The New York Times Company said on Thursday that it would not voluntarily recognize a newly formed union of tech and digital employees, instructing the group to put the matter to a formal vote through the National Labor Relations Board.
The Times Tech Guild, a group affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, had asked the company for recognition on April 13, when it announced that a majority of tech workers had formed a union. The group includes software engineers, data analysts, designers and product managers.
In an email to staff on Thursday, the Times chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, wrote that, since the union was formed, “we have heard questions and concerns from many of our colleagues about what this would really mean for their careers.”
“As a result, this morning, we advised the NewsGuild that we believe the right next step is a democratic process that surfaces all the facts, answers questions from employees and managers, and then lets employees decide via an election,” the note continued.
A NewsGuild spokesman said in a statement that The Times’s decision not to voluntarily recognize the union was “deeply disappointing” and “a sign of disrespect” to the company’s 1,400 union members.
“We call on The New York Times to listen to their tech workers, the majority of whom have already voted via a signed union card,” the spokesman said. “We expected better.”
The NewsGuild represents editorial employees at The Times and at Wirecutter, the company’s product review website. The Times voluntarily recognized the Wirecutter union in 2019.
If an employer does not voluntarily recognize a union, the National Labor Relations Board may hold an election. If a majority votes in favor, the union can start negotiations with management.
A Times spokeswoman said in a statement that the company had a long history of productive relationships with unions and with nonunion employees.
“We respect and support the right of all employees to decide through an election whether or not joining a union is right for them,” the spokeswoman said.
The union effort at The Times is notable for the size of the group, with more than 650 workers. In recent years, workers at Vice, Slate, Vox and BuzzFeed and other news media organizations have formed unions. On Monday, journalists at Insider, formerly known as Business Insider, became the latest to join the wave.
Back in the 1970s, as The New York Times lagged behind other papers in hiring reporters and editors of color, Paul Delaney, the first Black reporter hired in the newspaper’s Washington bureau, was among those helping to recruit nonwhite journalists.
He was on assignment in New Orleans in 1973 when he ran into a Black television reporter, who told him that her twin sister, who worked as a fact checker for Playboy magazine in Chicago, was eager to move to a daily paper. The next time Mr. Delaney was in Chicago, he looked her up.
And that was how Shawn G. Kennedy came to work at The Times, taking a route as random as any in that era, before organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists were formed to help organize the recruitment of journalists.
Ms. Kennedy, who worked at The Times for 23 years, died on April 5 at the home of her sister, Royal Kennedy Rodgers, in San Francisco. She was 73 and lived in New Orleans.Ms. Rodgers said the cause was breast cancer.
Ms. Kennedy began her career at The Times as a trainee in the Washington bureau in 1975 as part of a program to cultivate minority journalists.
Max Frankel, who was the Washington bureau chief from 1968 to 1972, and who later became executive editor, had recruited Mr. Delaney from The Washington Star. Then, as Mr. Frankel wrote in his memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times” (1999), “We decided we had an obligation not just to raid other staffs but to open a path into our business for promising youngsters.”
The Times created that path by hiring people of color in the bureau as news assistants. Through an agreement with the reporters’ union, Mr. Frankel said, the bureau used them as reporters while paying them clerical wages; in exchange, the bureau promised to sponsor them for reporting jobs in New York if they met Times standards. One of the bureau’s editors, Bob Phelps, helped them by taking their work home and marking it up as a teacher would.
Ms. Kennedy made the cut. “She was in the vanguard,” Mr. Delaney said in an interview. “Having her succeed and join the staff attracted a lot of other minorities to the program.”
At the time, people of color at the paper were relatively rare; more recently they made up about 26 percent of the newsroom (nine percent are Black) and 32 percent of the company as a whole, and The Times has established a fellowship program that attracts a great number of journalists of color.
Today in Business
In New York, Ms. Kennedy worked on the Metro Desk and was promoted to Long Island bureau chief. She then sought and was given the job of real estate writer.
“She loved real estate,” Lena Williams, another Black reporter who worked at The Times and was a close friend of Ms. Kennedy’s, said. “She was one of the first to see gentrification in Crown Heights and Harlem. She was writing real estate stories and turning them into lifestyle stories.”
