Saturday, September 10, 2016

Manchester Renowned, and Redrawn, by Its Soccer

Soccer

Manchester Renowned, and Redrawn, by Its Soccer


Photo

Manchester United’s soccer stadium rises above nearby houses in Manchester, England. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
MANCHESTER, England — It is what Gary Neville sees from the roof terrace of his hotel that gives him a sense that something is happening. Not the immediate view to his right of the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand at Old Trafford, with the words “Manchester United” — the club Neville supported, represented and captained — emblazoned in neon red. Neville points, instead, to the view on his distant left.
“There are cranes,” Neville said, scanning the skyline of Manchester and Salford, sister cities so contiguous that their boundaries have melted. “When you see cranes, you know that means things are moving. Now, when I look out, I see a lot of cranes. The city feels alive.”
This weekend, of course, it is positively pulsing. Hotel Football, the stylish establishment Neville and several of his former United teammates opened across the street from Old Trafford last year, is sold out. In fact, there are just a handful of rooms remaining across the city. Tens of thousands of people have descended on Manchester for Saturday’s meeting of Manchester United and Manchester City.
Derby day always acts as an adrenaline shot, but this edition is particularly energizing. If United and City’s matching flawless starts to the Premier League season were not enough, then the slew of subplots — particularly the first meeting on English soil between City’s new manager, Pep Guardiola, and his United rival, José Mourinho, soccer’s repelling poles — have turned the game into a must-see event.

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Gary Neville and several of his former Manchester United teammates opened Hotel Football across the street from Old Trafford last year. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Both coaches have tried to play down the tension, Guardiola positively sputtering when he was told they represented a Premier League version of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. “The question of the rivalry is something the media talk about,” he said. “We can’t control it.”
Both, though, know they are fighting a losing battle. The talk, this week, has been of little other than their shared history, the long-running feud that caught fire while Guardiola was at Barcelona and Mourinho at Real Madrid and that is now expected to ignite the Premier League.
But there is another story to this derby, one that casts the clubs not in frenzied opposition but in accidental unison. It may not feel like it, but it is this story that matters more to the city.
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Manchester’s name has always carried certain connotations. To Victorians, it was “famed and feared” as the world’s first great industrial city, according to the disc jockey and journalist Dave Haslam. It was here that Friedrich Engels found inspiration for “The Communist Manifesto.”

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Portraits of soccer stars on display in Hotel Football. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

In the 1960s, the soap opera “Coronation Street” depicted Manchester as a place of cloth caps and cobbled streets, and by the late 1970s, as the city’s industries disappeared and bands like the Smiths and Joy Division documented the bleakness, the music writer Paul Morley believed it a “very boring place to be.”
Modern portraits tend to be no more flattering. The turn of the century was accompanied by a rise in gang violence, and a new generation of television painted a darker, 21st-century vision of Manchester: broken windows, hooded youths and hopelessness.
This Manchester — tough, desolate — still exists, but it is not the only Manchester.
During the past 20 years, the city’s authorities have led a physical regeneration, symbolized by the canopy of glass towers that sprang up after a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army destroyed much of the city center in 1996. The revival of the spirit, though, has come from elsewhere.
Music led the way, with the so-called Madchester era of the late 1980s — centered on the Hacienda nightclub, and bands like Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses — turning the city’s public image on its head. Abandoned buildings became nightclubs and bars, and a cottage industry of record shops and independent labels flourished in their wake. Music gave the city its confidence back.
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With a soccer-theme hotel and Britain’s National Football Museum, above, soccer is part of the fabric of Manchester in a way rarely seen elsewhere. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
“All Manchester is missing is a beach,” the Stone Roses’ Ian Brown once said.
Two decades later, the process is the same, but the engine is different. Sports is Manchester’s driving cultural force.
“Since the mid-1990s, it has become an increasingly important part of what is special about Manchester,” said Richard Leese, the leader of the Manchester City Council. The city is home to British Cycling’s so-called Medal Factory; its role in recent Olympic successes is such that Manchester will host one of two parades celebrating Britain’s Olympians. Leese’s pride is evident, but it is soccer, he said, that has had the most impact.
“The rivalry between the clubs has enhanced the international consciousness of the city as a whole,” he said. “Manchester is the third-most-visited city in Britain. The single biggest draw is football. In most parts of the world, people have heard of Manchester. Without football, that would not have been the case.”
As well as boosting tourism, the combination of City and United serves to advertise Manchester abroad. Both clubs have played their part in turning that into investment. United hosted events while on tour in China this summer to attract businesses to the city, and City, 13 percent owned by a Chinese consortium, welcomed that country’s soccer-mad president, Xi Jinping, to its training facility last year. That, in turn, attracts others.
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A bridge connects the Manchester City stadium to a new training ground and other redeveloped areas. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
“It opens the door,” in Leese’s words.
Hotel Football, opened 18 months ago by Neville and several of his former teammates from United’s famed class of ’92, was partly financed by foreign investment. It is proof, too, of how Manchester is seeking to leverage its sporting fame.
“Football capital of the world is a difficult claim,” Neville said.
He does believe, however, that with a soccer-themed hotel and Britain’s National Football Museum, the sport is part of the fabric of Manchester in a way rarely seen elsewhere.
That has an impact in the broader cityscape, just as music did in the 1980s. Neville points to the explosion of bars and restaurants in recent years as a consequence of the boom in investment. Some of them — San Carlo, Wing’s — have won fame as regular haunts of players; others, like Tapeo, part-owned by United midfielder Juan Mata, are supported by them more directly.
“It feels like a genuine second city to London now,” Neville said.
It is around City’s home in the east of the city, though, that the difference soccer has made is most visible, most tangible.

