Jack Carr draws in unlikely readers with his personal details from battle and Amazon turns his work into a TV show

‘I’m bringing the feeling and emotions of somebody who fought,’ says author Jack Carr of his writing. PHOTO: SIMON & SCHUSTER

By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Some writers sell fantasy, romance or mystery. Former Navy SEAL Jack Carr trades in his precise knowledge of guns and battlefield tactics. 

In Carr’s latest novel, “Only the Dead,” battle-scarred James Reece opens a family trunk full of deadly weaponry.

He “reached inside and removed the 9mm Smith & Wesson M39 from the chest. Better known in the SEAL Teams as the Mk 22 ‘Hush Puppy,’ it had earned a legendary reputation in the jungles of Vietnam for silently eliminating sentries and guard dogs.” Soon, Reece is grabbing a box of “9mm Super Vel subsonic ammunition.”

That ultrarealistic detail is Carr’s signature. It’s part of the formula propelling him to success in a competitive genre, military and political thrillers, where few newcomers break out. Drawing on his experience, Carr spins tales about a SEAL who begins on a mission to avenge the deaths of his family and winds up unraveling terrorist plots and global conspiracies. 

Combined, his six books have sold about 3.3 million copies in all formats, according to publisher Simon & Schuster, with “Only the Dead” so far accounting for 300,000. His seventh, “Red Sky Mourning,” is expected to publish next spring.

His cumulative sales put him in a league reached by less than 1% of all authors, according to an estimate from publishing executives. Carr’s last two novels each made its debut at No. 1 on the New York Timeshardcover bestseller fiction list.

Tom Clancy was the father of military fiction, but he never served. Carr enlisted as a Navy SEAL in 1996 and saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving Naval Special Warfare in 2016.  

“I’m bringing the feeling and emotions of somebody who fought,” Carr said in an interview. “You can’t fake that, or if you did you couldn’t do it for long.” 

Carr’s books are laced with themes of patriotism and loyalty. That authenticity is attracting infrequent readers who are normally hard for publishers to reach. 

Amazon Prime Video has ordered a second season and a prequel to ‘The Terminal List’ starring Chris Pratt. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Literary agent Shane Salerno, who represents several successful thriller writers, said Carr has “managed in a very unique way to capture young men who are often difficult to market to and even harder to get to convert to purchase a $25 book.” Carr says some fans tell him they haven’t read a book since high school.

Cole Maund, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic from Dothan, Ala., first heard about Carr from a friend and got hooked after reading his debut, “The Terminal List.” “I barely ever read at all but this was one book I couldn’t put down,” he said. “He grabs you.” Maund has now read all six books and has already preordered the seventh.    

Carr has taken his place among the big names of the category, from Clancy to Vince Flynn to Brad Thor. But while he’s a commercial success, he’s been overlooked by the literary establishment—with few if any newspaper book reviews. “My guess is that English majors don’t groove on guns,” said literary agent Richard Pine. 

Jack Carr is a pseudonym that the author says he uses out of concerns for his security. 

Carr grew up in Northern California and says he knew he wanted to be a Navy SEAL after seeing the 1951 World War II movie, “The Frogmen,” as a seven-year-old. His mother, a librarian, encouraged him to read, and he embraced such thriller writers as Clancy, David Morrell and A.J. Quinnell.  

As a child of the 1980s, he says, he always believed he would be a Navy SEAL—and would one day top the New York Times bestseller list. 

“That was a natural part of my foundation,” he says. “I knew that was the path and never worried about it.” 

Carr says neither he nor his wife grew up with money; investing everything in his writing career after leaving the SEALs was a risk for both. A child with special needs who requires round-the-clock care has given Carr even greater focus. 

Amazon Prime Video created a TV show starring Chris Pratt based on “The Terminal List.” It has ordered a second season and a prequel.

Some readers say he injects a right-wing political worldview into his novels. Hugh Carter, a 45-year-old communications consultant based in Toronto, said he’d been a huge Clancy fan as a kid and hoped that Carr’s books would be like those. Instead, he found them “so specifically rooted in modern politics and the culture wars that it was a turnoff.”

In a reference to an Islamic militant attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, he wrote in one book that “a small group of CIA contractors fought for their lives while politicians half a world away, in no danger of being overrun, could hardly be bothered to respond to requests for reinforcements.” 

Carr at the premiere of ‘The Terminal List’ in Los Angeles in 2022. PHOTO: NINA PROMMER/SHUTTERSTOCK

Carr initially worked with a writing partner, Keith Wood, who is a lawyer and freelance contributor to gun magazines. Wood, who lives in Alabama, said the two met through a mutual friend and hit it off. They later had a falling out that focused in part on how much credit Wood would claim publicly.  

“We haven’t spoken in years, although at one time we were really good friends,” said Wood. Carr declined to comment on Wood.

Emily Bestler, an editor at Simon & Schuster, said she acquired Carr’s debut manuscript, “The Terminal List,” after a recommendation from Brad Thor, whom she also publishes. It was a good bet. 

