(I was so happy to read this article in The New York Times. This is where we went with clients over the years when we wanted to feel like big shots. We sat next to DeNiro, Rushdie, Wintour, and Karan. It was thrilling). —LWH

For decades, Silvano Marchetto’s Greenwich Village trattoria was a celebrity haven, serving Brad Pitt, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Then he vanished. What happened?

By Alex Vadukul

Alex Vadukul reported this story from Florence, Italy.

One recent morning, in the bustle of Florence’s ancient central market, Silvano Marchetto, a stout 76-year-old man with a mane of white hair, sat nursing a Negroni as he considered what he wanted to cook for dinner. The butchers and fishmongers who walked by threw respectful nods his way.

The silver bracelets on his wrists jangled as he polished off his drink. Shuffling past meat displays and fruit stands as he went deeper into the market, he grunted reminiscences about his old life in New York City, back when he ran a celebrity haven in Greenwich Village, Da Silvano.

“Lou Reed always said I served the best branzino.”

“Rihanna loved my taglierini contadina.”

“Anna Wintour’s ex-husband used to love my rabbit.”

Mr. Marchetto liked the look of some fresh porcini, so he resolved to cook monkfish with mushrooms. His next stop was a vegetable stall. Its operator, Elena Popa, gave him a look.

“Are you famous or something?” she asked in Italian.

“I ran a restaurant in New York called Da Silvano,” he said. “Closed now.”

“Why?”

“Because. The rent. My knees. Divorce.”

“If it was successful, couldn’t someone have just kept running it for you?” she asked.

“Someone else run Da Silvano?” he said. “Absolutely not!”

In certain New York circles, Da Silvano needs no introduction, and neither does Mr. Marchetto, who for four decades ran his trattoria as one of the city’s reigning downtown canteens for the art, fashion, film and media crowds.

That reign ended when he closed Da Silvano with little warning in 2016. Then Mr. Marchetto vanished from public view.

This summer, when I started making calls in an effort to track him down, some of the tips I heard were outlandish: He was on the run in the South of France; he’d opened a beach pizzeria in Cyprus; he was operating a tiny, one-man trattoria in rural Italy; a Vogue photographer I spoke with had heard he was dead; and the designer Isaac Mizrahi, a onetime regular, said he had “no idea what happened to him.”

“Da Silvano now represents a lost era of downtown New York, and he was its rustic host,” Mr. Mizrahi said. “I’m still mourning it, and I still glance at its old address whenever I go up Sixth Avenue and think, ‘Where did he go?’”

Mr. Marchetto opened the restaurant in 1975 with the idea of serving New Yorkers the rustic cuisine he had grown up with in Tuscany. Italian fine dining in the city was then typified by spaghetti and meatballs served with Chianti from straw-covered bottles, so his preparations of liver crostini and tripe stew proved revelatory.

“I was just cooking what I knew to cook,” he said as he drove from the market back to his villa in the Tuscan hills. “Early on, I even served birds off-menu. I bought robins at a pet shop on Thompson Streetand served them roasted with bacon.”

The art dealers Leo Castelli and Mary Boone were starting their galleries in SoHo around the same time that Da Silvano opened, and they soon made it their hangout. “Castelli used to go crazy for my polenta,” Mr. Marchetto said. Gradually, the patio tables beneath the yellow awning became prime seating for those who wanted to be seen. Paparazzi posted up to document Sarah Jessica Parker eating steamed artichokes and Jay-Z and Beyoncé on one of their first public dates.

The crowd came to include Calvin Klein, Yoko Ono, Lindsay Lohan, Joan Didion, Harvey Weinstein, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, Uma Thurman, Stephanie Seymour, Susan Sontag, Graydon Carter and Larry Gagosian. While Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt were engaged in 1997, they left notes in Da Silvano’s guest book: “Thank you for letting us smoke,” she wrote. “And smoke and smoke,” he added.

Da Silvano also provided endless fodder for The New York Post, which covered the trattoria as if it were the White House. A typical 2013 itemfrom its Page Six column reported that the art dealer Tony Shafrazi shouted at Peter Brant and Owen Wilson, while Wilson ate a dandelion and heirloom tomato salad, because they hadn’t been returning his calls. In 2014, while Rose McGowan was having a meal, a man emergedfrom a subway grate and tossed a smoke bomb at Bar Pitti, the Italian restaurant next door. The tabloid speculated that the incident was connected to the feudbetween the trattorias.

“Page Six covered us so much people asked if I owned The New York Post,” Mr. Marchetto said. “But it was good for Da Silvano, whatever they wrote.”

