Category: News

SEOUL — When a brand-new luxury residential district opened in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, this week, the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said it would be reserved for his most elite supporters, those he called “true patriots.”

Among them was the nation’s top state TV news anchor, Ri Chun-hee.

At a ceremony on Thursday, Mr. Kim not only presented one of the two-story apartments to the legendary anchorwoman. He also gave her a tour of her new home while holding her hand. Naturally, she narrated it all in a state media video.

Known both inside and outside the hermetically sealed nation for her soaring, bombastic and emotional news readings, Ms. Ri, 79, has been a staple on North Korean television on and off for more than 50 years.

A mouthpiece of the country’s dictators since 1971, she has guided her countrymen and women through major developments like nuclear and missile tests, as well as the deaths of the country’s past leaders: Kim Il-sung in 1994 and Kim Jong-il in 2011.

She could seem to melt with emotion while delivering news about the country’s current leader, who is revered as a god by North Korean citizens. But to South Korean viewers, when she has turned to more alarming announcements, such as the North’s weapons tests, her warlike cries could seem as bloodcurdling as the information itself.

South Korean government and intelligence monitors — as well as South Koreans in general — have braced themselves whenever Ms. Ri appeared on TV and opened what they call a “mouth that fires out cannons.”

“Her steel-grinding voice gives the enemy the shudders,” a 2008 issue of the North Korean magazine Chosun said of Ms. Ri.

In North Korea, she holds the title of “labor hero,” according to Chosun. Abroad, she is known as “the pink lady,” for the color of the traditional Korean attire she wears to deliver news reports.

Ms. Ri disappeared from the airwaves in the 2010s amid reports that she had retired, but she has since resurfaced occasionally to deliver the most important news, including narrating Mr. Kim’s New Year’s address in 2021.

Ms. Ri did not put her booming voice to use when North Korea tested its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile in March. That time, the country’s state media released a Hollywood-style video of Mr. Kim, who appeared to personally guide the test launch, clad in a sleek leather jacket and sunglasses.

Later, South Korea said elements of the missile launch might have been faked, with Mr. Kim disguising an older missile as a new one to exaggerate his country’s weapons achievements.

In the video of her house tour this week, she was far more operatic than bombastic. She said her new home felt “like a hotel” and was furnished with every amenity she needed.

State media video showed a spacious riverside apartment with shiny wooden floors, a living room furnished with a white five-seat sofa, a spacious bedroom, a kitchen with an L-shaped counter and a six-person dining table. The apartment also has a study, along with a veranda that offered a view of downtown Pyongyang. The images showed no sign of a TV. (The value of the apartment wasn’t immediately clear. The total number of bedrooms and square footage were unknown.)

The ceremony was widely publicized by the North Korean state, which published photographs of Mr. Kim and Ms. Ri taking the tour. Among others rewarded with an apartment at the complex were members of the state media, whose mission is also to spread propaganda.

Such largess for those deemed loyal to the regime is not uncommon in North Korea. Kim Jong-il gave luxury cars, watches, liquor or houses to his close aides. The current leader has given mostly verbal encouragement to officials — or has purged them. But he has recently sought to strengthen his support base by providing luxe apartments to high-ranking officials, even as the country has endured economic travails made worse by pandemic-prompted isolation and a diplomatic stalemate with much of the world.

Part of a five-year project to build 50,000 apartments in the capital to address the country’s housing problems, the opening of the luxury apartments occurred two days after the completion of high-rises intended for 10,000 ordinary residents. They may house Pyongyang’s working population, including a growing white-collar work force, which has faced constant food and electricity shortages.

The gift for Ms. Ri came ahead of the 110th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, on Friday. The occasion is regarded as one of the most important national holidays in the North, which has in previous years commemorated the birth anniversary with mass rallies or military parades.

Mr. Kim said, according to the state media, “There is nothing to spare for national treasures like Ri Chun-hee, who has led a virtuous life with the revolutionary microphone.” He also asked her to continue vigorously serve as the voice of his ruling Workers’ Party.

As for Ms. Ri, she said that she was “so grateful for the benevolent care of the party” that she and her family were “moved to tears.”

Mike Bossy, the Hockey Hall of Fame wing who played a key role in propelling the New York Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup championships in the early 1980s, has died. He was 65.

The Islanders announced his death but gave no other details. Bossy revealed in October that he had lung cancer.

