Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When construction began in Bloomsbury in 1823, the British Museum was said to be one of the biggest building sites in Europe. Two centuries later, it is destined to become a huge construction site again as Britain’s largest cultural capital project. It was announced last week that the winner of a competition to reimagine the museum’s western maze of galleries is Paris-based Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh.
It is a good thing that, at 44, she is relatively young. Because this might take a while. Fending off competition from better-known architectural names including David Chipperfield, OMA, Eric Parry, Jamie Fobert and 6a, this will be a remarkable leap in profile for Ghotmeh, who has been building a reputation as an intriguing designer for a decade or so.
It is a monumental commission; perhaps a lifetime’s work and certainly a once-in-a-generation attempt to redesign and redefine the museum. And the British Museum needs it. Mired in bad news stories — from the theft and loss of hundreds of artefacts, some allegedly sold on eBay by a curator, to an IT hack and the ongoing issues of BP’s sponsorship and the fate of the Parthenon Marbles — the museum is due a rethink. Under new director Nicholas Cullinan, it will get one. He has suggested that this will be “the biggest transformation of any museum in the world — not just physically, but intellectually too”.
Lina Ghotmeh’s British Museum design . . .
. . . has the feel of a structure in the desert
There is not yet much detail about what that intellectual reinterpretation might entail. Debates around restitution, the display of human remains and the very idea of a universal museum continue to rage, and it will be intriguing to see how architecture can address them. Perhaps the choice of a woman architect from the Middle East can itself begin that redress, a shift of perspective from Beirut via Paris, one an ancient city constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, the other the home of the Louvre, the former royal palace which was the ideal against which the resolutely civic British Museum had set itself.
This project is being billed as the museum’s biggest transformation in decades. That may surprise visitors who are familiar with Norman Foster’s massive intervention in the form of the glass-roofed Great Court, which opened in 2000, but this is a more complex, intricate project. It involves excavating, opening up, linking through and rationalising the galleries on the western side of the building, one-third of the museum’s exhibition space. The “Western Range” accommodates the museum’s most impressive artefacts — huge stone pieces from Ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome — and forms a complex tangle of spaces condensed into an entirely enclosed area between the Great Court and Bloomsbury Street.
The British Museum is itself an artefact. The institution, dating back to 1753, was the world’s first public national museum, established by an act of parliament. Like its 8mn artefacts, of which only about 1 per cent are on display at any time, the museum building is a collection of architectures illustrating changing tastes in conceptions of culture and material, lighting and labelling, colonisation and collecting.
Ghotmeh’s approach (gleaned from a few tentative renderings) appears to acknowledge the status of the museum as a site of archaeology itself, with a treatment that scrapes away at layers and strata in the structure. There is an echo here of the building she became globally known for: the Stone Garden apartment tower in Beirut. This super-solid structure appears almost as a cliff, a quarry or perhaps an old fortified tower, a mass of stone that has been carved out to create living spaces.
Unlike the massive capital projects of the millennium, there should be no desire here to create any kind of icon. This is an architectural intervention with no external manifestation, an inward-looking project which, although it might have radical aims in its intent to reimagine the displays for the future, is entirely contained within a structure with an existing and powerful identity.
The dangers of imposing too much of a new agenda are clear in past projects. The Great Court was seen as necessary to create a space for a growing numbers of visitors (5.8mn in 2023) to orientate themselves, a central public plaza. But it fell into a trap of becoming a kind of mall-space, a huge, rather banal volume at odds with the dark intensity of the rest of the interior. It also managed to somehow emasculate the otherwise awesome reading room, now utterly overwhelmed by the white doughnut of space around it.
Ghotmeh will need to excavate the museum to make full use of the constricted site, exposing the museum’s extensive vaults to public use, burrowing down and connecting in three dimensions. The designs presented so far appear to show only a scenographic effect, an impression of a huge courtyard topped by a gently draped roof. It has the feel of a building in a desert, sandblown and supported on squat, rather fashionable (though utterly unfashionable by the time this is complete) arches below. There seems to be some kind of filmic desire to recreate the conditions of a Middle Eastern archaeological setting here, an “Indiana Jones” outfitting. There is suspiciously little on display apart from a few carefully chosen and picturesque fragments. I might suggest that it ought to display more of the 8mn objects, not fewer.
