Opera featuring lesbian sex scenes, bloody gore leaves 18 requiring medical treatment from graphic 3-hour show

NY Post readers discuss pro-Palestine protests held on the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly attack.

Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out of the window. Her world had been shrinking for some time, as a hip replacement, a pacemaker, deteriorating vision, and other encroachments of old age had made it difficult to leave her New York City apartment, even with the aid of the walker she referred to as “my chariot.” But now, after a minor heart attack in June, she was confined to a hospital bed at home. There, she could study the rooftops and antique water tanks of the Upper West Side—a parochial vision for some, but not for the Viennese-born Segal, who once described herself as “naturalized not in North America so much as in Manhattan.”Of course, she was an old hand at seeing the universe in a nutshell. It was one of her great virtues as both a writer and a person, and her affinity for tiny, telling details had drawn me to her work long before I became her friend. I also loved her freshness of perception. In Segal’s 1985 novel, Her First American, Ilka Weissnix, newly arrived in this country, disembarks from a train in small-town Nevada and has what must be one of the very few epiphanies ever prompted by a glue factory. “The low building was made of a rosy, luminescent brick,” Segal writes, “and quivered in the blue haze of the oncoming night—it levitated. The classic windows and square white letters, saying AMERICAN GLUE INC., moved Ilka with a sense of beauty so out of proportion to the object, Ilka recognized euphoria.”To some extent, this euphoria must have stemmed from Segal’s own history as an immigrant. She left Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938, then lived in Britain and Santo Domingo before making landfall in the United States in 1951. Her books are full of people who have been dislodged from one place and set down in another. The challenges of such displacement are obvious. But it can be a gift for a writer, dropped into a glittering environment whose every detail is, to use Segal’s favorite word, interesting.She also possessed extraordinary empathy. Segal was quite specific about what this meant, and resisted the idea of being seen as a victim, even when it came to her narrow escape from the Third Reich’s killing machine. “Sympathy pities another person’s experience,” she once wrote, “whereas empathy experiences that experience.” It was getting inside other people that counted, even if our grasp of another human soul was always partial.Her empathetic impulse accounted for a hilarious comment she once made to me about her television-watching habits: “I don’t like to watch shows where people feel awkward.” Because this is the modus operandi of almost every post-Seinfeld TV show, it must have really cut down Segal’s viewing options. I think what bothered her were scenarios specifically engineered to bring out our helplessness in social or existential situations. She found it hard to hate other people and couldn’t even bring herself to dislike the water bug that lived in her kitchen.I’m not suggesting that Segal was some sort of Pollyanna. She was well aware of our capacity for cruelty and destruction—it had, after all, been shoved in her face when she was very young. But her fascination with human behavior on the individual level seemed to insulate her from received thinking on almost any topic. “Contradiction was her instinct, her autobiography, her politics,” Segal wrote of her doppelgänger, Ilka, who reappeared in Shakespeare’s Kitchen more than 20 years after the publication of Her First American. “Mention a fact and Ilka’s mind kicked into action to round up the facts that disproved it. Express an opinion and Ilka’s blood was up to voice an opposite idea.” Everything had to be freshly examined; everything had to pass the litmus test that is constantly being staged in a writer’s brain.[Read: Remembering the peerless Toni Morrison]Segal also brought this approach to ideological truths, few of which made the grade. It’s fascinating to me that a writer so allergic to ideology managed to produce one of the great Holocaust narratives and one of the great American novels about race—projects that might now be hobbled by questions of authenticity and appropriation. For Segal, the glut of information, and the ethical exhaustion that resulted, turned contemporary existence into a minefield, and politics was no way out. Decency was, but that took enormous work and concentration.