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Outside Old Trafford, the United Trinity statue refers to George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, who helped United win its first European Cup title, in 1968. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

“All of the area was heavily polluted,” said Pete Bradshaw, the club’s director of estate management. “The stadium itself is built on a mine shaft. There were wireworks, steelworks, dye makers, chemical plants.”
By the 1980s, Bradshaw said, “all of that had gone,” taking jobs and much of the local population with it.
It was, for many years, a forgotten part of the city. Hundreds of millions of dollars from Abu Dhabi, through City, changed all that.
As well as the stadium, the club has built its state-of-the-art training and academy facilities here, but the biggest difference is in the community. City’s investments have also brought a school, a college, a leisure center, a library. There are new housing developments, and access to health care.
Bradshaw, a veteran of the regeneration programs of the 1990s, is adamant that “it would not have been possible without the club, not on this scale.”
The work is not yet finished. Cranes dot the skyline here, too, just as they do on the enemy territory over at Old Trafford. Things are happening. Soccer has brought the city to life.

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  The New York Times

Facebook Restores Iconic Vietnam War Photo It Censored for Nudity

Facebook Restores Iconic Vietnam War Photo It Censored for Nudity

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Espen Egil Hansen, editor in chief of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, criticized Facebook for deleting a post that included Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked girl fleeing napalm during the Vietnam War. Credit Stein J. Bjorge/Aftenpost
The image is iconic: A naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War, tears streaming down her face. The picture from 1972, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, has since been used countless times to illustrate the horrors of modern warfare.
But for Facebook, the image of the girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, was one that violated its standards about nudity on the social network. So after a Norwegian author posted images about the terror of war with the photo to Facebook, the company removed it.
The move triggered a backlash over how Facebook was censoring images. When a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, cried foul over the takedown of the picture, thousands of people globally responded on Friday with an act of virtual civil disobedience by posting the image of Ms. Phuc on their Facebook pages and, in some cases, daring the company to act. Hours after the pushback, Facebook reinstated the photo across its site.
“An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our community standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography,” Facebook said in a statement on Friday. “In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”
The reversal underscores Facebook’s increasingly tricky position as an arbiter of mass media. While the social network has resisted being labeled a media entity — its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, recently told a group of Italian university students that Facebook is a “tech company, not a media company” — many used the Vietnam War photo uproar to call upon the Silicon Valley behemoth to acknowledge its control over the articles, videos and images that people consume.
“Mark Zuckerberg can resist the definition all he wants, claiming Facebook is a white hot tech company, not a media company,” said Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “But it is now possible for a company to be both.”
In an open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg, Espen Egil Hansen, the editor in chief of Aftenposten, said Facebook played a dominant role in how people around the world view information and that it should not set limits on what types of journalism could be seen online.
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“Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful editor in chief in the world,” Mr. Hansen, whose newspaper has a print circulation of 200,000, said in an interview on Friday. “Tomorrow, there will be another photo. Facebook will have to respond to that.”
Ms. Phuc did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nick Ut, the photographer who took the iconic image for The Associated Press, was traveling; the news agency said it was “proud of the photo.”
“We are always looking to improve our policies to make sure they both promote free expression and keep our community safe, and we will be engaging with publishers and other members of our global community on these important questions going forward,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.
