Business
Ivan Boesky Was Seen as Greed Incarnate, and Never Said Otherwise
Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.
Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.
Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.
But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.
Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.
The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.
Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.
Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.
“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”
The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.
The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .
Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.
Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.
The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.
There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.
“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”
The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.
Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.
With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.
The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.
Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.
“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.
Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.
The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.
“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”
President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.
In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.
The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.
Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.
“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”
The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.
On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.
The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.
Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.
“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.
Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.
“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.
Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.
“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.
The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”
Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.
The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.
new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk
By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey
February 27, 2026
Takeaways from AP’s report on the ICE detention center holding children and parents
2 Survivors Describe the Terror and Tragedy of the Tahoe Avalanche
‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ falls before it rises — but then it soars
Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery
World leaders split over military action as US-Israel strike Iran in coordinated operation
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
2 Survivors Describe the Terror and Tragedy of the Tahoe Avalanche
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 50 people
Anthropic CEO says he’s sticking to AI “red lines” despite clash with Pentagon
ICE blasts Washington mayor over directive restricting immigration enforcement
-
World3 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts3 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Montana1 week ago2026 MHSA Montana Wrestling State Championship Brackets And Results – FloWrestling
-
Louisiana5 days agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Denver, CO3 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Technology1 week agoYouTube TV billing scam emails are hitting inboxes
-
Technology1 week agoStellantis is in a crisis of its own making
-
Politics1 week agoOpenAI didn’t contact police despite employees flagging mass shooter’s concerning chatbot interactions: REPORT