The Islanders, founded as a National Hockey League expansion team in 1972, won only 12 games in their first season at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island and weren’t much better the following season.

But they began reaching the playoffs under General Manager Bill Torrey and Coach Al Arbour, who assembled teams that featured Bossy at right wing and his linemates Bryan Trottier at center, Clark Gillies at left wing, Denis Potvin on defense and Billy Smith in goal.

The Islanders defeated the Philadelphia Flyers, the Minnesota North Stars, the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers in their Stanley Cup championship run from 1980 to 1983, then lost to the Oilers in the 1984 cup final.

The Canadian-born Bossy was among the N. H.L’s fastest skaters, and he possessed an uncanny ability to get off wrist shots before opposing goalies had any notion that the puck was coming their way.

“Mike’s got the fastest hands I’ve ever seen,” Arbour, a former defenseman who had played alongside Gordie Howe’s with the Detroit Red Wings and Bobby Hull with the Chicago Black Hawks, once said.

Bossy twice led the N.H.L. in goals, with 69 in the 1978-79 season and 68 in 1980-81. He scored at least 51 goals in each of his first nine seasons before a back injury limited him to 38 goals in his last season. His 85 goals in 129 playoff games were the most in N.H.L. history at the time.

Bossy scored 573 goals and had 553 assists in 752 regular-season games over 10 N.H.L. seasons, all with the Islanders.

He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991.

A finesse player and slightly built, Bossy eluded hard checks and refused to get into melees.

“Guys knew he wouldn’t fight,” Trottier told Sports Illustrated in 1999. “They’d punch him, spear him, it didn’t matter. He didn’t need much room. The guy was so creative, he could make something special with just a half inch.”

“I probably developed what scouts called my quick hands and quick release more out of self-defense than anything else,” Bossy recalled in his memoir, “Boss: The Mike Bossy Story” (1988, with Barry Meisel). “The N.H.L. was zoom, zoom, zoom compared to junior. I learned to make quick passes and take quick shots to avoid getting hammered every time I had the puck.”

Bossy won the Lady Byng Trophy for gentlemanly play in 1983, 1984 and 1986. He incurred only 210 penalty minutes.

He was selected by the Islanders as the No. 15 pick in the 1977 N.H.L. amateur draft after being passed over by teams who, despite his remarkable goal-scoring in junior hockey, believed he didn’t have the checking skills to survive in the N.H.L.

It didn’t take long for Bossy to prove otherwise. He won the Calder Memorial Trophy for 1977-78 as the N.H.L.’s rookie of the year, scoring a rookie-record 53 goals that stood for 15 years. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the 1982 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Michael Bossy was born on Jan. 22, 1957, in Montreal, one of 10 children of Borden and Dorothy Bossy. His father was of Ukrainian descent, and his mother was English. Borden Bossy flooded the backyard of the family’s apartment building during winters to create an ice rink, and Mike learned to skate at 3.

He dropped out of Laval Catholic High School to join the Laval National team of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League near the end of its 1972-73 season and played in four full seasons for Laval, scoring 309 goals.

Then came his selection by the Islanders in the draft.

Bossy’s N.H.L. career was cut short by a chronic injury. At the beginning of the Islanders’ 1986 training camp, he experienced back pains. He missed 17 games during the regular season and injured his left knee in the playoffs, when the Flyers eliminated the Islanders in a preliminary round. Doctors eventually found that he had two injured discs that couldn’t be repaired by surgery. He sat out the 1987-1988 season, then retired from hockey in October 1988.

The Islanders retired Bossy’s No. 22 in March 1992, making him their second player accorded the honor, after Potvin.

Bossy married Lucie Creamer and had two daughters with her. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Bossy, who was bilingual, pursued business ventures and broadcasting work in Canada after his playing career ended. When he was found to have cancer, he took a leave from his post as a hockey analyst for the Montreal-based French-language channel TVA Sports.

For all that Bossy and his Stanley Cup champion Islanders accomplished, they lacked the charisma of his contemporary, the Oilers’ Hall of Fame center Wayne Gretzky and Gretzky’s Edmonton teams that won four Stanley Cups in the 1980s.

“We never got one millionth of the recognition we should,” Bossy once told Sports Illustrated. “We had a very low-key organization. They didn’t want guys doing too much because they thought the hockey might suffer. People don’t talk about us in the first mention of great teams.”

