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As YC retreats from Africa, alumni launch accelerators to fill the gap | The influential accelerator Y Combinator made a splash in Africa in 2020 when it shined its light on the market and began to accept startups from the region into its cohorts. The move was huge: in this nascent market, startups especially rely on programs like these to find their feet and connect with investors, and YC is the platinum standard for that process.
Fast forward to today, though, that attention has started to look a bit fickle. These days YC is going after big problems in areas like manufacturing, defense and climate, and it has quietly reduced its focus on developing markets. Yet in Africa, some are taking this as an opportunity. Local accelerators — backed by none other than African YC alumni — are emerging to fill the gap.
The new wave of accelerators is coming at the same time that the model favored by older local startup accelerators is changing. Co-creation HUB (CcHub), Flat6Labs, Baobab Network, and MEST Africa seeded companies for years alongside global accelerators, providing a pipeline of startups for bigger investors, including foreign ones, during the venture boom. Now with foreign investors pulling away, it’s forced local players to rethink how to tap and cultivate startups on the continent.
“My opinion is that instead of shadowboxing US firms (who don’t care about Africa anyway and were merely being opportunistic), the community has to come together to fund pipeline under $1 million in a programmatic way just like Techstars, YC and 500 startups did all those many years,” wrote Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of YC-backed Flutterwave, on LinkedIn recently.
Accelerate Africa, launched by Aboyeji, is one such initiative. With 20 startups in its portfolio already, the year-old accelerator spun off from an in-house program at Future Africa, Aboyeji’s venture capital firm (where another co-founder of Accelerate Africa, Mia von Koschitzky-Kimani, is also a partner).
Aboyeji’s ambition is to become ‘The YC of Africa’ — simply described, if not simply executed.
Indeed, African startups are currently at a crossroads. Successful African founders who have been through YC are unequivocal about the value of getting selected for programs with international profile.
“Everyone who knows me has heard me say, ‘The YC of Africa is YC,’’ Aboyeji, who also founded SoftBank-backed Andela, told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “That’s my go-to response whenever someone mentions joining an accelerator. I always tell them, ‘YC is the standard and let me help you prepare your pitch so you can apply there.’”
Yet the reality is that no African startup made it into Y Combinator’s most recent summer batch; and the three batches prior to that had just three startups each from the continent. Contrast that to years prior, when the Summer 2021 batch had 10 African startups, Winter 2022 had 23, and Summer 2022 featured 8 (and fully remote COVID-19 years had even more).
YC’s change of tune isn’t just because what it’s looking for has shifted: it’s also scaled back the size of its post-pandemic cohorts since 2022 (when at its peak it had 400 startups in one batch), and it’s gone back to in-person, with international founders in turn more susceptible to stricter U.S. visa policies. Startups in Latin America and India have also seen big declines in acceptances.
“YC has and will continue to fund startups and founders from around the world, including Africa. During COVID batches, we were funding global companies via Zoom,” a YC spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Today, we require all YC startups to move to San Francisco, which has naturally changed the composition of startups that apply to YC. We remain interested in speaking with and welcome applications from the best startups around the world.”
Prioritizing local capital, partners and public markets
Foreign funding, which includes VCs and development finance institutions, has typically made up around 77% of all venture funding in Africa over the last decade, according to the African Private Capital Association, and so the decline of foreign interest has had a direct impact on the amount invested in Africa. The first half of 2024, it said, saw the value of startup investments overall decline by a startling 65% compared to a year before.
Aboyeji believes Africa’s startups have two paths forward: continue relying on external funding sources (and hope they return); or take bold steps to build a local capital base.
“It starts with a pipeline of exceptional early-stage startups that the ecosystem and bigger companies have access to, and then it builds up from there. And I can say this confidently because I watched it happen when YC was getting built,” said Aboyeji, referring to his experience watching Erik Migicovsky, a friend and founder of Beeper and Peeble, participate in the accelerator’s early days. “I watched [YC] build and grow and become what it is today. And I think to myself, it’s possible for us to do it here.”
Some corporate VCs like Orange Ventures — linked to the French telco — exist, but local corporations have yet to embrace the venture asset class collectively.
Accelerate Africa’s aim is to forge partnerships between its portfolio companies and local banks, telcos, and others, not solely through direct equity investments, but through mentorship, resources, and services. Its aim is to get its portfolio companies to $1 million in revenue.
“We’re working closely with these corporates to create exit paths and help our companies solve problems unique to their markets rather than copying Silicon Valley’s funding model,” said Aboyeji.
There are large Africa-focused funds like Partech Africa, Norrsken22, Algebra Ventures, and Al Mada. Collectively, these have raised nearly $1 billion to invest on the continent, but they have yet to deploy extensively. Building stronger companies at the early stage will get more of them around the table with these larger investors.
There is still a question of exits. Tech listings on local African markets remain rare, with only two startups — Flutterwave and Interswitch — currently floating the idea of IPOs.
There’s AI in Africa, too.
Alongside investor appetite, startups in Africa are facing a different problem: they’ve gone out of style.
Generative AI is currently the hottest trend in tech, but Africa and other emerging markets have so far lagged behind their Western counterparts across North America and Europe when it comes to building AI startups. Tellingly, over half of the 92 African companies that have been through YC focused on fintech — the top sector in YC before AI’s boom.
Just one of Accelerate Africa’s portfolio companies, CDIAL.AI, is building a conversational AI that fluently understands and speaks African languages. The startup represents one of the few efforts from the continent and underrepresented communities to join the global generative AI discourse.
There is an accelerator now in Nigeria aiming to reverse that trend.
GoTime AI, based out of Lagos, is aimed at founders developing AI products in Africa. Using Nigeria as its launchpad, it has five startups in its cohort.
GoTime AI is the brainchild of Olugbenga Agboola, another co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, via his early-stage venture capital firm and studio Resilience17 (R17).
“AI is the most impactful global megatrend that has emerged in the last 20 years since mobile,” Hasan Luongo, general partner at R17, told TechCrunch in an interview. “It’s still early, so we want to move this engine forward. It’s not like a copy-paste from YC, but it’s simply the recognition that it’s not just Silicon Valley that’s excited about AI.”
This underscores an interesting shift. In the past, leading startups in emerging markets have succeeded by cloning, tailoring Silicon Valley models to fit regional needs in sectors like fintech, logistics, and health tech. AI, on the other hand, is undeniably a global play, much like SaaS — a challenge but also an opportunity.
Luongo, who leads GoTime AI’s efforts, believes Africa has an opportunity to build AI products at a lower cost than in Western markets, which could make AI startups here more attractive to acquirers, especially as they command lower valuations.
“That’s our bet—that they will measure up. We’re betting on the talent here being on par with, or even better than, that in other countries while benefiting from a lower cost of operations,” Luongo argued. “Also, the companies here will likely not have high valuations, so global companies could probably pick them up for less but still get great talent and their products.”
Fixing the pipeline: Check or no check?
Unlike Accelerate Africa, GoTime AI isn’t aiming to be the next YC on the continent. Instead, the accelerator is positioning itself as a stepping stone for AI startups to strengthen their footing in accessing opportunities from early-stage investors.
The accelerator plans to expand its program across Africa and scale to accept 15 to 20 startups per cohort, depending on the success of its inaugural cohort in Nigeria.
AI applications for legal, compliance, and sales/customer relationship management—trends also seen in YC’s recent batches—feature in the GoTime AI and Accelerate Africa’s portfolios. Both accelerators are starting with two cohorts annually, though their deal structures differ significantly.
GoTime AI invests up to $200,000 in exchange for 8% equity, structured as $25,000 upfront, $75,000 at Demo Day, and $100,000 at startup’s first fundraise. The accelerator also offers its startups mentorship, workspaces, and access to API and cloud computing credits to train AI models and test products.
Accelerate Africa, which currently operates with a grant of less than a million dollars, does not provide upfront funding or take equity upon admission.
“The utility of these first two cohorts is storytelling, halo effect, community, not money. Once the money comes in, we’ll probably change the model,” said Oji Udezue, venture partner at Accelerate Africa, to TechCrunch on the accelerator’s decision to not provide funding to its startups. Instead, its sister fund, Future Africa, may co-invest $250,000 to $500,000 after the program through its standard investment process.
Despite not offering funding upfront, Accelerate Africa boasts a 1.4% acceptance rate and claims to have helped startups in its first cohort raise over $5 million. “We have a quality bar; we don’t want to build an accelerator that’s not better than YC in Africa,” remarked Udezue. | {
"sections": [
{
"headline": [],
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"Fast forward to today, though, that attention has started to look a bit fickle. These days YC is going after big problems in areas like manufacturing, defense and climate, and it has quietly reduced its focus on developing markets. Yet in Africa, some are taking this as an opportunity. Local accelerators — backed by none other than African YC alumni — are emerging to fill the gap.",
"The new wave of accelerators is coming at the same time that the model favored by older local startup accelerators is changing. Co-creation HUB (CcHub), Flat6Labs, Baobab Network, and MEST Africa seeded companies for years alongside global accelerators, providing a pipeline of startups for bigger investors, including foreign ones, during the venture boom. Now with foreign investors pulling away, it’s forced local players to rethink how to tap and cultivate startups on the continent.",
"“My opinion is that instead of shadowboxing US firms (who don’t care about Africa anyway and were merely being opportunistic), the community has to come together to fund pipeline under $1 million in a programmatic way just like Techstars, YC and 500 startups did all those many years,” wrote Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of YC-backed Flutterwave, on LinkedIn recently.",
"Accelerate Africa, launched by Aboyeji, is one such initiative. With 20 startups in its portfolio already, the year-old accelerator spun off from an in-house program at Future Africa, Aboyeji’s venture capital firm (where another co-founder of Accelerate Africa, Mia von Koschitzky-Kimani, is also a partner).",
"Aboyeji’s ambition is to become ‘The YC of Africa’ — simply described, if not simply executed.",
"Indeed, African startups are currently at a crossroads. Successful African founders who have been through YC are unequivocal about the value of getting selected for programs with international profile.",
"“Everyone who knows me has heard me say, ‘The YC of Africa is YC,’’ Aboyeji, who also founded SoftBank-backed Andela, told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “That’s my go-to response whenever someone mentions joining an accelerator. I always tell them, ‘YC is the standard and let me help you prepare your pitch so you can apply there.’”",
"Yet the reality is that no African startup made it into Y Combinator’s most recent summer batch; and the three batches prior to that had just three startups each from the continent. Contrast that to years prior, when the Summer 2021 batch had 10 African startups, Winter 2022 had 23, and Summer 2022 featured 8 (and fully remote COVID-19 years had even more).",
"YC’s change of tune isn’t just because what it’s looking for has shifted: it’s also scaled back the size of its post-pandemic cohorts since 2022 (when at its peak it had 400 startups in one batch), and it’s gone back to in-person, with international founders in turn more susceptible to stricter U.S. visa policies. Startups in Latin America and India have also seen big declines in acceptances.",
"“YC has and will continue to fund startups and founders from around the world, including Africa. During COVID batches, we were funding global companies via Zoom,” a YC spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Today, we require all YC startups to move to San Francisco, which has naturally changed the composition of startups that apply to YC. We remain interested in speaking with and welcome applications from the best startups around the world.”"
]
},
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"Prioritizing local capital, partners and public markets"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Foreign funding, which includes VCs and development finance institutions, has typically made up around 77% of all venture funding in Africa over the last decade, according to the African Private Capital Association, and so the decline of foreign interest has had a direct impact on the amount invested in Africa. The first half of 2024, it said, saw the value of startup investments overall decline by a startling 65% compared to a year before.",
"Aboyeji believes Africa’s startups have two paths forward: continue relying on external funding sources (and hope they return); or take bold steps to build a local capital base.",
"“It starts with a pipeline of exceptional early-stage startups that the ecosystem and bigger companies have access to, and then it builds up from there. And I can say this confidently because I watched it happen when YC was getting built,” said Aboyeji, referring to his experience watching Erik Migicovsky, a friend and founder of Beeper and Peeble, participate in the accelerator’s early days. “I watched [YC] build and grow and become what it is today. And I think to myself, it’s possible for us to do it here.”",
"Some corporate VCs like Orange Ventures — linked to the French telco — exist, but local corporations have yet to embrace the venture asset class collectively.",
"Accelerate Africa’s aim is to forge partnerships between its portfolio companies and local banks, telcos, and others, not solely through direct equity investments, but through mentorship, resources, and services. Its aim is to get its portfolio companies to $1 million in revenue.",
"“We’re working closely with these corporates to create exit paths and help our companies solve problems unique to their markets rather than copying Silicon Valley’s funding model,” said Aboyeji.",
"There are large Africa-focused funds like Partech Africa, Norrsken22, Algebra Ventures, and Al Mada. Collectively, these have raised nearly $1 billion to invest on the continent, but they have yet to deploy extensively. Building stronger companies at the early stage will get more of them around the table with these larger investors.",
"There is still a question of exits. Tech listings on local African markets remain rare, with only two startups — Flutterwave and Interswitch — currently floating the idea of IPOs."
]
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"There’s AI in Africa, too."
