title: Lina Khan

text: Lina M. Khan (born March 3, 1989) is a British-born American legal scholar serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission since 2021. While a student at Yale Law School, she became known for her work in antitrust and competition law in the United States after publishing the influential essay "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox". She was nominated by President Joe Biden to the Commission in March 2021, and has served since June 2021 following her confirmation. She is also an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.


title: Lina Khan

text: Khan was born on March 3, 1989, in London, England, to a British Pakistani family. Khan and her family moved to the United States when she was 11 years old.


title: Lina Khan

text: After high school, Khan studied political science at Williams College. As a visiting exchange student, Khan also attended the University of Oxford as an undergraduate member of Exeter College. Khan served as editor of the Williams College student newspaper and wrote her senior thesis on Hannah Arendt. She graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts.


title: Lina Khan

text: From 2010 to 2014, Khan worked at the New America Foundation, where she did anti-monopoly research and writing for Barry Lynn at the Open Markets Program. Lynn was looking for a researcher without a background in economics, and he began critiquing market consolidation with Khan's help.


title: Lina Khan

text: Khan then attended Yale Law School, where she was a submissions editor for the "Yale Journal on Regulation". Khan graduated from Yale in 2017 with a Juris Doctor degree.


title: Lina Khan

text: In 2017, during her third year at Yale Law School, the "Yale Law Journal" published Khan's student article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox". The article made a significant impact in American legal and business circles, and the "New York Times" described it as "reframing decades of monopoly law". In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. The title of Khan's piece was a reference to Robert Bork's 1978 book "The Antitrust Paradox", which established the consumer-welfare standard that Khan critiqued. She proposed alternative frameworks for antitrust policy, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."


title: Lina Khan

text: The article was met with both acclaim and criticism. As of September 2018, it received 146,255 hits, "a runaway best-seller in the world of legal treatises," according to the "New York Times". Joshua Wright, who served on the FTC from 2013 to 2015, derided her work as "hipster antitrust" and argued it "reveal[ed] a profound lack of understanding of the consumer welfare model and the rule of reason framework." Herbert Hovenkamp wrote that Khan's claims are "technically undisciplined, untestable, and even incoherent", and that her work "never explains how a nonmanufacturing retailer such as Amazon could ever recover its investment in below cost pricing by later raising prices, and even disputes that raising prices to higher levels ever needs to be a part of the strategy, thus indicating that it is confusing predation with investment."


title: Lina Khan

text: For "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox", Khan won the Antitrust Writing Award for "Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article" in 2018, the Israel H. Peres Prize by Yale Law School, and the Michael Egger Prize from the Yale Law Journal.


title: Lina Khan

text: After graduating from law school, Khan worked as legal director at the Open Markets Institute. The institute split from New America after Khan and her team criticized Google's market power, prompting pressure from Google, a funder of New America. During her time at OMI, Khan met with Senator Elizabeth Warren to discuss anti-monopolistic policy ideas.


title: Lina Khan

text: Khan joined Columbia Law School as an academic fellow, where she pursued research and scholarship on antitrust law and competition policy, especially relating to digital platforms. She published "The Separation of Platforms and Commerce" in the "Columbia Law Review", making the case for structural separations that prohibit dominant intermediaries from entering lines of business that place them in direct competition with the businesses dependent on their networks. In July 2020, Khan joined the school's faculty as an associate professor of law.


title: Lina Khan

text: Khan has described herself as belonging to the New Brandeis movement, a political movement that seeks a revival in antitrust enforcement.


title: Lina Khan

text: In 2018, Khan worked as a Legal Fellow at the Federal Trade Commission in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra. In 2019, Khan began serving as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she has been leading the congressional investigation into digital markets.


title: Lina Khan

text: On March 22, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he was nominating Khan to be a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. On June 15, 2021, her nomination was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 69 to 28. Khan was confirmed with bipartisan support, mainly attributed to her "influential anti-Amazon views" being widely reflected by Members of Congress. President Biden then appointed her chairperson of the FTC. Upon taking office, Khan became the third Asian-American to serve on the FTC, after Dennis Yao (who served from 1991 to 1994) and her former boss Rohit Chopra (has served from 2018 to present).


title: Lina Khan

text: Following her appointment as chairperson, both Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook, filed petitions with the FTC seeking her recusal from investigations of the companies, suggesting that her past criticism of the companies left her unable to be impartial. However, according to legal scholar Eleanor Fox, the standard for recusal is very high and unlikely to be met for Khan. Senator Elizabeth Warren and other supporters of Khan argued that the recusal demands amount to an attempt by these companies to intimidate Khan in order to curtail regulatory scrutiny.


title: Lina Khan

text: In 2018 "Politico" described Khan as "a leader of a new school of antitrust thought" as part of its ""Politico" 50" list of influential thinkers. "New York" magazine said she was "indisputably the most powerful figure in the anti-monopoly vanguard". She was also listed as one of "Foreign Policy"'s "Global Thinkers," "Prospect"'s "Top 50 Thinkers," "Wired"'s WIRED25, the "National Journal" 50, "Washingtonian"'s list of most influential women, and "Time"'s "Next Generation Leaders."