“We have a lot of young military guys who pick up the entire series before they deploy,” said Maria Oytas, who manages Bay Books, an independent bookstore in Coronado, Calif.

Carr has worked to extend his brand beyond books. Carr’s podcast, “Danger Close,” attracts a minimum of approximately 224,000 monthly listeners, according to Podchaser, a podcast data firm, with an audience that skews 91% male. Carr feeds his social-media followers daily content about their shared interests in weapons, hunting and action movies, with references to stars like Sylvester Stallone. 

Carr’s website offers a Jack Carr Operator Hat with crossed tomahawks for $48; a Jack Carr Hunter’s Shirt for $188, and Jack Carr Revenge Blend coffee for $11.90 (“Feel free to add some cream and honey to take it like Navy SEAL Sniper James Reece.”) 

Carr believed from the beginning that readers would embrace his use of military jargon. In “The Terminal List,” he describes a soldier in Afghanistan as looking “like a creature from another world with his AOR1-patterned camouflage, body armor, and Ops Core half-shell helmet with NODs firmly in place.” 

Too much? No, says Carr. “It gives my characters legitimacy to see that the right helmet is described correctly,” he said.

Kenzie Fitzpatrick, a competitive professional shooter, recently spent a day with Carr at a shooting range in Utah. “When I’m reading his books I think, ‘That’s how I would load that ammunition,’ or ‘that’s the tool I would use to gauge my ballistic data at long range,’” she said.

Doug Downs, a professor at Montana State University who studies gun culture from a linguistics perspective, said most people look at any writing that involves guns through a political lens. 

“People who enjoy his work view guns as tools,” Downs said. “That’s not how you hear people outside that culture talk about them.” 

Others are drawn to the themes in Carr’s work, especially an optimism that ideals are worth standing up for. Don Bentley, a former Army Apache helicopter pilot who also became a thriller writer, said of Carr’s work,“The characters may be flawed, but they aspire to be the person we want to be.

Dick Wolf, ‘Law & Order’ Creator, Gives 200 Artworks to the Met Museum

Wolf has promised works by Botticelli, the Gentileschis and van Gogh to the museum, which is also naming two galleries for him thanks to a large financial donation.

By Zachary Small

Dec. 20, 2023

Dick Wolf, the “Law & Order” creator, has made a promised gift of more than 200 works — paintings, sculptures and drawings among them — for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections of Renaissance and Baroque art. He is also donating a substantial sum of money, the Met announced on Wednesday, adding that it would endow two galleries with his name.

Wolf has been a discreet collector in the art world, focusing his attention on older works at a time when the most well-known collectors invest in modern and contemporary art. Some of his promised gifts to the museum were also recent purchases, including a 15th-century Botticelli painting that sold for $4.6 million in 2012 and a 16th-century Orazio Gentileschi painting that sold for $4.4 million in 2022. The Gentileschi is already on view in the newly reopened European paintings galleries; Wolf is also donating a piece by the artist’s daughter, Artemisia, which sold for $2.1 million that same year.

Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said that he and the museum’s curators cultivated a relationship with the television producer over the last three years; however, he stayed away from giving advice on the market.

“I never wanted to be too presumptuous,” Hollein said in an interview. “But I think he was already thinking about the Met.”

The collection also includes a $2.8 million painting by van Gogh sold in 2022, “Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather,” one of his earliest oil landscapes. The painting was made in 1882, at the beach outside of the fishing village of Scheveningen, but the artist later abandoned the picture inside of a crate of some 40 works. His family stored the crate with a carpenter, who later sold the contents for the equivalent of 50 cents to a junk dealer named Johannes Couvreur.

A museum spokeswoman declined to provide a specific number for the endowment, which will ensure Wolf’s name is on two galleries in the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, but said it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

Wolf declined an interview but said in a statement that his appreciation for art started when he was a child visiting the Met on his way home from school. “It was a simpler time, there was no admission, you could walk in off the street,” he said. “I’m sure most collectors would agree that seeing your art displayed in the world’s greatest museum is an honor.”

Hollein characterized Wolf’s donation as one of the most meaningful gifts to the museum in recent memory.

“The collection reflects Dick Wolf’s excellent connoisseurship and enduring dedication to the diverse artistic media of the periods,” he said. “Furthermore, the substantial financial contribution will provide critical support for the Met’s collection displays and scholarly pursuits.”

A correction was made on December 20, 2023:

An earlier version of this article misstated the department in which two galleries will have Dick Wolf’s name. It is the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, not the department of European painting and decorative arts.

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Zachary Small is a reporter who covers the dynamics of power and privilege in the art world. They have written for The Times since 2019.More about Zachary Small

Hermes billionaire wants to bequeath fortune to his gardener

By Hanna Ziady, CNN

Nicolas Puech, heir of the Hermes family, pictured on his estate in Spain in March 2011 —

A descendant of Europe’s richest family has reportedly begun a process to adopt his middle-aged gardener, planning to leave him at least half of his roughly €12 billion ($13 billion) fortune.

