New York Times: February 14

A Succession Drama, Chinese Style, Starring Xi Jinping As a party congress approaches, it’s increasingly clear that Xi Jinping plans another five-year term. But if he has ideas about a successor, he has hidden them well. ......... Chinese legislators abolished a term limit on the presidency in 2018, clearing the way for Mr. Xi, 68, to hold onto all his major posts indefinitely: president, party leader and military chairman. ........ They see themselves as guarding China’s rise and one-party power in an often hostile world. ....... Mr. Xi and the premier, Li Keqiang, vaulted into the Standing Committee in 2007, confirming them as the two leaders-in-waiting at the time. ....... China’s history of botched succession plans stands as a warning to Mr. Xi. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both had an unhappy record of choosing, then turning on, political heirs. ......... Mr. Xi became top leader in 2012 after a year of lurid strife in ruling circles. He has argued that the fall of the Soviet Union resulted from installing weak, unworthy leaders who betrayed the Communist cause. ........ Mr. Xi was 59 when he became leader at a congress in 2012. .

The Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker Peter Thiel, one of Donald J. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, has re-emerged as a prime financier of the Make America Great Again movement. ......... the venture capitalist this year is backing 16 Senate and House candidates, many of whom have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the election. ........ To get these candidates into office, Mr. Thiel has given more than $20.4 million. That essentially puts him and Kenneth Griffin, the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, in a tie as the largest individual donors to Republican politics this election cycle .......... While the investor has been something of a cipher, he is currently driven by a worldview that the establishment and globalization have failed, that current immigration policy pillages the middle class and that the country must dismantle federal institutions. ....... he criticized the Chinese Communist Party and big tech companies and questioned climate science ......... he spoke about the “deranged society” that “a completely deranged government” had created ........ “My somewhat apocalyptic, somewhat hopeful thought is that we are finally at a point where things are breaking,” Mr. Thiel said. ...... “I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate,” said Mr. Bannon, who has known Mr. Thiel since 2016. “I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country.” ...... In the past, many courted the billionaire Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate. This year, they have clamored for invitations to Mr. Thiel’s Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes, or debated how to at least get on the phone with him, political strategists said. ......... Mr. Thiel has attracted the most attention for two $10 million donations to the Senate candidates Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. Like Mr. Thiel, the men are tech investors with pedigrees from elite universities who cast themselves as antagonists to the establishment. They have also worked for the billionaire and been financially dependent on him. Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, the investor’s family office, has promised to leave that job before Arizona’s August primary. .......... Born in West Germany and raised in South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Thiel showed his provocative side at Stanford in the late 1980s. Classmates recalled Mr. Thiel, who studied philosophy and law,

describing South Africa’s apartheid as a sound economic system.

................ In 1995, he co-wrote a book, “The Diversity Myth,” arguing that “the extreme focus on racism” had caused greater societal tension and acrimony. Rape, he and his co-author, David Sacks, wrote, sometimes included “seductions that are later regretted.” ......... Forbes puts his fortune at $2.6 billion. .......... Thiel branded himself as a contrarian. He published philosophical essays, often dark musings on politics, technology, Christianity and globalization. ........ he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” arguing that American politics would always be hostile to free-market ideals, and that politics was about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. Since then, he has hosted and attended events with white nationalists and alt-right figures. ............ Mr. Thiel, who had donated to Mr. Cruz’s 2012 campaign, replied, “It’s relatively safe to support Cruz (for me) because he threatens the Republican establishment.” ........ At a meeting with tech leaders at Trump Tower in Manhattan in December 2016, Mr. Trump told Mr. Thiel, “You’re a very special guy.” ........ A month later, Mr. Thiel, a naturalized American, was revealed to have also obtained citizenship in New Zealand. That prompted a furor, especially after Mr. Trump had urged people to pledge “total allegiance to the United States.” ...... During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Thiel became frustrated with the administration. “There are all these ways that things have fallen short,” he told The Times in 2018. .........

“I will take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth,” he said.

............ some Republicans worry that Mr. Thiel is arming candidates who are too extreme with financial firepower, fueling what could be politically detrimental primary races. ........ he said nationalism was “a corrective” to the “brain-dead, one-world state” of globalism. .