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: The 2017–18 season was Manchester United's 26th season in the Premier League and their 43rd consecutive season in the top flight of English football. The season was the first since 2003–04 without former club captain Wayne Rooney, who rejoined Everton after 13 seasons with United, during which time he overtook Bobby Charlton as their all-time top scorer. United also returned to the Champions League after a single season's absence, having won the 2016–17 UEFA Europa League.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: United achieved their highest points total and league placing since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013, amassing 81 points to finish second in the Premier League. However, despite winning three cups the previous season, the club failed to secure silverware this time around, also finishing as runners-up in both the UEFA Super Cup and FA Cup. United also suffered disappointing exits in both the EFL Cup and Champions League, bowing out to Bristol City and Sevilla respectively by 2–1 scorelines. Throughout the season, despite having a wealth of attacking options and completing the signing of Alexis Sánchez in January, manager José Mourinho was criticised by sections of the media and a section of United supporters for a perceived negative playing style.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: United preceded their 2017–18 campaign with a tour of the United States, which included the first Manchester derby to be played outside the United Kingdom, in the International Champions Cup. The tour also included games against Real Madrid and Barcelona. The US tour started against LA Galaxy on 15 July 2017. United then faced Vålerenga in Norway. The final preparations during pre-season included a trip to the Republic of Ireland to face Sampdoria.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: Manchester United, as winners of the 2016–17 UEFA Europa League faced Real Madrid, winners of the 2016–17 UEFA Champions League for the 2017 UEFA Super Cup on 8 August 2017, at the Philip II Arena in Skopje, Macedonia.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: The Premier League season began on 11 August 2017 and concluded on 13 May 2018. Michael Carrick played his final match against Watford as captain. He was subbed off in the 85th minute for Paul Pogba. He also received a guard of honour from both sets of players before the kick-off. This was also his 464th appearance for United.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: Manchester United entered the FA Cup in the third round as all 20 Premier League clubs automatically received a bye to that stage. Matches were played between 5–8 January 2018.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: Manchester United entered the EFL Cup as holders, having beaten Southampton in the 2017 final. As one of the seven clubs that qualified for European competition in 2017–18, they entered the EFL Cup in the third round, the draw for which was held on 24 August, with Manchester United being paired with Championship club Burton Albion. The two sides last met in the third round of the 2005–06 FA Cup, with United winning a replay 5–0 at Old Trafford following a goalless draw at the Pirelli Stadium. The fourth round draw confirmed the "Red Devils" visited Swansea City. The fifth round draw was held on 26 October 2017, with United drawn against another Championship side Bristol City.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: Manchester United qualified for the group stage of the Champions League as winners of the 2016–17 UEFA Europa League and were placed in pot 2 for the group stage draw. The draw was made on 24 August 2017, with Manchester United drawn alongside Benfica, Basel and CSKA Moscow. United were previously drawn with both Benfica and Basel in 2011–12, and with CSKA Moscow in 2009–10 and 2015–16; in 2011–12 and 2015–16, they finished third in the group and dropped down to the UEFA Europa League, while in 2009–10, United topped the group.


title: 2017–18 Manchester United F.C. season

text: After winning their group and progressing to the round of 16, United were drawn against Spanish club Sevilla in the first competitive meeting between the two sides. After a goalless draw in the first leg at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán Stadium, Sevilla took the lead in the tie late in the second leg, when Wissam Ben Yedder scored twice within minutes of coming on as a substitute. Romelu Lukaku pulled one back for United six minutes from the end, but they were unable to score the two further goals required to avoid elimination.


title: Danika Yarosh

text: Danika Yarosh (born October 1, 1998) is an American actress. She appeared in the Showtime series "Shameless" and in the NBC series "Heroes Reborn". She co‐starred with Tom Cruise in "" (2016).


title: Danika Yarosh

text: Yarosh is a native of Bedminster, New Jersey, the daughter of Victor and Linda Yarosh. She has three siblings, an older sister, Amanda, who also acts, an older brother, Erik, and a younger brother, Peter. Her father is a former member of the United States Air Force.


title: Danika Yarosh

text: Yarosh first appeared on film at the age of 5 as an extra in "The Stepford Wives" (2004), starring Nicole Kidman, which filmed in her home town. She began studying acting and dance, first appearing off-Broadway, and then won the role of ballet dancer Karen in the 2009 Broadway production of "Billy Elliot" at the Imperial Theatre, when she was 10.


title: Danika Yarosh

text: Yarosh moved with her mother to Los Angeles at age 12, and began booking bit parts on television, including the series "30 Rock" and "". She appeared in the 2012 film, "The Color of Time", starring Mila Kunis and James Franco, playing the first love of poet C. K. Williams. Yarosh then had recurring roles on the Nick at Nite sitcom "See Dad Run", and the Showtime series "Shameless", replacing Dove Cameron in the latter series. She postponed attending college full time when she was cast in the NBC sci-fi miniseries "Heroes Reborn".


title: Danika Yarosh

text: Yarosh played Samantha, the would-be daughter of Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) in the 2016 action film "". She starred opposite Erin Moriarty and Helen Hunt in the 2018 sports drama "The Miracle Season". She played Caroline "Line" Found, a star Iowa City West High School volleyball player, whose team went on to win the state championship after she was killed in a moped accident. Yarosh was cast opposite Teri Polo and Dylan Walsh in "Foreign Exchange", a drama written by Chris Sivertson. She also appeared in "Back Roads", a film directed by Alex Pettyfer. Yarosh joined the cast of the Netflix series "Greenhouse Academy" for its third season, replacing actress Grace Van Dien in the role of Brooke Osmond. In 2019, she signed on to the second season of the USA Network series "The Purge", recurring as college student Kelen Stewart.


title: Justin Holiday

text: Justin Alaric Holiday (born April 5, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played college basketball for the Washington Huskies. He won an NBA championship with the Golden State Warriors in 2015.