],
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"Alongside investor appetite, startups in Africa are facing a different problem: they’ve gone out of style.",
"Generative AI is currently the hottest trend in tech, but Africa and other emerging markets have so far lagged behind their Western counterparts across North America and Europe when it comes to building AI startups. Tellingly, over half of the 92 African companies that have been through YC focused on fintech — the top sector in YC before AI’s boom.",
"Just one of Accelerate Africa’s portfolio companies, CDIAL.AI, is building a conversational AI that fluently understands and speaks African languages. The startup represents one of the few efforts from the continent and underrepresented communities to join the global generative AI discourse.",
"There is an accelerator now in Nigeria aiming to reverse that trend.",
"GoTime AI, based out of Lagos, is aimed at founders developing AI products in Africa. Using Nigeria as its launchpad, it has five startups in its cohort.",
"GoTime AI is the brainchild of Olugbenga Agboola, another co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, via his early-stage venture capital firm and studio Resilience17 (R17).",
"“AI is the most impactful global megatrend that has emerged in the last 20 years since mobile,” Hasan Luongo, general partner at R17, told TechCrunch in an interview. “It’s still early, so we want to move this engine forward. It’s not like a copy-paste from YC, but it’s simply the recognition that it’s not just Silicon Valley that’s excited about AI.”",
"This underscores an interesting shift. In the past, leading startups in emerging markets have succeeded by cloning, tailoring Silicon Valley models to fit regional needs in sectors like fintech, logistics, and health tech. AI, on the other hand, is undeniably a global play, much like SaaS — a challenge but also an opportunity.",
"Luongo, who leads GoTime AI’s efforts, believes Africa has an opportunity to build AI products at a lower cost than in Western markets, which could make AI startups here more attractive to acquirers, especially as they command lower valuations.",
"“That’s our bet—that they will measure up. We’re betting on the talent here being on par with, or even better than, that in other countries while benefiting from a lower cost of operations,” Luongo argued. “Also, the companies here will likely not have high valuations, so global companies could probably pick them up for less but still get great talent and their products.”"
]
},
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"Fixing the pipeline: Check or no check?"
],
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"Unlike Accelerate Africa, GoTime AI isn’t aiming to be the next YC on the continent. Instead, the accelerator is positioning itself as a stepping stone for AI startups to strengthen their footing in accessing opportunities from early-stage investors.",
"The accelerator plans to expand its program across Africa and scale to accept 15 to 20 startups per cohort, depending on the success of its inaugural cohort in Nigeria.",
"AI applications for legal, compliance, and sales/customer relationship management—trends also seen in YC’s recent batches—feature in the GoTime AI and Accelerate Africa’s portfolios. Both accelerators are starting with two cohorts annually, though their deal structures differ significantly.",
"GoTime AI invests up to $200,000 in exchange for 8% equity, structured as $25,000 upfront, $75,000 at Demo Day, and $100,000 at startup’s first fundraise. The accelerator also offers its startups mentorship, workspaces, and access to API and cloud computing credits to train AI models and test products.",
"Accelerate Africa, which currently operates with a grant of less than a million dollars, does not provide upfront funding or take equity upon admission.",
"“The utility of these first two cohorts is storytelling, halo effect, community, not money. Once the money comes in, we’ll probably change the model,” said Oji Udezue, venture partner at Accelerate Africa, to TechCrunch on the accelerator’s decision to not provide funding to its startups. Instead, its sister fund, Future Africa, may co-invest $250,000 to $500,000 after the program through its standard investment process.",
"Despite not offering funding upfront, Accelerate Africa boasts a 1.4% acceptance rate and claims to have helped startups in its first cohort raise over $5 million. “We have a quality bar; we don’t want to build an accelerator that’s not better than YC in Africa,” remarked Udezue."
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"The influential accelerator Y Combinator made a splash in Africa in 2020 when it shined its light on the market and began to accept startups from the region into its cohorts. The move was huge: in this nascent market, startups especially rely on programs like these to find their feet and connect with investors, and YC is the platinum standard for that process."
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Syrian rebels advance on heavily defended city of Homs and Damascus suburbs | UN special envoy for Syria calls for urgent talks to ensure 'orderly political transition'
Syrian rebels continued their lightning advance on Saturday, with news they were active in the suburbs of the capital Damascus and were also closing in on the key central city of Homs, where government forces were dug in, to try to save President Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule.
Since the rebels' sweep into Aleppo a week ago, government defences have crumbled across the country at dizzying speed as insurgents seized a string of major cities and rose up in places where the rebellion had long seemed over.
Besides capturing Aleppo in the north, Hama in the centre and Deir al-Zor in the east, rebels said they have taken southern Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida im the south and advanced to within 50 kilometres of the capital.
Government defences were focused on Homs, with state television and Syrian military sources reporting big airstrikes on rebel positions and a wave of reinforcements arriving to dig in around the city.
Meanwhile, the rebels extended their control to almost the entire southwest and said they had captured Sanamayn on the main highway from Damascus to Jordan. The Syrian military said it was repositioning, without acknowledging territorial losses.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents are now active in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. He added that opposition fighters on Saturday were also marching from eastern Syria toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta.
Underscoring the possibility of an uprising in the capital, protesters in Jaramana tore down a statue of Assad's father, the late president Hafez al-Assad. In other suburbs, soldiers changed into civilian clothes and deserted their posts, residents said.
The pace of events has stunned Arab capitals and raised fears of a new wave of regional instability, with Qatar saying on Saturday it threatened Syria's territorial integrity.
UN envoy calling for talks
The UN's special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, has called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an "orderly political transition" in Syria.
Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the talks in Switzerland would discuss the implementation of a UN resolution that called for a Syrian-led political process.
Resolution 2254, adopted in 2015, called for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with UN-supervised elections. Pedersen said the need for an orderly political transition "has never been more urgent" and said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute.
Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad's rule, dragged in big outside powers, created space for jihadist militants to plot attacks around the world and sent millions of refugees into neighbouring states.
Western officials say the Syrian military is in a difficult situation, unable to halt rebel gains and forced into retreat.
Assad had long relied on allies to subdue the rebels, with bombing by Russian warplanes while Iran sent allied forces including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraqi militia to bolster the Syrian military and storm insurgent strongholds.
But Russia has been focused on the war in Ukraine since 2022 and Hezbollah has suffered big losses in its own grueling war with Israel, significantly limiting its ability or that of Iran to bolster Assad.
Russia promises to stop 'terrorists'
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was doing all it could to stop "terrorists" prevailing in Syria, and called for dialogue between the Damascus government and the legitimate opposition, without saying which groups this included.
Russia has a naval base and airbase in Syria that have not only been important for its support of Assad, but also for its ability to project influence in the Mediterranean and Africa.
Hezbollah sent some "supervising forces" to Homs on Friday but any significant deployment would risk exposure to Israeli airstrikes, Western officials said. Israel attacked two Lebanon-Syria border crossings on Friday, Lebanon said.
Iran-backed Iraqi militias are on high alert, with thousands of heavily armed fighters ready to deploy to Syria, many of them amassed near the border. Iraq does not seek military intervention in Syria, a government spokesperson said on Friday.
Iran, Russia, and Turkey, which is the rebels' main foreign supporter, discussed the crisis in Doha. Lavrov said they had agreed there should be an immediate end to the fighting.
A top Iranian official, Ali Larijani, met Assad in Damascus on Friday, an Iranian news agency reported a lawmaker as saying. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said "no specific decisions have been made regarding a horizon for Syria's future."
Battle for Homs includes airstrikes
The rebels said they were "at the walls" of Homs after taking the last village on its northern outskirts late on Friday.
Inside Homs, a resident said the situation had felt normal until Friday but had grown more tense with airstrikes and gunfire clearly audible and pro-Assad militia groups setting up checkpoints.
"They are sending a message to people to keep in line and that they should not get excited and not expect Homs to go easily," the resident said.
Seizing Homs, an important crossroads between the capital and the Mediterranean, would cut off Damascus from the coastal stronghold of Assad's minority Alawite sect, and from a naval base and airbase of his Russian allies there.
A Syrian military officer said there was a lull in fighting on Saturday morning after a night of intense airstrikes on the rebels and that a large convoy of troops and vehicles had redeployed from Palmyra to aid the Homs defense.
A coalition of rebel factions that include the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham made a last call on forces loyal to Assad's government in Homs to defect.
"Homs is the key. It will be very hard for Assad to make a stand but if Homs should fall, the main highway from Damascus to Tartus and the coast will be closed, cutting the capital off from the Alawite Mountains," said Jonathan Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma.
In the south, the fall of Deraa and Suweida on Friday, followed by Quneitra on Saturday, could allow a concerted assault on the capital, the seat of Assad's power, military sources said.
Deraa, which had a population of more than 100,000 before the civil war began, holds symbolic importance as the cradle of the uprising. It is the capital of a province of about one million people, bordering Jordan. | {
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"Syrian rebels continued their lightning advance on Saturday, with news they were active in the suburbs of the capital Damascus and were also closing in on the key central city of Homs, where government forces were dug in, to try to save President Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule.",
"Since the rebels' sweep into Aleppo a week ago, government defences have crumbled across the country at dizzying speed as insurgents seized a string of major cities and rose up in places where the rebellion had long seemed over.",
"Besides capturing Aleppo in the north, Hama in the centre and Deir al-Zor in the east, rebels said they have taken southern Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida im the south and advanced to within 50 kilometres of the capital.",
"Government defences were focused on Homs, with state television and Syrian military sources reporting big airstrikes on rebel positions and a wave of reinforcements arriving to dig in around the city.",
"Meanwhile, the rebels extended their control to almost the entire southwest and said they had captured Sanamayn on the main highway from Damascus to Jordan. The Syrian military said it was repositioning, without acknowledging territorial losses.",
"Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents are now active in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. He added that opposition fighters on Saturday were also marching from eastern Syria toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta.",
"Underscoring the possibility of an uprising in the capital, protesters in Jaramana tore down a statue of Assad's father, the late president Hafez al-Assad. In other suburbs, soldiers changed into civilian clothes and deserted their posts, residents said.",
"The pace of events has stunned Arab capitals and raised fears of a new wave of regional instability, with Qatar saying on Saturday it threatened Syria's territorial integrity."
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"The UN's special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, has called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an \"orderly political transition\" in Syria.",
"Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the talks in Switzerland would discuss the implementation of a UN resolution that called for a Syrian-led political process.",
"Resolution 2254, adopted in 2015, called for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with UN-supervised elections. Pedersen said the need for an orderly political transition \"has never been more urgent\" and said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute.",
"Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad's rule, dragged in big outside powers, created space for jihadist militants to plot attacks around the world and sent millions of refugees into neighbouring states.",
"Western officials say the Syrian military is in a difficult situation, unable to halt rebel gains and forced into retreat.",
"Assad had long relied on allies to subdue the rebels, with bombing by Russian warplanes while Iran sent allied forces including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraqi militia to bolster the Syrian military and storm insurgent strongholds.",
"But Russia has been focused on the war in Ukraine since 2022 and Hezbollah has suffered big losses in its own grueling war with Israel, significantly limiting its ability or that of Iran to bolster Assad."
]
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"headline": [
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"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was doing all it could to stop \"terrorists\" prevailing in Syria, and called for dialogue between the Damascus government and the legitimate opposition, without saying which groups this included.",
"Russia has a naval base and airbase in Syria that have not only been important for its support of Assad, but also for its ability to project influence in the Mediterranean and Africa.",
"Hezbollah sent some \"supervising forces\" to Homs on Friday but any significant deployment would risk exposure to Israeli airstrikes, Western officials said. Israel attacked two Lebanon-Syria border crossings on Friday, Lebanon said.",
"Iran-backed Iraqi militias are on high alert, with thousands of heavily armed fighters ready to deploy to Syria, many of them amassed near the border. Iraq does not seek military intervention in Syria, a government spokesperson said on Friday.",
"Iran, Russia, and Turkey, which is the rebels' main foreign supporter, discussed the crisis in Doha. Lavrov said they had agreed there should be an immediate end to the fighting.",
"A top Iranian official, Ali Larijani, met Assad in Damascus on Friday, an Iranian news agency reported a lawmaker as saying. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said \"no specific decisions have been made regarding a horizon for Syria's future.\""
]
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"headline": [
"Battle for Homs includes airstrikes"
],
"paragraphs": [
"The rebels said they were \"at the walls\" of Homs after taking the last village on its northern outskirts late on Friday.",
"Inside Homs, a resident said the situation had felt normal until Friday but had grown more tense with airstrikes and gunfire clearly audible and pro-Assad militia groups setting up checkpoints.",
"\"They are sending a message to people to keep in line and that they should not get excited and not expect Homs to go easily,\" the resident said.",
"Seizing Homs, an important crossroads between the capital and the Mediterranean, would cut off Damascus from the coastal stronghold of Assad's minority Alawite sect, and from a naval base and airbase of his Russian allies there.",
"A Syrian military officer said there was a lull in fighting on Saturday morning after a night of intense airstrikes on the rebels and that a large convoy of troops and vehicles had redeployed from Palmyra to aid the Homs defense.",
"A coalition of rebel factions that include the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham made a last call on forces loyal to Assad's government in Homs to defect.",
"\"Homs is the key. It will be very hard for Assad to make a stand but if Homs should fall, the main highway from Damascus to Tartus and the coast will be closed, cutting the capital off from the Alawite Mountains,\" said Jonathan Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma.",
"In the south, the fall of Deraa and Suweida on Friday, followed by Quneitra on Saturday, could allow a concerted assault on the capital, the seat of Assad's power, military sources said.",
"Deraa, which had a population of more than 100,000 before the civil war began, holds symbolic importance as the cradle of the uprising. It is the capital of a province of about one million people, bordering Jordan."