Her dream beyond that, Ms. Williams said, was to work for the Styles section. Ms. Kennedy was an accomplished cook and knowledgeable about fashion, interior design and architecture. She was disappointed when she was told that she was “not ready” for Styles, Ms. Williams said, though she occasionally freelanced for the section anyway.
Mr. Delaney said that “you’re not ready” was a common explanation when a Black reporter was denied a move. “That was the kind of stuff we faced all the time,” he said. “That’s what we had to overcome.”
Ms. Kennedy, left, with Times colleagues in the mid-1970s. Standing with her, from left, were Jill Gerston, Lena Williams and Marilyn K. Yee. In front was Sheila Rule. Credit…via Royal Rodgers
Shawn Graves Kennedy was born on June 8, 1947, in Chicago. Her father, Lt. Col. James Vincent Kennedy, was one of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black corps of elite pilots; he completed his training too late to see combat in World War II but became a career Air Force officer and flew missions in Korea and Vietnam. He received degrees in electrical engineering and worked on the Apollo space program.
Her mother, Shirley (Graves) Kennedy, went back to school after her children had grown and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in African-American studies and her doctorate in political science. She then taught Black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
With Mr. Kennedy in the military, the family lived on air bases around the world. The parents were intensely interested in current events and liked to read, and their children adopted the same habits. Royal Rodgers said that while living in Tokyo and having no television there, she and Shawn “devoured” American magazines. Shawn went to Ohio University in Athens but left for Playboy before graduating.
She married Harold Brown, an investment manager, in 1997 and left The Times shortly thereafter. They moved to Sacramento and Washington, D.C., before settling in New Orleans.
“New Orleans was her big second act,” her sister said. Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Brown were already involved in economic development there before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and afterward they devoted themselves even more to rebuilding the city. After Mr. Brown died in 2013, Ms. Kennedy continued many of his projects.
One project of which Ms. Kennedy was especially proud was overseeing the conversion of the historic St. Rosa de Lima church into a center for a Waldorf school, a performance space and a business incubator.
In addition to her sister, she is survived by two brothers, Kevin and Colin; a stepson, David Brown; and one step-grandson.
The New York Times on Monday named Jim Dao, a deputy editor on the national desk who has worked in a wide range of roles at the paper since 1992, as its new metropolitan editor.
“Jim will oversee the most consequential mayoral race in many years, and the epic story of the rebuilding of a city devastated by the pandemic,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, and Joseph Kahn, the managing editor, said in a note to the staff on Monday.
For Mr. Dao, 63, the new role is a homecoming. He joined The Times as a metro reporter nearly 30 years ago and was later the department’s deputy editor. He has also served as Albany bureau chief, congressional reporter and Pentagon correspondent.
In 2010 and 2011, he reported an eight-part, multimedia series about the yearlong deployment of an Army battalion in Afghanistan, “A Year at War,” which won an Emmy. He was also an executive producer of “Soldier Father Son,” a Netflix documentary based on the life of an Army sergeant profiled in his Afghanistan series.
the Op-Ed editor. In June, the section’s top editor, James Bennet, resigned amid internal and external criticism of a Times essay by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that called for troops to be deployed in response to civil unrest. Mr. Dao stepped down from his position, and The Times reassigned him, making him an editor on the national desk.
Mr. Dao takes over metro coverage from Clifford J. Levy, who led the department since 2018 until January, when The Times announced that he would spend some time advising the audio department as a deputy managing editor, one of the highest newsroom positions at the paper.
Mr. Dao steps into the new job as a number of candidates are promoting themselves in advance of the Nov. 2 vote that will determine the successor to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. He also takes the job at a time of flux within The Times. High-level editors have lately gotten promotions as Mr. Baquet, 64, approaches the paper’s traditional retirement age of 66 for top leaders.
Carolyn Ryan, who oversees recruitment and strategy at The Times, was promoted to deputy managing editor in October. Marc Lacey, the former national desk editor, joined the newsroom leadership team as the editor in charge of live coverage in December. Rebecca Blumenstein was promoted in February to a newly created role as a deputy editor working directly with the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger.