title: Justin Holiday

text: Holiday attended Campbell Hall School in Studio City, California. As a senior, he averaged 19.1 points, 9.5 rebounds and 2.0 blocks per game as he led Campbell Hall to a 33–1 record and the state Class IV championship.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In his freshman season at Washington, Holiday played sparingly for the Huskies. In 19 games, he averaged 0.7 points in 6.6 minutes per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In his sophomore season, his role, playing time and production all increased. In 35 games, he averaged 2.1 points, 2.5 rebounds and 1.2 assists in 15.6 minutes per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In his junior season, he was named to the 2010 Pac-10 All-Defensive Team. In 34 games (21 starts), he averaged 5.9 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 1.0 steals in 22.2 minutes per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In his senior season, he was named the Huskies' co-captain along with Isaiah Thomas. He went on to be named the Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year by "Netscouts Basketball". In 35 games (all starts), he averaged 10.5 points, 5.2 rebounds, 2.1 assists and 1.2 steals in 28.3 minutes per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: Holiday went undrafted in the 2011 NBA draft. On August 4, 2011, he signed with Okapi Aalstar of Belgium for the 2011–12 season. He was a starter for the Belgian team alongside fellow future NBA player Chris Copeland.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In July 2012, Holiday joined the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 2012 NBA Summer League. On October 1, 2012, he signed with the Cavaliers. However, he was later waived by the Cavaliers on October 10, 2012. Two days later, he was claimed off waivers by the Portland Trail Blazers. However, he was later waived by the Trail Blazers on October 27.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On October 31, 2012, Holiday was acquired by the Idaho Stampede. On November 28, he made his debut for Idaho in a 112–98 loss to the Los Angeles D-Fenders, recording 15 points and six rebounds.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On April 1, 2013, Holiday signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. Two days later, he made his debut for the 76ers in an 88–83 loss to the Charlotte Bobcats, recording two points and two rebounds in seven minutes. On April 26, Holiday was named to the All-NBA D-League Third Team and All-Defensive Second Team.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In July 2013, Holiday joined the Philadelphia 76ers for the 2013 NBA Summer League. On August 14, 2013, he was waived by the 76ers. On September 30, 2013, he signed with the Utah Jazz. However, he was later waived by the Jazz on October 26, 2013 after playing seven preseason games.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On November 21, 2013, Holiday signed with Szolnoki Olaj of Hungary for the rest of the 2013–14 season. In 19 league games for Szolnok, he averaged 12.9 points, 3.8 rebounds and 1.7 assists per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: In July 2014, Holiday joined the Golden State Warriors for the 2014 NBA Summer League. On September 8, 2014, he signed with the Warriors. On November 14, 2014, he was assigned to the Santa Cruz Warriors. He was recalled the next day. On March 13, 2015, he scored a career-high 23 points in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. Holiday won an NBA championship with the Warriors after they defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2015 NBA Finals in six games. In 59 games for Golden State in 2014–15, he averaged 4.3 points and 1.2 rebounds per game.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On July 9, 2015, Holiday signed a multi-year deal with the Atlanta Hawks. On October 29, he made his season debut in a 112–101 win over the New York Knicks, recording two points in 13 minutes off the bench.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On February 18, 2016, Holiday was traded to the Chicago Bulls in a three-team trade involving the Hawks and the Utah Jazz. On March 11, 2016, he made his first start for the Bulls (sixth of career) with Derrick Rose out injured. In 38 minutes of action, he recorded a then season-high 14 points, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals and 2 blocks in a 118–96 loss to the Miami Heat. In the Bulls' season finale on April 13, Holiday scored a career-high 29 points in a 115–105 win over the Philadelphia 76ers.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On June 22, 2016, Holiday was traded, along with Derrick Rose and a 2017 second-round draft pick, to the New York Knicks in exchange for José Calderón, Jerian Grant, and Robin Lopez. In the Knicks' season finale on April 12, 2017, Holiday scored a season-high 20 points against the Phoenix Suns. He appeared in all 82 games for the Knicks in 2016–17.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On July 10, 2017, Holiday signed with the Chicago Bulls, returning to the franchise for a second stint. On January 3, 2018, Holiday led Chicago with 26 points in a 124–115 loss to the Toronto Raptors. On January 15, 2018, he made a career-best seven 3-pointers and scored 25 points in a 119–111 win over the Miami Heat.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On November 23, 2018, Holiday had 27 points and 13 rebounds in a 103–96 loss to the Heat. A day later, he had 14 points and 11 rebounds in a 111–96 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. He was 4-of-13 from 3-point range, marking his 31st straight game with a made 3-pointer, tying Kirk Hinrich for the longest streak in team history. He broke the record the following game. By early December, he was the only player with at least one 3-pointer in every game to begin the season. His franchise-record streak ended at 43 straight games.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On January 3, 2019, Holiday was traded to the Memphis Grizzlies in exchange for MarShon Brooks, Wayne Selden Jr. and two future second-round draft picks. On April 7, 2019, he scored a career-high 30 points in a 129–127 overtime loss to the Dallas Mavericks.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On July 31, 2019, Holiday signed a one-year deal worth $4.767 million with the Indiana Pacers, uniting him with his younger brother Aaron. Justin played an NBA high 250 consecutive games (among active players), until the streak was broken on December 1, 2021 due to compliance with the league's Covid-19 health and safety protocols.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On February 8, 2022, Holiday was traded, alongside Domantas Sabonis, Jeremy Lamb and a 2023 second-round pick, to the Sacramento Kings in exchange for Tyrese Haliburton, Buddy Hield and Tristan Thompson.


title: Justin Holiday

text: On July 6, 2022, Holiday and Maurice Harkless were traded to the Atlanta Hawks in exchange for Kevin Huerter. The deal reunited Holiday with his brother Aaron, who signed with the Hawks as a free agent.


title: Justin Holiday

text: Holiday is the son of Shawn and Toya (née DeCree) Holiday. His parents both played college basketball at Arizona State, where Toya was named Pac-10 Player of the Year in 1982. All three of his siblings play basketball: younger brothers Jrue and Aaron became NBA players and younger sister Lauren played for UCLA's women's team. Additionally, he is the brother-in-law of U.S. women's national soccer team player Lauren Holiday.


