DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Jean Smart Is Having a Third Act for the Ages
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-12 | by ( J Wortham | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The slight is hurled early on in “Hacks,” the popular HBO series starring Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, a seasoned comedian who teams up with a younger one named Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to freshen up her act. Deborah, meanwhile, sees Ava as a bit of a hack herself — an entitled and spoiled young internet persona who was canceled for posting a joke about a closeted senator. Deborah is a workaholic on the verge of bitter, someone who grew tired of being cut and so became a knife. Just how far is Deborah Vance willing to go? In one of the show’s funniest moments, Deborah bluntly asks Ava, “You a lesbian?” Ava leans back in her chair while considering the question.

Persons: Jean Smart, Deborah Vance, Ava, Hannah Einbinder, Deborah —, Deborah, —, Z, “, ” Ava, Deborah doesn’t, Rachel Maddow’s Organizations: HBO Locations: Las Vegas

☆ 5 Takeaways From the Times Interview of Brittney Griner
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-02 | by ( J Wortham | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

star Brittney Griner was starting her nine-year sentence in a penal colony in Russia, sewing uniforms for the Russian military and subsisting on spoiled food. Griner was arrested at the Moscow Airport in February 2022, when officials found two vape cartridges in her backpack with 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. (To treat Griner’s chronic pain, a physician in Arizona had prescribed medical marijuana, but it was against the law in Russia.) She was charged with illegal drug possession and smuggling “a significant amount” of narcotics into the country and was sent to prison. Here are the highlights from my profile of the basketball star after I met her at a practice facility in Phoenix.

Persons: Brittney Griner, she’d, Griner Organizations: Moscow Airport Locations: Russia, Arizona, Phoenix

She loaded her carry-ons onto the conveyor belt at the security checkpoint and prepared to walk through the metal detector. “I just felt like they were searching for something.”At first, when they flagged her bags, Griner wasn’t too concerned. This was her eighth season in Russia; she paid taxes there and was familiar with the country and its laws. As soon as she felt the cannabis-oil cartridge stowed in a zippered inner pocket in her backpack, her stomach sank. Griner was told to wait while the agent took the cartridges for testing, along with her passport.

Persons: “, ”, wasn’t, Cherelle, Griner, Lindsay Colas, Colas, Alex Boykov, Boykov, snickered, peered, “ I’ve Organizations: Moscow Locations: Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Russia, Arizona, United States, Russian

For all the versions of Beyoncé we’ve seen in her career — beauty queen, vixen, scorned women — stand-up comedian might be her most uninhibited. But as much as the Renaissance World Tour is limned with the beauty of aliveness and vitality, it is also preoccupied with mortality. She is deeply aware of the precarity of Black, queer and trans life. The shift between the ecstasy of the concert and the reality of the world was so disconcerting it was almost physically painful. But Beyoncé isn’t the undertaker; she is directing the second-line band at the funeral procession.

Persons: Beyoncé, we’ve, —, “, livin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, O’Shae Sibley, vogueing, Barbara Ann Teer, Albert Einstein Organizations: National Black Theater Locations: York, Brooklyn, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Fla

☆ An Amazon manager who stole almost $10 million with fake invoices and used the money to buy a house, a Tesla, and a Lamborghini was jailed for 16 years
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-08 | by ( Ryan Hogg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

An Amazon manager was sentenced to 16 years in jail for running a fraud worth close to $10 million. Kayricka Wortham created fake vendors and invoices, with funds sent to bank accounts she controlled. She spent the proceeds on a $1 million Georgia home, as well as Tesla and Lamborghini cars. Kayricka Wortham, worked as an operations manager at an Amazon warehouse in Smyrna, Georgia between August 2020 and March 2022. She used her position to create fake vendors, passing them on to unknowing subordinates to process, per the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia.

Persons: Kayricka Wortham, Wortham, Brittany Hudson, Hudson, Lamborghini, Lamborghini Wortham, Nick Lotito, Steven R, Ryan K, Buchanan Organizations: Georgia, Lamborghini, Service, Amazon, US, Office, Northern, Northern District of, Tesla, CRUS, Company, The New York Times, Wortham, Chief, Judge, Hudson Locations: Wall, Silicon, Smyrna , Georgia, Northern District, Northern District of Georgia, Smyrna, Dodge Durango, Atlanta, Wortham

☆ The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Jenna Wortham | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

In her first book, “Monstrous Intimacies,” Sharpe writes extensively on Walker’s work to reveal how society is programmed to default to racist narratives. The work in Sharpe’s office, like many of Walker’s famous prints and sculptures, is devoid of color. The more time I spend with Sharpe’s work, the more it inflects my ways of seeing the world. According to Sharpe, Blackness is anagrammatical, meaning that the structures that order language, thought and society become disordered — if not destroyed entirely — when they encounter Blackness. “Her work has shown that we, as Black people, are the foils of humanity,” Frank B. Wilderson III, author of “Afropessimism,” told me.

Search resuls for: "Wortham"

6 mentions found