Nicolas Puech, 80, a fifth-generation descendant of the founder of French luxury goods company Hermes, wants to cancel a contract that would bequeath his fortune to the Isocrates Foundation, which he founded, and instead make his employee a legal heir.

Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 heures reported the news earlier this month.

The charitable foundation is contesting Puech’s plan to cut ties, which it says it learned of only recently. “From a legal point of view, a unilateral cancellation of the contract of inheritance seems void and unfounded,” the organization said in a statement shared with CNN. “The foundation has therefore opposed the cancellation of the contract, while leaving the door open for discussions with its founder.”

Referring to the Swiss media reports on Puech’s “wish to adopt his employee,” the charity said it wasn’t in a position “to judge or comment (on) this initiative,” adding that it “leaves it to the relevant authorities to decide on this matter.” CNN has contacted the billionaire’s lawyer for comment.

Established by Puech in 2011 and funded by him since, the Isocrates Foundation supports public interest journalism and civil society organizations working toward a “healthy digital public space,” according to its website.

The inheritance contract between the foundation and Puech, who isn’t known to have children, reportedly provides for his shares in Hermes to be left to the foundation. That is, unless he becomes a father, in which case his child would be entitled to a part of the inheritance, and at least 50% in the case of a son.

Puech purportedly owns 5.7% of Hermes, a company known for its silk scarves and leather handbags. A post-pandemic boom in demand for luxury goods has propelled Hermes to a valuation of nearly €211 billion ($230.8 billion), making Puech’s stake worth around €12 billion.

Hermes stopped breaking out Puech’s stake in 2016 but listed him as holding a 5.8% stake in its 2015 annual report. The latest report lists “other members of the Hermes family group” as holding a 5.7% share in the firm.

The Hermes family is the world’s third wealthiest, according to an annual Bloomberg ranking published earlier this month.

Richard Ekstract is mentioned in a recent WSJ article which features the book “Warhol After Warhol: Secrets, Lies, & Corruption in the Art World.” Richard got cheated out of millions of dollars because he couldn’t get his Warhol painting authenticated. Read on for the details.

Roger M. Heuberger emailed this recent WSJ article to Marcia Grand and me. I coincidentally bought the ereader version of the book a week ago. Thank you Roger.

By Belinda Lacks

In 2003, Richard Dorment received a call from a man named Joe Simon, a film producer who had bought a print of Andy Warhol’s “Red Self-Portrait” in 1989 for $195,000. Mr. Simon now wanted to sell his print for $2 million, but there was a wrinkle: It had been declared a fake by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Mr. Simon asked Mr. Dorment, an art historian and, at the time, the chief art critic at the Daily Telegraph, to offer some expert insight into why the print had been rejected. Mr. Dorment said he didn’t want to get involved—he’s no Warhol expert, he demurred—but Mr. Simon steamrolled over his objections and eventually pulled him into a high-stakes dispute with a formidable art organization.

At the heart of the debate were Warhol’s working methods. To mass-produce his paintings, Warhol used a commercial printing technique called silk-screening, a quick process for making multiple copies of an image. Prior to Warhol, silk-screening was rarely used for fine art, but it proved to have many advantages over traditional printmaking methods, such as etching, which limits the number of prints that can be made. Early in his career, to create texture, Warhol would add paint flourishes by hand to his silk-screened pictures. By the 1970s, most of his work was produced by third parties, with the artist delivering instructions to his printers over the phone. Outsourcing further allowed him to churn out so many prints that his art dealers feared he’d flood the market. It also made him one of the world’s easiest artists to fake.

Today, discerning which Warhol pictures are genuine is the business of authenticators, whose trained eyes and in-depth knowledge are supposed to be bulwarks against forgeries. Sometimes authenticators make bad calls, prompting other experts to weigh in and correct the error. With reputations and multimillion-dollar fortunes at stake, convincing an authenticator to reverse a decision is rarely easy. Armed with conclusive evidence, however, it shouldn’t be impossible—unless, as Mr. Dorment discovered, you’re going up against a powerful, moneyed and secretive authentication board. “Warhol After Warhol: Secrets, Lies, & Corruption in the Art World” is Mr. Dorment’s riveting memoir of how he tried to prove the authenticity—and importance—of Mr. Simon’s “Red Self-Portrait.”

The elements at the root of the global economy, the tragedy of Benedict Arnold, how to tell if you’ve got a real Warhol and more.
Mr. Dorment initially concedes that Mr. Simon’s painting looks like a fake. “Red Self-Portrait” is one of Warhol’s best-known works, but it was originally made as a series of 11 silk screens in 1964, a year before Mr. Simon’s print was produced. The subject matter of both versions is the same—the expressionless face and shoulders of a young Andy Warhol, photographed in an automatic photo booth in Times Square—but there are some critical differences. The first batch was printed on linen (Warhol’s preferred material) with an acrylic-paint background; Mr. Simon’s was printed on cotton duck using a plastic-based ink that gives the picture a shiny surface.