title: Brian's Song

text: Brian's Song is a 1971 ABC Movie of the Week that recounts the life of Brian Piccolo (James Caan), a Chicago Bears football player stricken with terminal cancer after turning pro in 1965, told through his friendship with teammate Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams). Piccolo's and Sayers's sharply differing temperaments and racial backgrounds made them unlikely to become friends but they did, becoming the first interracial roommates in the history of the National Football League. The film chronicles the evolution of their friendship, ending with Piccolo's death in 1970. The production was such a success on ABC that it was later shown in theaters by Columbia Pictures with a major premiere in Chicago; however, it was soon withdrawn for lack of business. Critics have called the movie one of the finest television movies ever made. A 2005 readers' poll taken by "Entertainment Weekly" ranked "Brian's Song" seventh in its list of the top "guy-cry" films.


title: Brian's Song

text: The movie is based on Sayers's account of his friendship with Piccolo and coping with Piccolo's illness in Sayers's 1970 autobiography, "I Am Third". The film was written by William Blinn, whose script one Dallas television critic called "highly restrained, steering clear of any overt sentimentality [yet conveying] the genuine affection the two men felt so deeply for each other."


title: Brian's Song

text: The movie begins as Chicago Bears rookie running back Gale Sayers (Williams) arrives at team practice as an errant punt lands near him. Fellow rookie running back Brian Piccolo (Caan) goes to retrieve the ball, and Sayers flips it to him. Before Sayers meets with coach George Halas (Jack Warden) in his office, Piccolo tells him – as a prank – that Halas has a hearing problem, and Sayers acts strangely at the meeting. Sayers pranks him back by placing mashed potatoes on his seat while Piccolo is singing his alma mater's fight song.


title: Brian's Song

text: During practice, Piccolo struggles while Sayers shines. Sayers and Piccolo are placed as roommates, a rarity during the racial strife at the time. When they are placed together Brian is scared he didn't make the team, and Gale makes a great point saying "if you didn't make the team, we wouldn't be placed together as roommates." Their friendship flourishes, in football and in life, quickly extending to their wives, Joy Piccolo and Linda Sayers. Sayers quickly becomes a standout player, but he injures his knee in a game against the San Francisco 49ers. To aid in Sayers's recovery, Piccolo brings a weight machine to his house. In Sayers' place, Piccolo rushes for 160 yards in a 17–16 win over the Los Angeles Rams and is given the game ball. Piccolo challenges Sayers to a race across the park, where Sayers stumbles but wins. Piccolo wins the starting fullback position, meaning both he and Sayers will now be on the field together, and both excel in their roles.


title: Brian's Song

text: Piccolo starts to lose weight and his performance declines, so he is sent to a hospital for a diagnosis. Soon after, Halas tells Sayers that Piccolo has cancer and will have part of a lung removed. In an emotional speech to his teammates, Sayers states that they will win the game for Piccolo and give him the game ball. When the players later visit the hospital, Piccolo teases them about losing the game, laughing that the line in the old movie wasn't "let’s blow one for the Gipper."


title: Brian's Song

text: After a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Sayers visits Joy, who reveals that Piccolo has to have another surgery for his tumor. After he is awarded the "George S. Halas Most Courageous Player Award", Sayers dedicates his award to Piccolo, telling the crowd that they had selected the wrong person for the prize and saying, "I love Brian Piccolo, and I'd like all of you to love him, too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him." In a call, Sayers mentions that he gave Piccolo a pint of blood while he was in critical condition. Piccolo dies with his wife by his side. The movie ends with a flashback of Piccolo and Sayers running through the park, while Halas narrates that Piccolo died at age 26 and is remembered not for how he died but for how he lived.


title: Brian's Song

text: The musical theme to "Brian's Song", "The Hands of Time", was a popular tune during the early 1970s and has become a standard. The music for the film was by Michel Legrand, with lyrics to the song by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.


title: Brian's Song

text: Legrand's instrumental version of the theme song charted for eight weeks in 1972, peaking at No. 56 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.


title: Brian's Song

text: The film received acclaim and is often cited as one of the greatest television films ever made, as well as one of the greatest sports films.


title: Brian's Song

text: The film was the most watched movie on U.S. television during 1971 and the most watched made-for-TV movie ever with a Nielsen rating of 32.9 and an audience share of 48% until it was surpassed by "The Night Stalker" in January 1972.


title: Brian's Song

text: It holds a 92% "Fresh" score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 12 critics, with a consensus stating "Buoyed by standout performances from James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, "Brian's Song" is a touching tale of friendship whose central relationship transcendeds its standard sports movie moments."


title: Brian's Song

text: Television critic Matt Zoller Seitz in his 2016 book co-written with Alan Sepinwall titled "TV (The Book)" named "Brian's Song" as the fifth greatest American TV-movie of all time, stating that the film was "The dramatic and emotional template for a good number of sports films and male weepies (categories which tend to overlap a bit)", as well as "an influential early example of the interracial buddy movie."


title: Brian's Song

text: Thirty years after its original airing, a remake was aired in 2001 on ABC's "The Wonderful World of Disney" starring Mekhi Phifer as Sayers and Sean Maher as Piccolo.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Henry R. Kravis (born January 6, 1944) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of KKR & Co. Inc.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis is a Republican who has supported a variety of causes and made significant donations to both parties, including a contribution of $1 million to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration. His lavish lifestyle has been criticized by activists looking to reform private equity regulations and restrict the practice of leveraged buyouts he pioneered. His buyout of RJR Nabisco was portrayed in the 1989 book and 1993 film "Barbarians at the Gate".