“To be good, sane, happy is simple only if you subscribe to the Eden theory of original goodness, original sanity, and original happiness, which humankind subverted into a fascinating rottenness,” she wrote in an essay. “Observation would suggest that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that rightness, like any other accomplishment, is something achieved.” In all of her books, in every word she wrote, Segal struggled for that very rightness. I would say she achieved it too, with amazing frequency.I cannot think about Lore Segal’s work without thinking about my friendship with her. For years and years, I read her books and admired her from a distance. It was only in 2009 that I finally met Lore, as I will now call her. Her publisher was reissuing Lucinella, a madcap 1976 novella that somehow mingles the literary life with Greek mythology: Zeus turns up at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ colony, in a notably priapic mood. I was asked to interview her at a bookshop, and we hit it off at once.This small, witty, white-haired person, whose voice still bore the inflection of her Viennese childhood, was a joy to be around. She laughed a lot, and made you laugh. Her marvelous capacity to pay attention made you feel larger-hearted and a little more intelligent—it was as if you were borrowing those qualities from her. In her apartment, with its grand piano and Maurice Sendak drawings and carefully arranged collections of nutcrackers and fin de siècle scissors, we spent many hours visiting, talking, joking, complaining. We bemoaned the slowness and blindness and intransigence of editors (even during the years when I was an editor). We drank the dry white wine I’d buy at the liquor store three blocks away, and Lore always pronounced the same verdict after her first sip: “This is good.”In time, she began sending me early drafts of the stories that would eventually make up most of her 2023 collection, Ladies’ Lunch. As her vision worsened, the fonts grew larger—by the end, I would be reading something in 48-point Calibri, with just a few words on each page. I was flattered, of course, to function as a first reader for one of my idols. I was touched as well to discover that she was still beset with doubts about her work. “Wouldn’t you think that age might confer the certainty that one knows what one is doing?” she lamented in an email a couple of years ago. “It does not. It deprives.”We saw each other, too, at meetings of our book group, which Lore had invited me to join in 2010. In more recent years, we always met at Lore’s, because it had become harder and harder for her to bundle herself and her walker into a taxi. Only a few weeks before she died, the group met one last time, at her insistence. She had chosen a beloved favorite, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was not going to be cheated out of the conversation.We sat around her hospital bed, with her oxygen machine giving off its periodic sighs in the background. Lore, peering once more into the microcosm of James’s novel and finding the whole world within it, asked the kind of questions she always asked.“Are the characters in this novel exceptional people?” she wanted to know.“Of course not,” replied another member of the group. “They’re absolutely typical people of the period, well-heeled Americans without an original thought in their heads.”This did not satisfy Lore. She felt that Lambert Strether, sent off to the fleshpots of Paris to retrieve his fiancée’s errant son, had been loaned some of James’s wisdom and perceptive powers (exactly as I always thought I was borrowing Lore’s). “Live all you can,” Strether advises, with very un-Jamesian bluntness. And here was Lore, living all she could, sometimes resting her head on the pillow between one pithy observation and the next. It was the capacity to feel, she argued, that had been awakened in the novel’s protagonist. Empathy, rather than analysis, was Lore’s true currency to the very end.[Read: The summer reading guide]I visited her just a few more times. She was fading; the multicolored array of pills and eye drops on the table grew bigger and more forbidding; the oxygen machine seemed louder with just the two of us in the room.“I hope I’ll see you again,” I said, the last time I left. These are the sort of words usually uttered at the beginning of a friendship, not at the conclusion. “But whatever happens, I’ll be thinking of you.”Out the door I went, and boarded the elevator, in whose creaking interior I shed a few tears, and as I strolled up one of those Upper West Side streets mounded with the trash bags that Lore had so eloquently described (“the bloated, green, giant vinyl bags with their unexplained bellies and elbows”), I found myself asking: Why do we cry? How do we cope with loss? What, precisely, is sadness? These were the questions that Lore would ask—the questions she had been asking her entire career. Her books constitute a kind of answer, at least a provisional one. I will be reading them for the rest of my life and, exactly as I promised Lore on my way out the door, thinking of her.

The Liberty are in the WNBA Finals for the second time in two years.