The authentication board recognized the 1964 series as genuine; in 2006 one print from the series sold for $3.7 million. But the board deemed Mr. Simon’s picture to be counterfeit, and stamped the back with a red “Denied”—a stain that, in effect, makes it worthless. Mr. Dorment spends much of his scholarly yet wholly accessible account discrediting that judgment. Drawing from eyewitness statements of those who knew and worked with Warhol, the author argues that not only did the artist authorize the second printing, he also approved of it—so much so that he chose the 1965 version over the original to be the cover image of his first catalogue raisonné, published in 1970.

Warhol’s motivation for producing the later series explains its perceived faults. In 1965 Warhol’s friend, a magazine publisher named Richard Ekstract, arranged for the artist to borrow a prototype of an early consumer videotape recorder. Warhol quickly realized the camera’s filmmaking potential and wanted more time with it, so he cut Ekstract a deal: For an extension on the use of the camera and other electronic equipment, Warhol would produce a new set of “Red Self-Portraits” for the publisher. To save money, Warhol’s business manager hatched the idea of turning over the original acetates to Ekstract so the publisher could foot the costly silk-screening bill. Since Warhol didn’t directly supervise the work, the pictures look very different from their predecessors.

Why, then, would the Warhol board deny the authenticity of the second series? “As far as I could see,” Mr. Dorment writes, “they did this for no other reason than because the date of its creation did not accord with their predetermined belief that Warhol did not start making ‘hands-off’ works until the 1970s.” In any case, the board refused to disclose the rationale behind its decision, so Mr. Simon spent years gathering documentation to disprove it. Having failed to accomplish that, in 2007 he brought a $20 million lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the authentication board’s parent organization. Mr. Simon accused the foundation of artificially driving up the value of its own collection—from which it occasionally sells pieces—by removing legitimate competing artwork from the market. (The board contacted other owners of the later “Red Self-Portrait” series and invited them to submit their pictures for authentication with, according to Mr. Dorment, “the deliberate intention of mutilating them.”) Mr. Dorment wrote articles in the New York Review of Books in support of Mr. Simon’s picture, attracting the wrath of the foundation’s president, Joel Wachs, who, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, accused Mr. Dorment of applying pressure on the board to authenticate a different painting owned by Mr. Simon that was truly a forgery. Mr. Dorment calls the allegation a libel designed to “damage my reputation for integrity both as a critic and as an art historian.” The Guardian eventually printed a correction.

Mr. Simon’s case proved ill-fated. A friend, the Russian oligarch Leonid Rozhetskin, promised to pay his legal bills. But before the trial even began, Rozhetskin disappeared and was later found dead. (Apparently Rozhetskin had fallen afoul of one of Vladimir Putin’s cronies.) That left Mr. Simon at a disadvantage against the deep-pocketed foundation. Mr. Dorment recounts the courtroom antics in painful detail, as the defense counsel buried the real issue of authenticity under what he describes as a mountain of theatrics, obstructions and diversions designed to prolong the trial. The foundation ended up spending $7 million in legal fees, forcing Mr. Simon, who could no longer afford litigation, to drop the case.
Mr. Dorment’s is an entirely one-sided account; we never really get to hear the foundation’s version of any of these events. But then he might say that is his point: In the context of Warhol, the foundation’s version of history shouldn’t be the only official version allowed. For Mr. Dorment, the board’s refusal to recognize the picture is an affront to Warhol’s legacy—the very thing the foundation was established to protect. The picture is not only authentic, Mr. Dorment asserts, but “the hinge that opened the door into Warhol’s hands-off working methods.”

In 2011 the authentication board stopped accepting submissions from the public but, as Mr. Dorment notes, continues to wield influence through its catalogue raisonné, which excludes the 1965 edition of “Red Self-Portrait,” rendering it virtually untouchable. In 2022 Richard Ekstract—who died earlier this year—offered his unsigned “Red Self-Portrait” for auction. Estimated to fetch between $500,000 to $700,000, it failed to sell.

Ms. Lanks is a New York-based editor and writer

Andre Braugher(1962-2023)

Andre Braugher, Actor on ‘Homicide’ and ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,’ Dies at 61

He was best known for playing stoic police officers on two acclaimed but very different television series — one an intense drama, the other a comedy.

By Alex Williams and Mike Ives

Dec. 12, 2023

Andre Braugher, a prolific and critically acclaimed actor whose simmering intensity and commanding presence earned him an Emmy Award for his role as a detective on television drama “Homicide: Life on the Street” and laughs as a stern, tart-tongued police captain on the sitcom “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” died on Monday. He was 61.

His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his longtime publicist Jennifer Allen. She said that Mr. Braugher, who lived in New Jersey, had died after a brief illness. She did not say where he died.