He added: “I guess as I get older I get tired of telling people I scored more than 50 nine consecutive years. Everything I’m saying makes it sound like I’m bitter, but I’m not whatsoever. It’s just that when you do something well, like our team did, you’d like to get recognized for it.”

As for comparisons with Gretzky, Bossy told The New York Times in January 1986, when he became the 11th player in N.H.L. history to score 500 goals: “People call him the Great Gretzky. I can’t compete with that. I do feel comfortable with what I’ve helped my team achieve. Whether I think of Wayne Gretzky as the greatest thing since apple pie is another question.”

We all carry the memory of our mistakes. For health care workers like me, these memories surface in the early morning when we cannot sleep or at a bedside where, in some way, we are reminded of a patient who came before. Most were errors in judgment or near misses: a procedure we thought could wait, a subtle abnormality in vital signs that didn’t register as a harbinger of serious illness, an X-ray finding missed, a central line nearly placed in the wrong blood vessel. Even the best of us have stories of missteps, close calls that are caught before they ever cause patient harm.

But some are more devastating. RaDonda Vaught, a former Tennessee nurse, is awaiting sentencing for one particularly catastrophic case that took place in 2017. She administered a paralyzing medication to a patient before a scan instead of the sedative she intended to give to quell anxiety. The patient stopped breathing and ultimately died.

Precisely where all the blame for this tragedy lies remains debated. Ms. Vaught’s attorney argued his client made an honest mistake and faulted the mechanized medication dispensing system at the hospital where she worked. The prosecution maintained, however, that she “overlooked many obvious signs that she’d withdrawn the wrong drug” and failed to monitor her patient after the injection.

Criminal prosecutions for medical errors are rare, but Ms. Vaught was convicted in criminal court of two felonies and now faces up to eight years in prison. This outcome has been met with outrage by doctors and nurses across the country. Many worry that her case creates a dangerous precedent, a chilling effect that will discourage health care workers from reporting errors or close calls. Some nurses are even leaving the profession and citing this case as the final straw after years of caring for patients with Covid-19.

From my vantage point, it is not useful to speculate about where malpractice ends and criminal liability begins. But what I do know as an intensive care unit doctor is this: The pandemic has brought the health care system to the brink, and the Vaught case is not unimaginable, especially with current staffing shortages. That is, perhaps, the most troubling fact of all.

It has been more than 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on preventable medical errors, arguing that errors are due not solely to individual health care providers but also to systems that need to be made safer. The authors called for a 50 percent reduction in errors over five years. Even so, there is still no mandatory, nationwide system for reporting adverse events from medical errors.

When patient safety experts talk about medical errors in the abstract, in lecture halls and classrooms, they talk about a culture of patient safety, which means an openness to discussing mistakes and safety concerns without shifting to individual blame. In reality, however, conversations around errors often have a different tone. Early in my intern year, a senior cardiologist gathered our team one morning, after one of my fellow interns failed to start antibiotics on a septic patient overnight. The intern had been busy with a sick new admission and had missed subtle changes in the now septic patient, who had spiraled into shock by the morning.

“You must never stop being terrified,” the attending doctor told us. Even after decades of practice, she remained in a constant state of high alert. When you allow yourself to neglect your usual compulsiveness, she said, that’s when mistakes happen. Not because of imperfect systems, overwork and divided attention but because an intern was not appropriately terrified.

I carried her words with me for years. I have repeated them to my own residents. And there is a truth here: The cost of distraction on our job can be life or death, and we cannot forget that. But I realize now that no one should have to maintain constant terror. Mistakes happen, even to the most vigilant, particularly when we are juggling multiple high-stress tasks. And that is why we need robust systems, to make sure that the inevitable human errors and missteps are caught before they result in patient harm.

The electronic health records we use now prompt doctors and nurses when patients’ combinations of vital signs and lab results suggest that they might be septic. This can be frustrating when we are fatigued by alarms and alerts, but it helps us recognize and react to patterns that a busy medical team might otherwise miss. When it comes to administering medications, they must generally be approved by a pharmacist before they can become available to a nurse to administer. Some hospitals create a no-talk zone where nurses withdraw these medications, because that process requires a focus that is often impossible in the frenzy of today’s hospitals.

Once the medication is in hand, nurses use a system to scan the drug along with the patient’s wristband to help ensure that the correct medication is given to the correct patient. None of these systems are perfect. But each serves to acknowledge that no individual can hold full responsibility for every step that leads to a patient outcome. Just being vigilant is not enough.