]
}
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"UN special envoy for Syria calls for urgent talks to ensure 'orderly political transition'"
]
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Clashes kill 6 Pakistan troops, 22 militants near Afghan border | Pakistan said Saturday that a predawn assault on a security post and intelligence-driven counterinsurgency raids in its northwestern province bordering Afghanistan killed at least six troops and 22 militants.
The military’s media wing said that the violence occurred in several districts, including Tank and North Waziristan.
The statement identified the slain militants as “khwarij,” a term employed by the government to categorize insurgents affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a globally recognized terrorist organization.
Area security officials said that dozens of heavily armed TTP militants staged a multipronged attack on the security outpost in the town of Thall, resulting in the deaths of six paramilitary troops and injuries to several others in the ensuing gun battles.
The TTP reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack but did not comment on its casualties in the reported military raids elsewhere.
Intensified TTP-led attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and separatist ethnic Baloch insurgents in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, which borders Afghanistan, have resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives, including many security personnel this year alone, according to official data.
Pakistan alleges TTP leaders and fighters orchestrate terrorism from Afghan hideouts with the support of the neighboring country’s Taliban government, which is not recognized by any country.
Taliban leaders reject the charges, saying they are not allowing anyone to use Afghanistan to threaten other countries, including Pakistan. | {
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What Does a Translator Do? | Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn’t about transforming or reflecting a text. It’s about conjuring one’s experience of it.
Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” the seven-novel sequence about art and God that helped win its author last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, stars two men and a dog. The men are both painters, and, confusingly, both named Asle. The dog, however, is quite straightforward: he’s called Bragi. He is the all-comprehending, inky-eyed companion to the first Asle, though he belongs to the other Asle, who’s ill and can’t look after him. The novel’s lazy river of a narrative is punctuated, much in the way of real life, whenever Bragi needs to be let out to do his business, or has licked his water bowl dry, or, with a laughable but also slightly troubling frequency, takes a tumble when Asle stands up without remembering that the dog is lying on his lap. Asle’s gruff love for Bragi, his physical closeness to the little creature, is written with such simple feeling that you can tell Fosse is, among his other distinctions, a dog-lover.
In the original Norwegian, Bragi is spelled Brage (pronounced BROG-eh). Damion Searls, Fosse’s translator, is responsible for the new vowel. Brage is the Norse god of poetry, something Searls didn’t realize until Fosse told him, since the name is traditionally spelled, in English, with an “I.” If he used the Norwegian spelling, Searls reasoned, Anglophone readers might think the word rhymed with “rage” or “page”—distinctly uncute words for a very cute canine. Using the typical English version would let those in the know understand the mythical association, and it had the added advantage of rhyming with “doggie,” if you squint. “I will never know for sure, but I am convinced that English-language readers would not have loved Brage as much as they love Bragi and that changing the name was one of the best translation decisions I made in those books,” Searls writes in his new essay on the craft, “The Philosophy of Translation” (Yale).
Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work. Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up, and many would agree with George Eliot’s pronouncement that “a good translator is infinitely below the man who produces good original works.” (Eliot herself translated from German and Latin.) George Steiner’s chaotic and brilliant “After Babel” was the first comprehensive treatment of the subject when it was published, in 1975. Some translations, and translators, did indeed achieve their own fame—Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, Alexander Pope’s Homer, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust—but Lawrence Venuti’s landmark 1995 treatise “The Translator’s Invisibility” pretty much summed up the history of translation in its title.
In the United States, it’s estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her “Don Quixote.” Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn’t agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read.”
A new subgenre has emerged of books by translators about translation, including manifestos like Edith Grossman’s “Why Translation Matters” (2010) and Mark Polizzotti’s “Sympathy for the Traitor” (2018), theoretical studies like David Bellos’s “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” (2011), and memoiristic essays like Kate Briggs’s “This Little Art” (2017), Polly Barton’s “Fifty Sounds” (2021), and Daniel Hahn’s “Catching Fire: A Translation Diary” (2022). Earlier this year, Croft even published “The Extinction of Irena Rey”, a novel about a meeting (a babel?) of literary translators who go in search of the author whose work they each render into different tongues.
Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”
“Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.
It’s not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls’s account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not “counting out words for the reader,” but “weighing them out.” A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original.
Around the time Columbus discovered the New World, translation began to take on something like its contemporary scope. “Now the object of translation was the work,” Searls writes, “with its indissoluble fusion of content and form, body and soul, and translation became the task of preserving the soul or essence of the original in an entirely new body.” In the Renaissance, translation went into overdrive as humanists rediscovered the ancient Greek language, translated copiously into Latin, and started bringing literature, philosophy, and history into the spoken tongues of Europe. At the same time, religious reformers, like William Tyndale and Martin Luther, and, later, a committee of translators assembled by King James, translated the Bible into the languages of everyday people.
Translation was, then, much riskier than today: a bad review would be the least of a translator’s worries. In 1536, Tyndale was burned at the stake. Ten years later, Étienne Dolet, a French translator and an early theorist of the art, was accused of heresy for his version of Plato; he was hanged and, just in case the point wasn’t clear, also burned at the stake. These are, as Mark Polizzotti points out, translation’s first martyrs. The problem wasn’t that they translated poorly but, rather, that their translations destabilized the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on the reading and interpretation of the holy writ—or directly challenged the Church’s dogmas. At the same time, however, translation—first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin—helped the Bible spread beyond its local origins. From the start, translation has been something of a Faustian bargain.
Things changed, as they were wont to do, in the spiritual soup of Sturm und Drang, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. The German Romantics associated the idea of the “mother tongue” with “race” and the burgeoning nation-state. In their thinking, language evolved from a mere means of expression into the means “by which man gives form simultaneously to himself and to the world,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander, and a translator and linguist, put it. The modern ideological stakes of translation—as a fraught operation transposing the utterances of a person enmeshed in a unique cultural fabric—begin here.
So does the basic framework that theorists, and indeed many translators and critics, still use. A key moment came in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating,” a lecture from 1813. Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, stated that “either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him.” In this view, translation is at best a tug of war, at worst a zero-sum game. Lawrence Venuti glossed these alternatives as “domestication” and “foreignization.” A “foreignizing” translation—one that brings you closer to the text, that never lets you forget that it’s a translation—might productively unsettle readers but maybe also put them off, whereas a “domesticating” translation could do violence to the source.
What this means, practically, can be hard to say. How much cultural literacy can you assume from a reader? “Goulash” doesn’t need to be translated as “paprika meat soup,” Searls notes. On the other hand, I’ve read thousands of pages of Norwegian literature and I still don’t really know what lutefisk is. Style is a harder problem. Clearly the gargantuan single sentence of the “Septology” is intentionally extreme. But how long does a translated sentence of Proust need to be to be Proustian without being perverse? What do you do with dialect, or dirty jokes? How much translation is too much?
Scholars like to remind you that one of the ancient Greek words for translation is metaphora. Translation is metaphor, and it can be trapped by the conceptual frames used to describe it. Take, for instance, the military overtones of the commonly used term “target language.” Or consider the notion of the “faithful” translation, which, as Emily Wilson has written, implies that the translation is gendered female, that it might betray the male original (hence the old Italian phrase, traduttore, traditore, “translator, traitor”). Cervantes, in “Don Quixote,” compares reading a translation to “viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side,” where “the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.”
Searls seeks a reset, and finds it in phenomenology. In phenomenological terms, there is no boundary between mind and world: the two are intertwined. Searls gives the comfortable example of a chair. When you see one, you’re not “being confronted with ‘sense data,’ as philosophers like to say, which my supercomputer brain then processes.” Rather, you’re simply seeing “a place to sit. That is what seeing a chair is.” You recognize a chair as the thing you sit in. That’s its “affordance,” Searls says, borrowing a term coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who initially conceived it during the Second World War, while studying how fighter pilots perceive their environment. This approach to perception has the benefit of breaking down the distinction between self and world: a chair in all of its chairness doesn’t exist without a perceiver to see it as something to sit in; a chair is the affordance of a place to sit.
What does this have to do with translation? Reading, Searls points out, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. “All the philosophical dilemmas about whether translation ‘reflects’ or instead ‘transforms’ what’s in the original need to be swept aside,” Searls declares. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is neither found nor created through experience but revealed, developed, Searls writes, as if it were a photograph. He suggests that translation does something similar, “developing” the original as if it were a photographic negative.
Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. “We don’t translate words of a language, we translate uses of language,” Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text’s “force.” “In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English,” Searls writes. He points to his retranslation of Max Weber’s “Vocation Lectures,” delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, “We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as . . .” (Nun können wir . . . mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung . . . in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to “The clear trend is toward . . .” He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English.
Conceiving language as something you flirt and fight with, rather than a dry dictionary’s worth of words, also helps resolve the old cocktail-party question of whether everything can be translated. What do you do with some triple-barreled German compound, or the fabled forty-ninth Eskimo term for snow? Searls relates a story from a talk he gave with the Austrian dramatist Clemens Berger, who told the audience about a word (mamihlapinatapai) from an Indigenous language (Yagán) in southern Patagonia. Berger explained that the word referred to “well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I’m interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that.” The audience laughed—and Searls pointed out that, in relating how mamihlapinatapai can’t be translated, the playwright had in fact just translated it: it didn’t fit into a single word, but the term did what it was supposed to do. Thinking this way lets a translator cut through, or simply ignore, a lot of knotty problems.
Searls’s philosophy is ultimately one of freedom— to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done. Some might find this liberty surprising, even alarming, particularly when it comes to texts whose meaning is not merely a product of the reader’s experience but inheres closely in their precise verbal structure. (A philosopher reviewing Searls’s edition of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” observes that the translation’s occasionally revelatory “fluency” could also lead to “sometimes downright misinterpretation.”) But for Searls it’s inevitable that any translation will be deeply subjective. “All translators are faithful,” Searls writes, “but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve.” It can be something as big as gender politics in the Odyssey, or as small as that “I” wagging like a tail at the end of Bragi’s name.