I wonder whether the real archaeology here, the layers of existing brick vaults and courts, might have presented a more ready-made archaeology than an imposed and confected one. Think of David Chipperfield’s work at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which revealed the traces of war and damage to create a highly theatrical series of spaces born out of the material itself. Nevertheless, Ghotmeh, a thoughtful architect who also designed London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2023 and the striking Estonian National Museum in Tartu, will be able to refine the design, rethinking as she encounters the actual conditions.
It will be a long while before we see the changes sketched out here as a reality, and they will change and shift along the way. But I hope the museum can appreciate its own place as a critical part of history itself. This should be as much a project about appreciating an intensely used, debated, visited and loved slice of the city as it is about displaying the treasures of the world.
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This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Singapore
Characterised by its cocktail of colonial heritage, sleek skyscrapers and lush, seemingly unstoppable outbursts of tropical greenery, Singapore can look like a fantasy future city, almost unreal at times in its contrasts and juxtapositions of the picturesque and the hyper-modern.
The island city-state has made and remade its identity through striking landmarks and strange, sci-fi architectures. It can appear visionary, a gleaming model of a sustainable city, and it can appear disheartening, littered with buildings conceived as statements yet with apparently little interesting to say.
Nevertheless, Singapore has become a kind of laboratory, a testing ground for extreme architecture, the success (or otherwise) of which filters out increasingly rapidly to the rest of the world.
With a need to develop a postcolonial identity in the mid 1960s, both government and business decided to seek that new image through the construction of an architecture as modern as any elsewhere. Much of what was built was housing to replace the city’s sprawling informal settlements, and it remains a city where most people live in good-quality government- subsidised housing (a fact often ignored by the free-marketeers who hold Singapore up as an exemplar of market freedoms). But there were also office towers, Brutalist buildings (often designed by major international architects), slick skyscrapers and generous public spaces. Then, in the 21st century, the architecture was turned up a notch with blockbuster spectacles including Marina Bay Sands and Gardens by the Bay — the advent of fridge-magnet architecture.
This mix of bizarre form-making and high-tech, of biophilia and occasional real innovation, makes it a place of architectural pilgrimage, a blend of the radical, the comical and, very probably, the future.
If Singapore is aiming for its defining characteristic to be its greenery, the sales pitch starts as soon as you land. At the centre of Jewel Changi Airport is the gushing sound of the world’s largest indoor waterfall (the HSBC Rain Vortex) cascading from the centre of the latticed dome and a tropical forest, all beneath a doughnut-shaped glass roof. Changi has long been recognised as one of the world’s most remarkable airports but this centrepiece really is breathtaking, even for the most jaded of global travellers and transiters. It was designed by the Israeli-Canadian-US architect Moshe Safdie, who also redefined Singapore’s skyline with the Marina Bay Sands (see below). The airport also, incidentally, features an enchanting and improbable butterfly garden. Perhaps, when the planet has overheated and has been extracted to death, this is what nature we will have left. Website; Directions
A high-tech Stonehenge with a surfboard balanced on top, Marina Bay Sands has become Singapore’s most visible landmark. Containing a vast casino (owned by Las Vegas Sands), super-luxe hotel towers, shops, celebrity-chef dining spots and one of the world’s most spectacular, if anxiety-inducing, infinity pools, it is the work of the Jewel Changi Airport designer, Moshe Safdie. For better or for worse, it transformed the city’s skyline, propelling it into a space age future. Impossible to ignore. If you’re there anyway, it’s worth checking out Foster + Partners’ Apple store, sited on its own island accessible by a walkway and beneath a glass dome, a little like the one he designed for Berlin’s Reichstag. Probably the slickest and most exclusive tech shop on the planet. Website; Directions
Greenery was clearly not enough for this botanical garden sited on land reclaimed from the Singapore Strait. The fantastic flowers are supplemented by a barrage of spectacular structures, from the “Supertrees” that sprout from the earth as alien-looking armatures for creepers and climbers (as well as supercharged multicoloured lampposts) to the humpbacked greenhouses that (this is the tropics, after all) emulate the planet’s more temperate environments. If they look like a 21st-century response to the great glasshouses of London — the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Palm and Temperate Houses at Kew — it is no accident. Their designer, Chris Wilkinson, is a Brit who draws influence from these incredible feats of Victorian engineering. Lit up like a gaudy Christmas wonderland after dark and buzzing with colour, flower and insect life, the Gardens by the Bay reinforce the super-modern unreality of Singapore, like a place that seems CGI’d, as if it might not actually exist yet. But it absolutely does. Website; Directions