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Page Six has exclusively learned some “shah-mazing” news for Jen Shah. The “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” alum’s prison sentence has been reduced for a second time. Watch the full video to learn more about the latest update on Jen’s legal woes.  Subscribe to our YouTube for the latest on all your favorite stars.

The Hasidic Jewish students who dug a secret tunnel under a Brooklyn synagogue said they’d rather go to prison than face a ban from the historic temple — as they rebuffed plea deals from prosecutors Thursday. Nearly all of the 13 young men charged over the infamous hideout — which went viral when it was...

The one-legged, sailboat-dwelling Florida man affectionately nicknamed “Lieutenant Dan” is OK after riding out Hurricane Milton’s wrath in Tampa Bay — despite the mayor insisting he went to shelter ahead of the powerful storm. The sailor who went viral for refusing to abandon ship never left his boat, in which he lives, as Milton swelled...

Rebecca Cook/ReutersDonald Trump on Thursday addressed business leaders in Detroit, where he insulted their city and big companies.“You want to know the truth?” Trump told members of the Detroit Economic Club as he painted a picture of what his opponent would do to America. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re gonna have a mess on your hands.”Audience members clapped when Trump said he wouldn’t allow Kamala Harris to make the rest of the country mirror their hometown, suggesting that, at least among his fans, Trump’s comments weren’t too off base.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Allen's head slammed to the turf during the Bills' Week 5 loss, and cameras captured him huffing smelling salts before returning to action.

Tate McRae and Kid Laroi had a whale of a time on their vacation! Tate shared in an interview with Capital Radio that her and her boyfriend nearly “got eaten by a whale” during a jet ski accident over the summer. Watch the full video to learn more about the scary incident.  Subscribe to our...

Hurricane Milton, which made landfall on Florida's west coast on Wednesday, also sparked multiple tornadoes.

"He's a monster and should be locked away for life," said Anna Escobar, the dead boy's aunt.

A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.

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The NYPD Detectives' Endowment Association posted a message on its website reminding members they don't have to talk to the feds — and shouldn't, lest they become a target.

The Tampa Bay Rays have reacted to the destruction of their home Tropicana Field, which saw half of its roof torn to shreds by the destructive winds of Hurricane Milton.

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Biden and fellow Democrats have broadly dismissed criticism of the federal response to the earlier Hurricane Helene — the deadliest to hit the US since Katrina in 2005.

Mongrel MediaIt turns out that when you make the film that Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see, everybody wants to see it. At the very least, they want to talk about it. Fight about it. Scream about it. Or, in the case of Trump, threaten to sue about it.The Apprentice, the film about Trump’s unscrupulous rise as a businessman in the ’70s and ’80s, detonated a fiery global discourse about its controversial scenes and the implications of it being released right before the election. In the crosshairs is director Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), who, following a rapturous reception that caught the ire of the former president at the Venice Film Festival, wasn’t sure the movie would see the light of day in the U.S.“This has been a very strange sort of strip tease, getting the movie release” he told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed the afternoon after the film’s New York City premiere. “You feel like you’re flirting with it. You’re dancing around it. You’re getting close. And then no, no—you can’t. Then you start over again.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

"The Young Turks" co-host Ana Kasparian explained what drove her to ditch the Democratic Party while on Jillian Michaels' "Keeping It Real" podcast on Monday.

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Citadel: Diana becomes the first spin-off to populate the Citadel universe. All we’re saying is that it’s time you caught up on all of it, because more action’s coming.

Gerrit Cole will lead the Yankees past Michael Wacha and the Royals in Game 4 of the ALDS on Thursday night in Kansas City, Mo., Stitches predicts.

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Amber Clavell, 25 appeared in Penrith’s District Court on Wednesday as she avoided jail time after pleading guilty to a string of offenses relating to her affair with inmate Mark Kennedy at Geoffrey Pearce Correctional Centre in north western Sydney.

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Welcome to Week 6.