The frequency with which Facebook needs to respond to questions over its media role has increased over the past 18 months. In May, the company had to grapple with reports that some editors working on its “Trending Topics” section — a portion of the site in which Facebook displays some of the most-talked-about stories on the network — were suppressing conservative political content.
Facebook last month laid off the Trending Topics team and said it would rely solely on algorithmic decision-making to surface trending stories across the site. In the weeks since, some have called for Facebook to rethink that stance, as several fake news stories have more prominently appeared in the section.
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A.J. Chavar, a New York Times journalist, reposted the Times’s article about Facebook removing posts including the Vietnam War-era photo showing a naked girl escaping napalm bombing. Facebook quickly removed Mr. Chavar’s post, citing Facebook community standards that restrict the display of nudity. Credit AJ Chavar
Last year, Facebook also had to revise its community standards after photos of women breast-feeding were removed from their Facebook pages. And the company apologized in May after it blocked a photo of a plus-size model for being “undesirable.”
Facebook’s editorial influence reaches far beyond Trending Topics. The company, with 1.71 billion members worldwide, is continuously refining and updating the algorithms that control the News Feed, the stream of status updates, news articles, photos and videos that most of its users spend the most time interacting with. Those changes affect the type of content people see more frequently — photos from friends and family, for instance, instead of news stories — which can have an effect on what people are sharing across the network.
Many of the world’s largest publishers, from The New York Times and The Guardian to Vice and BuzzFeed, also increasingly rely on Facebook to communicate with the social network’s users. A growing number of media companies and analysts have raised concerns that Facebook may hold too much sway over how information is distributed.
Almost half of American adults rely on Facebook as a source of news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
The commotion over the photo of Ms. Phuc, also known as the Napalm Girl picture, began when Tom Egeland, a Norwegian author, wrote a Facebook post in August that included seven photographs about the history of warfare. One of those was the image of Ms. Phuc, which was then removed by Facebook, citing its standards policy.
Facebook uses a combination of algorithms and human moderators to review photos that can potentially break its rules. In this case, the photo was tagged for removal by one of Facebook’s algorithms, which was then followed up by a human editor, according to a person at the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly.
After Mr. Egeland criticized the removal of his post, he was barred from posting on Facebook for 24 hours. On Wednesday, after he republished the photo on his Facebook page, Mr. Egeland said he had been barred from Facebook for another three days.
Mr. Hansen of Aftenposten, taking a stand on behalf of Mr. Egeland, asked his journalists to report on the author’s case this week and also posted the Vietnam War photo on the newspaper’s own Facebook page. Mr. Hansen said he received an email on Wednesday from the social network requesting that the image be taken down. Before he could respond, he said Facebook removed the newspaper’s post without asking permission.
On Friday, Norway’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, and cabinet ministers also posted the Vietnam War photo on their Facebook pages in a show of solidarity. “Facebook gets it wrong when they censor such images,” Ms. Solberg wrote in her post.
Yet soon after Ms. Solberg published that Facebook post, the social network also removed it, citing the company’s standards policy.
When the picture’s takedown went viral, the photo went into wide circulation on the social network, including on the Facebook page of Mr. Ut, the photographer. Facebook later said it would take some time for the photo and posts that contained it to reappear across the site, perhaps as much as a few days.
Mr. Egeland, the Norwegian author whose Facebook post kicked off the global protest, said the company’s reversal underlined how people can come together to force a tech giant to change its ways — even though he could still not post on his own Facebook page until his three-day exile expired.
“I hope that Facebook realized that this was a mistake,” he said in an interview. “I would love to go online right now and publish, ‘We won!’”

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... the rules of comedy, and how to break them.



One generation’s smartest talk show host meets another’s to discuss the rules of comedy, and how to break them.