The former Supreme Court building reopened in 2015 as a huge art gallery, designed by French architects StudioMilou. The colonial-era classical building is a solid, frankly dour structure, but the architects managed to inject a little tropical flair with a slender, sweeping entrance canopy and sun screening that dapples the floor in light throughout. Really very nicely done. It houses a huge and impressively varied collection of south-east Asian art, vibrant and mostly unfamiliar to westerners. Website; Directions
It’s not contemporary but it is modern, a prefabricated cast-iron structure made from components manufactured by the Saracen Foundry in Glasgow in the 1890s — an excellent example of modular colonial construction. It has proved a fantastically resilient and well-used building, and its hawker stalls prefigure the modern food court: open, airy, hygienic and efficient. Its plan is radial, with arms shooting out from a central clock tower (very Victorian) and, although it isn’t a huge building, it has an array of stalls and seating around it that allow it to radiate out into the city. It is now a last remnant of low-rise construction, dwarfed but not overwhelmed by the surrounding towers. This is an architecture as much of scents and sounds as it is of shelter, a good opportunity to escape the air-con and one with a terrific choice of cuisines, fast-noodle spots and ruggedly unluxurious communal seating. Website; Directions
This visionary Brutalist structure dates from 1973, and in its mountainous stepped form you can see hints of the early-20th-century Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia and of contemporary developments in the UK (such as the Brunswick Centre and Alexandra Road estates in London), Italy (the “Lavatrici” or “washing machines” in Genoa) and the US (Paul Rudolph’s unrealised megastructure for the Lower Manhattan Expressway). Designed by Design Partnership Architects, it housed a mix of apartments, offices, shops, a large supermarket and outdoor recreation spaces. Once the heart of the island’s Thai population, it closed in 2023 but is being redeveloped with plans to preserve its historical structure. Directions
This odd stack of buildings by OMA and Ole Scheeren in the west of the city is both bizarre and brilliant — it represented an entirely new way to arrange blocks in a big development to break up the mass and create a sense of place through enclosure without any concomitant claustrophobia. The residential blocks wrap around a series of interconnecting courtyards, with pools and play areas and drum-shaped lights for the levels below. Extremely striking and still cool. Scheeren was also responsible for the Duo towers, back nearer the centre of the city, a distinctive pair of skyscrapers wrapped in a honeycomb grid curving around a shady tropical garden and containing apartments and a hotel. Website; Directions
Built around (and over) a group of surviving 1930s shophouses in Singapore’s Chinatown, this aluminium-swathed boutique hotel is a surprising and deft new piece of work. It was designed by local practice WOHA, which has been responsible for some of Singapore’s most striking contemporary buildings and a lot of the neighbourhood’s lushest luxury hotels. 21 Carpenter is screened by its perforated metal facade upon which punched quotes occasionally appear. The historic buildings were a remittance house where Chinese labourers would send their wages home, and the phrases are taken from some of their accompanying letters, which were typed up by clerks: poignant and deeply affiliated with place and history. Website; Directions
Also interesting is WOHA’s Parkroyal Collection Pickering, a bigger hotel with sleek towers emerging from a concrete base that looks eroded and ruined, overgrown with vegetation. A kind of optimistic, high-tech vision of the post-apocalypse.
Late modernism
Singapore proved surprisingly receptive to the work of the masters of modernism once they had fallen slightly out of fashion elsewhere. That foresight now means the city-state has some of the best examples of the late style of some of architecture’s biggest names.
Chief among them is probably Paul Rudolph’s The Colonnade (1980), an apartment tower on Grange Road. It was a development from the architect’s unbuilt designs for the Graphic Arts Center of Manhattan. It looks like a stack of prefab pods, but the technology to build them wasn’t quite there so the concrete was poured in situ instead. New York’s loss was Singapore’s gain.
You might also take a look at One Raffles Place (1986), one of the later works of the Japanese great Kenzo Tange. He was well past his more Brutalist (or more accurately Metabolist) phase, and this smooth, slick tower is sharp and a little strange, as if there were a false perspective in play. The spiky, stripy and very striking The Gateway towers (1990) seem to be in a similar architectural idiom. This one is by IM Pei, who worked a lot in Singapore in his later years, including also the OCBC Centre (1986), a solid castle tower of a skyscraper with protruding block bays of fenestration — an intriguing and chunky survival. These are not the usual exuberant buildings that characterise the city, but rather a kind of technocratic modernism that set the background for its reputation as modern, clean and efficient.