Projecting a no-nonsense authority, Mr. Braugher was a natural for police roles, which also included turns as a detective opposite Telly Savalas in television movie reboots of the 1970s police series “Kojak” in 1989 and 1990, and as another cop in “Hack,” a series about a disgraced police officer who becomes a taxi-driving vigilante, seen on CBS from 2002 to 2004.

Even so, Mr. Braugher, a Stanford University graduate who trained at the Juilliard School in New York, also enjoyed a fruitful and multifaceted career as a stage, film and television actor in roles that did not involve a badge or a sidearm.

He made his film debut as Cpl. Thomas Searles, a proper Boston intellectual turned soldier, in the 1989 film “Glory,” about the storied 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the Union’s first Black fighting units in the Civil War. The film also starred Denzel Washington (who won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role), Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick, who played the regiment’s white abolitionist leader, Col. Robert Gould Shaw. (Shaw was a childhood friend of Mr. Braugher’s character.)

“I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of,” Mr. Braugher said in interview that year with The New York Times. “I can tell you now that my mother will be proud of me when she sees me in this role.”

Among his other big-screen roles were an egomaniacal actor in “Get on the Bus” (1996), Spike Lee’s talky road movie about a group of Black men traveling to Washington for the Million Man March; the captain of a capsized ocean liner in “Poseidon,” the 2006 remake of the 1970s disaster movie “The Poseidon Adventure”; and the United States secretary of defense in “Salt” (2010), an espionage thriller starring Angelina Jolie.

In one of his last films, Mr. Braugher brought gravitas to the role of Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of The Times, in “She Said” (2022), a drama about two Times reporters’ efforts to document sexual abuse by the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, which helped ignite the #MeToo movement.

He was also a respected stage actor who appeared in several New York Shakespeare Festival productions, including “Measure for Measure,” “Twelfth Night” “As You Like It” and “Henry V,” for which his performance in the title role earned him an Obie Award in 1997.

But it was his role as Detective Frank Pembleton on “Homicide” that proved indelible. A gritty police procedural series set in crime-ravaged quarters of Baltimore, “Homicide” ran on NBC from 1993 to 1999.

“We had a lot of great, incredibly talented actors on that show, but we could see that he would be the quarterback of the team,” Tom Fontana, the show’s executive producer, was quoted as saying in a recent article in Variety. “He has great nobility about him.”

While the role made him a familiar face in prime time, Mr. Braugher later expressed reservations about the heroic portrayals of police officers on television, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I look up after all these decades of playing these characters, and I say to myself, it’s been so pervasive that I’ve been inside this storytelling, and I, too, have fallen prey to the mythologythat’s been built up,” he said in a 2020 interview with Variety. “It’s almost like the air you breathe or the water that you swim in. It’s hard to see. But because there are so many cop shows on television, that’s where the public gets its information about the state of policing. Cops breaking the law to quote, ‘defend the law,’ is a real terrible slippery slope.”

With “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” Mr. Braugher would get the opportunity to upend some of those cop-show clichés by lampooning them.

Andre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1, 1962, and grew up on the city’s West Side. His mother, Sally, worked for the United States Postal Service. His father, Floyd, was a heavy-equipment operator for the State of Illinois.

“We lived in a ghetto,” he told The Times in 2014. “I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don’t consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”

Mr. Braugher attended St. Ignatius College Prep, a prestigious Jesuit high school in Chicago, and later earned a scholarship to Stanford. His father, who wanted him to be an engineer, was furious when he gravitated to acting instead.

“Show me Black actors who are earning a living,” he recalled his father telling him. “What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”

After graduating from Stanford with a major in mathematics, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Juilliard School.

Mr. Braugher insisted on living in New Jersey even though he often worked in California. Among his other roles in acclaimed television series, he played an unorthodox physician on the ABC drama “Gideon’s Crossing” (2000-1) and the car salesman Owen Thoreau Jr. on the TNT series “Men of a Certain Age” (2009-11). He also starred in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight” (2017-22).

Mr. Braugher won an Emmy for “Homicide” in 1998 and another in 2006 for his role as the steely leader of a heist crew in the FX mini-series “Thief,” set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

He is survived by his wife, the actress Ami Brabson; his sons, Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley; his brother, Charles Jennings; and his mother. His father died in 2011.

Mr. Braugher took a marked detour into comedy in 2013 with “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” playing Capt. Raymond Holt, an erudite if stiff precinct commander. He received four Emmy nominations and won two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series.

It was a counterintuitive role on a number of levels. For one, Mr. Braugher had little experience playing for laughs — indeed, it was a joke on the show that his character was so rigid, he had to strain to smile, even if he was always good for a devastating wisecrack.

“I’d never done it before,” he told Variety. “ Am I any good? I remember turning to my wife and asking her, ‘Is this funny?’ And she said, ‘Yes, of course, you’re not being deceived.’ But I kept looking at it, saying to myself, ‘Is this good?’ I couldn’t really judge.”

He also flouted stereotypes with his portrayal of Capt. Holt as a gay character whose sexual orientation is merely a matter of fact, not a source of amusement.