This is also, then, a philosophy of trust. Readers must take translators on their word that the translated version has anything to do with the original, and authors—well, authors just have to buckle up and hold on. Translators also need to trust themselves, and to commit to rendering their experience of a novel or an essay or a poem, rather than trying to make themselves disappear in the no man’s land between languages. In fact, visibility may be the key to their survival as A.I.-driven translators improve, and transcend the mere equivalence-hunting of tools like Google Translate. As is often the case, A.I. isn’t so much changing the game as exaggerating a dynamic already at work: good translation draws on as much of life and experience and personality as good writing does. Robert Frost is reported to have said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But, Searls might say, that’s only true if the translator gets lost, too. ♦ | {
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"Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” the seven-novel sequence about art and God that helped win its author last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, stars two men and a dog. The men are both painters, and, confusingly, both named Asle. The dog, however, is quite straightforward: he’s called Bragi. He is the all-comprehending, inky-eyed companion to the first Asle, though he belongs to the other Asle, who’s ill and can’t look after him. The novel’s lazy river of a narrative is punctuated, much in the way of real life, whenever Bragi needs to be let out to do his business, or has licked his water bowl dry, or, with a laughable but also slightly troubling frequency, takes a tumble when Asle stands up without remembering that the dog is lying on his lap. Asle’s gruff love for Bragi, his physical closeness to the little creature, is written with such simple feeling that you can tell Fosse is, among his other distinctions, a dog-lover.",
"In the original Norwegian, Bragi is spelled Brage (pronounced BROG-eh). Damion Searls, Fosse’s translator, is responsible for the new vowel. Brage is the Norse god of poetry, something Searls didn’t realize until Fosse told him, since the name is traditionally spelled, in English, with an “I.” If he used the Norwegian spelling, Searls reasoned, Anglophone readers might think the word rhymed with “rage” or “page”—distinctly uncute words for a very cute canine. Using the typical English version would let those in the know understand the mythical association, and it had the added advantage of rhyming with “doggie,” if you squint. “I will never know for sure, but I am convinced that English-language readers would not have loved Brage as much as they love Bragi and that changing the name was one of the best translation decisions I made in those books,” Searls writes in his new essay on the craft, “The Philosophy of Translation” (Yale).",
"Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work. Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up, and many would agree with George Eliot’s pronouncement that “a good translator is infinitely below the man who produces good original works.” (Eliot herself translated from German and Latin.) George Steiner’s chaotic and brilliant “After Babel” was the first comprehensive treatment of the subject when it was published, in 1975. Some translations, and translators, did indeed achieve their own fame—Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, Alexander Pope’s Homer, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust—but Lawrence Venuti’s landmark 1995 treatise “The Translator’s Invisibility” pretty much summed up the history of translation in its title.",
"In the United States, it’s estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her “Don Quixote.” Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn’t agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read.”",
"A new subgenre has emerged of books by translators about translation, including manifestos like Edith Grossman’s “Why Translation Matters” (2010) and Mark Polizzotti’s “Sympathy for the Traitor” (2018), theoretical studies like David Bellos’s “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” (2011), and memoiristic essays like Kate Briggs’s “This Little Art” (2017), Polly Barton’s “Fifty Sounds” (2021), and Daniel Hahn’s “Catching Fire: A Translation Diary” (2022). Earlier this year, Croft even published “The Extinction of Irena Rey”, a novel about a meeting (a babel?) of literary translators who go in search of the author whose work they each render into different tongues.",
"Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”",
"“Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.",
"It’s not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls’s account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not “counting out words for the reader,” but “weighing them out.” A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original.",
"Around the time Columbus discovered the New World, translation began to take on something like its contemporary scope. “Now the object of translation was the work,” Searls writes, “with its indissoluble fusion of content and form, body and soul, and translation became the task of preserving the soul or essence of the original in an entirely new body.” In the Renaissance, translation went into overdrive as humanists rediscovered the ancient Greek language, translated copiously into Latin, and started bringing literature, philosophy, and history into the spoken tongues of Europe. At the same time, religious reformers, like William Tyndale and Martin Luther, and, later, a committee of translators assembled by King James, translated the Bible into the languages of everyday people.",
"Translation was, then, much riskier than today: a bad review would be the least of a translator’s worries. In 1536, Tyndale was burned at the stake. Ten years later, Étienne Dolet, a French translator and an early theorist of the art, was accused of heresy for his version of Plato; he was hanged and, just in case the point wasn’t clear, also burned at the stake. These are, as Mark Polizzotti points out, translation’s first martyrs. The problem wasn’t that they translated poorly but, rather, that their translations destabilized the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on the reading and interpretation of the holy writ—or directly challenged the Church’s dogmas. At the same time, however, translation—first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin—helped the Bible spread beyond its local origins. From the start, translation has been something of a Faustian bargain.",
"Things changed, as they were wont to do, in the spiritual soup of Sturm und Drang, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. The German Romantics associated the idea of the “mother tongue” with “race” and the burgeoning nation-state. In their thinking, language evolved from a mere means of expression into the means “by which man gives form simultaneously to himself and to the world,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander, and a translator and linguist, put it. The modern ideological stakes of translation—as a fraught operation transposing the utterances of a person enmeshed in a unique cultural fabric—begin here.",
"So does the basic framework that theorists, and indeed many translators and critics, still use. A key moment came in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating,” a lecture from 1813. Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, stated that “either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him.” In this view, translation is at best a tug of war, at worst a zero-sum game. Lawrence Venuti glossed these alternatives as “domestication” and “foreignization.” A “foreignizing” translation—one that brings you closer to the text, that never lets you forget that it’s a translation—might productively unsettle readers but maybe also put them off, whereas a “domesticating” translation could do violence to the source.",
"What this means, practically, can be hard to say. How much cultural literacy can you assume from a reader? “Goulash” doesn’t need to be translated as “paprika meat soup,” Searls notes. On the other hand, I’ve read thousands of pages of Norwegian literature and I still don’t really know what lutefisk is. Style is a harder problem. Clearly the gargantuan single sentence of the “Septology” is intentionally extreme. But how long does a translated sentence of Proust need to be to be Proustian without being perverse? What do you do with dialect, or dirty jokes? How much translation is too much?",
"Scholars like to remind you that one of the ancient Greek words for translation is metaphora. Translation is metaphor, and it can be trapped by the conceptual frames used to describe it. Take, for instance, the military overtones of the commonly used term “target language.” Or consider the notion of the “faithful” translation, which, as Emily Wilson has written, implies that the translation is gendered female, that it might betray the male original (hence the old Italian phrase, traduttore, traditore, “translator, traitor”). Cervantes, in “Don Quixote,” compares reading a translation to “viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side,” where “the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.”",
"Searls seeks a reset, and finds it in phenomenology. In phenomenological terms, there is no boundary between mind and world: the two are intertwined. Searls gives the comfortable example of a chair. When you see one, you’re not “being confronted with ‘sense data,’ as philosophers like to say, which my supercomputer brain then processes.” Rather, you’re simply seeing “a place to sit. That is what seeing a chair is.” You recognize a chair as the thing you sit in. That’s its “affordance,” Searls says, borrowing a term coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who initially conceived it during the Second World War, while studying how fighter pilots perceive their environment. This approach to perception has the benefit of breaking down the distinction between self and world: a chair in all of its chairness doesn’t exist without a perceiver to see it as something to sit in; a chair is the affordance of a place to sit.",
"What does this have to do with translation? Reading, Searls points out, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. “All the philosophical dilemmas about whether translation ‘reflects’ or instead ‘transforms’ what’s in the original need to be swept aside,” Searls declares. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is neither found nor created through experience but revealed, developed, Searls writes, as if it were a photograph. He suggests that translation does something similar, “developing” the original as if it were a photographic negative.",
"Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. “We don’t translate words of a language, we translate uses of language,” Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text’s “force.” “In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English,” Searls writes. He points to his retranslation of Max Weber’s “Vocation Lectures,” delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, “We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as . . .” (Nun können wir . . . mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung . . . in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to “The clear trend is toward . . .” He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English.",
"Conceiving language as something you flirt and fight with, rather than a dry dictionary’s worth of words, also helps resolve the old cocktail-party question of whether everything can be translated. What do you do with some triple-barreled German compound, or the fabled forty-ninth Eskimo term for snow? Searls relates a story from a talk he gave with the Austrian dramatist Clemens Berger, who told the audience about a word (mamihlapinatapai) from an Indigenous language (Yagán) in southern Patagonia. Berger explained that the word referred to “well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I’m interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that.” The audience laughed—and Searls pointed out that, in relating how mamihlapinatapai can’t be translated, the playwright had in fact just translated it: it didn’t fit into a single word, but the term did what it was supposed to do. Thinking this way lets a translator cut through, or simply ignore, a lot of knotty problems.",
"Searls’s philosophy is ultimately one of freedom— to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done. Some might find this liberty surprising, even alarming, particularly when it comes to texts whose meaning is not merely a product of the reader’s experience but inheres closely in their precise verbal structure. (A philosopher reviewing Searls’s edition of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” observes that the translation’s occasionally revelatory “fluency” could also lead to “sometimes downright misinterpretation.”) But for Searls it’s inevitable that any translation will be deeply subjective. “All translators are faithful,” Searls writes, “but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve.” It can be something as big as gender politics in the Odyssey, or as small as that “I” wagging like a tail at the end of Bragi’s name.",
"This is also, then, a philosophy of trust. Readers must take translators on their word that the translated version has anything to do with the original, and authors—well, authors just have to buckle up and hold on. Translators also need to trust themselves, and to commit to rendering their experience of a novel or an essay or a poem, rather than trying to make themselves disappear in the no man’s land between languages. In fact, visibility may be the key to their survival as A.I.-driven translators improve, and transcend the mere equivalence-hunting of tools like Google Translate. As is often the case, A.I. isn’t so much changing the game as exaggerating a dynamic already at work: good translation draws on as much of life and experience and personality as good writing does. Robert Frost is reported to have said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But, Searls might say, that’s only true if the translator gets lost, too. ♦"
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SEO: Korg MicroKorg 2 Review: Better, Not Best | This tiny synth is a solid upgrade, but it lives in a sea of excellent competitors.
Introduced in 2002, the MicroKorg became one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. But a lot has changed since then. In the last 22 years Korg has actually tried to update this early 21st century classic a few times, but they haven’t caught on the way the original did. The oxymoronically named MicroKorg XL, the MicroKorg S (which added speakers and not much else), and the MicroKorg XL+ (just a MicroKorg XL with a facelift) all failed to usurp the OG. But Korg is hoping the MicroKorg 2 will be the true successor to the crown.
The MicroKorg 2 is an improvement on the original in almost every way, that much is clear. What’s less clear is whether or not Korg has a winner on its hands, or if the MicroKorg 2 is an uninspired attempt to cash in on a classic. There are so many great smaller synths these days, I'm not sure that this will be the answer for everyone.
Modern Sound
One of the biggest changes from the original MicroKorg is the sound engine. At its core, the MicroKorg 2 is a virtual analog synth (it's digital but aims to sound analog), just like its predecessor. But the scope of its sound-shaping power is much broader. In addition to standard waveshapes like sine and saw, the MicroKorg 2 has a configurable noise source and access to a library of PCM samples that can be used to add a transient to the start of a patch, similar to what you might find on classic ’80s Roland synths like the D-50. The MicroKorg 2 also has three oscillators (instead of two on the original) and a continuously morphing multimode filter.
The MicroKorg 2 is also a multitimbral synth with double the number of voices (eight versus four), compared to its predecessor. This gives it the ability to create complex layered patches (say, an arpeggio and a pad simultaneously) or lush expansive chords. Add to this an expanded six-slot mod matrix with many more sources and destinations, plus a broader selection of effects, and you’ve got an instrument that clearly outclasses its namesake.
What’s truly impressive is that it manages to be far more powerful, but also much easier to program than the original. While the big-knob and genre-based patch browsing remain, gone is the obtuse system where you’re forced to look up parameters on a giant table when trying to tweak presets or craft a sound from scratch. The MicroKorg 2 is nowhere near knob-per-function, but the 2.8-inch screen and contextual buttons make it much easier to find your way around.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say building patches on the MicroKorg 2 is actually fun. This is definitely not something anyone would have ever said about the original.
Not Great Navigation
The genre-based patch navigation does feel outdated, though. It was questionable in 2002 and now seems downright bizarre. The way it’s broken up—four categories with eight banks and eight programs in each bank—feels unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, of the 256 slots, only 64 are reserved for user patches, which is annoying for folks who like to customize for live shows. That being said, if there isn’t a giant knob with the words “hiphop” and “trance” around it, is it really a MicroKorg?
Just like on the first MicroKorg, the factory presets are a mixed bag. Some sound great, some sound aggressively cheesy, and everything is decidedly digital. While the MicroKorg line are virtual analog instruments, they lean into the “virtual” part of that pretty hard. Even with three oscillators at its disposal and the ability to stack sounds in multitimbral mode, the MicroKorg 2 can sound thin at times. This can leave it sounding unimpressive on its own, but makes it very easy to place in a mix. None of this is to say the MicroKorg 2 sounds bad; it excels at the sort of bread-and-butter synth sounds that would be at home in almost any genre, and it’s quite a bit more versatile than the original.
The vocal processing has also received a big upgrade, but it does leave something to be desired. In addition to a vocoder, the MicroKorg 2 now features hardtune (Autotune) and harmonizer effects. When they work, and when combined, they can sound pretty decent. But the hardtune on its own isn’t great and struggles to deliver consistent results. It doesn’t help that the included gooseneck microphone is pretty terrible. While I appreciate Korg including a mic, you basically have to eat the thing for it to pick up your voice at all. You’re definitely better off just bringing your own mic to the party.
It’s also worth noting that the MicroKorg 2 has an arpeggiator but no sequencer. Instead it has an audio looper. It’s an interesting choice that encourages you to approach composing on the MicroKorg 2 slightly differently than you would on most synths. Since you can record with one patch, then switch sounds and record over it, pretty much forever, you can create complex loops that just wouldn’t be possible on a standard mono-timbral synth with a sequencer. I do have one serious nit to pick: There’s no free mode. Instead you need to set the BPM and the number of bars beforehand in a menu. This can make it hard to lock something in during a quick moment of inspiration.
A Better Keybed
The original MicroKorg had its charms, but its keyboard was not one of them. Its keys were tiny, even by mini-key standards, and they were unpleasantly spongy. The new version isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s certainly a massive improvement on the original. The keys are slightly wider and deeper, and have a pretty standard synth-action feel.
Like the original, the MicroKorg 2 is surprisingly sturdy considering its price. While it’s certainly not a premium instrument, it feels like it would withstand the rigors of regular gigging. The buttons and potentiometers all feel robust, as do the pitch and mod wheels. The chassis is mostly plastic, and it’s pretty light, but there’s no alarming flexing even when you start putting some real body weight on it.
Then there's the looks: While in general I think the MicroKorg 2 is more aesthetically pleasing than the original, I will say I do miss the wooden cheeks. They would not only add a classy touch to what is a pretty utilitarian design, but it would also bring a slightly more premium feel befitting its $550 price.
Stiff Competition
Ultimately the biggest issue for the MicroKorg 2 isn't that it is bad, it's simply how much more competition it faces in the $500 to $600 range in 2024 than there was in the early oughts. The ASM Hydrasynth Explorer and Arturia MiniFreak are both $599 and offer far more robust modulation options and arguably more powerful sound engines in general. While both of them are pretty easy to program, neither are quite as approachable and friendly as the MicroKorg 2 with its colorful graphics and weird trophies celebrating your use of the instrument.
$580 would get you another Korg modern classic: the Minilogue. It’s definitely a simpler device and has only half the voices, but it gives you true analog synth sound. If you’re willing to forgo a keyboard you could also get the Minilogue XD desktop module for $550, which gives you both analog and digital voices, plus customizable effects and oscillators through the logue SDK. Plus there’s the Roland Gaia 2 and JD-Xi ($600), all the small Moog semi-modular units ($600), and more Behringer knockoffs than anyone ever asked for.