The Times has also promoted rising stars recently. Jia Lynn Yang, a deputy editor on the national desk, was appointed national editor in February. Ms. Yang, the author of the 2020 book “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965,” coordinated the national department’s collaborations with the politics team for the paper’s coverage of the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential campaign.
Tribune Publishing, the newspaper chain that includes The Chicago Tribune, The Daily News and The Baltimore Sun, said on Monday that it has begun serious discussions about a sale of the company to a pair of bidders who came through with an offer nearly two months after Tribune agreed to sell itself to Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund.
The new bid, which is greater than the amount offered by Alden, was made on Thursday by Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland hotel magnate, and Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who made his fortune as a manufacturer of medical devices.
The two have joined together in a company called Newslight. Tribune Publishing announced on Monday that it would “engage in discussions and negotiations” with Mr. Bainum and Mr. Wyss. The company added that, for now, it will not “terminate the Alden merger agreement or enter into any merger agreement with Newslight, Mr. Bainum or Mr. Wyss.”
Until recently, it looked as though Alden Global Capital would almost certainly become the next owner of Tribune. Late last month, Mr. Wyss emerged as a surprise new player, telling The New York Times that he would team up with Mr. Bainum in a bid for the chain. On Thursday, Mr. Wyss and Mr. Bainum submitted their bid, which valued Tribune at $18.50 a share, beating Alden’s offer of $17.25.
reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
Tribune Publishing said on Monday that its special committee had determined that the competing bid from Mr. Wyss and Mr. Bainum would be reasonably expected to lead to a “superior proposal” than the Alden bid.
Today in Business
But the Tribune advised caution, telling shareholders, “There can be no assurance that the discussions with Newslight and its principals will result in a binding proposal.”
Nearly two months ago, Mr. Bainum had reached a nonbinding agreement to establish a nonprofit that would buy The Sun and two other Tribune-owned Maryland newspapers from Alden, for $65 million, after the Alden-Tribune deal gained shareholder approval. That agreement ran into trouble soon after it was made, however. Last month, Mr. Bainum, the chairman of Choice Hotels International, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, made a bid for all of Tribune, offering $18.50 a share.
After considering the bid from Mr. Bainum last month, Tribune said it still favored the agreement with Alden, which had solid financing. At the same time, the board informed Mr. Bainum that he was free to find backers to make his offer more attractive. He did just that by joining with Mr. Wyss.
opinion essay in which two former Chicago Tribune reporters, David Jackson and Gary Marx, warned that Alden would create “a ghost version of The Chicago Tribune.” Other Tribune journalists, from California to Maryland, have led campaigns to persuade local benefactors to buy Tribune Publishing, or at least one of its papers.
Mr. Wyss, who lives in Wyoming, said he joined the effort to buy Tribune because of his belief in a robust press. “I don’t want to see another newspaper that has a chance to increase the amount of truth being told to the American people going down the drain,” he said in the interview last month.
On March 11, Delta Air Lines dedicated a building at its Atlanta headquarters to Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former mayor. At the ceremony, Mr. Young spoke of the restrictive voting rights bill that Republicans were rushing through the Georgia state legislature. Then, after the speeches, Mr. Young’s daughter, Andrea, a prominent activist herself, cornered Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian.
“I told him how important it was to oppose this law,” she said.
For Mr. Bastian, it was an early warning that the issue of voting rights might soon ensnare Delta in another national dispute. Over the past five years, corporations have taken political stands like never before, often in response to the extreme policies of former President Donald J. Trump.
After Mr. Trump’s equivocating response to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, Ken Frazier, the Black chief executive of Merck, resigned from a presidential advisory group, prompting dozens of other top executives to distance themselves from the president. Last year, after the killing of George Floyd, hundreds of companies expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But for corporations, the dispute over voting rights is different. An issue that both political parties see as a priority is not easily addressed with statements of solidarity and donations. Taking a stand on voting rights legislation thrusts companies into partisan politics and pits them against Republicans who have proven willing to raise taxes and enact onerous regulations on companies that cross them politically.
Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star game from Atlanta in protest, and more than 100 other companies spoke out in defense of voting rights.
The groundswell of support suggests that the Black executives’ clarion call will have an impact in the months ahead, as Republican lawmakers in more than 40 states advance restrictive voting laws. But already, the backlash has been swift, with Mr. Trump calling for boycotts of companies opposing such laws, and Georgia lawmakers voting for new taxes on Delta.
eliminate a tax break for Delta, costing the company $50 million.
