurant, employees could work four days a week, feel empowered and safe and creative,” Mr. Redzepi said. “The problem is how to pay them enough to afford children, a car and a house in the suburbs.”

    Noma’s internship program has also served as a way for Noma to shore up its labor force, supplying 20 to 30 full-time workers (“stagiaires” is the traditional French term) who do much of the painstaking labor — hand-peeling walnuts and separating lavender leaves from stems — that defines Noma’s food and aesthetic.

    Until last October, the program provided only a work visa. However, being able to say, “I staged at Noma” is a priceless culinary credential. For that reason alone, most of the alumni interviewed said that an internship at Noma is worth the expense, the exhaustion and the stress.

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