You’re spoiled for choice at this tier of the synth market. What the MicroKorg 2 delivers is a selection of pretty bread-and-butter synth sounds, plus usable vocal effects in a very fun and user-friendly package. If Korg had managed to keep the price the same ($430), it would be a no brainer. But, with so many other options at this higher price, you’ll have to decide whether you want something simple (MicroKorg 2), something deep (Hydrasynth), something weird (MiniFreak), or something warm (Minilogue). The good news is that the world is your oyster. | {
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"headline": [],
"paragraphs": [
"Introduced in 2002, the MicroKorg became one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. But a lot has changed since then. In the last 22 years Korg has actually tried to update this early 21st century classic a few times, but they haven’t caught on the way the original did. The oxymoronically named MicroKorg XL, the MicroKorg S (which added speakers and not much else), and the MicroKorg XL+ (just a MicroKorg XL with a facelift) all failed to usurp the OG. But Korg is hoping the MicroKorg 2 will be the true successor to the crown.",
"The MicroKorg 2 is an improvement on the original in almost every way, that much is clear. What’s less clear is whether or not Korg has a winner on its hands, or if the MicroKorg 2 is an uninspired attempt to cash in on a classic. There are so many great smaller synths these days, I'm not sure that this will be the answer for everyone."
]
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"One of the biggest changes from the original MicroKorg is the sound engine. At its core, the MicroKorg 2 is a virtual analog synth (it's digital but aims to sound analog), just like its predecessor. But the scope of its sound-shaping power is much broader. In addition to standard waveshapes like sine and saw, the MicroKorg 2 has a configurable noise source and access to a library of PCM samples that can be used to add a transient to the start of a patch, similar to what you might find on classic ’80s Roland synths like the D-50. The MicroKorg 2 also has three oscillators (instead of two on the original) and a continuously morphing multimode filter.",
"The MicroKorg 2 is also a multitimbral synth with double the number of voices (eight versus four), compared to its predecessor. This gives it the ability to create complex layered patches (say, an arpeggio and a pad simultaneously) or lush expansive chords. Add to this an expanded six-slot mod matrix with many more sources and destinations, plus a broader selection of effects, and you’ve got an instrument that clearly outclasses its namesake.",
"What’s truly impressive is that it manages to be far more powerful, but also much easier to program than the original. While the big-knob and genre-based patch browsing remain, gone is the obtuse system where you’re forced to look up parameters on a giant table when trying to tweak presets or craft a sound from scratch. The MicroKorg 2 is nowhere near knob-per-function, but the 2.8-inch screen and contextual buttons make it much easier to find your way around.",
"In fact, I’d go as far as to say building patches on the MicroKorg 2 is actually fun. This is definitely not something anyone would have ever said about the original."
]
},
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"Not Great Navigation"
],
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"The genre-based patch navigation does feel outdated, though. It was questionable in 2002 and now seems downright bizarre. The way it’s broken up—four categories with eight banks and eight programs in each bank—feels unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, of the 256 slots, only 64 are reserved for user patches, which is annoying for folks who like to customize for live shows. That being said, if there isn’t a giant knob with the words “hiphop” and “trance” around it, is it really a MicroKorg?",
"Just like on the first MicroKorg, the factory presets are a mixed bag. Some sound great, some sound aggressively cheesy, and everything is decidedly digital. While the MicroKorg line are virtual analog instruments, they lean into the “virtual” part of that pretty hard. Even with three oscillators at its disposal and the ability to stack sounds in multitimbral mode, the MicroKorg 2 can sound thin at times. This can leave it sounding unimpressive on its own, but makes it very easy to place in a mix. None of this is to say the MicroKorg 2 sounds bad; it excels at the sort of bread-and-butter synth sounds that would be at home in almost any genre, and it’s quite a bit more versatile than the original.",
"The vocal processing has also received a big upgrade, but it does leave something to be desired. In addition to a vocoder, the MicroKorg 2 now features hardtune (Autotune) and harmonizer effects. When they work, and when combined, they can sound pretty decent. But the hardtune on its own isn’t great and struggles to deliver consistent results. It doesn’t help that the included gooseneck microphone is pretty terrible. While I appreciate Korg including a mic, you basically have to eat the thing for it to pick up your voice at all. You’re definitely better off just bringing your own mic to the party.",
"It’s also worth noting that the MicroKorg 2 has an arpeggiator but no sequencer. Instead it has an audio looper. It’s an interesting choice that encourages you to approach composing on the MicroKorg 2 slightly differently than you would on most synths. Since you can record with one patch, then switch sounds and record over it, pretty much forever, you can create complex loops that just wouldn’t be possible on a standard mono-timbral synth with a sequencer. I do have one serious nit to pick: There’s no free mode. Instead you need to set the BPM and the number of bars beforehand in a menu. This can make it hard to lock something in during a quick moment of inspiration."
]
},
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"A Better Keybed"
],
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"The original MicroKorg had its charms, but its keyboard was not one of them. Its keys were tiny, even by mini-key standards, and they were unpleasantly spongy. The new version isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s certainly a massive improvement on the original. The keys are slightly wider and deeper, and have a pretty standard synth-action feel.",
"Like the original, the MicroKorg 2 is surprisingly sturdy considering its price. While it’s certainly not a premium instrument, it feels like it would withstand the rigors of regular gigging. The buttons and potentiometers all feel robust, as do the pitch and mod wheels. The chassis is mostly plastic, and it’s pretty light, but there’s no alarming flexing even when you start putting some real body weight on it.",
"Then there's the looks: While in general I think the MicroKorg 2 is more aesthetically pleasing than the original, I will say I do miss the wooden cheeks. They would not only add a classy touch to what is a pretty utilitarian design, but it would also bring a slightly more premium feel befitting its $550 price."
]
},
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"headline": [
"Stiff Competition"
],
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"Ultimately the biggest issue for the MicroKorg 2 isn't that it is bad, it's simply how much more competition it faces in the $500 to $600 range in 2024 than there was in the early oughts. The ASM Hydrasynth Explorer and Arturia MiniFreak are both $599 and offer far more robust modulation options and arguably more powerful sound engines in general. While both of them are pretty easy to program, neither are quite as approachable and friendly as the MicroKorg 2 with its colorful graphics and weird trophies celebrating your use of the instrument.",
"$580 would get you another Korg modern classic: the Minilogue. It’s definitely a simpler device and has only half the voices, but it gives you true analog synth sound. If you’re willing to forgo a keyboard you could also get the Minilogue XD desktop module for $550, which gives you both analog and digital voices, plus customizable effects and oscillators through the logue SDK. Plus there’s the Roland Gaia 2 and JD-Xi ($600), all the small Moog semi-modular units ($600), and more Behringer knockoffs than anyone ever asked for.",
"You’re spoiled for choice at this tier of the synth market. What the MicroKorg 2 delivers is a selection of pretty bread-and-butter synth sounds, plus usable vocal effects in a very fun and user-friendly package. If Korg had managed to keep the price the same ($430), it would be a no brainer. But, with so many other options at this higher price, you’ll have to decide whether you want something simple (MicroKorg 2), something deep (Hydrasynth), something weird (MiniFreak), or something warm (Minilogue). The good news is that the world is your oyster."
]
}
],
"summary": [
"This tiny synth is a solid upgrade, but it lives in a sea of excellent competitors."
]
} | en | [
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Skip the Viral Hatch Restore 2 for This Brighter, Cheaper Clock | After testing many, many sunrise alarm clocks, I recommend the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 for your perpetually sleepy loved one.
Everytime someone finds out I write about sunrise alarm clocks, they ask me if I’ve tried the Hatch. Specifically, the Hatch Restore 2 ($170), which I’ve seen on gift guides left and right this holiday season. It’s a good device, but personally, I think you can do better.
The Hatch Restore is great for falling asleep, and great if you want a sound machine. But if you really want to wake up easier, it’s not the one I recommend. My favorite sunrise alarm clocks both sell for over $200, which might be a bit more than you'd want to spend. But if you’re looking for something a little cheaper (and cheaper than the Hatch’s $170 price tag!) that can do all the same tricks, look no further than the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300.
Bedtime Brightside
The way sunrise alarm clocks work is that they slowly brighten over the course of a set amount of time. Both the Lumie and Hatch default to start at around 20 minutes, and you can customize it to be longer or shorter to slowly wake you up. It simulates a sunrise, but right next to your face and at your preferred time rather than whenever the sun will actually be rising. It’s especially handy in these dark winter months, and if you need black-out curtains to fall asleep (or if you have a room with no windows, as I once did in college).
A sunrise alarm clock is supposed to replicate the sunrise, the very thing that makes life possible. So the ability to get nice and bright is a clear necessity. That's my problem with the Hatch—it doesn't get bright enough to wake me up in the mornings. I don't have that problem with the Shine 300, which gets bright enough not only to wake me up, but to double as my bedside lamp in the evenings.
It just has one range of sunrise-like shades of yellow and white that it can perform, while the Hatch can do a full rainbow of lights like a smart bulb, but I found I really didn't need green or purple mood lights on a daily basis. What I needed was something bright enough to wake me up, especially as a non-morning person.
It also has a wind-down routine, letting you customize a routine with sounds and dimming the light over your preferred course of time to help you get nice and sleepy. It's one of my favorite features as someone who has just as much trouble falling asleep as she does waking up. I also like that I can click a button and activate the routine on the Shine 300 whenever I'm ready.
Little Quirks
The main downside to not getting a Hatch is losing out on Hatch's larger library of sounds. The Hatch Restore 2 gives you access to 13 wake-up sounds and 24 sleep sounds, plus you can get extra content if you subscribe to Hatch+ ($5 a month). Everything with Hatch is set up through its app, which is easy to use.
The Shine 300, and any other Lumie product, doesn't have an app. Instead, you set it up manually on the device, clicking through its menus to customize your settings for both your morning and evening routines. Setup isn't hard, but you'll definitely want to check the instructions to find out which buttons do what. It's a nice option for anyone who doesn't want a Wi-Fi device at their bedside.
It has an FM radio built in too, letting you choose to fall asleep or wake up to your favorite station. (The Lumie Bodyclock Luxe 750FM ($220) has multiple station-saving buttons, if you want a full-fledged radio experience with your sunrise alarm.) There's a smaller library of 15 sounds, ranging from the classic white noise and waves to the sound of goats bleating and a bustling café. There's your true classic alarm beep, too. For wake-up routines, the sound kicks on once the Shine 300's light has fully brightened, while the evening routine will play your sound of choice the entire time.
The weirdest thing about Shine 300 is that it only tells military time. This is true for all of Lumie's products. While it's not ideal, I got used to it quickly, and friends of mine who have tried a Lumie sunrise alarm have reported the same thing. It's a funny little quirk that I think is well worth it, considering the rest of its features. | {
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"Everytime someone finds out I write about sunrise alarm clocks, they ask me if I’ve tried the Hatch. Specifically, the Hatch Restore 2 ($170), which I’ve seen on gift guides left and right this holiday season. It’s a good device, but personally, I think you can do better.",
"The Hatch Restore is great for falling asleep, and great if you want a sound machine. But if you really want to wake up easier, it’s not the one I recommend. My favorite sunrise alarm clocks both sell for over $200, which might be a bit more than you'd want to spend. But if you’re looking for something a little cheaper (and cheaper than the Hatch’s $170 price tag!) that can do all the same tricks, look no further than the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300."
]
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"Bedtime Brightside"
],
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"The way sunrise alarm clocks work is that they slowly brighten over the course of a set amount of time. Both the Lumie and Hatch default to start at around 20 minutes, and you can customize it to be longer or shorter to slowly wake you up. It simulates a sunrise, but right next to your face and at your preferred time rather than whenever the sun will actually be rising. It’s especially handy in these dark winter months, and if you need black-out curtains to fall asleep (or if you have a room with no windows, as I once did in college).",
"A sunrise alarm clock is supposed to replicate the sunrise, the very thing that makes life possible. So the ability to get nice and bright is a clear necessity. That's my problem with the Hatch—it doesn't get bright enough to wake me up in the mornings. I don't have that problem with the Shine 300, which gets bright enough not only to wake me up, but to double as my bedside lamp in the evenings.",
"It just has one range of sunrise-like shades of yellow and white that it can perform, while the Hatch can do a full rainbow of lights like a smart bulb, but I found I really didn't need green or purple mood lights on a daily basis. What I needed was something bright enough to wake me up, especially as a non-morning person.",
"It also has a wind-down routine, letting you customize a routine with sounds and dimming the light over your preferred course of time to help you get nice and sleepy. It's one of my favorite features as someone who has just as much trouble falling asleep as she does waking up. I also like that I can click a button and activate the routine on the Shine 300 whenever I'm ready."
]
},
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"Little Quirks"
],
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"The main downside to not getting a Hatch is losing out on Hatch's larger library of sounds. The Hatch Restore 2 gives you access to 13 wake-up sounds and 24 sleep sounds, plus you can get extra content if you subscribe to Hatch+ ($5 a month). Everything with Hatch is set up through its app, which is easy to use.",
"The Shine 300, and any other Lumie product, doesn't have an app. Instead, you set it up manually on the device, clicking through its menus to customize your settings for both your morning and evening routines. Setup isn't hard, but you'll definitely want to check the instructions to find out which buttons do what. It's a nice option for anyone who doesn't want a Wi-Fi device at their bedside.",
"It has an FM radio built in too, letting you choose to fall asleep or wake up to your favorite station. (The Lumie Bodyclock Luxe 750FM ($220) has multiple station-saving buttons, if you want a full-fledged radio experience with your sunrise alarm.) There's a smaller library of 15 sounds, ranging from the classic white noise and waves to the sound of goats bleating and a bustling café. There's your true classic alarm beep, too. For wake-up routines, the sound kicks on once the Shine 300's light has fully brightened, while the evening routine will play your sound of choice the entire time.",
"The weirdest thing about Shine 300 is that it only tells military time. This is true for all of Lumie's products. While it's not ideal, I got used to it quickly, and friends of mine who have tried a Lumie sunrise alarm have reported the same thing. It's a funny little quirk that I think is well worth it, considering the rest of its features."