Yet as 2021 began and Mr. Bastian focused on his company’s recovery from the pandemic, an even more partisan issue loomed.
In February, civil rights activists began reaching out to Delta, flagging what they saw as problematic provisions in early drafts of the bill, including a ban on Sunday voting, and asking the company to use its clout and lobbying muscle to sway the debate.
Delta’s government affairs team shared some of those concerns, but decided to work behind the scenes, rather than go public. It was a calculated choice intended to avoid upsetting Republican lawmakers.
In early March, Delta lobbyists pushed David Ralston, the Republican head of the Georgia house, and aides to Gov. Brian Kemp to remove some far-reaching provisions in the bill.
followed the same script, refraining from criticizing the bill.
That passive approach infuriated activists. In mid-March, protesters staged a “die in” at Coca-Cola’s museum. Bishop Reginald Jackson, an influential Atlanta pastor, took to the streets with a bullhorn and called for a boycott of Coca-Cola. Days later, activists massed at the Delta terminal at the Atlanta airport and called on Mr. Bastian to use his clout to “kill the bill.” Still, Mr. Bastian declined to say anything publicly.
Two weeks to the day after Delta dedicated its building to Mr. Young, the law was passed. Some of the most restrictive provisions had been removed, but the law limits ballot access and makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.
The fight in Georgia appeared to be over. Days after the law was passed though, a group of powerful Black executives frustrated by the results sprang into action. Soon, Atlanta companies were drawn back into the fight, and the controversy had spread to other corporations around the country.
spoke with the media. “There is no middle ground here,” Mr. Chenault told The Times. “You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote.”
“This was unprecedented,” Mr. Lewis said. “The African-American business community has never coalesced around a nonbusiness issue and issued a call to action to the broader corporate community.”
Mr. Bastian had been unable to sleep on Tuesday night after his call with Mr. Chenault, according to two people familiar with the matter. He had also been receiving a stream of emails about the law from Black Delta employees, who make up 21 percent of the company’s work force. Eventually, Mr. Bastian came to the conclusion that it was deeply problematic, the two people said.
accused Mr. Bastian of spreading “the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists.” And Republicans in the Georgia house voted to strip Delta of a tax break, just as they did three years ago. “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand,” said Mr. Ralston, the house speaker.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted a video in which he called Delta and Coca-Cola “woke corporate hypocrites” and Mr. Trump joined the calls for a boycott of companies speaking out against the voting laws.
Companies that had taken a more cautious approach weren’t targeted the same way. UPS and Home Depot, big Atlanta employers, also faced early calls to oppose the Georgia law, but instead made unspecific commitments to voting rights.
declared their opposition to proposed voting legislation in that state. And on Friday, more than 170 companies signed a statement calling on elected officials around the country to refrain from enacting legislation that makes it harder for people to vote.
It was messy, but to many activists, it was progress. “Companies don’t exist in a vacuum,” said Stacey Abrams, who has worked for years to get out the Black vote in Georgia. “It’s going to take a national response by corporations to stop what happened in Georgia from happening in other states.”
ENFIELD, Conn. — The bones of Brooks Brothers stores are scattered across 100,000 square feet here in a warehouse near the Massachusetts border, mixed in with a sea of cardboard boxes and junk.
There are legions of mannequins, empty circular tables that once displayed neckties, posters of horseback-riding gentlemen from a bygone era. There is a whole section of Christmas trees and countless gold-painted ornaments of sheep suspended by ribbon — a Brooks Brothers symbol since 1850 known as the Golden Fleece. Blank order forms for tailors are strewn about. A neon sign that apparently still works. There is no apparel, but there are rows of heavy sewing machines that most likely came from one of the brand’s recently shuttered factories. And in the bathroom, a welcome carpet with Brooks Brothers written in cursive sits next to a toilet.