There is much modern architecture in Singapore that is billed as cutting edge but is actually pretty daft, superficial or unhelpful. Even the worst, though, is usually striking and may be worth seeking out for the Insta thrill- seekers among you. Among these is Thomas Heatherwick’s 2013 Hive Learning Hub at Nanyang Technology University. It is a tottering cluster of cylinders with insane amounts of concrete bulging out, barely able to contain its interior. The courtyard is, despite my reservations, an interesting space, but the green fuzz on top meant to make it super-sustainable looks like a weak apology for its carbon footprint. (The recent fashion to drape and dangle every new structure with greenery is most visible in Singapore. The upside is that it does hide a lot of mediocre architecture.)
In the Downtown Core, BIG and Carlo Ratti Associati’s CapitaSpring tower (2022) with its fluid, applied facade looks like the work of a Zaha Hadid tribute band. Maybe take a look at the concrete lots of the ArtScience Museum (2011) by Moshe Safdie by Marina Bay if you want to see the downsides of shapism and the relentless and tiring quest for architectural icons. But Singapore remains a place where designers go to try stuff out, a lab in which the experiments, triumphs, failures and the rest all remain on show.
What are your favourite and least-favourite Singapore buildings? Tell us in the comments below.Andfollow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Architecture was not Liu Jiakun’s first choice. Before it on his list of potential subjects to study came medical sciences (to please his parents), storage management and tannery. Even when he did finally commit to architecture in the 1970s, Liu did not immediately take to it. He signed up, he says, because he thought it was mostly about drawing, and was disappointed to find it was not, quitting the profession soon after to become a novelist. It was only gradually that he drifted back. “Life will find its own way,” he says.
Now the 69-year-old Chinese architect has been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His designs are thoughtful, considered and intriguing, and his way of working with salvaged and remade materials, as well as with builders and tradespeople, has marked him out from his contemporaries in China’s vast arena of generic commercial construction.
His best known project is West Village (2015) in his home city of Chengdu. A megablock that more closely resembles a kind of urban stadium than a housing development, its design aims to create an almost utopian interior, its deep terraces surrounding a forested, landscaped courtyard with playing fields and parks. A stack of shallow ramps allows residents and visitors to climb the structure slowly and use the top deck as a public space with a view of the city. It became so successful as an attraction that the authorities (always wary of a crowd) closed off public access.
“There is a wisdom in his architecture,” says Tom Pritzker, chair of the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the $100,000 award, architecture’s most prestigious, “philosophically looking beyond the surface to reveal that history, materials and nature are symbiotic.”
Liu’s approach also reveals itself in his smaller, subtler work. Visiting the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he met a bereaved family and offered to build a memorial for their lost 15-year-old daughter. The simple, grey shed, with its open door and pink interior, is a strikingly personal and emotional work that memorialised not only an individual but all 90,000 victims. Its “everydayness” (his word) is also characteristic. Despite their often large scale, Liu’s works play with ideas about the ordinary, the imperfect and the mundane. At their best, even the biggest works appear self-effacing and attempt to become background rather than monument.
Liu has no single approach. The Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002), housing a collection of Buddhist relics, is, for instance, an elegant intervention in a remote landscape that builds on European influences (notably, to me, Carlo Scarpa). Entered via a bridge over a river, it is an omnivorous piece of architecture, its landscaping modelled after a traditional Chinese garden with complex symbolic and iconographic elements. The Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick (2016) is made mostly of the material it celebrates, something between a temple and a cavernous warehouse, with a reinterpretation of a Chinese garden on one side, including water features and an exquisite screened bridge. His Clock Museum of the Cultural Revolution (2007) meanwhile is an odd, conceptual thing. Even brickier than the brick museum, its many niches create a columbarium of clocks for a stopped moment in time, but its monumental exterior seems to echo the socialist realist buildings of the Mao era. It suggests a particularly personal project.