Mr. Marchetto became a downtown celebrity in his own right, and a cartoon logo of him wearing sunglasses was branded onto Da Silvano’s espresso cups and olive oil bottles.

He lived a block away with his wife, Marisa Acocella, a New Yorker cartoonist and graphic novelist, and he went home for midday naps. He parked his Ferraris ornamentally outside the restaurant. He wore scarves, yellow pants and Hawaiian shirts. He hired young Italian waiters who flirted with the models and actresses.

But as blogs and social media began to rival Page Six as a source of celebrity gossip, his restaurant lost some of its luster. And as smartphones ushered in an era in which a celebrity’s nightlife indiscretions could be documented, the machismo-fueled party at Da Silvano began to look a little dated. In 2013, a rival Italian restaurant, Carbone, opened nearby to praise from critics, who welcomed the swing back to red-sauce recipes, and became a haunt for Drake, Jennifer Lopez and multiple Kardashians.

Around the same time, Mr. Marchetto’s life turned tumultuous. A manager at his garage filed a sexual harassment suit, claiming that Mr. Marchetto had grabbed his genitals after dropping off one of his Ferraris; waiters filed a class-action lawsuit, claiming that he had withheld wages. Mr. Marchetto denied the allegations, and both caseswere settled out of court. In 2016, after 12 years of marriage, his wife filed for divorce, leading to a contentious trial.

Mr. Marchetto abruptly closed Da Silvano on the night of Dec. 20, 2016. His explanation was straightforward: The rent had spiked to $42,500 a month. “A fortune, I couldn’t handle it,” he told The New York Times that week. “Everybody is sad; it’s been 41 years and 51 days exactly since I opened, but I don’t care.”

Celebrities mourned its closing. A few stayed in touch.

“I visited him in Florence because I was playing a show, and he was living outside the city with his olive trees,” Patti Smith said. “I think Silvano’s heart was broken when he had to close his restaurant, so he needed to leave New York. When I saw him, he looked like he was finding happiness out there.”

When I finally reached Mr. Marchetto in Italy by phone, he hastily explained that he hadn’t received my numerous messages because he does “not really check email,” and instructed me to meet him outside Florence’s train station in three days.

That afternoon, he drove me to a hilltop hotel, Villa San Michele. A doorman, Paolo Greco, greeted Mr. Marchetto and announced him to a young hostess, saying: “Do you know who this is? He’s a myth. Back in New York, he knew them all: the angels and the scoundrels.”

In the courtyard, Mr. Marchetto savored a vermentino and described his life now: “I let the days go by. I have a drink for lunch. I go home and nap. Then I go out again. I’ll sit in a piazza for hours. I grow figs and bottle olive oil from my trees.”

Do you look back?

“Once in a blue moon. I miss the action, but I never feel sorry for myself.”

Any gossip?

“Donald Trump came in once. Wanted spaghetti and meatballs. I said, ‘We don’t do that here.’ He said, ‘But that’s what I eat.’ So we made it for him.”

Do you remember your last night of service?

“I bought two kilos of caviar and handed it to people,” he said. “I told them, ‘Tonight is our last evening.’ They looked at me like I was joking, but I was crying inside.”

Coldplay blared as we drove to his hillside villa near Bagno a Ripoli. While he took a nap, I perused the relics of his old life: a framed letter from Barack and Michelle Obama wishing him a happy 70th birthday; some Da Silvano business cards; a portrait of him from the 1970s in Greenwich Village in which he has flowing dark hair and is riding a Honda motorcycle.

That evening, at a restaurant on a lonely piazza, he was joined by an old friend, Aldo Antonacci. Over Sangiovese, they reminisced about how heads would turn when Monica Bellucci walked into Da Silvano, and Mr. Antonacci said he still dreamed about the fiori di zucca.

For dessert, Mr. Marchetto ordered Gorgonzola. Then he leaned forward to tell Mr. Antonacci: “Did you hear about my restaurant in Cyprus? It was un casino.”

The Italian term un casinomeans a disaster.

The precise details of the recent reboot of Da Silvano on the island of Cyprus are somewhat opaque, because the restaurant is now closed and its existence was barely publicized. But for a moment Mr. Marchetto got back into the game this summer, opening a beachy version of his trattoria in Ayia Napa, a resort town known for its nightlife.

For four months, Da Silvano Cyprus served British and Swedish tourists and young women who stopped in for Instagram selfies before going clubbing. The cartoon logo of Mr. Marchetto appeared in a sign above the entrance and was branded onto menus and place mats. The restaurant offered Da Silvano hits like spaghetti puttanesca.