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Members of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force search a flood-damaged area along the Swannanoa River in Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 4, 2024. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Hurricanes Milton and Helene have absolutely devastated large swaths of the United States. But residents who are cleaning out waterlogged homes and businesses have another challenge to their recovery, one that hasn’t let up — viral disinformation.  There’s the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is limiting payouts to disaster survivors to $750. False, according to a fact-checking page the agency has set up.  What about the one that says FEMA is blocking private planes from landing in affected areas to deliver supplies? Also false.  These rumors have turned political, with some Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, repeating them to large audiences. As FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said recently, the swirl of misinformation is “absolutely the worst that I have ever seen.”  “Misinformation is not uncommon in disasters. They come on fast. People see things that don’t end up being true,” Juliette Kayyem, a crisis management expert at Harvard who served as the assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, told Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram. “I think in many ways what we’re experiencing now is purposeful lying.” Kayyem is also the author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Sean Rameswaram For people who may have missed this disaster of facts, can you just tell them what’s going on?  Juliette Kayyem If you look on social media, at the atmosphere of response, there’s a lot of false facts about how the Biden administration is responding, about basic disaster response capabilities and rules. They are then amplified by, in particular, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and create their own reality that then has to be shot down by already-overburdened first responders, emergency managers, and FEMA, which has put up a rumor page on their website just to combat this crap.  One example is Donald Trump consistently saying that the money that should go to Americans who are impacted by the disaster was all used for housing illegal immigrants. Not true. There was a separate line item to support migrants and sheltering that Congress passed. That money was sent to FEMA to administer, but it wasn’t replacing disaster management funds. It didn’t even overlap. It’s just the same entity distributing these funds. This creates a false division between the immigrants, who are not getting this money, and Americans, who might be mad that the money that they want for disaster relief is not available. They demoralize emergency managers and volunteers. They put them at risk. I have talked to people at FEMA about what’s happening on the ground. They are deploying people in larger numbers because they’re worried about what the reaction will be. Most importantly, it’s confusing victims about what they should do, what they have access to, and what’s available to them.  Sean Rameswaram You’re saying that Donald Trump is perpetrating some of this misinformation. Where is he doing it?  Juliette Kayyem At his rallies; on social media. Recently at a rally, he suggested that resources weren’t going to red states, that more Republicans were dying. There’s just no factual basis for it.  What’s interesting is you’re seeing Republican governors push back on that narrative, saying that they are getting the resources they want. They know that they have to work with the federal government to protect their citizens and begin these recoveries.  One of the most obnoxious, disgusting rumors being amplified out in the communications space involves whether FEMA would take your home. FEMA has a process where they can buy your home. It’s a very small program. It’s if you, the homeowner, and FEMA agree on a fair market value and you don’t want to live there anymore because it’s been flooded four years in a row, and this is a rational transactional decision.  This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.  Sean Rameswaram And you’re saying this is being amplified not only by other Republican politicians, but by the owner of Twitter?  Juliette Kayyem Yes. He is probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false.  What they’re trying to do is create divisions in communities in two ways. One is the divide between the citizen and government, which has always been a tactic by that wing of MAGA-ism. Then also [there’s the divide] between citizens and their neighbors. That creates chaos, confusion, and divisions.  I think why you’re seeing such a concerted pushback by GOP governors, but also by FEMA and others who are calling this out, is because they know it can harm their response capabilities. I should say this is being done at a time when we’re seeing our very communication networks under stress. Communications are down. It’s hard to communicate with people. And so they have that vacuum being filled by this noxiousness of which has life-and-death consequences.  Sean Rameswaram Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?  Juliette Kayyem It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”  Twitter’s moment of birth, the moment that its founder realized its benefit, was during a minor earthquake in San Francisco. It had been just one of those other social media platforms. But it was that real-time, authenticated information that was flowing in people’s feeds that the leadership at Twitter began to take its responsibility in a disaster very seriously.  You had an entire system, including the government relying on Twitter to amplify good information, and that whole system is down. This is the first domestic disaster where that is entirely clear, that Twitter is broken across the board for disaster management. Sean Rameswaram Is the mis- and disinformation around Milton as bad as that we saw after Helene? Juliette Kayyem You saw it more online than, say, from political leadership.  You saw much more aggressive government [and] FEMA pushback on that. They were sort of ready now. Helene was — I think they were sort of caught [by surprise]. So you saw just a lot of outreach, a lot of push back on the misinformation and even from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, who pushed back on some of that. Sean Rameswaram Do you think this makes an agency like FEMA more prepared for the next hurricane and for the next storm, if you will, of misinformation? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, I think it will, on the misinformation and the lies front. I think it’s just going to be part of your emergency management plan. You’re going to push back on the rumors in a very formal way. It used to be done, but it was very piecemeal. I saw language coming out of FEMA spokespeople, which I’d never seen before, essentially just calling out the lies, in particular on social media. So they’re using the language, the sort of freewheeling language, of social media, which I think is important, rather than the sort of more formal language of government.  Sean Rameswaram I think from the hype around Milton, there was this sense that, like, it could destroy Tampa. And it’s early yet, but I don’t think that happened. Do you think that sort of confirms and fuels this misinformation engine after an event like this? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, it will be viewed as overreach, as “the government’s incompetent, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.” I think the next evacuation will be harder if you don’t see the kind of damage and the kind of death that everyone was worried about. This is something that’s common, it has a name: the preparedness paradox. If you are ready, you get houses ready, you get communities ready, you get them to evacuate, and the thing comes through and the damage is less than you were worried about — that’s why you wanted the evacuation. That’s why you wanted the houses to be ready.  People will say, “What were you so worried about in the first place?“ In other words, the government’s reaction, which may have minimized harm and damage and death, may very well, paradoxically, be viewed as the government’s original assessment was wrong.  Sean Rameswaram Could FEMA be doing a better job during Helene and now Milton?  Juliette Kayyem It’s hard for me to know right now. In some ways, FEMA’s biggest challenge is going to be recovery. How quickly can they deploy resources?  In Helene, the biggest lesson learned is how we communicate risk to Americans who may not view themselves at risk. Looking back, the only warnings that were given were a flood warning given to communities where there could be a flood. That is likely because people remember the soil was very saturated from rains in the days before. And I wonder if, in hindsight, flood warning — does it get people to move? Maybe we should think about how we communicate risk, especially because we’re getting these events that don’t really have historical precedent.

