Etiket arşivi: She

How Taryn Delanie Smith, TikTok’s Heaven Receptionist, Spends Sundays

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Before Taryn Delanie Smith was crowned Miss New York in 2022, she worked at a call center. At one point, she said, she was only pretending to take calls.

“I was actually making these little videos at my desk or on my way to work,” she said.

Ms. Smith, 28, is best known for her TikToks as Denise, a receptionist in heaven with a New York accent. Dressed in a robe and a towel head wrap, she welcomes newcomers and fields calls from heaven hopefuls through her headset microphone (a pink razor). In one video, Denise is drinking holy water at the Saints Lounge with Princess Diana and Whitney Houston. In another, she responds to viewers who want her to welcome their loved ones who have died.

She is a self-described “reigning chaos goblin” whose videos err on the side of comedy. Now with more than 1.4 million followers on TikTok, she creates videos full time and is a co-host of “Influenced,” a talk show on Amazon.

“I’ve never felt safer and more protected than by New Yorkers,” said Ms. Smith, who is from Seattle. “And so that is sort of what Denise embodies to me.”

Sundays, Ms. Smith said, are an anchor for her and her husband, Alec Castillo, whom she describes as a “big tatted-up dude who loves to cook.” They live with their “city cow,” a Great Dane named Bruce, in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Ms. Smith with her 2-year-old Great Dane, Bruce.Credit…Mimi d’Autremont for The New York Times

Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?

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Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?

Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.

I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.

“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”

Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”

Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.

Crypto Exec Pushing for Industry Support of Kamala Harris for President

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The former CEO of crypto platform Uphold, J.P. Thieriot, is trying to drum up crypto support for Vice President Kamala Harris as she pursues the Democratic nomination in the presidential election, arguing that former President Donald Trump is offering empty promises to the industry and Harris is signaling a new openness.

Trump, the Republican nominee in the 2024 race, has quickly become the crypto favorite, garnering big-money support from industry leaders as he adopts enthusiastic cheering for the digital assets sector (which he’d looked on with open skepticism until recently). But Thieriot said there seems to be “a real opportunity to help shape the Harris campaign’s position on crypto.”

“Of course, she’s going to have to do some stuff to gain trust, but she has signaled she’d like a chance,” said Thieriot, who said he still retains a stake in Uphold and is building a new crypto trading operation, in an interview. “It would be crazy to not engage on that.”

He said he wrote a strategy paper with a wider group, which included crypto lawyers who he declined to name. They shared that document with Harris’ campaign this week and are awaiting a response.

“We would argue that crypto is this electoral cycle’s foremost interstate swing issue,” said the strategy paper, which was reviewed by CoinDesk. “Trump has already moved to try to capture this space, and raised significant capital, essentially offering vague platitudes and no meaningful policy commitments.”

The paper suggested an opening crypto fundraiser in San Francisco and predicted that Harris could garner endorsements from prominents crypto figures and potentially earn tens of millions in campaign donations from the industry. Thieriot said he’s setting up a website, and the effort can be contacted at info@crypto4kamala.co.

Industry support has most loudly gravitated toward Trump, who spoke at the recent Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tenn., and who says he’ll put a stop to the government resistance to cryptocurrency typified by the actions of Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler and the opposition of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Despite President Joe Biden’s appointment of Gensler and ongoing support of his oversight of the cryptocurrency sector, “Kamala has, I think, an opportunity at a clean slate,” Thieriot said. The strategy he and the other supporters have in mind: She makes it clear her administration will work with the industry and support clear rules for it, and she shows openness for a friendlier chief at the SEC.

Thieriot isn’t alone among crypto insiders now favoring Harris. Tonya Evans, a prominent crypto law professor and board member of the Digital Currency Group, argued that Harris offers a chance for a new course that differs from the Gensler/Warren views that have dominated this administration. Evans is involved in a group of decentralized finance leaders favoring the vice president, which has scheduled a Thursday organizational meeting.

Some of the most recent national polling shows Harris with a slight lead over Trump, though the candidates remain nearly even.