According to Mr. Marchetto, the restaurant came into being after a longtime former Da Silvano regular, Stephen Conte, a radiologist from New Jersey who vacations in Cyprus, pitched him the idea.

“He said he could make me good money if I lent my name, so I figured why not,” Mr. Marchetto said. “So I went to Cyprus to teach them how to make osso buco and my signature pastas. I noticed problems, like it was hard finding good ingredients and cooks, but I was just excited to get back into a restaurant.”

By midsummer, Da Silvano Cyprus was struggling. There were kitchen staffing troubles, and the restaurant started selling mostly pizza.

“We tried doing something this summer, it didn’t work out, but it was an honor working alongside Silvano,” Mr. Conte said. “I plan to try opening again next season.”

“It’s not easy running a restaurant,” Mr. Marchetto said. “The experience reminded me I should follow what I’m good at more. If someone asked me to open a place tomorrow, now I probably would.”

After the next day’s afternoon nap, Mr. Marchetto poured himself a Montepulciano and started preparing the monkfish with porcini. As the glow of a sunset crept into his villa, he chopped the mushrooms and skinned the fish, setting aside its head for a stew. He swatted away a fly as he tossed the porcini into a sizzling pan filled with the monkfish fillets, grape tomatoes and shallots.

As we ate at his kitchen counter, he took out his phone and pulled up a video posted to Da Silvano’s Facebook page in 2013. It showed Rihanna, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap during a busy night at the restaurant.

“Hello Mr. Silvano, it’s your favorite customer, Rihanna, wishing you a happy 38th anniversary,” she said. “You’ve been here since 1975. That’s a big deal to be here in New York City at the same spot. This place is legendary. I love coming here. And I will always come here as long as you are here.”

He smiled as the clip finished. Then he poured himself another glass of wine and stepped outside to take in the silence of the Tuscan night.

Alex Vadukul is a city correspondent for The New York Times. He writes for Styles and is a three-time winner of the New York Press Club award for city writing and a three-time winner of Silurians Press Club medallions for his feature writing. He was a longtime writer for Sunday Metropolitan and has been a reporter on the Obituaries desk.More about Alex Vadukul

MARTIN TOGNOLA

By Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin

A bewildering array of new terms has accompanied the rise of artificial intelligence, a technology that aims to mimic human thinking. From generative AI to machine learning, neural nets and hallucinations, we’ve gained a whole new vocabulary. Here’s a guide to some of the most important concepts behind AI to help demystify one of the most impactful technology revolutions of our lifetime: 

Algorithm: Today’s algorithms are typically a set of instructions for a computer to follow. Those designed to search and sort data are examples of computer algorithms that work to retrieve information and put it in a particular order. They can consist of words, numbers, or code and symbols, as long as they spell out finite steps for completing a task. But algorithms have their roots in antiquity, going at least as far back as clay tablets in Babylonian times. A Euclidean algorithm for division is still in use today, and brushing your teeth could even be distilled into an algorithm, albeit a remarkably complex one, considering the orchestration of fine movements that go into that daily ritual.

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Machine Learning: a branch of AI that relies on techniques that let computers learn from the data they process. Scientists had previously tried to create artificial intelligence by programming knowledge directly into a computer. 

You can give an ML system millions of animal pictures from the web, each labeled as a cat or a dog. This process of feeding information is known as “training.” Without knowing anything else about animals, the system can identify statistical patterns in the pictures and then use those patterns to recognize and classify new examples of cats and dogs.

While ML systems are very good at recognizing patterns in data, they are less effective when the task requires long chains of reasoning or complex planning.

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Natural Language Processing: a form of machine learning that can interpret and respond to human language. It powers Apple’s Siri and Amazon.com’s Alexa. Much of today’s NLP techniques select a sequence of words based on their probability of satisfying a goal, such as summarization, question and answering, or translation, said Daniel Mankowitz, a staff research scientist at DeepMind, a Google subsidiary that conducts research on artificial intelligence.

It can tell from the context of surrounding text whether the word “club” likely refers to a sandwich, the game of golf, or nightlife. The field traces its roots back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the process of helping computers analyze and understand language required scientists to code the rules themselves. Today, computers are trained to make those language associations on their own.

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Neural Networks: a technique in machine learning that mimics the way neurons act in the human brain. In the brain, neurons can send and receive signals that power thoughts and emotions. In artificial intelligence, groups of artificial neurons, or nodes, similarly send and receive information to one another. Artificial neurons are essentially lines of code that act as connection points with other artificial neurons to form neural nets. 