The whole mass was abandoned here in the fallout of Brooks Brothers’ bankruptcy filing and sale last year, the scraps of a retailer that made nearly $1 billion in sales in 2019. Ever since, the couple that owns the warehouse, Chip and Rosanna LaBonte, has been scrambling to figure out how to get rid of it all. Junk removal companies have told them it will cost at least $240,000 to clear the space, which Brooks Brothers had rented through November. In order to pay the bill, the LaBontes are going to have to sell their home.
retail bankruptcies, which cascaded during the pandemic and affected everyone from factory workers to executives. Smaller vendors and landlords have often been left holding the short end of the stick during lengthy byzantine bankruptcy proceedings, particularly with limits on what they can spend on legal bills compared with larger corporations. And once bankrupt brands are sold, people like the LaBontes are typically left in the dust.
corporate bankruptcies in the United States last year, which had the highest number of filings in a decade, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The LaBontes, who are in their 60s, have been working with a liquidator to sell what they can of the Brooks Brothers detritus, and are about to list their home in Sherborn, Mass. While they have filed a claim in bankruptcy court, they are anticipating receiving less than 5 percent of what they are owed, if that — and confessed that the proceedings are hopelessly confusing. Most of all, they are angry and incredulous about the situation, especially as Brooks Brothers continues to operate under wealthy new owners.
entire portions of their closets. J. Crew and the owners of Ann Taylor and Men’s Wearhouse also filed for bankruptcy, while sales nose-dived at chains like Banana Republic. Temporary store closures added to the distress, along with the cancellations of special occasions like proms, graduations, weddings and other events.
All that led up to Brooks Brothers’ bankruptcy filing in July, one of the most significant retail collapses of 2020. Brooks Brothers had dressed all but four U.S. presidents at the time of its filing, and prided itself on its American factories, which were also forced to close.
the SPARC Group, including Lucky Brand denim and Forever 21, leveraging the combination of Authentic Brands’ expertise in licensing famous brand names in various lucrative and creative (and some say equity-destructive) ways and Simon’s real estate portfolio.
At the time of the Brooks Brothers purchase, SPARC committed to keep operating at least 125 Brooks Brothers retail locations, compared with 424 retail and outlet stores globally before the pandemic.
Under the new owners, Brooks Brothers switched to wire transfers instead of checks, but kept paying rent on the warehouse through November, sending even more goods there as it closed dozens of stores and shuttered its three American factories, Mr. and Ms. LaBonte said. But after Thanksgiving, it sent a letter to the couple rejecting the lease as well as the contents of the warehouse. According to a person with knowledge of the deal, the warehouse and its contents had not been part of SPARC’s purchase of Brooks Brothers. As a result, said Mr. Van Horn said, the new owner most likely has no legal responsibility to the LaBontes.
A representative for SPARC stopped returning requests for comment.
“They used it for all of their store fixtures, so tables, props, fishing poles, canoes, everything you would see that would go in and out of a store to decorate it,” Mr. LaBonte said. “There’s probably 20,000 square feet of Christmas trees — everything except the actual merchandise.”
As to who would want it now: Customers have included local clothing makers looking for mannequins and a set designer from an upcoming HBO series called “The Gilded Age.” Last Monday, an older couple wandered through the space, looking at the Christmas decorations and empty gift boxes. Habitat for Humanity has been looking at the haul for several days and is taking some of the goods. Still, Mr. LaBonte estimated that somewhere around 30 percent of the leftovers have been sold.
The liquidator paid the LaBontes approximately $20,000 to sell what they can through mid-April or so. The couple will not receive a cut, and will deal with what’s left. When junk removal specialists assessed the cost of clearing the space in December, one quote was around $243,000 while the other was closer to $290,000.
“We’re just another Covid casualty to them, we get that,” Ms. LaBonte said of Brooks Brothers. “But I also don’t think they realized how much stuff was there.”
The junk removal firms, which confirmed the prices with The New York Times, said that it was expensive to remove the volume of goods. The costs included labor, multiple trips to dumps, donation and recycling centers, and the use of specialized equipment such as a forklift, large dumpsters and an 18-foot box truck.
“I’ve been doing this for seven years and I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Rick McDonald Jr., the owner of EastSide Junk, which provided the $243,000 quote to the couple. “They left an astronomical amount of stuff.”
When Authentic Brands, the licensing firm, announced the purchase of Brooks Brothers out of bankruptcy last year, Jamie Salter, the company’s chief executive, spoke about the retailer’s legacy and its “incredible history.”