Born in 1956, Liu grew up amid the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He was exiled to the countryside to labour in the fields for three years as part of the “educated youth” programme and only began to study after the reopening of universities in the 1970s. A feeling of uncertainty seems to permeate his work, which is often constructed using what he terms “rebirth brick”. This is not quite reused material (of the kind that his fellow countryman Wang Shu, another Pritzker winner, has employed), but rather something remade, using rubble (from earthquakes or demolition) and cheap additives such as wheat stalks and rough cement. This shift away from the perfection of the modern manufactured product gives his buildings a texture and grain that imbues it with character and a relationship to what came before. It is also very different from the relentless newness of the contemporary urban Chinese cityscape.
Of his own work, the architect says: “I always aspire to be like water — to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.” Join the https://vic2.club/ community and experience the ultimate online betting destination, where excitement and rewards await.”
Drake drops cases over ‘Not Like Us’ before filing defamation lawsuit
Two months earlier, Drake filed petitions in New York and Texas over his claim UMG schemed to “artificially inflate” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
unbranded – Entertainment
Drake’s ongoing legal cases now include a federal defamation lawsuit in New York and a petition in Texas, which accuses Universal Music Group of paying off radio stations to play “Not Like Us.”
Drake alleges UMG, which distributes both his and Kendrick Lamar’s music, has continued to defame him with the release of Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which the rapper performed at the Super Bowl.
Three months after he accused record label Universal Music Group in a Texas court filing of making “covert payments” to radio stations to “play and promote” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Drake is letting iHeartRadio off the hook in the case.
Drake and iHeartMedia “reached an amicable resolution of the dispute to the satisfaction of both sides,” according to a Thursday court filing in Bexar County, obtained by USA TODAY on Monday.
The rapper has updated his case – originally filed Nov. 21 – to remove the San Antonio-based company.
“In exchange for documents that showed iHeart did nothing wrong, Drake agreed to drop his petition. No payments were made by either one of us,” a spokesperson for iHeartMedia said in a statement to USA TODAY on Monday.
Drake’s legal team, meanwhile, is “pleased that the parties were able to reach a settlement satisfactory to both sides, and have no further comment on this matter,” according to a statement provided to USA TODAY.
Drake’s Nov. 21 petition, which was not a lawsuit but instead a precursor to potential legal action, sought to depose UMG and iHeartMedia and obtain proof of his claim that his music distributor “funneled payments” to iHeartRadio as part of a “pay-to-play scheme” to “inflate artificially the metrics” and spread “Not Like Us” across the airwaves.
Recap of Drake’s new album: Rapper minimizes ‘beef’ in his first album since Kendrick Lamar feud
What is Drake’s Texas court case regarding ‘Not Like Us’ about?
The song, which was released May 4 and dominated the 2025 Grammy Awards last month, calls Drake a “certified pedophile.” It also drops an incendiary verse that has gone viral and been co-signed by major members of the music industry, if the Grammys sing-along was any indication: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor.”
Drake’s petition offers a more detailed look at Drake’s ire toward UMG over the allegations against Drake in Lamar’s song. His petition claimed the company “knew that the song itself, as well as its accompanying album art and music video, attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake, by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders, and committing other criminal sexual acts.”
Due to UMG’s control over the licensing of “Not Like Us” through Interscope Records, Drake’s lawyers said, the company “could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed.”
The latest in Drake’s legal cases over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track
A week after their legal move in Texas, Drake’s team filed a petition in New York Supreme Court that accused UMG and Spotify of engaging in a “scheme to ensure” Lamar’s diss track, “Not Like Us,” “broke through” on multiple streaming platforms.
He claimed UMG used underhanded tactics to garner more listeners for the Lamar song on Spotify and radio stations, which resulted in “Not Like Us” breaking a few Spotify records and landing at No. 1 twice on the Billboard Top 100.
UMG denied the “offensive and untrue” claims in a statement to USA TODAY at the time.
In January, Drake dropped the case and pivoted to a defamation case against UMG.
In a civil lawsuit filed in New York federal court, Drake’s legal team claimed that despite a decade-long relationship, his and Lamar’s shared music distributor “intentionally sought to turn Drake into a pariah, a target for harassment, or worse.” They also wrote the company sought to “profit from damaging Drake’s reputation.”
Drake sued for defamation, second-degree harassment via promoting violence against him and deceptive business practices. “Not Like Us,” he alleged, spreads defamatory claims about Drake, including that he engages in sexual relations with minors and sex trafficking and also harbors sex offenders.