Unlike older forms of machine learning, they train constantly on new data and learn from their mistakes. For example, Pinterest uses neural networks to find images and ads that will catch the consumer’s eye by crunching mountains of data about users, such as searches, the boards they follow and what pins they click on and save. At the same time, the networks look at ad data on users, such as what content gets them to click on ads, to learn their interests and serve up content that is more relevant. 

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Deep Learning: a form of AI that employs neural networks and learns continuously. The “deep” in deep learning refers to the multiple layers of artificial neurons in a network. Compared with neural nets, which are better at solving smaller problems, deep learning algorithms are capable of more complex processing because of their interconnected layers of nodes. While they are inspired by the anatomy of the human brain, writes University of Oxford doctoral candidate David Watson in a 2019 paper, neural networks are brittle, inefficient and myopic when compared with the performance of an actual human brain. The method has exploded in popularity since a landmark paper in 2012 by a trio of researchers at the University of Toronto. 

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Large Language Models: deep learning algorithms capable of summarizing, creating, predicting, translating and synthesizing text and other content because they are trained on gargantuan amounts of data. A common starting point for programmers and data scientists is to train these models on open-source, publicly available data sets from the internet. 

LLMs stem from a “transformer” model developed by Google in 2017, which makes it cheaper and more efficient to train models with enormous amounts of data. OpenAI’s first GPT model, released in 2018, was built on Google’s transformer work. (GPT stands for generative pretrained transformers.) LLMs known as multimodal language models can operate in different modalities such as language, images and audio.

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Generative AI: a type of artificial intelligence that can create various types of content including text, images, video and audio. Generative AI is the result of a person feeding information or instructions, called prompts, into a so-called foundation model, which produces an output based on the prompt it was given. Foundation models are a class of models trained on vast, diverse quantities of data that can be used to develop more specialized applications, such as chatbots, code writing assistants, and design tools. Such models and their applications include text generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard, and OpenAI’s Dall-E and Stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion, which generate images. 

Interest in generative artificial intelligence exploded last November with the release of ChatGPT, which made it easy to interact with OpenAI’s underlying technology by typing questions or prompts in everyday language. Similarly, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 creates realistic-looking images. 

Such models are trained on the internet as well as on more tailored data sets to find long-range patterns in sequences of data, enabling AI software to express a fitting next word or paragraph as it writes or creates.

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Chatbots: a computer program that can engage in conversations with people in human language. Modern chatbots rely on generative AI, where people can ask questions or give instructions to foundation models in human languages. ChatGPT is an example of a chatbot that uses a large language model, in this case, OpenAI’s GPT. People can have conversations with ChatGPT on topics from history to philosophy and ask it to generate lyrics in the style of Taylor Swift or Billy Joel or suggest edits to computer programming code. ChatGPT is able to synthesize and summarize immense amounts of text and turn it into human language outputs on any number of topics that exist in language now. 

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Hallucination: when a foundation model produces responses that aren’t grounded in fact or reality, but are presented as such. Hallucinations differ from bias, a separate problem that occurs when the training data has biases that influence outputs of the LLM. Hallucinations are one of the primary shortcomings of generative AI, prompting many experts to push for human oversight of LLMs and their outputs. 

The term gained recognition after a 2015 blog post by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, who wrote about how models can “hallucinate” text responses, like making up plausible mathematical proofs.

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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN TOGNOLA

Artificial General Intelligence: a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence in which a machine can learn and think like a human. While the AI community hasn’t reached broad consensus on what AGI will entail, Ritu Jyoti, a technology analyst at research firm IDC, said it would need self-awareness and consciousness so it could solve problems, adapt to its surroundings and perform a broader range of tasks.

Companies including Google DeepMind are working toward the development of some form of AGI. DeepMind said its AlphaGo program was shown numerous amateur games, which helped it develop an understanding of reasonable human play. Then it played against different versions of itself thousands of times, each time learning from its mistakes. 

Over time, AlphaGo improved and became increasingly better at learning and decision-making—a process known as reinforcement learning. DeepMind said its MuZero program later mastered Go, chess, shogi and Atari without needing to be told the rules, a demonstration of its ability to plan winning strategies in unknown environments. This progress could be seen by some as an incremental step in the direction of AGI.

Our Miraculous Exit from Tel Aviv

This story appears today in The Three Tomatoes, the newsletter where my Friday “Miami Life” column is featured. I just read it early this morning.

Our Miraculous exit from Tel Aviv Saturday October 7

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Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office has produced 20 married couples – The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/19/senator-chuck-grassley-married-couples-weddings/

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What is keeping hurricanes away from South Florida, Puerto Rico? John Morales explains

OPINION

BRET STEPHENS

President Biden’s Finest Hour

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

Sign up for Your Places: Global Update.   All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

This column doesn’t always abound with praise for President Biden and his administration. This week’s is an exception.