“As long as there’s no pink hot pants and singing ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ then everything’s OK,” Mr. Braugher said in a 2018 video interview. “Typically, when you see gay characters on shows, they’re goofballs or caricatures,” he added. “But this is one more facet of Holt as opposed to being Holt’s defining characteristic, so that’s what’s important to me.”

His teenage son, he said, asked him, “You’re playing a gay police captain?” “I said ‘No, I’m playing the police captain who’s gay.’ So we have to sit down and understand what that distinction is.”

Rebecca Carballo contributed reporting.

“You know how to pack, you know how to live.”

THE SEASONED TRAVELER

Diane von Furstenberg

In 1974, early in Diane von Furstenberg’s fashion career, she debuted the wrap dress—a fitted, feminine garment for the modern woman just joining the workplace. Within two years, she sold five million of them. Half a century later, ladies around the world are still wearing the garment. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Fashion & Lace Museum, in von Furstenberg’s native Brussels, has devoted an exhibition to it, and Rizzoli has filled a book with essays about and images of the dress. Von Furstenberg has been jetting around the globe since long before she designed the wrap dress. Here, she shares a few travel tips.

Last flight you took?
I came back from Europe a week ago.

What do you wear to the airport?
I wear comfortable clothes. I take my makeup off before—I don’t travel with makeup.

Check bags or carry-on only?
La petite valse, as we say in French, is the focal point of my life. I travel the lightest of anyone you’ve ever met. That’s also because I make clothes that take no room, are extremely packable, and easy to mix and match. My best design ideas have always come when I pack. One of the famous things that I say is “You know how to pack, you know how to live.” If you pack lightly, you live lightly. What takes the most room is your toiletries and your shoes, and I try to simplify that as much as possible.

Items you can’t fly without?
I always have some kind of warm scarf with me. In my bag, strangely enough, I always have jewelry, my diary, my iPad—I can’t travel without my phone and my iPad. I have my must-have medicine, which is nothing much.

How do you pass time on the plane?
I read, or I listen to a book. I’m addicted to jigsaw puzzles on my iPad. You can do a jigsaw puzzle with your own photographs, which is fun. When you do a jigsaw puzzle and you listen to a book, they are two parts of your brain that don’t conflict. It makes me feel less guilty because if I do only the puzzle, I feel like I’m wasting my time.

Are you a nervous flier?
I’m not nervous because I’m not a nervous liver. I love long flights because when you are in flight, it’s being in no-man’s-land. I love being in no-man’s-land.

I always hear people have anxiety to leave. I’ve never had anxiety to leave. I am happy to leave because it’s an adventure. I’m a very content traveler.

Advice for travelers?
Packing is such a big part of traveling. If you pack well, it means you have a clear understanding of where you are going and what you will be doing. If your bag is organized, traveling is easier.