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis was born into a Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Bessie (née Roberts) and Raymond F. Kravis, a successful Tulsa oil engineer who had been a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy. Kravis began his education at Eaglebrook School ('60), followed by high school at the Loomis Chaffee School, where he participated in student government and was elected vice president of the student council his senior year. He attended Claremont McKenna College (then known as Claremont Men's College) and majored in economics. He was a member of the CMC varsity golf teams for four years and was a member of the Knickerbockers student service organization. He served as his sophomore class secretary-treasurer. He graduated from CMC in 1967 before going on to Columbia Business School, where he received an MBA degree in 1969.


title: Henry Kravis

text: After working at various jobs in New York City's financial sector, he and his first cousin, George R. Roberts, joined the staff of Bear Stearns. There, they worked under the corporate finance manager, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. They both became partners at Bear Stearns at very young ages, 30 and 31.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Working for Bear Stearns in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kravis, alongside Kohlberg and Roberts, began a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments. In the following years, Kohlberg and later Kravis and Roberts would complete a series of buyouts including Stern Metals (1965), Incom (a division of Rockwood International, 1971), Cobblers Industries (1971), and Boren Clay (1973) as well as Thompson Wire, Eagle Motors and Barrows through their investment in Stern Metals. Although they had a number of highly successful investments, the $27 million investment in Cobblers ended in bankruptcy.


title: Henry Kravis

text: By 1976, tensions had built up between Bear Stearns and the trio of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts leading to their departure and the formation of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in that year. Most notably, Bear Stearns executive Cy Lewis had rejected repeated proposals to form a dedicated investment fund within Bear Stearns and Lewis took exception to the amount of time spent on outside activities.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis and Roberts invested $120,000 of their own capital in their new firm. Early investors in KKR included the Hillman Family and the Griffith family (who are also large shareholders in MGM and Time Warner). By 1978, with the revision of the ERISA regulations, the nascent KKR was successful in raising its first institutional fund with approximately $30 million of investor commitments.


title: Henry Kravis

text: In 1987, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. resigned from KKR, and Henry Kravis and George Roberts continued to lead the firm. Under Kravis and Roberts the firm was responsible for the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. At a cost of $31.4 billion, it was then the highest price ever paid for a commercial enterprise. The publicity surrounding the event led to the story being dramatized in the book and film, "Barbarians at the Gate". Kravis was portrayed in the film by actor Jonathan Pryce.


title: Henry Kravis

text: In early 1995, KKR divested its remaining holdings in RJR Nabisco, taking an overall loss on the deal. A journalist for the "New York Times" wrote a few years later that "the deal will go down in history as showing just how difficult it can be to get out of a huge deal that goes badly, and of the perils of putting too much money on one investment." KKR pledged not to commit so much of its fund to a single investment again in the future. However, other investments proved more profitable, and the fund still did well overall.


title: Henry Kravis

text: The list of companies in which Henry Kravis's KKR has invested over the years includes health care provider Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), TXU, Playtex, Beatrice Foods, Safeway, Toys "R" Us, Borden, First Data and Regal Entertainment Group. A takeover of the battery maker Duracell proved particularly profitable.


title: Henry Kravis

text: On December 24, 2013, KKR closed their first real estate specific investment fund, which raised $1.2 billion of new money to invest. With additional funds from within KKR, the new fund provided over $1.5 billion to utilize.


title: Henry Kravis

text: In July 2017, Kravis and Roberts announced that they would eventually be succeeded by Joseph Y. Bae and Scott C. Nuttall, who were named co-presidents and co-chief operating officers so that they might gradually take over daily operations. This succession plan was enacted in October 2021, with Kravis and Roberts stepping down from their positions as co-CEOs but continuing as co-executive chairmen.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis has been married three times. His first marriage to Helene Diane "Hedi" Shulman ended in divorce. They had three children, Harrison S. Kravis (b. 1972, d. 1991 car accident), Robert R. Kravis (b. 1973), and Kimberly Kravis Schulhof (b. 1975). Hedi remarried to James Thompson Ruger, son of William B. Ruger and died of cancer on April 2, 1997, at age 49. Kravis later married New York designer Carolyne Roehm (born Carolyne Jane Smith) in 1985, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1993. Kravis is currently married to a prominent Canadian economist, and former columnist and TV personality in Canada, Marie-Josée Drouin. She sits on the boards of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Robin Hood Foundation, and is the president of the Museum of Modern Art board of directors.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis mainly lives in New York City and has a seasonal residence in Palm Beach, Florida; he also owns homes in New York City; Southampton, New York; Paris; and Sharon, Connecticut.


title: Henry Kravis

text: A supporter of Republican politics, he was a supporter and fundraiser for President George W. Bush and John McCain. He was also a major contributor to the 1992 re-election campaign of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, Henry Kravis joined with Lewis M. Eisenberg to establish the Republican Leadership Council. In 2017, he also contributed $1 million to President Donald Trump's presidential inauguration.


title: Henry Kravis

text: The Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership, established in 2006, identifies extraordinary leaders in the nonprofit sector, celebrates their accomplishments and shares their best practices with others. The prize is presented and administered by Claremont McKenna College (CMC) and Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis. Kravis is an alumnus and trustee of Claremont McKenna College. The Kravis Prize is affiliated with the Kravis Leadership Institute, a research institute at Claremont McKenna. A formal award ceremony celebrates the recipient's accomplishments, and $250,000 is directed to a nonprofit organization designated by the recipient.


title: Henry Kravis

text: Kravis also funds the Henry Kravis Leadership Institute that sponsors the Leadership Studies programs at Claremont McKenna College, and the "Henry Kravis Internships for Teachers of Color" program. He has also financed the construction of extensive facilities at Middlesex School (Kravis House), the Eaglebrook School (Kravis Dorm), Deerfield Academy (Kravis Arena), and The Loomis Chaffee School (Kravis Hall).