]
}
],
"summary": [
"After testing many, many sunrise alarm clocks, I recommend the Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 for your perpetually sleepy loved one."
]
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"Nena Farrell"
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A Photographer’s Intimate Chronicle of Home Birth | Maggie Shannon’s black-and-white images of childbirth in the COVID era capture the awe-inspiring, quotidian experience of turning one person into two.
In the early, terrifying days of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, many hospitals required pregnant women to labor while wearing a mask, or to give birth without partners or other loved ones present. Soon, midwives reported seeing a surge of interest from women who wanted to have their babies at home. The photographer Maggie Shannon began following some of these midwives in the Los Angeles area—including one who, for a time, performed prenatal checkups in outdoor tents in front of her clinic—and capturing their patients during labor.
Babies born at home accounted for just one and a half per cent of total births in the U.S. in 2022 (the most recent year for which complete statistics are available). But this represented the highest over-all rate in some thirty years, and an increase of fifty-six per cent since 2016. The mothers-to-be whom Shannon photographed, she told me, were often “worried about laboring alone, or they thought that being in a hospital during a pandemic is pretty scary.”
Shannon’s black-and-white images of childbirth in the COVID era eventually became a photo essay in the Times, and are now collected in a new monograph titled “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy.” In these pictures, women breathe through contractions in their own bathrooms and beds, or push out their babies in inflatable birthing pools set up in the middle of their living rooms. The ordinary stuff of domestic life is evident all around them: laundry drying outside a window, or an older sibling’s toys strewn in a corner. In a quintessentially early-COVID image, a midwife sits alone in a cluttered kitchen, doing paperwork in an N95 mask. Childbirth is at once awe-inspiring and utterly quotidian in any context, but especially so when it’s happening right where you usually brush your teeth or watch TV.
One of the touchstones for “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy,” Shannon said, is W. Eugene Smith’s famous photo essay “Country Doctor,” published in Life magazine in 1948, about a heroically overextended general practitioner in rural Colorado. In both Smith’s and Shannon’s work, some of the pictures are imbued with rawness and urgency, while others have the artful angles and shadows of a still from a film noir. In one of Smith’s most memorable images, the doctor looks up sharply from an injured toddler he is tending to, his eyes big and startled; he might be asking an attendant for assistance, or maybe he’s simply taking a beat to steady himself. “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” has a rhyming shot: A father-to-be, bent over the birthing pool where his partner is sobbing in agony, looks over his shoulder, wearing a similar high-beam expression of stunned pause.
“Country Doctor” has personal resonance for Shannon, whose mother is a nurse and whose father is a paramedic. “I always found their work to be incredibly interesting and intimate,” she said. “ ‘Country Doctor’ highlighted the sense of care that they provided—it feels like this is a doctor who really knows his patients.” Shannon also sees “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” as of a piece with her photographs of patients, physicians, and nurses at a Maryland clinic that provides later abortions, which were published in The New Yorker, in February. “It’s all health care—it’s all wrapped together,” she told me. A pregnancy can end in many ways, from a later abortion to a home birth. The watchful, gentle competence of the ob-gyns, midwives, and nurses who see a pregnancy through to its end is a refrain across Shannon’s photographs, including one in “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” in which three midwives gather around a startled mother and her oven-fresh newborn, umbilical cord still attached. One of the midwives, Chemin Perez, is wearing the shy, proud smile of a job well done.
Shannon told me that she wanted to foster a spirit of closeness and trust—even of collaboration—with her subjects, who were allowing a virtual stranger into one of the most vulnerable, private, and pivotal life events that a person can experience. In a gesture of thanks for the new mothers’ generosity, she granted them a measure of editorial control in the form of veto power. “I showed them galleries of all the images beforehand to see what their comfort level was, and if there was anything they didn’t want to have shown,” she said. (Only one woman exercised her veto.) Shannon had been concerned that her photographs might be upsetting to one subject in particular, Lauren Sawson, who had transferred to a traditional hospital setting to avoid complications. But Sawson was quick to reassure her. “No, Maggie, I wasn’t there—you captured this, and I want to see what happened, what it was like, because I was just on a different plane,” Sawson recalled saying.
A paradox of giving birth is that you are irrefutably there—no one has ever been more there!—and yet not there at all. In all but one of Shannon’s images that portray a woman in the throes of labor, her eyes are shut: She cannot see what is happening because she is what is happening, turning one person into two. In studying these photographs, I suddenly remembered the moment, just after my second child was born, when I stood up too fast and looked down, completely unfazed, to behold myself covered in blood. Great bright globs of gore, falling splat-splat on the linoleum. Blood all over my arms and legs, blood stuck in my hair and crusting on my throat. Whose blood is this? How did this happen? It didn’t seem to matter much, now that the baby was here. But “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” made me realize, for the first time in the seven years since that night, that I wouldn’t have minded the chance to review some photographic evidence of how I got that way.
The science journalist Meehan Crist, writing about the birth of her son, describes her “conscious everyday mind . . . floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access.” It is perhaps beyond any artist’s abilities to intrude fully upon this world. Instead, the photographer can document the bright, hectic surface while the mother is consumed with her work deep underground. “It felt really good,” Shannon said of Sawson, “to be able to offer a different viewpoint of her experience that she feels like she missed.” | {
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"In the early, terrifying days of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, many hospitals required pregnant women to labor while wearing a mask, or to give birth without partners or other loved ones present. Soon, midwives reported seeing a surge of interest from women who wanted to have their babies at home. The photographer Maggie Shannon began following some of these midwives in the Los Angeles area—including one who, for a time, performed prenatal checkups in outdoor tents in front of her clinic—and capturing their patients during labor.",
"Babies born at home accounted for just one and a half per cent of total births in the U.S. in 2022 (the most recent year for which complete statistics are available). But this represented the highest over-all rate in some thirty years, and an increase of fifty-six per cent since 2016. The mothers-to-be whom Shannon photographed, she told me, were often “worried about laboring alone, or they thought that being in a hospital during a pandemic is pretty scary.”",
"Shannon’s black-and-white images of childbirth in the COVID era eventually became a photo essay in the Times, and are now collected in a new monograph titled “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy.” In these pictures, women breathe through contractions in their own bathrooms and beds, or push out their babies in inflatable birthing pools set up in the middle of their living rooms. The ordinary stuff of domestic life is evident all around them: laundry drying outside a window, or an older sibling’s toys strewn in a corner. In a quintessentially early-COVID image, a midwife sits alone in a cluttered kitchen, doing paperwork in an N95 mask. Childbirth is at once awe-inspiring and utterly quotidian in any context, but especially so when it’s happening right where you usually brush your teeth or watch TV.",
"One of the touchstones for “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy,” Shannon said, is W. Eugene Smith’s famous photo essay “Country Doctor,” published in Life magazine in 1948, about a heroically overextended general practitioner in rural Colorado. In both Smith’s and Shannon’s work, some of the pictures are imbued with rawness and urgency, while others have the artful angles and shadows of a still from a film noir. In one of Smith’s most memorable images, the doctor looks up sharply from an injured toddler he is tending to, his eyes big and startled; he might be asking an attendant for assistance, or maybe he’s simply taking a beat to steady himself. “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” has a rhyming shot: A father-to-be, bent over the birthing pool where his partner is sobbing in agony, looks over his shoulder, wearing a similar high-beam expression of stunned pause.",
"“Country Doctor” has personal resonance for Shannon, whose mother is a nurse and whose father is a paramedic. “I always found their work to be incredibly interesting and intimate,” she said. “ ‘Country Doctor’ highlighted the sense of care that they provided—it feels like this is a doctor who really knows his patients.” Shannon also sees “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” as of a piece with her photographs of patients, physicians, and nurses at a Maryland clinic that provides later abortions, which were published in The New Yorker, in February. “It’s all health care—it’s all wrapped together,” she told me. A pregnancy can end in many ways, from a later abortion to a home birth. The watchful, gentle competence of the ob-gyns, midwives, and nurses who see a pregnancy through to its end is a refrain across Shannon’s photographs, including one in “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” in which three midwives gather around a startled mother and her oven-fresh newborn, umbilical cord still attached. One of the midwives, Chemin Perez, is wearing the shy, proud smile of a job well done.",
"Shannon told me that she wanted to foster a spirit of closeness and trust—even of collaboration—with her subjects, who were allowing a virtual stranger into one of the most vulnerable, private, and pivotal life events that a person can experience. In a gesture of thanks for the new mothers’ generosity, she granted them a measure of editorial control in the form of veto power. “I showed them galleries of all the images beforehand to see what their comfort level was, and if there was anything they didn’t want to have shown,” she said. (Only one woman exercised her veto.) Shannon had been concerned that her photographs might be upsetting to one subject in particular, Lauren Sawson, who had transferred to a traditional hospital setting to avoid complications. But Sawson was quick to reassure her. “No, Maggie, I wasn’t there—you captured this, and I want to see what happened, what it was like, because I was just on a different plane,” Sawson recalled saying.",
"A paradox of giving birth is that you are irrefutably there—no one has ever been more there!—and yet not there at all. In all but one of Shannon’s images that portray a woman in the throes of labor, her eyes are shut: She cannot see what is happening because she is what is happening, turning one person into two. In studying these photographs, I suddenly remembered the moment, just after my second child was born, when I stood up too fast and looked down, completely unfazed, to behold myself covered in blood. Great bright globs of gore, falling splat-splat on the linoleum. Blood all over my arms and legs, blood stuck in my hair and crusting on my throat. Whose blood is this? How did this happen? It didn’t seem to matter much, now that the baby was here. But “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” made me realize, for the first time in the seven years since that night, that I wouldn’t have minded the chance to review some photographic evidence of how I got that way.",
"The science journalist Meehan Crist, writing about the birth of her son, describes her “conscious everyday mind . . . floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access.” It is perhaps beyond any artist’s abilities to intrude fully upon this world. Instead, the photographer can document the bright, hectic surface while the mother is consumed with her work deep underground. “It felt really good,” Shannon said of Sawson, “to be able to offer a different viewpoint of her experience that she feels like she missed.”"
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New York’s top VCs under 30 | The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple.
They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We chatted with some of the young investors — think, under 30 — who are helping to shape the future of venture capitalism in New York City.
Here’s who is on the list so far.
(This list will be updated periodically.)
Layla Alexander — Female Founders Fund
Background: Alexander, 25, first entered the industry through an internship with Cleo Capital and Harlem Capital, before landing at FFF as an investor in 2022.
Why this VC is notable: She’s excited about the care economy, enterprise climate tech, and healthcare (all very buzzy — and lucrative — sectors these days). Her firm’s portfolio includes the astrology app Co-Star and model Winnie Harlow’s Cay Skin.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, reading, the sauna, and Pilates. She’s looking for founders who deeply know their market, retain users, and have research that shows their companies can scale.
Talia Askowitz — Deerfield Management
Background: Askowitz, 26, is a principal at Deerfield Management where she became the firm’s youngest partner at just the age of 25, according to Forbes. She previously worked at AMC Health as a business intelligence intern and was a volunteer research assistant at Mount Sinai Health Systems.
Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and, according to the outlet, has helped deploy over $500 million in capital.
Fun facts and interests: She co-authored three papers while at Mount Sinai Health Systems.
Lori Berenberg — Bloomberg Beta
Background: Berenberg, 29, worked in technical and product management roles after college until she caught the eye of Bloomberg Beta. Transitioning from product management to venture capital was a risk, but she says her background gives her a unique perspective while evaluating startups, allowing her to “bridge the gap between technical innovation and go-to-market,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: One of the features she led while working at MongoDB as a product manager is now awaiting a patent.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include needlepoint and vintage fashion. She wants to back companies with the potential to be more than great. “It needs a shot at the extraordinary.”
Alex Chung — Chai Ventures
Background: Chung, 26, got into the venture industry through her mentor, Serena Dayal, a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, who shared tips on how to navigate the ecosystem. “Most importantly, she imbued me with confidence,” Chung told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: She’s into women’s health, identifying it as an area for much potential as the sector — and its need for innovation — steps into the national spotlight. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, racquet sports, and needlepointing.
Besart Çopa — Antler
Background: Çopa, 27, started at Antler just this year. He previously held an internship at a16z, then started Chestr, an online shopping platform. The company closed and Copa then joined Antler. He thought about founding another startup but felt he didn’t have an idea he was passionate about, “so the second best thing was to support others who did.”
Why this VC is notable: He’s a founder turned principal investor at one of the hottest accelerator programs around. “If I hadn’t chewed glass myself, I would have found it impossible to truly sympathize with the journeys of the founders I support.”
Fun facts and interests: He disagrees with the industry’s seeming obsession with young founders. “Let teens be teens,” he said. “Fall in love. Watch the stars. You can still build on the side. If you have an idea you feel in your bones that it must exist, then go for it. Otherwise, you can always start a B2B SaaS [company] later.”
