Flagship

Ethiopian scientist wins top US prize

The Ethiopian-born scientist Gebisa Ejeta was awarded the National Medal of Science, the United States’ top scientific honor, for his contribution to plant genetics. In 2009 Ejeta won the World Food Prize for developing a hybrid form of sorghum that resists both drought and a common parasitic weed. Sorghum is the world’s fifth-most important cereal crop, after maize, wheat, rice, and barley, and Africa is especially dependent upon it. U.S. President Joe Biden said Ejeta, who grew up near Addis Ababa and now works at Purdue University, Indiana, “has improved food security for millions.” Ejeta himself grew up in poverty: “When I went to school away from home invariably I was hungry,” he once told the BBC. “Recalling grade school, I can count the number of days where I had breakfast.”

A new Rothko show opens in Paris

A new show by leading abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko opened at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Despite being less than a decade old, the Frank Gehry-designed gallery “now stages exhibitions as stellar as those in Paris’s most venerable museums,” the Financial Times reported. It has also become the Parisian home for some of the most important U.S. artists of the 20th century, having housed exhibitions by Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Joan Mitchell, among others. The new Rothko show, which includes more than 100 paintings including several that reveal a different facet of the artist’s work beyond his well-known color rectangles, “sets the bar very high indeed.”

AI resurrects final Beatles song

The last song the Beatles recorded will be released next week thanks to artificial intelligence. Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back used AI to isolate the Fab Four’s voices. The same technology was later used to recover John Lennon’s voice from an old cassette of Now and Then, a demo the group recorded in the 1970s. The song will be released on Nov. 2, along with a short documentary, Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song. The single’s B-side will be Love Me Do, the group’s first song. It was “the closest we’ll ever come to having [Lennon] back in the room.” Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said.

Messi madness drives shirt craze

Lionel Messi joining Inter Miami caused a worldwide rush for the soccer club’s trademark pink shirts. Adidas’s meager stock of jerseys “evaporated” just upon the news of the Argentina star’s possible move in July: It placed orders for vast rolls of fabric — recycled polyester, shade Pantone 1895C — even before the deal was made. Even so, the first delivery sold out instantly, The New York Times reported. In Miami itself, dubiously legal pop-ups selling unofficial shirts were doing a brisk trade, while sports shops from Tokyo to Manchester sold out. One online retailer said it had sold more Messi shirts than it had of any other player, in any sport, within the first 24 hours after his move. David Beckham, former England star and current Inter Miami owner, was unable to get hold of one, and had to wait like everyone else.

India, the new whiskey powerhouse

Seven of the world’s top 10 whiskey brands by volume sold are Indian, and one in every two bottles sold worldwide are sold in India. The world’s most populous country has quietly become a whiskey-producing powerhouse: Brands like Officer’s Choice, Royal Stag, and McDowell’s are not well known outside India but sell vast quantities within it. Premium single malts, made with Indian-grown barley and locally distilled, are increasingly popular. The Rampur Distillery in the Himalayan foothills makes a $75-a-bottle Double Cask Malt, which, the Financial Times reported, combines “combines elegant dulce de leche sweetness with a ravishing rosewater/orange blossom/lychee perfume.”

Bestsellers in Budapest, owned by an Egyptian-born immigrant and a much-loved expat meeting place, recommends Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, “the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era.” Buy at Bestsellers or from the publisher.

The Texas Rangers could snap Major League Baseball’s second-longest title drought should they beat the Arizona Diamondbacks in this year’s World Series. Perhaps no-one would relish victory more than Rangers slugger Adolis García, who hit a walk-off home run in yesterday’s first game of the series. García defected from Cuba to the Dominican Republic in 2016 with the hope of keeping his dream of playing in the majors alive. After excelling in last year’s spring training, García, 30, got his first shot at playing regularly in the majors, and he hasn’t looked back. “It was a tough decision that I made at the time,” García said about his defection. “I think if I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I definitely would, because it’s been really good.”

How many years ago a series of sketches believed to have been drawn by Michelangelo were found below the Medici Chapels Museum in Florence. Until now, the drawings have only been seen by a select and lucky few. But next month the museum’s “stanza segreta” (secret room) — believed by some scholars to have been Michelangelo’s hiding place from the Medicis, whose overthrow he had supported — will open to the public. Though the provenance of the works may be disputed, the museum’s director said, what is certain is that “nothing of this kind exists in the world of 16th-century drawings.”

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