The LaBontes, confronting a warehouse full of some of that history, were unhappy to see those comments.
They put out a statement recently asking: “What kind of heritage can they claim when they operate like low-rent, fly-by-night bullies?”
Contact Sapna Maheshwari at sapna@nytimes.com or Vanessa Friedman at vanessa.friedman@nytimes.com.
Until recently, Bill Hwang sat atop one of the biggest — and perhaps least known — fortunes on Wall Street. Then his luck ran out.
Mr. Hwang, a 57-year-old veteran investor, managed $10 billion through his private investment firm, Archegos Capital Management. He borrowed billions of dollars from Wall Street banks to build enormous positions in a few American and Chinese stocks. By mid-March, Mr. Hwang was the financial force behind $20 billion in shares of ViacomCBS, effectively making him the media company’s single largest institutional shareholder. But few knew about his total exposure, since the shares were mostly held through complex financial instruments, called derivatives, created by the banks.
That changed in late March, after shares of ViacomCBS fell precipitously and the lenders demanded their money. When Archegos couldn’t pay, they seized its assets and sold them off, leading to one of the biggest implosions of an investment firm since the 2008 financial crisis.
Almost overnight, Mr. Hwang’s personal wealth shriveled. It’s a tale as old as Wall Street itself, where the right combination of ambition, savvy and timing can generate fantastic profits — only to crumble in an instant when conditions change.
in a 2019 speech. “I couldn’t go to school that much, to be honest.”
Grace and Mercy Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit that sponsors Bible readings and religious book clubs, growing it to $500 million in assets from $70 million in under a decade. The foundation has donated tens of millions of dollars to Christian organizations.
“He’s giving ridiculous amounts,” said John Bai, a co-founder and managing partner of the equity research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors, who has known Mr. Hwang for roughly three decades. “But he’s doing it in a very unassuming, humble, non-boastful way.”
Today in Business
But in his investing approach, he embraced risk and his firm ran afoul of regulators. In 2008, Tiger Asia lost money when the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy at the peak of the financial crisis. The next year, Hong Kong regulators accused the fund of using confidential information it had received to trade some Chinese stocks.
In 2012, Mr. Hwang reached a civil settlement with U.S. securities regulators in a separate insider trading investigation and was fined $44 million. That same year, Tiger Asia pleaded guilty to federal insider-trading charges in the same investigation and returned money to its investors. Mr. Hwang was barred from managing public money for at least five years. Regulators formally lifted the ban last year.
ViacomCBS announced plans to sell new shares to the public, a deal it hoped would generate $3 billion in new cash to fund its strategic plans. Morgan Stanley was running the deal. As bankers canvassed the investor community, they were counting on Mr. Hwang to be the anchor investor who would buy at least $300 million of the shares, four people involved with the offering said.
But sometime between the deal’s announcement and its completion that Wednesday morning, Mr. Hwang changed plans. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but RLX, the Chinese e-cigarette company, and GSX, the education company, had both spiraled in Asian markets around the same time. His decision caused the ViacomCBS fund-raising effort to end with $2.65 billion in new capital, significantly short of the original target.
ViacomCBS executives hadn’t known of Mr. Hwang’s enormous influence on the company’s share price, nor that he had canceled plans to invest in the share offering, until after it was completed, two people close to ViacomCBS said. They were frustrated to hear of it, the people said. At the same time, investors who had received larger-than-expected stakes in the new share offering and had seen it fall short, were selling the stock, driving its price down even further. (Morgan Stanley declined to comment.)
By Thursday, March 25, Archegos was in critical condition. ViacomCBS’s plummeting stock price was setting off “margin calls,” or demands for additional cash or assets, from its prime brokers that the firm couldn’t fully meet. Hoping to buy time, Archegos called a meeting with its lenders, asking for patience as it unloaded assets quietly, a person close to the firm said.
Those hopes were dashed. Sensing imminent failure, Goldman began selling Archegos’s assets the next morning, followed by Morgan Stanley, to recoup their money. Other banks soon followed.
