Roll back some

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his country’s richest man, has resided in “gulag lite,” as he calls the Russian penal system under Vladimir Putin, for six years. Since the spring, on most working days he is roused at 6:45 in the morning, surrounded by guards and packed into an armored van for the drive to court. For two hours each way, the man who once supplied 2 percent of the world’s oil crouches in a steel cage measuring 47 by 31 by 20 inches. Convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 2005, Khodorkovsky now faces a fresh set of charges that add up to the supposed theft of $30 billion. In the dark of the van, Khodorkovsky tries to prepare for his trial, replaying in his mind his night reading, the daily stack of documents from his lawyers. But Russia’s most famous prisoner worries too about what would happen if a car slammed into the van. (Collisions are routine in Moscow’s clotted avenues.) “Your chances of making it out alive,” he wrote me one day this summer, “at any speed, are next to … [Read more...] about Who Fears a Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears, judging by this spurious, somewhat cranky documentary by John Scheinfeld , is that the band faced the unforeseen consequences of its own bad decisions. In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the enormously popular nine-piece jazz-rock group, undertook a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, inadvertently outraging the progressive, college-age fans whose enthusiasm had made the group such a stratospheric counterculture success. To make matters worse, upon their return, the members of the band — who had headlined Woodstock and spoken out against the war in Vietnam — now decried communism as “scary,” professing gratitude for freedoms they’d previously taken for granted — quite the about-face. As David Felton wrote acidly in a 1970 issue of Rolling Stone , it sure sounded like “the State Department got its money’s worth.” The backlash was swift and, the documentary argues, effectively … [Read more...] about ‘What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?’ Review: What Goes Up

Denver is about to get one of Portland’s finest. Chef Carlo Lamagna, a 2022 James Beard Award finalist who was also named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs in 2021 , plans to open a Filipino restaurant, Magna Kainan, at 1350 40th St. in early 2024. “I’ve always wanted to move to Denver,” Lamagna said. “It was on my list of places to move after Chicago with my wife, but Portland got to me first with the job offer. It’s a central location and a hub of international travel with an intriguing food scene. “I haven’t had a chance to explore everything yet, but when I did visit, I was hard pressed to find a Filipino restaurant, so I think we’re going to have a pretty unique offering,” he added. Filipino food has long been underrepresented in Colorado with only a very few restaurants serving it or specializing in it. Magna Kainan, a more upscale, woodfired approach to Filipino fare, will be a sister restaurant to Lamagna’s original spot, Magna Kusina, which he opened in … [Read more...] about James Beard-nominated Portland chef opening Filipino restaurant in RiNo

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images OpenAI entered the Silicon Valley stratosphere last year with the release of two AI products, the image-generator DALLE-2 and the chatbot ChatGPT . (The company recently unveiled GPT-4 , which can ace most standardized tests, among other improvements on its predecessor.) Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder, has become a public face of the AI revolution, alternately evangelical and circumspect about the potent force he has helped unleash on the world. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher , Swisher speaks with Altman about the many possibilities and pitfalls of his nascent field, focusing on some of the key questions around it. Among them: How do we best to regulate a technology even its founders don’t fully understand? And who gets the enormous sums of money at stake? Altman has lofty ideas for how generative AI could transform society. But as Swisher observes, he sounds like the starry-eyed tech founders she … [Read more...] about Sam Altman on What Makes Him ‘Super Nervous’ About AI

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 10 PARIS (AP) — Unrest in France is tarnishing the sheen of King Charles III's first overseas trip as monarch, with striking workers literally refusing to roll out a red carpet amid pension reform protests and calls for the visit to be canceled altogether. The British king is scheduled to undertake the trip beginning Sunday on behalf of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government, which hoped a glamorous royal tour would underscore efforts to rebuild Anglo-French ties that were frayed by the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union. But anger over French President Emmanuel Macron's resolve to increase the retirement age by two years are clouding what was meant to be a show of bonhomie and friendship. Instead, Charles' visit is being seen as an unnecessary display of hereditary privilege. “It’s very bad timing. Normally the French would welcome … [Read more...] about No red carpet? French unrest impacts King Charles III’s trip

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 6 His circumstances sounded straight out of "Moby-Dick," but Rick Rodriguez wasn't kidding. In his first text messages from the life raft, he said he was in serious trouble. "Tommy this is no joke," he typed to his friend and fellow sailor Tommy Joyce. "We hit a whale and the ship went down." "Tell as many boats as you can," Rodriguez also urged. "Battery is dangerously low." On March 13, Rodriguez and three friends were 13 days into what was expected to be a three-week crossing from the Galápagos to French Polynesia on his 44-foot sailboat, Raindancer. Rodriguez was on watch, and he and the others were eating a vegetarian pizza for lunch around 1:30 p.m. In an interview with The Washington Post later conducted via satellite phone, Rodriguez said the ship had good winds and was sailing at about 6 knots when he heard a terrific BANG! "The second pizza had just … [Read more...] about Sailboat crew rescued in Pacific after abandoning ship sunk by whale