Russia has suffered some 600,000 casualties in its war with Ukraine – more than its losses in every conflict since World War II combined, according to U.S. officials.

The Mormon Church is expanding its real estate empire with a massive $289 million deal for 46 farms across eight states.

Republicans are walking a tightrope as they work with a Democratic White House to help states recover from election-time, back-to-back hurricanes while managing optics.

Anderson Cooper was drilled in the face with flying debris as he gave a live report in the midst of the powerful winds brought on by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9. Cooper, posted near the Manatee River, attempted to explain how the storm impacted the water when he was met with Milton’s wrath, 30 minutes...

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Call it the artist's magnum opus.

Sean "Diddy" Combs returned to court Thursday as the rapper's sex trafficking case continues. Diddy will go to trial on May 5, 2025.

Kevin Dietsch/GettyCNN waved the white flag on Thursday, acknowledging it likely would not host another presidential debate this cycle. Instead, it’s trying for the second-best option: a town hall.The network extended invites to both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Thursday for a late-October town hall after Trump missed the deadline to RSVP to their request that he participate in a debate.“We continue to believe the American people would benefit from hearing more from the two major candidates for President of the United States and so CNN has extended invitations to both Vice President Harris and President Trump’s campaigns to participate in separate CNN Town Halls on October 23,” the network said in a Thursday statement.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Rafael Nadal is one of tennis's highest net-worth players, having amassed a fortune in prize money and sponsorships.

"I got that feeling when we fell in the water and you're just tingling at the bottom of your feet and you're like, 'We could die right now!'" McRae recalled.