On Oct. 8, the day after the greatest atrocity in Jewish history since Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jews in Israel and the diaspora woke up without a leader. The prime minister of Israel has never been, in a formal sense, the leader of the Jews — even when the office was held by people far worthier than Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the prime minister does have the most important job in the Jewish world, which is to ensure that Israel be a safe haven for Jewish life. The Jewish people have long memories; whatever happens next, Netanyahu will be remembered, irrevocably, as the man who failed — not tragically, much less heroically, but selfishly, arrogantly, despicably. He maintains political authority but is devoid of moral authority. I cannot imagine a future for him or his cabinet of blowhards and toadies except in exile, walled compounds or prison cells.

Biden stepped into the vacuum. I have read, probably a half-dozen times now, his Oct. 10 speech about the massacres. For its moral clarity, emotional force and political directness it deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric. Without equivocation, without the mealy-mouthed clichés and evasions that typified so many institutional statements about the assault, the president said what Jews desperately needed to hear.

That the massacres were “pure, unadulterated evil.” That there is “no excuse” for what Hamas did. That Israel has an affirmative “duty” to defend itself, not simply a passive “right.” That the United States will make good on its commitment to a Jewish state not with feeble statements of solidarity but with the surge of military force. A few days later, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” he called the assault “barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”

We need political leaders who maintain the capacity to call out barbarism by name and who commit themselves to its defeat. We need it especially on the political left, certain corners of which waited only a few days before returning to their usual program of denouncing Israel for its alleged or anticipated war crimes. These are the same people who sometimes pretend to believe in Israel’s right to self-defense but offer no plausible strategy for how Israel can exercise it against a terrorist enemy that hides behind civilians.

We also need Biden’s leadership given the moral void on the right. I spent the years of Donald Trump’s presidency being hectored by a certain type of Jewish conservative who insisted that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. Today, Trump takes a dimmer view of Netanyahu — less because of his failed performance than because he can’t forgive the prime minister for calling Biden in 2020 to congratulate him on his victory. Four days after the Hamas attacks, Trump also called Hezbollah, without reprobation, “very smart.” About Vladimir Putin, he said, “I got along with him very good.”

Very good. Very smart. The Republican front-runner.

Now Biden is going to Israel. It’s a brave trip, even for a president with his vast security apparatus, given that Hamas’s rockets continue to fall indiscriminately on Israel and a second front with Hezbollah could open at any time. He is going, almost surely, to do what he does best: console the bereaved and bereft, give courage to those in fear. This is statesmanship in the teeth of far-left opposition and incessant right-wing criticism. It’s the president’s finest hour.

I have seen some criticism that the hidden purpose of the trip is for Biden to hug Israel close so that he can stay its hand, or at least slow it. I doubt it, since he could hardly have been clearer in his “60 Minutes” interview that Hamas would have to be eliminated entirely, even as there needed to be a path to a Palestinian state. That path is a long one, but Biden gets the big thing right — the former is the basic precondition for the latter. No Israeli leader can ever allow a Palestinian state to exist if a group like Hamas has even the whisper of a chance of gaining power.

I expect Biden to caution Israel’s war cabinet that a military campaign that concludes with a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a Pyrrhic victory. I expect the Israelis to reply that they cannot be asked to eliminate Hamas as Gaza’s dominant military and political actor without the cooperation of the United States and moderate Arab regimes, particularly Egypt. This is not a confrontation; it’s a potentially fruitful dialogue that will work much better once Netanyahu is out of office and cannot put his personal needs ahead of the national interest.

I also hope that Biden’s leadership can remind the decent left — and what’s left of a decent right — of what American moral leadership looks like. To stand with our allies and hold our friends. To see our enemies for what they are and treat them accordingly. To remind ourselves that as others see us, so should we: as the last best hope of earth.

Us Swifties, Gail Williams, Dawn McCall, Eliot and yours truly, went to see Taylor’s concert movie yesterday, three hours long. Even if you are not a Swifty, you become one immediately just for the sheer entertainment. The production, special effects, fashion, and music, not necessarily in that order, are definitely worth the price of the ticket. Taylor Swift did it right. She picked a topic that females love to sing about, “men.” She and her family are now billionaires.

I’ve included a link to a New York Times article that profiles her stardom and and a link to her Wikipedia page. That’s enough information for one day.

.