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The quick-witted TV icon Dick Cavett and his heir apparent, the late-night comedian Seth Meyers. Credit Marcelo Krasilcic

“Wait, am I wearing a mic?” Dick Cavett pats his blue button-down searching for an imaginary wire that turns out to be a pair of glasses. Realizing his error, the talk show legend looks over at the “Late Night” host and “Saturday Night Live” alum Seth Meyers and says, smiling, “Well, there it is. That’s when you know it’s all over.” Cavett should be forgiven for assuming he’s always on: For six consecutive decades, starting in the ’60s, he has been a TV mainstay, interviewing the reigning greats of the time, from Lucille Ball to Truman Capote to David Bowie. The affable Meyers, with his dry wit and politically inflected comedy, is, in many ways, this generation’s Cavett: Both cut their teeth in show business as actors, both have hosted the Emmys and both have inspired the wrath of dubious politicians (although only one of them was name-checked more than two dozen times on the Nixon White House tapes). With genuine affection, Cavett says to Meyers, whom he’s only just met, “I feel like your dad in a way.” But the moment is fleeting and an impish smile stretches across his face. “You know,” he says jokingly, “I’m the one who told them to use you in the first place.”
Seth Meyers: How long did it take for you to walk out onstage and not feel like an actor without lines?
Dick Cavett: The first time you’re in charge of an hour and a half of television, you might as well be looking at Mount Everest. It took a few weeks to relax into it, and then it was fun, but those first shows I’d realize the guest’s lips had stopped moving and I had no idea what they’d been talking about. A tip for a young guy like you from an old hand: Have something ready that you can always say that can apply to everybody. Something like, “Do you pee in the shower?”

Photo

Credit Marcelo Krasilcic

Meyers: I’m so jealous of how much time you had with people. Every now and then I have a seven-minute guest who feels like 90 minutes, but more often than not I’m just getting going right about the time I’m wrapping it up.
Cavett: That’s another problem. I used to laugh at Dave Letterman when he’d get an actress on, who probably was not a Rhodes scholar and whose favorite word was inevitably “exciting”: “Oh, it was such an exciting movie to work on. The director, he was exciting.” As if the world owes you exciting. We need to expunge that word.
Meyers: I’m going to take this as a personal note, because I can hear myself saying, “That must have been exciting.”
Cavett: Try instead saying, “That must have been dreary and made you feel soporific.” See how that helps.
Meyers: I don’t know if it was the era, or the guests, but you would have people on who didn’t necessarily seem like they wanted to be there.


‘As much as we
shouldn’t let the risk
of offending guide
the material, I do
want to be on the
right side of history
with certain things.’

Cavett: That often was the case, at least at first. When I had George Harrison on, people said, “You’re going to try to do 90 minutes with George? Lots of luck.” And I saw what they meant for the first few minutes, but then he got interesting. Then he got more interesting, until he turned out to be one of the best guests. And I love every second of that Brando show. People say it felt like pulling teeth, but no, it wasn’t. To get him was the victory. He wasn’t sure if he was going to come on. Then the phone rang, and I heard those wonderful words, “Dick, it’s Marlon Brando.” I thought, Don’t let this be someone imitating Marlon Brando. Don’t let this be Alec Baldwin, who sounds more like Brando than Brando. The sun was only halfway down when the call started, and the moon was up in the dark sky by the time I convinced him to do the show. My wife’s favorite Brando moment was when I said, “Were you happy with the way ‘The Godfather’ came out?” And he said, “I’d rather not talk about movies.” And to my credit, I said, “O.K., what about the book ‘The Godfather’?”
Meyers: You had some really thoughtful interviews with people, where, because of the nature of them, the audience wasn’t laughing much. Did you feel pressure to come up with a line like that to make everyone laugh?

Video

Perfect Strangers | Dick Cavett & Seth Meyers

The TV legend and late-night comedian talk fashion, Snapchat and Pokémon Go.
By MARCELO KRASILCIC on Publish Date September 5, 2016. Photo by Marcelo Krasilcic. Watch in Times Video »

Cavett: Sure, but it’s not necessarily something you should go for if the guest is talking about Buchenwald. Have you ever found yourself not listening to a guest? That used to happen to me all the time; I was too wedded to my notes: “So, Dick, we uncovered the old trunk and pulled it out. My fellow scientists and I lifted the lid, and you’ll never guess what was inside.” And I’d hear myself say, “Do you have any hobbies?” [Laughter.]
Meyers: The difference then and now is that talk shows have become a bit of an industry.
Cavett: There’s no honor now to have a talk show.
Meyers: Back in the day, you stood on a mountain with very few. And for the interviews that endure, you don’t get the sense that, say, Katharine Hepburn did another talk show the next night. And then the next night she did another one. So many guests now are on a promotional tour.