What’s needed alongside these systems is a culture in which doctors and nurses are empowered to speak up and ask questions when they are uncertain or when they suspect that one of their colleagues is making a mistake. This could mean that a nurse questions a doctor’s medication order and discovers it was intended for a different patient. Or that a junior doctor admits she is out of her depth when faced with a procedure that she should know how to do.

Stories in medicine so often celebrate an individual hero. We valorize the surgeon who performs the groundbreaking surgery but rarely acknowledge the layers of teamwork and checklists that made that win possible. Similarly, when a patient is harmed, it is natural to look for a person to blame, a bad apple who can be punished so that everything will feel safe again. It is far easier and more palatable to tell a story about a flawed doctor or a nurse than a flawed system of medication delivery and vital sign management.

But when it comes to medical errors, that is rarely the reality. Health care workers and the public must acknowledge that catastrophic outcomes can happen even to well-intentioned but overworked doctors and nurses who are practicing medicine in an imperfect system. Punishing one nurse does not ensure that a similar tragedy won’t occur in a different hospital on a different day. And regardless of the sentence that Ms. Vaught receives in May and whether it is fair, her case must be viewed as a story not just about individual responsibility but also about the failure of multiple systems and safeguards. That is a harder narrative to accept, but it is a necessary one, without which medicine will never change. And that, too, would be a tragic error but one that is still in our power to prevent.

DODOMA, Tanzania — Shortly before midnight on a spring night last year, Samia Suluhu Hassan, then Tanzania’s first female vice president, appeared on television to announce to a shocked nation that the president was dead.

President John Magufuli, an autocrat known as “The Bulldozer,” had denied that coronavirus existed in his country, rejected Covid vaccines and died after a weekslong absence from public view amid unconfirmed reports that he had contracted the virus.

His death catapulted Ms. Hassan to a historic position as Tanzania’s first female president. Known as “Mama Samia,” she is currently the only female head of government in Africa. On Friday, she is set to meet in Washington with a fellow path-breaker, Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of color to be vice president of the United States.

Since taking office, Ms. Hassan has set off on a different path than her predecessor: She encouraged Covid vaccinations by publicly taking the shot herself, lifted a ban on pregnant girls in schools and began to amend some Magufuli-era economic regulations to lure back investors.

But her first challenge, Ms. Hassan said in an interview last week at the state house in the capital, Dodoma, was to overcome the notion that a woman could not lead Tanzania.

“Most of the people couldn’t believe that we can have a woman president and she can deliver,” Ms. Hassan said. “The challenge was to create a trust to the people that yes, I can do it.”

She said that other African female leaders — including Liberia’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Sahle-Work Zewde, the president (though not head of government) of Ethiopia — quickly came to her support, urging her in a virtual meeting to remain confident, seek counsel and listen to her inner voice.

“They all gave me courage that you can do it,” said Ms. Hassan, who was fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Since ascending to power in March last year, Ms. Hassan has positioned herself as a unifying national figure willing to challenge the establishment and bent on bringing her country in from the cold after five years of isolationism under Mr. Magufuli, who rarely traveled abroad.

Tanzania, a nation of 60 million people that borders eight other countries in eastern, central and southern Africa, was long seen as a bulwark of stability in a region torn by ethnic strife and civil war.

But Ms. Hassan, who is expected to run for president in 2025, takes the helm of a polarized nation with a battered economy and growing unemployment, a slow pace of vaccine deployment and a growing clamor for constitutional overhauls.

In addition to meeting American officials during her trip to the United States, she is also set to court investors and promote Tanzania as a vibrant tourist destination.

In Washington, one issue that Ms. Hassan is likely to face is the war in Ukraine. Tanzania was among the African nations that abstained from the United Nations vote condemning the war — a move Ms. Hassan said was in line with Tanzania’s longstanding position of nonalignment.

Pushed on this, she said that in “Tanzania, we don’t know why they are fighting,” adding that Russia and Ukraine should sit down to talk. “The world has to convince Putin not to fight,” she said.

Ms. Hassan, 62, was born in the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of mainland Tanzania to a stay-at-home mother and schoolteacher father. After high school, she completed bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees in economics and public administration in schools in Tanzania and Britain. She later worked with the World Food Program and held positions in various nongovernmental organizations in Zanzibar.

But at the turn of the century, she decided to try her hand in government.