title: Henry Kravis

text: He is a benefactor and a past chairman of New York's public television station and sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A trustee of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, Henry and wife Marie-Josée Kravis donated $15 million to establish the "Center for Cardiovascular Health" as well as funding a professorship. They have also endowed the chair in human oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.


title: Henry Kravis

text: He previously co-chaired with Jerry Speyer the influential Partnership for New York City, founded by David Rockefeller in 1979, and now sits on its board of directors. He created the New York City Investment Fund, a non-profit organization to create jobs and new business in New York City.


title: Henry Kravis

text: He is a trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, chairman of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, and is a member of the executive committee of The Business Council for 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. He co-chairs the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers where he recently pledged a gift of $100 million to support the school's new campus project and is a vice-chairman of Rockefeller University.


title: Donovan Patton

text: Donovan Patton (born March 1, 1978) is an American actor and television host. Patton graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy and acted in Shakespeare plays such as "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Romeo and Juliet" before replacing Steve Burns as the host of Nickelodeon's long-running children's television program, "Blue's Clues" in 2002. Series co-creator Angela Santomero stated that Patton brought Joe, his character, closer to the preschool viewer, as Joe was more willing to "jump into a problem rather than figuring it out first like Steve". After "Blue's Clues" ended in 2006, Patton then voiced Bot on Nickelodeon's "Team Umizoomi" (2010–2015) and currently voices CatRat on the Netflix original DreamWorks series "Gabby's Dollhouse" as well as special appearances in the new series "Blue’s Clues & You!".


title: Donovan Patton

text: Although most of his career has been in children's television programs, Patton has also appeared in independent films, such as "Black Wine" (2005), "Awake" (2013), "Lies I Told My Little Sister" (2014), "The Broken Ones" (2017), "The Murder" (2019), "The Anniversary" (2019), "Psycho Escort" (2020), and "DieRy" (2020), and in television shows, such as "Blue Bloods" (2011), "Nurse Jackie" (2011) and "Damages" (2012).


title: Donovan Patton

text: He also appeared in video games, such as "Grand Theft Auto V" (2013), "Lego Jurassic World" (2015), "" (2015), "" (2015), "" (2017), and "God of War" (2018).


title: Donovan Patton

text: Patton was born on a U.S. military base in Guam to Michael Patton (born 1951), an Air Force meteorologist and Darlene Curtis (born 1952), who worked for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He has an older brother, Casey, and a younger half-sister, Annabelle. After his parents divorced when he was 3, he, his brother, and their mother moved to Colorado. They moved to Las Vegas when Donovan was 12. Patton graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in northwest Michigan in 1996, having transferred there his junior year.


title: Donovan Patton

text: His first acting roles were in Shakespeare plays such as "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Romeo and Juliet". He took acting classes in Manhattan while working odd jobs such as a book clerk and a video deliveryman.


title: Donovan Patton

text: Patton's "big break" came in the autumn of 2000 when he was cast to replace Steve Burns as Joe, the second host of the Nickelodeon children's television program "Blue's Clues". At the time, Patton worked as a waiter and a part-time actor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. He was originally set up for a part in "" at the time, but he considered the role as Joe "a happy accident". Patton became a "household name" and has been called "an unqualified star to the 5-and-under set and their parents". He was subjected to "the same kind of scrutiny" as Burns, who was involved in Patton's selection and helped train him, to earn the role. Patton was selected out of 1,500 auditions. He had never seen the show before his audition, but like Burns was the favorite with preschool test audiences. He said, "I am convinced that I got that part because of a Christopher Walken impression I sometimes do. There's a tape out there, somewhere, with both Steve Burns and myself doing a "Blue's Clues" scene both as Christopher Walken, which we did at the screen test. I haven't seen the tape, but I know somewhere it still exists". Beginning in September 2000, Burns trained Patton to take over the host spot and advised him not to "think of [the show] as children's TV", but rather as "acting and telling the truth". Burns left the show in January 2001, with the transition episodes airing in April 2002.


title: Donovan Patton

text: According to Traci Paige Johnson, one of the producers and creators of "Blue's Clues", Patton's character was more like a preschooler and more innocent than Steve. Angela Santomero, another producer and creator, stated that Patton's characterization as Joe brought him closer to the preschool viewer as Joe was more willing to "jump into a problem rather than figure it out first like Steve". Patton liked working on "Blue's Clues" because, as he stated, "I got to go be a kid for twelve hours a day". He called the show's crew "a real fun little family" and a "well-oiled machine" by the time he joined the show. Patton remained on the show for 50 episodes, until it ended its run in 2006, and also appeared in its spin-off, "Blue's Room", which premiered in 2004. Several years later, Patton said he had not yet grasped the enormity of replacing Burns, even after he became a parent and witnessed the show's effect on his own children. He admitted that he preferred when his daughter watched the Steve episodes.


title: Donovan Patton

text: Patton, alongside Burns, appeared in the first episode of the 2019 revival "Blue's Clues & You!", reprising their roles as Joe and Steve respectively to help their cousin Josh (which was played by Joshua Dela Cruz) learn how to take care of Blue.


title: Donovan Patton

text: In 2012, Patton appeared in the short films "Awake" and "Pharmboy", the latter of which was directed by his longtime friend Lawrence Feeney. Mark Finguerra, the director of "Awake", was able to look past the potential typecasting of Patton's role in "Blue's Clues" to cast him in a darker role. Patton had impressed him in an audition for an earlier feature film. Finguerra called Patton a "complete professional [and a] tremendous actor", and enjoyable on set. He appeared in the soap opera "One Life to Live", in which he played, in a departure of his previous roles, "a very angry man". In 2014, he appeared in a small movie shot mostly in New Jersey, entitled "Lies I Told My Little Sister", directed by William Stribling and starring Lucy Walters. He also stars in "Four for Fun", a film by Jason Cook, alongside Jacob Young, Brytni Sarpi, and Annika Foster.