The ‘Zen Mayor’: How Eric Adams Mixes Tough Talk With Spinach Smoothies Mr. Adams has tied his interest in nutrition, meditation and fitness to his views on how to lead New York at a challenging time. ....... He is a vegan cookbook author and self-identified Virgo who is conversant with astrology ....... Mayor Eric Adams sat in his workout room at City Hall last week, demonstrating how deep-breathing exercises can help combat adversity. ............ “We all breathe incorrectly because we were never taught breathing,” Mr. Adams declared ....... alternate-nostril breathing. .......... “My health routine helped me for this moment,” he said of his crisis-laden first weeks in office. “It’s a balance of my physical and emotional stability.” ...... New York City is now run by a man who at once sternly warns against “disorder in my city” and invokes his life coach, delights in cooking demonstrations and cites the “healing powers” of spices. ........ Type 2 diabetes impaired his vision and threatened his health before he embraced a plant-based diet in 2016 that he says reversed the disease. ........ For personal fuel, Mr. Adams keeps a NutriBullet blender in his small City Hall kitchen. Last Monday he whipped up a purplish-brown concoction; typical recipes involve “either kale, spinach, blueberries and a few superfood powders,” he said, adding that the search for a plant-based Gracie Mansion chef is ongoing. ...... he has called himself a “Zen mayor” who will “bring the calmness” to the city. .......... In a book released ahead of his mayoral run, “Healthy at Last,” he also urged Black Americans to rethink soul food, casting it as an unhealthy relic of slavery. ........ Just don’t get him going on olive oil, which he said he avoids because of its fat content, though respected major studies show it is associated with significant positive health benefits. (“The olive oil companies wrote that,” he inaccurately claimed.) ....... he was still a “big believer that if you’re born at a certain time when the sun and the stars line up, that it could have some impact on your personality.” ...... “I am constantly evolving,” he said, preparing his smoothie. “Who I am today is not who I am tomorrow.” .

How Democrats’ New Maps Could Shape N.Y. Politics for Years to Come Democrats could potentially expand the veto-proof majorities they already have in both the Assembly and Senate, further solidifying New York’s leftward shift. ........ Few areas on the current maps inspired as much frustration as Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park in Queens, where South Asian residents mounted a concerted campaign to try to get lawmakers to reunite an area split among seven different Assembly districts. The new maps offers a modest improvement, with most of the area contained in three districts, but local Democratic leaders were not satisfied. .

After Pak and Beeple, What’s Next for NFT Collectors? Art Made With a Paintbrush Now crypto collectors are investing in something more tangible, and traditional, like paintings and sculpture. And art dealers are rushing to woo them. ........ catering to the tastes of the crypto nouveau riche has become the frantic obsession of the commercial art world, which is reshaping itself around these new collectors nearly a year after artists like Beeple and Pak sold NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, for tens of millions of dollars, inspiring the typically technophobic art industry to head into the metaverse .

In Mexico, Ornately Painted Churches Enshrine Years of Indigenous Resilience As Michoacán’s centuries-old chapels undergo restorations, the buildings raise new questions about how architectural conservation should work — and whom such projects are really for. ........ As Mass ended on the afternoon of March 7, 2021, a fire, reportedly sparked by either a short circuit under the roof or a firecracker blown off course, caught among the church’s thin oyamel fir tejamanil, or ceiling shingles. March is the height of the dry season in central Mexico, and the tejamanil, dehydrated by years of winter sun, lit like tissue paper. A chain of 200 people formed across Nurio’s central plaza, dousing the flames with hoses and passing buckets of water from their homes to a group of 20 men who’d climbed onto the roof to choke the fire. ....... state and federal institutions were still negotiating funding when the church caught fire. The community saw the disaster as a direct result of bureaucratic stagnation .......... the Indigenous dyes and pigments they likely used connect them to a previous world, turning every panel into a document of a culture in the midst of devastating change.......... Conceived to erase a civilization, the churches of the Meseta and the paintings they contain stand today as priceless artworks and historical records but also as sacred spaces through which a long-suppressed culture can retell its story on its own terms — a restoration of another kind. ....... When the first Europeans set foot in the lakeside capital of Tzintzuntzan, they found a mighty empire, second only to the rival Aztecs in size and power, laid low by a plague of smallpox brought by the Spanish. ....... Though most early missionaries learned the local tongue, a linguistic isolate, language proved incapable of transmitting their complicated theology. As in other religious spaces, from the Buddhist cave temples of classical India to the Gothic cathedrals of Northern Europe, paintings became powerful visual aids. ........ In the earliest convents, monastic orders painted fortresslike walls in somber grisaille, often filling the chapels where Indigenous initiates gathered for Mass with brutal images of the Last Judgment, a violent inducement to conversion. ...... Gilded pomegranates and avocados — today, the Meseta’s most lucrative crop and thus one of the central drivers of violence in the region — decorate the gilded altarpiece. ...... Having never been conquered by the Aztecs, whom they declined to aid in their fight against the Spanish, the Purépecha stood outside that lineage. ....... When restorers stripped away the grime a few years later, they revealed the Litany of the Blessed Virgin spelled out in resplendent shades of azure and rose. Inclusive and direct, these paintings were “an invitation to prayer — not of punishment or penalty or sadness but rather of happiness,” Sigaut says, “of a community living in permanent joy.” ....... Like so much of rural Mexico, the region struggles with the crushing poverty that, for decades, has driven immigration to Mexico’s largest cities and to the United States. ...... “Our problem,” he says, “is that people aren’t curious about coming here. They don’t even know this place exists.” For many of his neighbors, restoration has little to do with the Venice Charter’s lofty unity of human values. It’s a hedge against disappearance. ...... While the children play, the women talk and laugh, glancing down occasionally at the Spanish-language Bibles open in their laps to read passages that speak of love for nature and neighbor, ideas central to the ancient society that the crown, the church and the successive governments of an independent Mexico all failed to eradicate. .