A member of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party — or Party of the Revolution — since the late 1980s, she was elected as a lawmaker in Zanzibar in 2000 before joining the national Parliament in 2010. Ms. Hassan, who sits in the party’s central committee, quickly went up the ranks, becoming a minister in the vice president’s office and then rising to the vice presidency in 2015. Ms. Hassan is married to Hafidh Ameir Hafidh, a former agriculture lecturer, with whom she has three sons and one daughter.

Ms. Hassan, who is soft-spoken and comes across as reserved, said that as vice president, it was “tough” working with Mr. Magufuli at times, and that she argued with him on several issues, including his Covid denialism. She rebutted the idea that he had succumbed to Covid and said he had died of heart complications.

As president, she said, her main priority was to revive the economy, build thousands of schools and health clinics, extend clean water and electricity to rural areas and complete key infrastructure projects — including a railway line and a major hydropower plant. She said that more than 250 new businesses had already been registered in the country last year.

Yet concerns have persisted about the pace of change under her government.

Over the past year, activists were abducted, two newspapers were temporarily suspended by the government and the main opposition leader, Freeman Mbowe, was jailed for several months on terrorism-related charges before his release. Political rallies outside elections have been banned in the country since 2016, when the government accused the opposition of wanting to use them to cause mass civil disobedience. Activists also questioned whether Ms. Hassan was committed to reviewing the constitution, which grants vast powers to the executive and was adopted in 1977, when the country was still a one-party state.

Ms. Hassan said she wanted to focus on fixing the economy before turning to the “huge” and “costly” endeavor of changing the constitution. She said she created a task force from within the political parties council to make recommendations on changes, including lifting the ban on political rallies. She added that she was intent on leveling the playing field, even if it cost her the presidency in the next elections.

She has also struck a conciliatory note with the political opposition and civil society.

On a recent morning, she arrived at a packed hall in the capital to preside over a conference discussing how to improve the democratic space in the country. Sitting by her side onstage was one of the leaders of the country’s main opposition parties, who under her predecessor had been arrested and found guilty of sedition, and whose fellow party members were beaten, tear-gassed and denied the chance to hold rallies.

“Things have changed,” Zitto Kabwe, the opposition leader, said in an interview the next day. “We started to breathe some fresh air from the day the new president took office.”

But while he would like to see the political changes put in place quickly, Mr. Kabwe said he also understood Ms. Hassan’s predilection for incremental change. “She’s a leader who wants consensus, and consensus takes time,” he said.

Last year, Ms. Hassan’s government lifted bans on four newspapers, but she has yet to change some of the restrictive laws that have been used to undermine media freedom.

Simon Mkina, the publisher and editor in chief of Mawio, a weekly investigative newspaper that she reinstated, said she should overhaul media laws so that future leaders do not abuse them. “She must take action,” he said.

With three more years before the next election, Ms. Hassan has her work cut out for her.

Fatma Karume, a prominent Tanzanian lawyer who was disbarred and had her office bombed for challenging Mr. Magufuli’s government, said Ms. Hassan has the chance to restore Tanzanians’ faith in democracy and transform the country.

“She could leave behind a legacy that few other presidents have managed,” Ms. Karume said in an interview at her home in the port city of Dar es Salaam. “And imagine doing that as a result of a historical accident. It will be amazing.”

Last Wednesday, Derrick Palmer clocked in for his 7:15 a.m. shift at Amazon’s giant warehouse on Staten Island and spent the day packing boxes with board games, iPhones and mini vacuum cleaners. The following morning, he boarded a train to Washington, D.C., where more experienced labor leaders hailed him and his best friend, Christian Smalls, for doing what had once seemed impossible: unionizing an Amazon facility.

In the past week, their David-versus-Goliath victory has become a symbol of growing worker power. On a recent episode of “The Daily,” the two men relayed the twists and turns of their story, from a fateful misdirected email that rebounded in their favor, to the D.I.Y. tactics they used, like free marijuana and bonfires, to forge a bond with co-workers.

But whether their victory will last is far from assured. In the coming weeks, the fight between the new union and Amazon is likely to become even more heated. Amazon is marshaling its legal might to try to overturn the election. The new union will attempt to win another, more difficult vote at a second Staten Island location. And everyone will be watching to see if similar efforts emerge at other Amazon facilities — and whether the company will be able to extinguish them.