My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/magazine/taylor-swift-eras-tour.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift

First two photos by LWH, the balance Eliot Hess

Thank you Gary Shapiro, President of the Consumer Technology Association, for sending a group of us this video from the Mayor of New York City. Gary explained that it made him think of his dad being a NAACP member and fighting for civil rights. My parents too taught us at an early age to love and respect all mankind. I think about this all the time. We have lived a good life because of that teaching. Again, thank you Gary.

Birds are confused by lights and windows, which they don’t know they can’t fly through.

Nearly 1,000 Birds Die After Striking Chicago Building

At least 961 birds died in one night in Chicago after crashing into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center during the height of the fall migration.

By Amanda Holpuch

Millions of birds fly over Chicago during the fall migration season, and a number of them die after being confused by bright lights or after trying to fly through a window, but the carpet of bird carcasses outside a convention center on Thursday morning shocked people who have been monitoring birds in the city for decades.

At least 961 dead birds were found outside the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, according to the Field Museum, a natural history museum about one mile north of the convention center.

Volunteers and scientists at the museum go to the convention center, which overlooks Lake Michigan and has an exterior made mainly of glass, each day during the spring and fall migration seasons to search for birds that have clattered into the building overnight. The building, which has four levels, is not especially tall compared with nearby skyscrapers.

Douglas Stotz, a senior conservation ecologist at the museum, said that he was “blown away” by how many birds were migrating on Wednesday night and early on Thursday, as well as by how many were found dead.

“I’ve been in Chicago for 40 years and bird-watch all the time and I’ve never, ever seen anything like that,” he said on Sunday.

Mr. Stotz said that the number of birds that strike the convention center each day varies.

The previous record had been around 200 dead birds. Some days, no birds die. The nearly 1,000 dead birds found on Thursday were the most the museum had recorded in the four decades that it has been keeping track, he said.

Mr. Stotz said that a large number of birds were migrating that night because their travel had been delayed by unfavorable weather conditions. Before Wednesday night, the temperature had been unusually high and the birds encountered a headwind.

When the temperatures dropped and the wind shifted, a huge number of birds took advantage of the improved conditions and flew over Chicago, which is in Cook County.

Around 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, about 1.49 million birds were in flight above Cook County, according to BirdCast, a bird migration tracking project by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Around this time, a small storm system moved through the city.

“The birds hit this storm and they drop out, they don’t want to fly through the storm,” Mr. Stotz said. “So they come down to the ground, and that sets up the conditions for the incredible migration we saw — and for the big kill we saw.”

Birds are confused by lights and windows, which they don’t know they can’t fly through.

It is a problem in all cities. Between 365 million and 988 million birds are killed annually by striking buildings in the United States, according to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

At the Field Museum, dead birds are turned over to a flesh-eating beetle colony that cleans the birds so that their skeletal remains can be added to the museum’s collection and used for research.

Mr. Stotz said that the high concentration of dead birds found on Thursday should emphasize how important it is for buildings to turn off their lights during bird migration season. He also hopes it will move building owners to opt for windows that are less reflective or more opaque, which are safer for birds.

In a statement, McCormick Place said that it was “truly saddened by this incident” and described its efforts to reduce bird window strikes, including participating in Lights Out Chicago, a program managed by the Chicago Audubon Society that encourages building owners to turn off or dim decorative lights.

The statement said that lights at the complex are turned off unless they are needed for workers and visitors. There had been an event during the week of the bird strikes, so the lights were sometimes on, the statement said.

“We deeply appreciate our community’s concern for the welfare of birds and your engagement with our efforts to mitigate these issues, and we are in discussion with industry experts to look for better solutions to protect our avian neighbors,” the statement said.

A large number of dead birds were also found on Thursday in other parts of downtown Chicago, said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.

Ms. Prince told WGN Radiothat the group on Thursday found about 300 injured birds and about 700 to 800 dead birds in the square mile it monitored.

Outside some buildings, the group found more than 100 dead or injured birds, which she said “was a very unusual and tragic occurrence.”

Donald Trump Can Snarl All He Likes, But He’s Making a Star Out of Letitia James

The fraud trial playing out in New York “adds a lot of value to her political future,” says one Democratic strategist, but taking on a prominent Biden surrogate role in 2024 “would feed into the narrative that Trump wants, that this case is about politics.”

BY CHRIS SMITH

Donald Trump is doing a brilliant job of promoting Letitia James. The former president had been punching at New York State’s attorney general sporadically for more than a year, calling James a “racist” and a “disgrace” as her office investigated whether Trump and his company had committed fraud by manipulating the value of his businesses. But now, as Trump is on trial, he has taken to attacking James on a daily basis, raging to reporters outside the lower Manhattan courtroom while calling her “grossly incompetent,” a “monster,” and even a “deranged lunatic” on social media.