His hobbies include reading history and painting. As a pre-seed investor, he has a founder-centric approach to investing and says he’s looking for those who are building focused solutions for niche user problems. “The more niche, the better!”
Ethan Daly — Shine Capital
Background: Daly, 27, started out in investment banking before moving to Shine, where he has been for the past four years. He is now a partner at the firm.
Why this VC is notable: He was recently promoted to partner at Shine.
Fun facts and interests: Shine Capital’s portfolio includes the collector community Flamingo and the workplace platform Notion.
George Easley — Outsiders Fund
Background: Easley, 29, started at Outsiders Fund in 2021 and is now a principal at the fund where he helps lead investments in sectors such as AI and robotics. He was previously a senior analyst at ICONIQ Capital, as well as held associate and analyst roles at Bridgewater and Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, respectively.
Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 and, according to Forbes, he’s helped invest more than $25 million in companies such as Breedr and Cercle. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his LinkedIn, he studied history and geography at Dartmouth, where he played both tennis and table tennis.
Marina Girgis — Precursor VC
Background: Girgis, 29, started out on the finance side, researching data and semiconductors. She loved learning about emerging tech but said she wanted to have more of a direct impact on the companies she researched, so she pivoted and has since become quite bullish on investing in companies at the pre-seed stage.
“I chose to become a generalist and invest at the earliest stage possible, idea-stage companies, so I could get to know the people behind the companies and witness their transformation from the very beginning,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: Known for her knack at picking pre-seed companies, like AI security startup Edera, and for moving fast to make the end-to-end investment process feel seamless.
Fun facts and interests: Her outside hobbies include jigsaw puzzles and reading murder mysteries. One thing she would like to see change in the industry is rigid thinking on what type of founders to back. “There are no hard and fast rules in venture,” she said, adding that anyone can fail regardless of background. “You should learn from your past experiences as an investor, but my hope is to stay open-minded.”
Laura Hamilton — Notable Capital
Background: Hamilton, 26, has been an investor at Notable Capital since 2023. She got her start in the industry by sending many cold emails and making cold calls to alumni. She landed her first VC job by applying cold on LinkedIn, “proving the hustle strategy works,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: At Notable, she’s focusing on data, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and cybersecurity. “Right now, I’m especially interested in agent infrastructure,” and she is looking to back more founders with deep passion and purpose.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hosting a podcast called Partner Path, where she dives into the success stories of rising investors and founders. She also helps run FemBuild Collective, a community for female engineers and technical founders in the City.
Emily Herrera — Slow Ventures
Background: Herrera, 25, is an investor at Slow Ventures, whose portfolio includes delivery service Postmates, women’s footwear brand Birdies, and the social app Citizen. She previously worked at Night Ventures and specializes in consumer investing and the creator economy.
Why this VC is notable: Her forward-thinking approach to creator economy investing came as others were still pondering the sector’s impact.
Fun facts and interests: She has a long history in venture, interning everywhere from Harlem Capital to Dorm Room Fund. Fast Company hailed her as one of the “savviest creator economy investors” in 2022 for her work at Night Ventures, which backed companies such as influencer marketing platform Pearpop and NFT app Zora.
Bryce Johnson — Primary Venture Partners
Background: Johnson, 25, spent time working in software and product at Big Tech. He heard Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital speak at an event one year and became fixated on the idea of early-stage investing. He pivoted to management consulting and used that network to land an analyst role at Primary.
Why this VC is notable: One of the only junior VCs at his firm, he is known for being an advocate for diversity within VC.
Fun facts and interests: He loves classical music and backpacked Southeast Asia last summer. For work, his focus is in healthcare, consumer, SMB tech, and vertical SaaS.
Bradford Jones — SignalFire
Background: Bradford, 28, is a principal at SignalFire. Before that, he was an investor at Insight Partners.
Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2025 and Forbes reports that he leads SignalFire’s NYC office, where he focuses on the intersection of applied AI and SaaS, helping lead investments into companies like Tofy and Shade. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his Linkedin, he played D-1 football at the University of Michigan
Will McKelvey — Lerer Hippeau
Background: McKelvey, 29, partnered with a few classmates and raised a fund to start backing startups while attending UC Berkeley. After graduation, he moved to New York and joined Lerer Hippeau.
Why this VC is notable: Launched a student venture fund at Berkeley that is still making investments.
Fun facts and interests: One thing he would like to change about the industry is the amount of ego and arrogance that persists, which can cause investors to miss out on opportunities and talent. “Many VCs have always been the star student, went to the fancy schools, and got the fancy job, so they misguidedly carry that attitude into this role,” he continued. “This industry could use a heavy dose of humility.”
His hobbies include softball, basketball, and beach volleyball. He wants to know two things from the founders who pitch him. “What is the insight you have that everyone else is missing, and how did you unearth it?” he said. “What is driving you to take on the titanic effort of building a company from scratch?”
Mason Murray — NEA
Background: Murray, 28, joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.
Why this VC is notable: Unprompted, three people on this list asked to make sure he was included. According to NEA’s website, he has made six investments, including in the newsletter company beehiiv and AI video company Tweleve Labs.
Fun facts and interests: He joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.
He’s bullish on AI and wouldn’t mind seeing more AI founders coming to New York. “We have talent, customers, capital, and great academic institutions,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m bullish on New York.”
In his personal life, he’s a hobby collector, musician, singer, and amateur cook. In his professional life, he’s looking for founders with a clear vision on how the world can be different, “paired with a precise hypothesis on what it takes to get there.”
Zehra Naqvi — Headline Ventures
Background: Naqvi, 25, worked at a few consumer startups before officially becoming an investor for Headline last year.
Why this VC is notable: She’s known around town for her popular venture capital newsletter No GPs Allowed, which offers networking opportunities to investors around New York.
Fun facts and interests: She loves being an investor and says even though the market is down in the consumer sector right now, “history has proven time and time again that now is the best time to double down on investing in the future of consumers,” she told TechCrunch. “Be a contrarian.”
Her hobbies include going to art galleries, traveling, playing tennis, and watching movies (she’s an AMC Stubs member). She’s looking for founders in the consumer space, in both tech and consumer packaged goods, between pre-seed and Series A.
David Ongchoco — Comma Capital
Background: Ongchoco, 28, has a background in tech, sales, and investing, working for places like Dorm Room Fund, interning at Learn Capital, and working in sales and growth at Amplitude and Rutter.
Why this VC is notable: Ongchoco is a co-founder of Comma Capital, which invests at the pre-seed and seed stages. Fun facts and interests: He, alongside his co-founder Adarsh Bhatt, made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 this year for their work in venture capital. Comma has backed more than 50 companies to date, some of which have gone on to be acquired by companies like Stripe and Airtable.
Will Robbins — Contrary
Background: Robbins, 27, is a general partner at Contrary. According to his LinkedIn, he previously worked for various tech companies doing machine learning and held general roles at startups.
Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025, with the outlet reporting that he has helped raise four funds worth millions. Investments include the unicorn Zepto and Alloy Automation.
Fun Facts and Interests: Forbes also says he helps provide startup opportunities to underrepresented youth.
Michael Shepard — Insight Partners
Background: Shepherd, 29, is a principal at Insight Partners. Before that, he held roles at iCapital Network and Levine Leitchman Capital Partners.
Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and worked his way up from an intern at Insight Partners to a partner. He focuses on SaaS in Europe and North America, with investments including Kabal and Colab. Fun facts and interests: His LinkedIn says he is the founder of the startup Lagom.io which creates homepages for browsers.
Alexandra Sukin — Bessemer Venture Partners
Background: Sukin, 27, got her start in the industry while at Harvard, where she was involved with various on-campus activities like Harvard Ventures and was a founding member of the VC firm Contrary Capital. After graduating, she joined Bessemer.
Why this VC is notable: She’s a vice president at Bessemer, and her investments include the fintech Truebill (acquired by Rocket Technologies) and enterprise companies Unito, Rewind, and Contractbook.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hiking and skiing, and she loves spending time out West, as her father’s side of the family is from Montana and Colorado. “While I’m investing a lot these days in vertical and SMB software, I am also really excited about AI enabling a wave of consumer companies,” she said.
Mark Xu — Lightspeed Venture Partners
Background: Xu, 24, is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, whose investments, according to his LinkedIn, include Glean, Stripe, Wiz, and Anduril.
Why this VC is notable: One of the youngest to ever be promoted to partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
Fun facts and interests: Attended the Juilliard School for the violin before heading to Harvard University to study math. Had a background in business development and investment banking before joining Lightspeed Ventures.
Claire Zau — GSV Ventures
Background: Zau, 27, is one of the youngest investors ever to become a partner at GSV, where she helps lead AI investments, according to Forbes. She previously held internships at Red & Blue Ventures, Julius Bear, and Baring Private Equity Asia.
Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 with investments including Pace AI, Magic School, and Paloma. Fun facts and interest: She has an AI newsletter called “GSV: AI & Education” that has more than 6,000 subscribers.
Vincent Zhu — General Catalyst
Background: Zhu, 25, is an early-stage investor at General Catalyst and, according to his LinkedIn, loves working with founders “building for the digitally native generation.”
Why this VC is notable: He’s made a name for himself around town, hosting events and helping founders get intros.
Fun facts and interests: After college, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining General Catalyst two years ago. The firm’s portfolio includes Stripe, Canva, and Warby Parker.