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Art Basel
Miami Beach

1901 Convention Center Dr.
Miami Beach, FL 33139

December 6 -December 10, 2023

Anastasia Samoylova at Wentrup Gallery

Alejandra Moros at Roberts Projects

Bony Ramirez at Jeffrey Deitch

Catalina Ouyang at Lyles and King

Chemu Ng’ok at Central Fine Gallery

Chiffon Thomas at Kohn Gallery

David Shrobe at Monique Meloche

Devan Shimoyama at Kavi Gupta

Didier Williams at Altman Siegel Gallery

Ebony G. Patterson ar Monique Meloche

Francesca DiMatteo at Pippy Houldsworth

Gisela McDaniel at Pilar Corrias

Genevieve Gaignard at Vielmetter

Hew Locke at Art Basel Meridians

Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Kenny Rivero at Moran Moran

Lavar Munroe at Monique Meloche

Lauren Halsey at Gagosian

Lucas Simões at Casa Triangulo Galeria and Patron Gallery

Lynette Yiadom-Boayke at Jack Shainman

Marcela Cantuaria at A Gentil Cairoca

Mano Penalva at LLANO Galeria and Simões de Assis

Manoela Medeiros at Nara Roesler

Melissa Joseph at UBS Art Studio

Naama Tsabar at Kasmin Gallery

Nate Lewis at Vielmetter

Patricia Ayres at Mendes Wood DM Gallery

Paul Anthony Smith at Jack Shainman

Samuel Levi Jones at Galerie Lelong & Co. NYC, PATRON, and Vielmetter

Shephard Fairey at Jeffrey Deitch

Raul de Nieves at Moran Moran

Umar Rashid at Blum

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Untitled Art

Ocean Drive and 12th Street

Miami Beach, FL 33139
December 5 – December 10, 2023

Beverly Acha at Emerson Dorsch

Elisabeth Condon at Emerson Dorsch

Frances Goodman at Gallery Les Filles Du Calvaire

GeoVanna Gonzalez performance presented by Commissioner

Jade Thacker at Kravets Wheby

Joiri Minaya at Praise Shadows Gallery

Kalup Linzy performance presented by The Tulsa Artist Fellowship

Karlo Ibarra at Vigil Gonzalez

Marisa Telleria at Patrick Heide Contemporary

Mano Penalva at Portas Vilaseca Galeria

Manoela Medeiros at Double V Gallery

Moira Holohan at Emerson Dorsch

Nate Lewis at Ziddoun Bossuyt

Natia Lemay at Yossi Milo Gallery

Omar Barquet at Zilberman

Pacifico Silano at Fragment Gallery

Rachel Mica Weiss at Carvalho Park

Rachel Perry at Yancey Richardson Gallery

Ricardo Alcaide at Zielinsky gallery

Sheena Rose at Johansson Projects

Shikeith at Yossi Milo Gallery

Yvette Mayorga at David B Smith

Zoe Walsh at Yossi Milo Gallery

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New Art Dealer’s Alliance

1400 N Miami Ave

Miami, FL 33136

December 5 -December 10, 2023

Alexander Russi at Halsey McKay

Alejandra Moros at Harkawik

Ato Ribeiro at Burnaway

Chris Chiappa at Kate Werble

Coady Brown at Stems

Melissa Joseph at Rebecca Camacho

Naama Tsabar at Shulamit Nazarin

Studio Lenca at Halsey McKay

Yongqi Tang at Latitude Gallery

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Art Miami
1 Herald Plaza

Miami, FL 33130

December 5-December 10, 2023

Felice Grodin at Diana Lowenstein

Michael Swaney at Fabien Castanier

Shepard Fairey at Ernst Hilger

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SCOPE
801 Ocean Drive

Miami, FL 33138

December 5- December 10 2023

Shephard Fairey at Deodato Arte Gallery

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Pinta Art Fair
3385 Pan American Drive

Miami, FL 33133

December 6 -December 10, 2023

Manoela Medeiros at Kubikgallery

Marlon Portales at Pan American Art Projects

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Prizm Art Fair
169 E Flagler St

Miami, FL 33131

December 5 -December 10, 2023

Jean-François Boclé at Kristel Ann Gallery

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Museums
Pérez Art Museum Miami

1103 Biscayne Blvd.

Miami, FL 33132

The South American Dream
Bony Ramirez

Naama Tsabar

Studio Lenca

Typoe

Marcela Cantuaria

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Rubell Museum

1100 NW 23rd St.

Miami, FL 33127
rubellmuseum.org
Collection Highlights
Basil Kincaid

Kennedy Yanko

Lauren Halsey

Tschabalala Self

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de la Cruz Collection

23 NE 41st St.

Miami, FL 33137
delacruzcollection.org
House in Motion/ New Perspectives

Christina Quarles

Elizabeth Webb

Ilona Szwarc

Murjoni Merriweather

Patricia Ayres

Victoria Martinez

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El Espacio 23

2270 NW 23rd St.

Miami, FL 33142

elespacio23.org

To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions
Gabriel Chaile

Gisela McDaniel

Karina Peisajovich

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ICA Miami

61 NE 41 St

Miami, FL 33137
icamiami.org

Collection Highlights
Melissa Joseph

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Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

770 NE 125th street
North Miami, FL 33161

mocanomi.org

Juan Francisco Elso: Por America

Karlo Ibarra

Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jiménez

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The Bunker

444 Bunker Rd

West Palm Beach, FL 33405
thebunkerartspace.com
Collection Highlights

Bony Ramirez

Cajsa von Zeipel

Lucia Hierro

Margarita Cabrera

Raul de Nieves

Tschabala Self

Valerie Hegarty

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Boca Raton Museum of Art

501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton, FL 33432

bocamuseum.org
Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art

Mark Thomas Gibson

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Exhibitions

MiMo / Little River
Ariel Baron Robbins and Leo Castaneda in A Public XR Metaverse mud.foundation

Elisabeth Condon: Tempis Fugit at Emerson Dorsch emersondorsch.com

Ellon Gibbs, Cameron Platter and Typoe in OMGWTF at Primary Projects thisisprimary.com

Joyce Billet, Marisa Telleria and Vickie Pierre in You Are Here at Dimensions Variable dimensionsvariable.net

Sandra Ramos and Marlon Portales in Text/Image at Pan American Projects panamericanart.com

Patricia Schnall Gutierrez: Painting and Drawing at BlackShip Gallery blackship,gallery

Allapattah/ Liberty City

Basil Kincaid and Ornella Pocetti in In Spirtual Light at Mindy Solomon Gallery mindysolomon.com

Alex Nunez in Archepelagic Narratives of Female Metamorphosis at Collective 62 thecollective62.com

Design District

Su Su: Impressions at David Castillo davidcastillogallery.com

Sandra Ramos: Entropydoscopes at Pan American Art Projects second location grand opening, panamericanart.com

Omar Barquet in Landscape of Memories at Zilberman Gallery zilbermangallery.com

Miami Beach
Alejandra Moros and Emiliana Henriquez in Bounce at Oolite Arts oolitearts.org