As ViacomCBS shares flooded onto the market that Friday because of the banks’ enormous sales, Mr. Hwang’s wealth plummeted. Credit Suisse, which had acted too slowly to stanch the damage, announced the possibility of significant losses; Nomura announced as much as $2 billion in losses. Goldman finished unwinding its position but did not record a loss, a person familiar with the matter said. ViacomCBS shares are down more than 50 percent since hitting their peak on March 22.
Mr. Hwang has laid low, issuing only a short statement calling this a “challenging time” for Archegos.
At this point in the pandemic, it feels that we have, all, collectively, hit a wall. Last week, The New York Times asked readers to tell us about work burnout they’re experiencing — nearly 700 people responded in two days. The responses were funny, vulnerable and indicative of a universal sense of: “We’ve had enough.” The collective picture they painted was of a work force struggling to do tasks that were once easy, people who know they are lucky to have a job but dream of quitting, and who would do anything to never have a Zoom meeting again.
Here’s what else we heard from readers. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity, and some people preferred to give only their first names.
On what is particularly challenging and overwhelming about work right now
“Waking up and realizing, ‘I am going to stare at my laptop for 8 hours, maybe 9, maybe 10, log off, feel utterly unaccomplished because I have not left my small office/bedroom/yoga studio for the entire day, and do it all again for who knows how long.’ At this point I don’t know who is going to crack first, me or the pandemic.”
— Stephanie Soderlund, chemist, Portland, Ore.
“Logging off at the end of the day. It’s nearly impossible. Once the world went into lockdown a year ago, I felt like I logged onto work and I’m still waiting to log off.”
— Natalie Fiacco, art director, New York
“All of it. I can’t focus at all. Every day is Groundhog Day. I get up, I drink tea, I spend 8-12 hours in front of the computer, I listen to podcasts all day while I work, I spend too much time on social media, and then I go to bed. We’ve barely left the flat in over a year now. I’m lucky to have a job, but I fantasize about quitting all the time.”
— Lee Anne Sittler, translator, Madrid
“The Microsoft Teams ringtone strikes fear in my heart and the Slack buzz dread in my spirit.”
— Carolyn, graphic designer, Brooklyn
“I’m juggling child care, teaching a kindergartner and also being timed for each activity at work. In social services, it takes a lot of emotional labor in normal times, now we have had nearly 300 percent increase in folks seeking our assistance”
— Risa, public benefits eligibility specialist, Tacoma, Wash.
“How do I log the hours I spent crying or staring out my window? (Spoiler: I can’t, because those things aren’t monetizable.)”
— Julie Bourne, content strategist, Brooklyn
On what, if anything, keeps them motivated
“I’ve come to rely very much on the story of the Exodus during the past year, the story of ancient Israel’s time in the wilderness as both a time of trial, but also a time of preparation for what comes next.”
— Todd Vetter, pastor, Madison, Conn.
“I have been playing D&D every week through Discord with a group of friends. It has served as the closest thing to a routine that I have now, and a moment of respite to actually feel connected to other human beings.”
— Silas Choudhury, student, Jersey City, N.J.
“I dream about vacations to which I cannot drive.”
— Alexandra Robinson, art professor, Austin, Texas
“Getting outside in the morning makes the most difference on preventing motivational flatlining, but unless I have an accountability buddy it’s easy to skip. I skip more now than I was a year ago.”
— Prajna Cole, project manager, Eugene, Ore.
“I try to remember that pandemics don’t last forever.”
— Jason, high school teacher, Virginia
“I focus on my family, on keeping them happy and healthy. I also eat jelly beans.”
— Dr. Yemina Warshaver, emergency medicine physician, New York
“I feel fried,” said Erin H., a social media and event coordinator at a Midwestern university, whose work once inspired and excited her but currently seems like an unpleasant cocktail of boredom, dread and exhaustion. (She asked that her last name not be used so as not to upset her employers.) Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.
“I’m out of ideas and have zero motivation to even get to a point where I feel inspired,” she wrote, responding to a request by The New York Times for people to describe their work- related challenges in Month 13 of the pandemic. “Every time my inbox dings, I feel a pang of dread.”