In a statement to USA TODAY at the time, UMG called Drake’s claims “untrue,” denying ever engaging in defamation. The spokesperson said, in part, that Drake is trying to “weaponize the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression and to seek damages from UMG for distributing that artist’s music.”
Drake: UMG spread ‘defamatory content’ with Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show
A pretrial conference for the case is scheduled for April 2, but UMG’s attorneys have argued the meeting should not take place until the judge weighs the merits of their request to dismiss the case.
Drake’s team opposed the move in a Feb. 24 filing in response to the motion, accusing the defense of delaying discovery, or the exchange of information so both parties can gather evidence.
“At the same time UMG has been delaying here, UMG launched new campaigns to further spread the defamatory content, including at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, which had over 133.5 million viewers,” the filing stated.
In a Feb. 21 letter to the judge, one of UMG’s lawyers noted Drake’s team “has agreed to withdraw certain key allegations in his complaint.”
However, the “God’s Plan” rapper’s lawyers claimed this was a misleading statement, saying Drake only “agreed to address UMG’s concerns regarding a single factual allegation,” which would at most “result in changes to 5 paragraphs of a Complaint spanning 237 paragraphs over 81-pages.”
USA TODAY’s Ralphie Aversa recaps the 97th Academy Awards from Los Angeles, where “Anora” was the night’s big winner.
And the Oscar for best hard launch goes to… Teyana Taylor and Aaron Pierre!
The award-winning actress and dancer teased a romance with the “Lion King” actor in an Instagram post Monday, which showed the glamorous pair posing for an Oscars-inspired photoshoot. Both Taylor and Pierre attended Vanity Fair’s Oscar after-party on Sunday night, though they were photographed separately.
The black-and-white Instagram photos saw Taylor, dressed in an elegant floor-length gown, smolder for the camera while Pierre, donning a crisp tuxedo, looked beside her. “Oscar night in black (and) white, no grey area. 🤍” she wrote.
The romantic post comes nearly two years after Taylor confirmed her separation from ex-husband Iman Shumpert.
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Taylor and Pierre for comment.
Essence magazine, which honored Taylor at its Black Women in Hollywood Awards last week, celebrated the multihyphenate entertainer’s personal news in its own Instagram post.
“This is how you do a hard launch!” the outlet wrote. “P.S. It should be illegal for two people this beautiful to be together!”
Pierre, who broke out with his role as young Mufasa in the Disney prequel “Mufasa: The Lion King,” previously appeared in Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad” series and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Old.”
In 2024, Pierre starred as Malcolm X in the miniseries “Genius: MLK/X” and played an ex-Marine with fight in the Netflix action thriller “Rebel Ridge.”
Why did Teyana Taylor and Iman Shumpert break up?
In a September 2023 Instagram post, Taylor revealed her split from Shumpert, whom she’d been married to for seven years. The former couple also shares daughters Iman Tayla, 9, and Rue Rose, 4.
“We are still the best of friends, great business partners and are one hell of a team when it comes to co-parenting our 2 beautiful children,” Taylor wrote at the time. “Most importantly we are family (and) in the 10 (years) together, 7 (years) married we ain’t ever played with or about that.”
The “White Men Can’t Jump” star also seemingly debunked online rumors that the couple broke up due to Shumpert’s alleged infidelity, adding that the actress-dancer and former NBA player chose to handle their breakup privately.
“To be 1000% clear, ‘infidelity’ ain’t one of the reasons for our departure,” Taylor wrote. “We just keep y’all (butts) out (of) the group chat lol, which is the reason we’ve been able to successfully (and) peacefully separate without all of the outside noise. The only reason I’m even sharing this part of the chat is because the narratives are getting a little out of hand (and) it’s unfair to all parties involved.”
There are spoilers ahead. You might want to solve today’s puzzle before reading further! Winter Break
Constructor: Kiran Pandey
Editor: Anna Gundlach
What I Learned from Today’s Puzzle
WING COASTER (54A: Theme park ride where riders sit on either side of a track) The first WING COASTER, named Raptor, opened in 2011 at Gardaland, an amusement park in northern Italy. The first WING COASTER in North America was Wild Eagle at Dollywood in Tennessee, which opened in March of 2012. As the clue informs us, on a WING COASTER, riders sit on either side of the track. There is no track below riders, giving the impression of free flight. I’ve seen pictures of this type of roller coaster, but I did not know the term WING COASTER.