Juana Valdes, Mette Tommerup and Lydia Rubio in Port Miami Public Art, 1103 North Cruise Boulevard

Chemu Ng’ok in Shadowboxing It: Painting Peripheries at Central Fine centralfine.com

Edison Penafiel: Run, Run, Run Like The Wind, Public Art at 41st Street and Pine Tree Drive
Opa Locka

Adama Delphine Fawundu and Victoria Undondian in Fragmented Worlds / Coherent Lives tennorthgroup.com
Hollywood
South Florida Cultural Consortium at Art and Culture Center Hollywood

artandculturecenter.org

Ana Samoylova

Hermes Berrio

Misael Soto

Regina Jestrow

Vincent Miranda

Special Projects
Allapattah
Derrick Adams, Bony Ramirez, Lauren Halsey and Naama Tsabar in Gimme Shelter at Historic Hampton House, 4240 NW 27th Ave

Design District

Devin B. Johnson and Lauren Halsey in FORMS by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch

December 5-10, 35 NE 40th St
Kennedy Yanko: Soul Talk

December 5 – 10, 95 NE 40th St

Carlos Rigau and Cristina Lei Rodruguez in Making Miami, December 6-25 makingmiami.com
Miami Beach
Merav & Halil and Marlon Portales in MUSES curated by Tam Gryn

December 6-8, 1100 Lincoln Road

Jarvis Boyland and Chiffon Thomas in Bedroom Bathroom

December 5-9, triangleprojectsmiamishow.as.me

Christina Pettersson in No Vacancy at The Cadillac Hotel

November 16- December 14, 3925 Collins Ave
Mimo/Little River
PJ Mills, Peter Hosfeld and David Rohn in Feria Clandestina

December 7-9, 5940 Biscayne Blvd
Coconut Grove
Sandra Ramos in Vuelve a nosotros tus ojos. La Caridad nos une. Santuario Nuestra Senora de la Caridad

December 4- January 15, 3609 S Miami Ave
Downtown
Polen Cerci in A World of Artistry

December 7-15, Intercontinental Hotel,100 Chopin Plaza

Rose Marie Cromwell and Marisa Telleria in AIM Biennial

aimbiennial.org
Mark Thomas Gibson in Miami MoCAAD: Soul Basel

December 4, 1000 Northwest 2nd Avenue miamimocaad.org
Little Havana
Amy Bravo, Karlo Ibarra and Joiri Minaya in Caribbean Dreams by Good to Know FYI

December 6-8, 3555 SW 8th St
Miami Shores
Samara Ash: Lady Unity & Cardinal public mural unveiling

December 8, 10050 NE 2nd Ave

Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement

Before chatbots exploded in popularity, a group of researchers, tech executives and venture capitalists had worked for more than a decade to fuel A.I.

By J. Edward Moreno

Dec. 3, 2023

While artificial intelligence has taken the limelight over the past year, technology that can appear to operate like human brains has been top of mind for researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.

Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern A.I. movement who have influenced the technology’s development.

Sam Altman

Mr. Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. lab that made the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral over the past year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped start OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman ran Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up incubator.

Dario Amodei

Mr. Amodei, an A.I. researcher who joined OpenAI early on, runs the A.I. start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped set OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements about the path the company was taking. That year, he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating safe A.I. systems.

Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical of how powerful A.I. could become. Then in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the A.I. model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an A.I. convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative A.I.

Demis Hassabis

Mr. Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is a founder of DeepMind, one of the most important labs of this wave of A.I. He secured financial backing to create DeepMind from the investor Peter Thiel and built a lab that produced AlphaGo, an A.I. software that shocked the world in 2016 when it beat the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought DeepMind, which is based in Britain, in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top A.I. executives.

Geoffrey Hinton

A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton and two of his graduate students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of A.I. Neural networks captivated the tech industry, and Google quickly agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his crew $44 million in 2012 to bring them on, beating out Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese tech company.

Reid Hoffman

Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

Elon Musk

Mr. Musk, who leads Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped to establish OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about A.I.’s potential dangers. At the time, he sought to position OpenAI, a nonprofit, as a more ethical counterweight to other tech companies. Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr. Altman.

Satya Nadella

Mr. Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, spearheaded the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the start-up over that period. Microsoft has since gone whole hog on A.I., incorporating OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and across many of its other products.

Larry Page

Mr. Page, who founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of A.I. and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of A.I. than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will live harmoniously one day.

Peter Thiel

Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a key investor in early A.I. labs. He poured money into DeepMind and, later, OpenAI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Mr. Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher, helped seed much of the philosophical thinking around the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of A.I. but also worried the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on A.I., where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and secured his backing for DeepMind.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has pushed for A.I. for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind, before Google made the winning bid. He then went on a hiring spree to bring aboard A.I. talent to Facebook.

Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac.

J. Edward Moreno is the 2023 David Carr fellow at The Times. More about J. Edward Moreno

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