None of that is surprising, said Margaret Wehrenberg, an expert on anxiety and the author of the book “Pandemic Anxiety: Fear, Stress, and Loss in Traumatic Times.” A year of uncertainty, of being whipsawed between anxiety and depression, of seeing expert predictions wither away and goal posts shift, has left many people feeling that they are existing in a kind of fog, the world shaded in gray.
Today in Business
“When people are under a long period of chronic, unpredictable stress, they develop behavioral anhedonia,” Dr. Wehrenberg said, meaning the loss of the ability to take pleasure in their activities. “And so they get lethargic, and they show a lack of interest — and obviously that plays a huge role in productivity.”
Nearly 700 people responded to The Times’s questions, and the picture they painted was of a work force at its collective wits’ end. We heard from a clergyperson, a pastry chef, an I.C.U. nurse, a probation officer, a fast-food worker. Budget analysts, librarians, principals, college students holed up in childhood bedrooms, project managers, interns, real estate agents — their mood was strikingly similar, though their circumstances were different. As one respondent said, no matter how many lists she makes, “I find myself falling back into deep pajamaville.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who cannot say that the last year hasn’t been the hardest they’ve ever had,” Elizabeth Abend, 41, said in an interview. As head of human resources at a small chain of boutique fitness studios, Ms. Abend, who lives in Manhattan, has faced a cascade of challenges: having to tell casual employees there was no work; navigating uncertainty over when, and how, to reopen; pivoting to new digital services. And there has been loneliness, the death of her beloved dog, her own severe bout with Covid-19 last spring and the need, she said, “to be an adult human and pay bills and eat meals and all of that amid the exhaustion of having our entire world turned on its head.”
In the 1970s, Michael Friedlander was an architecture student at the Cooper Union, his head bursting with bodacious, unconventional designs. On graduating, he settled for a stopgap job with the City of New York, which had him working on prosaic assignments like drafting blueprints to renovate locker rooms for sanitation workers.
It proved to be far from a stopgap.
Over 40 years with the Sanitation Department he became an in-house architect, a project manager and finally the director of special projects — all the while never giving up on a singular crusade: to transform civic architecture, from being exercises in intrusive mediocrity, as the public tended to see such buildings, to being something worthy of approval, and even veneration.
His vision was epitomized in the form of a sculptural Sanitation Department salt-storage shed on the western fringe of TriBeCa in Manhattan. Glacially blue, cubelike, crystalline and rising 69 feet, it is called the Spring Street Salt Shed and appears, with a little imagination, to form, out of concrete, a coarse grain of salt.
Mr. Friedlander described this $20 million structure as a whimsical “architectural folly” that can hold 5,000 tons of salt.
in 2015: “Opponents of the sanitation project in Hudson Square may not have gotten exactly what they wanted. But they were fortunate. They got something better.”
He added, “I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.”
replied, “There are people inside.”
Architect magazine in 2016: “Anybody who has seen it has to be happy with it. It’s a real example of how these things can be done well.”
Mr. Friedlander told The Times in 2015 that his secret to overcoming not-in-my-backyard opposition to public works was straightforward: “Build the best building in the neighborhood.”
“I keep learning from one building to the other,” he said. “I may not make a ton of money, but I’m having fun.”
Michael Jay Friedlander was born on June 6, 1957, in Manhattan to Joseph and Frances (Kempner) Friedlander. His mother was a teacher, his father an insurance representative.
Growing up in an East Village tenement, he began thinking about urban design early. “In kindergarten,” he told The Times, “I was building housing developments with highways between them.”
Jeffrey, Bruce and Kenneth. Jeffrey Friedlander retired as second in command in the city’s Law Department in 2015.
The salt shed had many mothers and fathers, starting with the architects who collaborated on the project, WXY and Dattner Architects; Amanda M. Burden, who chaired the City Planning Commission under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; and James S. Polshek, a member of the Public Design Commission.
Rick Bell, executive director of the excellence program in the city’s Department of Design and Construction, said in 2015 that the shed might be the most important change to the public face of the Sanitation Department since its fleet was painted white in 1967.
The shed’s concrete walls are six feet thick, leading the architect Richard Dattner to imagine some future civilization stumbling on it just as Charlton Heston’s character discovers the remnants of the Statue of Liberty in the film “Planet of the Apes.”
“They will wonder,” Mr. Friedlander said, “why did these people worship salt?”