The publicity offensive is certainly ugly and perverse, but it is elevating James’s profile. The attorney general has already won one enormous victory against the former president: Last month, state judge Arthur Engoron ruled that James had proven that Trump and his companies committed long-running fraud in their financial statements. “This case was brought simply because it was a case where individuals have engaged in a pattern and practice of fraud,” James said on Wednesday. “And I will not sit idly by and allow anyone to subvert the law.” Upon the former president’s departure, James told reporters that “the Donald Trump show is over” and suggested his voluntary appearance in court “was nothing more than a political stunt, a fundraising stop.”

The current legal proceedings, which could last until December, are to determine what penalty Trump will pay, from a monetary fine to being barred from doing business in New York State. Perhaps Engoron will allow Trump to walk away with an anticlimactic slap on the wrist. But the odds that James will earn a large legal triumph and accumulate a sizable stockpile of political capital look far better.

Political capital that she will cash in to go…well, probably nowhere. The earnest, consensus view is that James will stay put because she loves her current job. “Tish is not interested in publicity or what drives most elected officials,” says Roberto Ramirez, a former New York Democratic state assemblyman who knows James well from his work as a strategist on several of her campaigns. “She is the unicorn of New York politics. She is obsessed with the substantive nature of being a lawyer for the state.”

There is also the hard political reality that James is boxed in. New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand aren’t departing anytime soon. Two years ago James mounted a brief, half-hearted run for governor (“The people around her wanted it far more than she did,” a state Democratic insider says), and the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, won’t be on the ballot again until 2026. In the past, James has talked far more enthusiastically about running for mayor of New York City—but it is very hard to see her giving up a powerful statewide office for a bloody 2025 primary challenge to fellow Democrat and fellow Brooklynite Eric Adams.

And then there’s the more intriguing constraint on James’s enhanced prestige: She would undermine a defeat of Trump by trying to capitalize on it. Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is highly worried about turning out crucial Black voters, particularly women, in battleground states. James would be an energetic, effective surrogate—except that making her a prominent part of the president’s campaign would hand Trump ammunition. “This case adds a lot of value to her political future, and it inoculates her from what a lot of women in her position have to deal with, being more credentialed and validated in ways that men don’t,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who worked on both of Barack Obama’s White House runs. “But the Biden campaign couldn’t and wouldn’t use her, because it would feed into the narrative that Trump wants, that this case is about politics.”

James certainly doesn’t lack ambition. She maneuvered through the treacherous, corruption-prone ranks of the Brooklyn Democratic Party to be elected a city councilwoman, before winning one of New York’s three citywide offices, as public advocate. James had entered politics as a candidate of the left-wing Working Families Party—but ditched the WFP to make a useful alliance with its mortal enemy, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, in her successful 2018 run for AG. In 2021, after conducting an investigation requested by Cuomo, James delivered a 165-page report detailing multiple sexual harassment allegations against him. One week later the governor announced his resignation.

One year into her second term as New York’s top prosecutor James, 64, looks as if she’s settling in for at least the medium haul. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, when too many pols are fixated on the next rung of the ladder. Yet unpredictable things have a way of happening in politics. “It’s natural for a person to feel maybe I should consider other options,” Ramirez says. “Her future is only limited by what she wishes to do.” For the moment, though, James is the rare politician whose future is paradoxically restricted by the nature of her imminent triumph.

Chris Smith

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Chris Smith is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the best-selling author of The Daily Show (the Book) and Till the End (with CC Sabathia). Smith joined VF after covering politics, entertainment, sports, and crime for New York magazine.

I feel the New York Times non-fiction book writer, Jennifer Szalai, was a little tough on critiquing Michael Lewis. She made some assumptions about Lewis’s writing that wasn’t necessarily true. He wasn’t overwhelmed by Sam Bankman-Fried to the extent that he had trouble writing the book. He just wanted to be sure that the reader understood the way Bankman-Fried’s mind works. That’s something most people will never understand—LWH.

Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried

“Going Infinite,” Lewis’s new book about the disgraced crypto billionaire, defies the author’s winning formula of upbeat narratives and unsung genius.

By Jennifer Szalai

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GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis

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Reading “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis’s strange new book about the disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, you soon get the sense that Lewis felt unusually flummoxed by his material. Among the reliable pleasures offered by a Michael Lewis book are his formidable storytelling skills, his comic timing, his winsome confidence. He makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for: the dedicated public servant, the renegade baseball general manager, the contrarian investor who doesn’t get snookered by the hype. Even Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker,” which recounts all kinds of bad behavior on Wall Street, is structured around a young man named Michael Lewis who leaves the “absurd money game” of finance for the bright lights of journalism and best-sellerdom.

Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”

The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect — especially now that jury selection for Bankman-Fried’s trial on fraud charges is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, which is also the book’s publication date. But “Going Infinite” still contains zombie traces of the old unsung hero project, one that should have taken a definitive drubbing last November, when Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire imploded. Lewis, who traveled back and forth from the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat — from which he could apparently see nothing. “As late as the final days of October 2022,” he writes, “you could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.”

“Not the faintest sense”? That April, Bankman-Fried had given an infamous interview to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine in which he all but admitted that the cryptocurrency industry — the linchpin of the Bankman-Fried edifice — was like a Ponzi scheme. (Zeke Faux’s recent book “Number Go Up” offers a shrewdly skeptical view of crypto where “Going Infinite” is stubbornly credulous.) Not to mention that a crypto crash had already begun earlier that year.

But Bankman-Fried had long been positioning himself as a different kind of crypto guy. He was a vegan, because he cared about the earth; he slept on a beanbag chair by his desk, because he didn’t care about his personal comfort. In 2017, he helped found a crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, and two years later built a crypto futures exchange, FTX, because he was an effective altruist whose goal was to make enormous amounts of money to donate to worthy causes.

“Infinity dollars” was in fact how Bankman-Fried put it to Lewis at their first meeting, explaining how much money he needed to address existential risks, like an apocalypse started by artificial intelligence. Lewis found the discrepancy between Bankman-Fried’s grand ambitions and disheveled self-presentation intriguing. He was far from alone. The incessant video game-playing, the furtive lack of eye contact, the unkempt hair — it all became part of the billionaire’s brand, which was burnished by his supposed do-gooder intentions. While Lewis was shadowing Bankman-Fried, Bankman-Fried also seemed to be on an endless publicity tour, eager to sing to any journalist who was willing to listen.

And Lewis listened. He offers the quirky portrait that is standard fare in his books. We learn that Bankman-Fried is someone who is unmoved by art and disdainful of Shakespeare (“unrealistic characters, illogical plots and obvious endings”). He cares a lot about “humanity” but little about individual humans (“I guess I should care the same amount about everyone”). He has little patience with the concept of responsibility (“fault is just a construct of human society”). He allowed Lewis to read his “private writings,” in which he complained about being consistently misunderstood. “No one is curious,” a morose Bankman-Fried wrote while working at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street after college. “No one cares, not really, about the self I see.”

Given the financial wreckage in FTX’s wake, this kind of self-pity might sound like the world’s tiniest violin. Bankman-Fried is given ample space in this book to air his pet theories about what led to the collapse, while insisting that his intentions were always pure. Occasionally, Lewis will hand the mic to a devastated subordinate who finds Bankman-Fried’s excuses hard to swallow. “He made me try to believe it was an accounting error,” says one woman. He “let me go out and lie” for him, says another former employee. Lewis, for his part, says he kept trying to get to the bottom of what happened — though his endless interviews with Bankman-Fried seemed to yield diminishing returns: “I’d poke and prod and always come away with the sense that I’d learned less than I need to know.”

But this isn’t a book of investigative journalism; this is Lewis’s account of being a fly on the wall — a perspective that’s all well and good when your subject isn’t a billionaire savant who is charged with defrauding people who trusted him. Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride. He tells us that Bankman-Fried is so worried about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump that he was planning to give the Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell “$15-$30 million” to “defeat the Trumpier candidates in the U.S. Senate races.” Thirty million? To Mitch McConnell? To save democracy? (Bankman-Fried also said that he was told that Trump might be willing to sit out the next election for $5 billion.)

Lewis ends his story by describing how Bankman-Fried’s parents were so fearful for their security that they purchased a German shepherd named Sandor, who had been trained to kill on command when given the correct instructions in German. The parents had learned the commands, but Sam had not. “So when Sam was in a room with the dog, it always felt as if some accident was waiting to happen,” Lewis writes. “It would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.”

Is this supposed to be a metaphor? Or maybe an attempt at a joke? Is Lewis trying to suggest that the guard dog is somehow like those former employees who are expected to testify against Bankman-Fried?

Lewis is an undeniably talented writer, but the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t play to his strengths. He knows how to write a happy story, not a tragic one. I keep thinking about what Christina Rolle, the chief financial regulator in the Bahamas, said about Bankman-Fried soon after everything came crashing down. “I don’t think he knows why people don’t trust him,” she told Lewis. “It’s not hard to see you are being played by him, like a board game.”

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GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon | By Michael Lewis | Norton | 254 pp. | $30

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.