title: Donovan Patton

text: Patton called his career, with its mixture of children's television and darker roles in independent films, "an odd experience" and told a reporter that he had spent half his life at Nickelodeon. In 2009, he was cast as Bot, the robot superhero, on the children's show "Team Umizoomi" through the relationships he had made at Nickelodeon on "Blue's Clues". He found working on "Team Umizoomi" "comforting" because many of the same crew, producers, and creators had also worked on "Blue's Clues". It was the first time he had worked as a voice-over artist, unlike on "Blue's Clues", when he was able to be more physical acting in front of a blue screen. He said, about "Team Umizoomi", "the work the animators have done on it has been superlative". He stated that he enjoyed working on "Team Umizoomi" because it gave him the opportunity to participate in a show from its inception, which he had missed with "Blue's Clues". Patton said his voice performance of Bot, which he modeled on Brent Spiner's performance as the android Data on "" and was influenced by Mel Blanc's work in the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, "ended up sounding more like my natural voice, with a teeny bit of superhero in there". Despite both roles in "Blue's Clues" and "Team Umizoomi" requiring him to sing, he did not consider himself a natural singer and felt that he had to work hard at it. He said, about being cast as Bot, "I get to be a superhero. Who doesn't want to be a superhero?" Patton was the only main cast member to stay on "Team Umizoomi" for its entire run, voicing Bot in all episodes spread through its four seasons.


title: Donovan Patton

text: Patton is married to his wife Jackie and has two children. They live in Los Angeles. He is active in several charities in the New York City area, including Literacy Inc., the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a large children's hospital.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: Merry Christmas is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey, and her first Christmas album. Released by Columbia Records on October 28, 1994, at the peak of the initial stretch of Carey's career, between "Music Box" (1993) and "Daydream" (1995), the album features cover versions of popular Christmas songs in addition to original material. Carey worked with Walter Afanasieff, with whom she wrote all of the original tracks, as well as producing Carey's interpretations of the covered material. Three singles were released from the album, of which "All I Want for Christmas Is You" went on to become one of the best-selling singles of all time and the best-selling Christmas ringtone in the United States.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: Critical response to the album's contemporary Christmas theme was mixed. Some music critics complimented the "gospel and soul-inflected" vocals and even called it "Carey's best record" to date. Re-released on multiple occasions in various formats since its debut, the album has sold 5.7 million copies in the United States as of December 2019 and has been certified 8x Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Internationally, it reached number one in Japan, Latvia, and Lithuania. It achieved top-ten in 16 additional countries including Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In 2005, the album was re-released as a special edition DualDisc, featuring "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and a special anniversary version of "Santa Claus is Comin' To Town" on the CD side. The DVD side features the entire album in enhanced PCM stereo and music videos. In 2010, Carey released a sequel Christmas album, "Merry Christmas II You". In 2019, an anniversary deluxe edition was released featuring live renditions, newer songs like "Oh Santa!" and "The Star", and numerous remixes in commemoration of the album's twenty-fifth anniversary. As of 2021, "Merry Christmas" has sold 15 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling holiday albums of all time.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: Carey has expressed her belief in God and the connection between music and spirituality, and felt the album was finally a way to portray her spirituality through music. After the success of Carey's previous effort, "Music Box", there was speculation of a new project in the works; however it was not until October 1994, only one month before the album's release, that "Billboard" announced Carey would be releasing a holiday album for the Christmas season. Initially, critics were shocked; they did not know how Carey would fare as an entertainer across genres, as she had previously only been viewed as a pop star. Nevertheless, Carey, unaffected by the speculation, continued working on and promoting the album in high spirits, confident in her work. The idea proved to be wise, earning Carey recognition in various markets including Christian radio and contemporary R&B stations, as well as extended her fame in Japan, where the album experienced much of its success.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: Throughout the album's development, Carey worked extensively with Walter Afanasieff, with whom she collaborated extensively on "Emotions" (1991) and "Music Box" (1993). Together, they wrote all three of the album's original songs, as well as producing most of the traditional tracks at The Hit Factory, in New York.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Merry Christmas" boasted a variety of musical arrangements, sounds, and genres. Carey's goal was to provide an album that would have a "Christmas feel", providing a mixture of soulful tracks, as well as fun and joyous holiday treats. The song "Jesus Oh What a Wonderful Child", produced by Carey, Afannasief, and Holland, was described as an arrangement of a traditional gospel standard that "really took flight". The song was recorded in a church, with many live backup singers and children playing tambourines and other melodious instruments. The goal was to produce a "real church flavored song", in which Loris Holland played the keyboards and allowed Carey's voice to "cut loose". According to Chris Nickson, Carey's love of gospel music came through on the track, writing, "[she] led the band without pushing herself forward, letting the song develop and work out, trading lines with the chorus until, after the crescendo, the musicians moved into a fast double-time to the end."


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "All I Want for Christmas Is You", the album's lead single was described as an "up-tempo love song, one that could have easily been written for Tommy Mottola". "Miss You Most (At Christmas Time)", another one of the album's original tracks, was very different from its predecessor. The song was described as a "sad ballad", in line with many of Carey's previous hit singles. The song featured a synthesized orchestra, including keyboard notes courtesy of Afanasieff, during which Carey would sing to her "long-gone lover, crystallizing the way that Christmas brought memories of the past into focus." According to Nickson "Jesus Born on This Day" was the most impressive original track on the album. It was described as a "full-blown production number", which again featured synthesized orchestra, as well as a live children's choir. The song's tune was described as "solemn and hymn-like, but the arrangement, oddly, made it less religious and rather more glitzy, behind the lyrics that overtly praised Jesus."