Random Thoughts & Interesting Things
ALI (4A: “Tuca & Bertie” star Wong) Tuca & Bertie is an animated sitcom that aired on the Cartoon Network as part of their Adult Swim programming from 2021 to 2022. Tuca and Bertie are anthropomorphic birds. They live in the same apartment complex, and the show’s episodes focus on their interactions with each other and with their friends. ALI Wong voices the character Bertie, a career-minded song thrush and an aspiring baker. Tiffany Hadish voices the character of Tuca, a newly sober toucan working odd jobs and relying on her wealthy aunt’s financial support.
HER (13A: Half of a common pronoun pair) and SHE (49A: Half of a common pronoun pair) This is a fun clue echo. If HER and SHE are in the grid, you might as well pair them together.
ORA (17A: “Girls” singer Rita) “Girls” is a 2018 song by Rita ORA. The song also features Cardi B, Bebe Rexha, and Charli XCX.
ASIA (18A: Most populated continent) ASIA is home to about 60% of the world’s population. This is the first appearance of our crossword friend ASIA this month, and the fourth appearance of ASIA this year.
MATTEL (24A: Barbie’s company) The MATTEL toy company was founded in 1945 by Elliot and Ruth Handler. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago we saw RUTH clued as [Barbie doll creator Handler]. Barbie debuted in 1959, and became MATTEL’s best-selling toy.
ROMEO (34A: He compares Juliet to the sun) In William Shakespeare’s tragedy ROMEO and Juliet, ROMEO says, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” He says a lot of other words, too, but those are the ones pertinent to this clue.
TED (66A: “The Good Place” star Danson) The Good Place (2016-2020) is a TV series about a heaven-like utopia where humans spend their afterlife. TED Danson portrays Michael, an afterlife “architect” who designs the Good Place neighborhood where the main characters of the show reside. My husband and I really enjoyed TED Danson in the recent Netflix series A Man on the Inside, and have been meaning to go back and watch The Good Place. This is a reminder to me to try to make that happen.
LOS ALAMOS (5D: New Mexico town of note in “Oppenheimer”) LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico is located near Santa Fe, and is the home of the LOS ALAMOS National Laboratory (LANL). One of sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy, LANL was established in 1943 as a top-secret site for designing nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. The 2023 biographical movie, Oppenheimer, is about the life of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped develop nuclear weapons during World War I, and was the first director of LANL, serving from 1943 to 1945.
IRIS (6D: Pigmented eye part) IRIS is making its third puzzle appearance in four days, as we saw it on Saturday clued as [Rainbow goddess] and Sunday clued as [Colorful part of the eye].
AMORE (7D: “That’s ___” (Dean Martin song)) “That’s AMORE” is a 1953 song by Dean Martin. “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s AMORE…” The song first appeared in the 1953 movie The Caddy, and has appeared in a number of other movies since then including Rear Window (1954), Moonstruck (1987), Grumpier Old Men (1995), Stuart Little (1999), Enchanted (2007), and The Garfield Movie (2024).
MALTA (26D: Island country south of Italy) MALTA is an archipelagic country (one consisting of islands) in the Mediterranean Sea. The country and its main island share the name MALTA. The capital of MALTA is Valletta, whose metropolitan area covers the entire island of MALTA.
HAL (39D: “2001: A Space Odyssey” computer) The 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, who won an Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects. HAL 9000 is the name of the sentient supercomputer in the movie.
A few other clues I especially enjoyed:
ACT NOW (7A: “Don’t delay!” in an infomercial)
MOI (27A: “Surely I’m not to blame?”)
NICE MOVE (10D: “Well played”)
Crossword Puzzle Theme Synopsis
WINE TASTER (20A: Connoisseur of merlots and pinots)
WINDOW SHUTTER (37A: Venetian blind, for example)
WING COASTER (54A: Theme park ride where riders sit on either side of a track)
WINTER BREAK: Each theme answer BREAKs the word WINTER: WINE TASTER, WINDOW SHUTTER, and WING COASTER.
Hopefully WINTER is almost over. However, I have lived in the Midwest long enough to realize that it’s likely Mother Nature still has some WINTER weather in store for us. Therefore, I’m happy for this WINTER BREAK, even if it’s in the form of a crossword. Thank you, Kiran, for this enjoyable puzzle.