As this unfolds, here are three questions to watch for:

1. What does this union want?

Smalls and the other Amazon Labor Union leaders won in large part because the Staten Island workers have a long, varied list of frustrations. This week, he said that the A.L.U. was prepared to demand broad changes in Amazon’s working conditions and on safety, pay and benefits. But the campaign lacks the kind of single, galvanizing goal, like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, that has given other labor organizing efforts a focal point.

Amazon, partly responding to the political pressures of the national minimum wage campaign, raised wages to $15 in 2018 and now pays an average starting pay of more than $18 an hour.

2. How will Amazon respond?

To overturn the election, Amazon would have to meet a high bar, proving not only that misconduct occurred but that the problems were so widespread that they tainted the entire vote, Wilma Liebman, a former head of the National Labor Relations Board, explained.

But no matter the outcome, or whether the new group succeeds in negotiating a contract, the company has a larger question to answer: How will it respond to the underlying concerns that allowed the union drive to get this far?

Amazon, in a sense, faces the same conceptual challenge that the new union does: The list of workers’ grievances with the company is just so long.

Our Times investigation last year revealed how strained Amazon’s labor model had become, with a sky-high 150 percent annual turnover rate and a low-trust, management-by-machine approach. In contrast to its precise handling of packages, its human resources systems were so overtaxed that we found a pattern in which the company inadvertently fired its own employees. Injury rates continue to be a serious concern. And there’s more.

On Thursday, in his first letter to shareholders since taking over as chief executive, Andy Jassy acknowledged the breadth of problems. “We’ve researched and created a list of what we believe are the top 100 employee experience pain points and are systematically solving them,” he wrote.

But Amazon, known for its ambition, shows no sign of making fundamental changes. In yesterday’s letter, Jassy said he would continue to take an “iterative” approach — making repeated tweaks — to the company’s year-old goal of becoming “Earth’s Best Employer.”

3. Will other warehouses follow?

Smalls has said that workers at more than a hundred other Amazon facilities have contacted the union, interested in organizing at their locations. In an interview this week, he said that the A.L.U. now plans to go national. If the Staten Island efforts prove contagious, Amazon would start looking more like Starbucks, where more locations are voting to unionize every week.

But it’s too early to tell if anything like that will happen. “Let’s not make a single event a movement,” Andrew Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview this week. “We don’t know whether this is an extraordinary occurrence or a reproducible event.”

Last month, in another contested election, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama appear to have narrowly rejected unionizing, though the margin is close enough that the results will not be known until hundreds of contested ballots are litigated.

The key difference between Amazon and Starbucks is the sheer size of each site, which must individually unionize. For Starbucks, the union needs about 20 votes to prevail in a single cafe; at Amazon, with its enormous warehouses, the union needs more than a thousand, making each election a far harder task.

The stakes of this fight could not be higher for Amazon, whose entire retail model rests on a coast-to-coast chain of manual labor, or for unions themselves. Despite the rapid organizing at Starbucks — and the frequent arrival of high-profile examples of other new organizing efforts — union membership has been on a downhill slope for decades.

If workers at Amazon — the nation’s second-largest employer, and perhaps the most influential one of our time — decide they don’t want or need unions, or cannot overcome Amazon’s resources, it will be an ominous sign for the relevance of organized labor. So expect nothing less than a bitter, messy, drawn-out battle that could help determine the future of American work.

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Bringing consent to ballet

For dancers, touch is routine. Now, when it comes to choreography that simulates sex or violence onstage, some companies are hiring intimacy directors, Laura Cappelle writes in The Times.

In recent years, more films and plays have turned to intimacy directors to choreograph scenes and look after the physical and emotional well-being of performers. But intimacy work for screen and theater doesn’t necessarily translate to dance, where the choreography mostly can’t be altered. And dancers have been discouraged from speaking up when they feel uncomfortable. Tales of boundaries being crossed are commonplace in ballet, where training starts young and most companies maintain a strict hierarchy.

Intimacy coaching sessions offer a space for dancers to voice their concerns. For a production at Scottish Ballet, two intimacy directors gave workshops and had private discussions with dancers. Afterward, the change in the dancers was “instant,” the company’s director said.

In one exercise, the dancers used a drawing of a body to mark the areas that felt vulnerable, and then communicated that to their colleagues. “To see it in black and white, and to speak to your partner, it opens up that whole trust,” one dancer said. “And it wasn’t just me saying it. It was the whole group.”

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