‘Have something
ready that you can
always say that
can apply to
everybody. Something
like, “Do you pee
in the shower?” ’

Cavett: There’s not much worse than a “plug-ola guest” who is so tired that he tells the same story he just told the segment before, with one eyelid drooping down to here. The best at repeating himself was Gore Vidal, because his delivery was so delicious you didn’t mind hearing something a second time. The great moment for me on the Hepburn show was when I decided to poke her a bit. I said, “Do you remember me as an actor?” And she just stopped and said, “I’ve been told I should.” I said, “We were in a play together. Stratford, Connecticut, ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ I had one line: ‘Gentlemen, my master Antonio is at his house, and desires to speak with you both.’ ” She looked at me and said, “Is that the way you said it?” It was one of the longest laughs I didn’t get.
Meyers: That’s when I’m happiest, when it feels like a conversation. But for the guest, I think there’s an added pressure now because they’re aware that whatever they say will live forever online. In your era, people were a little looser.
Cavett: Sometimes I wondered, Do they think this isn’t going beyond this room? Do you have any irritating memories where you wish you hadn’t said something?
Meyers: Not exactly, but one of my claims to fame is that I might have made the last Bin Laden joke that Bin Laden could have physically heard, when I hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner the night before he was killed.

Photo

Credit Marcelo Krasilcic

Cavett: I was actually persona grata at the White House for a brief time. I went to an evening of Shakespeare there, and Nixon was in the receiving line. I never knew in that moment that some time later a guy out in California would find tapes of Nixon and his lickspittle H.R. Haldeman, where Nixon says, “Cavett — there must be some way we can screw him.”
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Meyers: The specter of a Trump presidency is that he actively dislikes me.
Cavett: It’s the most interesting thing that this vile, no-class, ignorant man who brags that he doesn’t read and does great imitations of people with disabilities — and hates women and a few other things — is considered a presidential candidate. I was going to give Mrs. Clinton a line: “What if a great international crisis blew up in the Middle East? Don’t you want a president who knows Shiite from Shinola?”
Meyers: He’s built for late-night shows to talk about. More generally, it feels like we’re in a cycle of tragedies, and if you talk about the news every night, it can feel like you’re ignoring something if you don’t talk about it — like Dallas. But you can’t talk about it every time something happens, otherwise it stops being a comedy show.
Cavett: What about the subject of offending? I had John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the show, whose first appearance gave us some of our biggest ratings, and when they came back on, I was told that ABC was going to cut their performance of a song.

Photo

Credit Marcelo Krasilcic

Meyers: What song was it?
Cavett: “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”
Meyers: Well, yeah, there you go.
Cavett: ABC agreed to air it as long as I said something cautionary about it before they came on. It played, and there were about 420 complaints — none of them about the song, but about, as one woman said, “that mealy-mouthed speech you made Dick do, treating us like idiots.”
Meyers: Now, thanks to social media, we live in a world where no one can hide from hate mail.
Cavett: You’ve got to pay a little price.
Meyers: And it’s usually a price worth paying. But as much as we shouldn’t let the risk of offending guide the material, I do want to be on the right side of history with certain things.


‘Hosting a talk show
is a great job — if
you’ve never had a
nervous breakdown
and you want to
know what that feels
like.’ — Dick Cavett

Cavett: Among the standard topics of gag-writing back in my day were: mothers-in-law, parking problems, headaches, fags. One of the categories was fag jokes. I’d done them, but it never occurred to me that what we were doing was wrong. One day at a grocery store in Montauk, a deep voice standing next to me said right into my ear, “Really, Cavett? Fag jokes?” I turned directly into the face of the great Edward Albee and I realized, My god, yes, that time has passed. Speaking of passing, have you made up your mind what to do when a guest dies?
Meyers: Well, that’s the beauty of having done 400 shows. Some guests don’t care if they die. Some desperately want a life preserver.
Cavett: Let me put it to you again: What do you do when a guest croaks? My guess is that I’m the only person who’s ever had a guest drop dead. And who would the gods choose to die on a talk show? J. I. Rodale, a health expert. He was a lovely old gent who looked like Trotsky. I made a mental note to have him back, and then in the next segment, he joined the silent majority right there on the stage. He had made a snoring sound, and suddenly slid down in his chair.

Meyers: What did you do?
Cavett: I went over and took his wrist and realized I didn’t know what a wrist is supposed to feel like. I wanted to run and hide. Some say I said to him, “Are we boring you?”
Meyers: Well, Dick, that’s all the proof I need. I always did say you were a groundbreaking host.
Photographs by Marcelo Krasilcic. Grooming by Kristen Serafino using Chanel Les Beiges. This interview has been condensed and edited.
A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016, on page M2107 of T Magazine with the headline: Dick Cavett & Seth Meyers.