This piece was updated to reflect Mason Murray’s most recent investments. | {
"sections": [
{
"headline": [],
"paragraphs": [
"They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We chatted with some of the young investors — think, under 30 — who are helping to shape the future of venture capitalism in New York City.",
"Here’s who is on the list so far.",
"(This list will be updated periodically.)"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Layla Alexander — Female Founders Fund"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Alexander, 25, first entered the industry through an internship with Cleo Capital and Harlem Capital, before landing at FFF as an investor in 2022.",
"Why this VC is notable: She’s excited about the care economy, enterprise climate tech, and healthcare (all very buzzy — and lucrative — sectors these days). Her firm’s portfolio includes the astrology app Co-Star and model Winnie Harlow’s Cay Skin.",
"Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, reading, the sauna, and Pilates. She’s looking for founders who deeply know their market, retain users, and have research that shows their companies can scale."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Talia Askowitz — Deerfield Management"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Askowitz, 26, is a principal at Deerfield Management where she became the firm’s youngest partner at just the age of 25, according to Forbes. She previously worked at AMC Health as a business intelligence intern and was a volunteer research assistant at Mount Sinai Health Systems.",
"Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and, according to the outlet, has helped deploy over $500 million in capital.",
"Fun facts and interests: She co-authored three papers while at Mount Sinai Health Systems."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Lori Berenberg — Bloomberg Beta"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Berenberg, 29, worked in technical and product management roles after college until she caught the eye of Bloomberg Beta. Transitioning from product management to venture capital was a risk, but she says her background gives her a unique perspective while evaluating startups, allowing her to “bridge the gap between technical innovation and go-to-market,” she told TechCrunch.",
"Why this VC is notable: One of the features she led while working at MongoDB as a product manager is now awaiting a patent.",
"Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include needlepoint and vintage fashion. She wants to back companies with the potential to be more than great. “It needs a shot at the extraordinary.”"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Alex Chung — Chai Ventures"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Chung, 26, got into the venture industry through her mentor, Serena Dayal, a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, who shared tips on how to navigate the ecosystem. “Most importantly, she imbued me with confidence,” Chung told TechCrunch.",
"Why this VC is notable: She’s into women’s health, identifying it as an area for much potential as the sector — and its need for innovation — steps into the national spotlight. Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, racquet sports, and needlepointing."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Besart Çopa — Antler"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Çopa, 27, started at Antler just this year. He previously held an internship at a16z, then started Chestr, an online shopping platform. The company closed and Copa then joined Antler. He thought about founding another startup but felt he didn’t have an idea he was passionate about, “so the second best thing was to support others who did.”",
"Why this VC is notable: He’s a founder turned principal investor at one of the hottest accelerator programs around. “If I hadn’t chewed glass myself, I would have found it impossible to truly sympathize with the journeys of the founders I support.”",
"Fun facts and interests: He disagrees with the industry’s seeming obsession with young founders. “Let teens be teens,” he said. “Fall in love. Watch the stars. You can still build on the side. If you have an idea you feel in your bones that it must exist, then go for it. Otherwise, you can always start a B2B SaaS [company] later.”",
"His hobbies include reading history and painting. As a pre-seed investor, he has a founder-centric approach to investing and says he’s looking for those who are building focused solutions for niche user problems. “The more niche, the better!”"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Ethan Daly — Shine Capital"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Daly, 27, started out in investment banking before moving to Shine, where he has been for the past four years. He is now a partner at the firm.",
"Why this VC is notable: He was recently promoted to partner at Shine.",
"Fun facts and interests: Shine Capital’s portfolio includes the collector community Flamingo and the workplace platform Notion."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"George Easley — Outsiders Fund"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Easley, 29, started at Outsiders Fund in 2021 and is now a principal at the fund where he helps lead investments in sectors such as AI and robotics. He was previously a senior analyst at ICONIQ Capital, as well as held associate and analyst roles at Bridgewater and Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, respectively.",
"Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 and, according to Forbes, he’s helped invest more than $25 million in companies such as Breedr and Cercle. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his LinkedIn, he studied history and geography at Dartmouth, where he played both tennis and table tennis."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Marina Girgis — Precursor VC"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Girgis, 29, started out on the finance side, researching data and semiconductors. She loved learning about emerging tech but said she wanted to have more of a direct impact on the companies she researched, so she pivoted and has since become quite bullish on investing in companies at the pre-seed stage.",
"“I chose to become a generalist and invest at the earliest stage possible, idea-stage companies, so I could get to know the people behind the companies and witness their transformation from the very beginning,” she told TechCrunch.",
"Why this VC is notable: Known for her knack at picking pre-seed companies, like AI security startup Edera, and for moving fast to make the end-to-end investment process feel seamless.",
"Fun facts and interests: Her outside hobbies include jigsaw puzzles and reading murder mysteries. One thing she would like to see change in the industry is rigid thinking on what type of founders to back. “There are no hard and fast rules in venture,” she said, adding that anyone can fail regardless of background. “You should learn from your past experiences as an investor, but my hope is to stay open-minded.”"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Laura Hamilton — Notable Capital"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Hamilton, 26, has been an investor at Notable Capital since 2023. She got her start in the industry by sending many cold emails and making cold calls to alumni. She landed her first VC job by applying cold on LinkedIn, “proving the hustle strategy works,” she told TechCrunch.",
"Why this VC is notable: At Notable, she’s focusing on data, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and cybersecurity. “Right now, I’m especially interested in agent infrastructure,” and she is looking to back more founders with deep passion and purpose.",
"Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hosting a podcast called Partner Path, where she dives into the success stories of rising investors and founders. She also helps run FemBuild Collective, a community for female engineers and technical founders in the City."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Emily Herrera — Slow Ventures"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Herrera, 25, is an investor at Slow Ventures, whose portfolio includes delivery service Postmates, women’s footwear brand Birdies, and the social app Citizen. She previously worked at Night Ventures and specializes in consumer investing and the creator economy.",
"Why this VC is notable: Her forward-thinking approach to creator economy investing came as others were still pondering the sector’s impact.",
"Fun facts and interests: She has a long history in venture, interning everywhere from Harlem Capital to Dorm Room Fund. Fast Company hailed her as one of the “savviest creator economy investors” in 2022 for her work at Night Ventures, which backed companies such as influencer marketing platform Pearpop and NFT app Zora."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Bryce Johnson — Primary Venture Partners"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Johnson, 25, spent time working in software and product at Big Tech. He heard Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital speak at an event one year and became fixated on the idea of early-stage investing. He pivoted to management consulting and used that network to land an analyst role at Primary.",
"Why this VC is notable: One of the only junior VCs at his firm, he is known for being an advocate for diversity within VC.",
"Fun facts and interests: He loves classical music and backpacked Southeast Asia last summer. For work, his focus is in healthcare, consumer, SMB tech, and vertical SaaS."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Bradford Jones — SignalFire"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Bradford, 28, is a principal at SignalFire. Before that, he was an investor at Insight Partners.",
"Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2025 and Forbes reports that he leads SignalFire’s NYC office, where he focuses on the intersection of applied AI and SaaS, helping lead investments into companies like Tofy and Shade. Fun Facts and Interests: According to his Linkedin, he played D-1 football at the University of Michigan"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Will McKelvey — Lerer Hippeau"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: McKelvey, 29, partnered with a few classmates and raised a fund to start backing startups while attending UC Berkeley. After graduation, he moved to New York and joined Lerer Hippeau.",
"Why this VC is notable: Launched a student venture fund at Berkeley that is still making investments.",
"Fun facts and interests: One thing he would like to change about the industry is the amount of ego and arrogance that persists, which can cause investors to miss out on opportunities and talent. “Many VCs have always been the star student, went to the fancy schools, and got the fancy job, so they misguidedly carry that attitude into this role,” he continued. “This industry could use a heavy dose of humility.”",
"His hobbies include softball, basketball, and beach volleyball. He wants to know two things from the founders who pitch him. “What is the insight you have that everyone else is missing, and how did you unearth it?” he said. “What is driving you to take on the titanic effort of building a company from scratch?”"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Mason Murray — NEA"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Murray, 28, joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.",
"Why this VC is notable: Unprompted, three people on this list asked to make sure he was included. According to NEA’s website, he has made six investments, including in the newsletter company beehiiv and AI video company Tweleve Labs.",
"Fun facts and interests: He joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.",
"He’s bullish on AI and wouldn’t mind seeing more AI founders coming to New York. “We have talent, customers, capital, and great academic institutions,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m bullish on New York.”",
"In his personal life, he’s a hobby collector, musician, singer, and amateur cook. In his professional life, he’s looking for founders with a clear vision on how the world can be different, “paired with a precise hypothesis on what it takes to get there.”"
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Zehra Naqvi — Headline Ventures"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Naqvi, 25, worked at a few consumer startups before officially becoming an investor for Headline last year.",
"Why this VC is notable: She’s known around town for her popular venture capital newsletter No GPs Allowed, which offers networking opportunities to investors around New York.",
"Fun facts and interests: She loves being an investor and says even though the market is down in the consumer sector right now, “history has proven time and time again that now is the best time to double down on investing in the future of consumers,” she told TechCrunch. “Be a contrarian.”",
"Her hobbies include going to art galleries, traveling, playing tennis, and watching movies (she’s an AMC Stubs member). She’s looking for founders in the consumer space, in both tech and consumer packaged goods, between pre-seed and Series A."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"David Ongchoco — Comma Capital"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Ongchoco, 28, has a background in tech, sales, and investing, working for places like Dorm Room Fund, interning at Learn Capital, and working in sales and growth at Amplitude and Rutter.",
"Why this VC is notable: Ongchoco is a co-founder of Comma Capital, which invests at the pre-seed and seed stages. Fun facts and interests: He, alongside his co-founder Adarsh Bhatt, made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 this year for their work in venture capital. Comma has backed more than 50 companies to date, some of which have gone on to be acquired by companies like Stripe and Airtable."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Will Robbins — Contrary"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Robbins, 27, is a general partner at Contrary. According to his LinkedIn, he previously worked for various tech companies doing machine learning and held general roles at startups.",
"Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025, with the outlet reporting that he has helped raise four funds worth millions. Investments include the unicorn Zepto and Alloy Automation.",
"Fun Facts and Interests: Forbes also says he helps provide startup opportunities to underrepresented youth."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Michael Shepard — Insight Partners"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Shepherd, 29, is a principal at Insight Partners. Before that, he held roles at iCapital Network and Levine Leitchman Capital Partners.",
"Why this VC is notable: He made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2025 and worked his way up from an intern at Insight Partners to a partner. He focuses on SaaS in Europe and North America, with investments including Kabal and Colab. Fun facts and interests: His LinkedIn says he is the founder of the startup Lagom.io which creates homepages for browsers."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Alexandra Sukin — Bessemer Venture Partners"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Sukin, 27, got her start in the industry while at Harvard, where she was involved with various on-campus activities like Harvard Ventures and was a founding member of the VC firm Contrary Capital. After graduating, she joined Bessemer.",
"Why this VC is notable: She’s a vice president at Bessemer, and her investments include the fintech Truebill (acquired by Rocket Technologies) and enterprise companies Unito, Rewind, and Contractbook.",
"Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hiking and skiing, and she loves spending time out West, as her father’s side of the family is from Montana and Colorado. “While I’m investing a lot these days in vertical and SMB software, I am also really excited about AI enabling a wave of consumer companies,” she said."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Mark Xu — Lightspeed Venture Partners"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Xu, 24, is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, whose investments, according to his LinkedIn, include Glean, Stripe, Wiz, and Anduril.",
"Why this VC is notable: One of the youngest to ever be promoted to partner at Lightspeed Ventures.",
"Fun facts and interests: Attended the Juilliard School for the violin before heading to Harvard University to study math. Had a background in business development and investment banking before joining Lightspeed Ventures."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Claire Zau — GSV Ventures"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Zau, 27, is one of the youngest investors ever to become a partner at GSV, where she helps lead AI investments, according to Forbes. She previously held internships at Red & Blue Ventures, Julius Bear, and Baring Private Equity Asia.",
"Why this VC is notable: She made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2025 with investments including Pace AI, Magic School, and Paloma. Fun facts and interest: She has an AI newsletter called “GSV: AI & Education” that has more than 6,000 subscribers."
]
},
{
"headline": [
"Vincent Zhu — General Catalyst"
],
"paragraphs": [
"Background: Zhu, 25, is an early-stage investor at General Catalyst and, according to his LinkedIn, loves working with founders “building for the digitally native generation.”",
"Why this VC is notable: He’s made a name for himself around town, hosting events and helping founders get intros.",
"Fun facts and interests: After college, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining General Catalyst two years ago. The firm’s portfolio includes Stripe, Canva, and Warby Parker.",
"This piece was updated to reflect Mason Murray’s most recent investments."
]
}
],
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"The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple."
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Power cuts, train cancellations as Storm Darragh batters UK | Tens of thousands of people across the U.K. were left without power Saturday morning after Storm Darragh hit the country with strong winds and caused pre-Christmas travel disruptions.
The U.K.'s Met Office issued a rare red alert for high winds overnight to Saturday morning, covering parts of Wales and southwest England.
The government warned 3 million people living in the area with a siren-like alert on their phones to stay at home Friday night.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the storm posed a "challenging situation."
"About 3 million homes will have had the emergency alert system to their mobile phone. I would just encourage anyone who has had that to follow the advice," Reynolds told Sky News on Saturday.
Darragh, the fourth named storm of the season, is also expected to bring heavy rain through the weekend, with more than 100 flood warnings and alerts in place across the U.K.
One man died after a tree fell onto his van during the storm, said police in Lancashire, northwest England.
In Wales, the Met Office estimated gusts of up to 150 kph, which knocked out power for over 50,000 people, according to the PA news agency.
Power cuts affected 86,000 homes in England, Scotland and Wales, according to the Energy Networks Association.
Trains were disrupted or suspended on several routes, including from Glasgow to Edinburgh in Scotland and between Cambridge and Stansted Airport in eastern England.
Rail operator CrossCountry put a "do not travel" notice in place for Saturday due to cancellations and severe delays.
Network Rail Wales suspended trains on the Welsh northern coast due to a "fallen tree blocking the line," and several bridges in southern England and Wales were closed for safety reasons.
A separate amber warning, which is less serious than the red alert but still poses "potential risk to life and property," covering a larger stretch of the Britain and Northern Ireland is in place until Saturday night.
In Northern Ireland, thousands were left without power, and several bus and train services were suspended or delayed.
Christmas markets and sporting events were postponed, including the Merseyside derby between Premier League leaders Liverpool and Everton.
In Ireland, which issued an "orange" wind warning, 400,000 people were left without electricity, according to the RTE news agency.
Dublin Airport said a "a number of flights scheduled for Saturday morning have been cancelled by airlines" due to the storm.
Darragh comes two weeks after Storm Bert battered much of Britain, causing flooding in parts of Wales and knocking out power to thousands of homes in Ireland. | {
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"Tens of thousands of people across the U.K. were left without power Saturday morning after Storm Darragh hit the country with strong winds and caused pre-Christmas travel disruptions.",
"The U.K.'s Met Office issued a rare red alert for high winds overnight to Saturday morning, covering parts of Wales and southwest England.",
"The government warned 3 million people living in the area with a siren-like alert on their phones to stay at home Friday night.",
"Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the storm posed a \"challenging situation.\"",
"\"About 3 million homes will have had the emergency alert system to their mobile phone. I would just encourage anyone who has had that to follow the advice,\" Reynolds told Sky News on Saturday.",
"Darragh, the fourth named storm of the season, is also expected to bring heavy rain through the weekend, with more than 100 flood warnings and alerts in place across the U.K.",
"One man died after a tree fell onto his van during the storm, said police in Lancashire, northwest England.",
"In Wales, the Met Office estimated gusts of up to 150 kph, which knocked out power for over 50,000 people, according to the PA news agency.",
"Power cuts affected 86,000 homes in England, Scotland and Wales, according to the Energy Networks Association.",
"Trains were disrupted or suspended on several routes, including from Glasgow to Edinburgh in Scotland and between Cambridge and Stansted Airport in eastern England.",
"Rail operator CrossCountry put a \"do not travel\" notice in place for Saturday due to cancellations and severe delays.",
"Network Rail Wales suspended trains on the Welsh northern coast due to a \"fallen tree blocking the line,\" and several bridges in southern England and Wales were closed for safety reasons.",
"A separate amber warning, which is less serious than the red alert but still poses \"potential risk to life and property,\" covering a larger stretch of the Britain and Northern Ireland is in place until Saturday night.",
"In Northern Ireland, thousands were left without power, and several bus and train services were suspended or delayed.",
"Christmas markets and sporting events were postponed, including the Merseyside derby between Premier League leaders Liverpool and Everton.",
"In Ireland, which issued an \"orange\" wind warning, 400,000 people were left without electricity, according to the RTE news agency.",
"Dublin Airport said a \"a number of flights scheduled for Saturday morning have been cancelled by airlines\" due to the storm.",
"Darragh comes two weeks after Storm Bert battered much of Britain, causing flooding in parts of Wales and knocking out power to thousands of homes in Ireland."
]
}
],
"summary": []
} | en | [
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