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In addition, Carey recorded a cover of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love, as well as classics such as "Silent Night", "O Holy Night" and "Joy to the World". The latter song, which was used as a promotional single, was remixed several times and sent to various clubs; adding to the album's range of listeners. Record producer and composer, Loris Holland, co-produced some of the albums gospel flavored tracks, including "Silent Night", where he arranged the backing vocals and synthesizers. Carey's rendition of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", was deemed as "one of the more playful tracks on the album", alongside "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)".


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In the United States, Carey started promotion for "Merry Christmas" with a live concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 8, 1994, performing for the first time several tracks from the album, including "All I Want for Christmas Is You", which was later performed on several of her concert tours, including the Japanese shows of Carey's Daydream World Tour (1996), Butterfly World Tour (1998), Rainbow World Tour (2000), Charmbracelet World Tour (2003) and The Adventures of Mimi Tour (2006), due to the massive success of the song in Japan, which became her best-selling single in the country. On December 25, 2001, she appeared on the Christmas special "BET Christmas Remembrances Special", where she performed "Joy to the World" and her hit "One Sweet Day" with Boyz II Men. Three years later, she appeared in 2004 Walt Disney World Christmas Day Parade, where she performed "Joy to the World" and "All I Want for Christmas is You".


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: On December 3, 2008, she performed "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" at the 2008 Grammy Nomination Concert. A year later, Carey sang the So So Def remix version of "All I Want for Christmas is You" at the opening night of her Angels Advocate Tour on New Year's Eve. Other live performances of "All I Want for Christmas is You" includes the 2010 Walt Disney World Christmas Day Parade, "Christmas In Rockefeller Center" (in 2012, 2013 and 2014) and "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in 2012, where she performed the song alongside Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. Carey also performed "All I Want for Christmas is You" with Michael Bublé for his third Annual Christmas Special in December 2013. She also performed the song at the 91st Annual National Christmas Tree Lighting on December 16, 2013.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: During "The Late Late Show" with James Corden on December 15, 2016, Carey sang "All I Want for Christmas is You" on the popular feature Carpool Karaoke. Fellow singers Adele, Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas, Elton John, Selena Gomez, Gwen Stefani, Coldplay's Chris Martin and the band Red Hot Chili Peppers were featured in the video. Carey also performed the song at "The Wonderful World of Disney: Magical Holiday Celebration", "" and "Disney Parks Magical Christmas Celebration" in 2016. In December 2019, Carey returned to "The Late Late Show" to perform the song for its 25th anniversary.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of "Merry Christmas", Carey embarked on her first Christmas concert residency, All I Want For Christmas Is You, A Night of Joy & Festivity, which began on December 15, 2014, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, and ended on December 15, 2019, after completing eight legs and fifty-six shows in North America and Europe. On December 1, 2020, Carey performed a medley of "Heroes", "Hero", and "Joy to the World" at "Good Morning America", two days prior to her Christmas special "Mariah Carey's Magical Christmas Special", where she re-recorded and performed several songs from the album. The following year, she performed "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" and a new song, "Fall in Love at Christmas", during her 2021 Christmas Special "Mariah's Christmas: The Magic Continues". She also performed "All I Want for Christmas is You" at the 2022 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Merry Christmas" was supported by three commercial singles and two promotional singles, with different releases depending on the country. The album's lead single, "All I Want for Christmas Is You", was released on October 29, 1994, in Japan, and in other countries the next month. While it was not initially commercially released in the United States, "Billboard" described Columbia's level of promotion as unprecedented for a Christmas album. On November 14, 1994, the label released three songs to US radio stations as promotional singles: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" (top 40 and adult contemporary radio stations), "Jesus Born on This Day" (Christian and gospel stations), and


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Miss You Most (At Christmas Time)" (R&B stations). The latter was also commercially released that year, including in the Philippines where it served as the lead single in that country. Originally released in 1994 as a 12-inch promotional single of dance remixes, "Joy to the World" was released in Australia as the album's third single on November 27, 1995, becoming a top-forty hit there. "O Holy Night" was released as a promotional single in 1996, and later peaked at number 19 in Iceland, at number 31 in Italy, at number 70 on the US Holiday 100 chart, and at number 191 in France; later being certified Gold in the United States and Italy.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is Carey's biggest international hit of her career, breaking several records worldwide and topping the charts in twenty-six countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK Singles chart and the US " Billboard" Hot 100, becoming the best-selling Christmas song by a female artist and one of the best-selling singles of all time, selling over 16 million copies worldwide. The song was certified 12× Platinum in the US, becoming the first holiday song to achieve this. It is also Carey's best-selling single in the UK, where it was certified six-times Platinum, becoming the highest-certified song of all time by a female artist in the country. It is also her best-selling single in Australia and Germany, where it was certified 9× Platinum and 2× Platinum, respectively.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In the "Los Angeles Times", Chris Willman wrote that Carey "attempts her share of girl-group pop amid the quasi-gospel melisma, though still not evidencing as much personality as talent in either style". "The New York Times" journalist Jon Pareles was more critical in his review. "Regardless of backup, Ms. Carey oversings, glutting songs with her vocal tics—like sliding down from the note above the melody note—and turning expressions of devotion into narcissistic displays." Chris Dickinson from the "Chicago Tribune" called the singer a "trilling songbird" and "over-the-top irritant" throughout the album, particularly on "All I Want for Christmas Is You", where she "sounds like a bush-league Petula Clark". The newspaper later named it the seventh worst Christmas album ever.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: J. D. Considine was more enthusiastic in "The Baltimore Sun". In his opinion, "Merry Christmas" "may look like just another attempt to cash in on Christmas cheer, but is actually the work of someone who genuinely loves this music". Considine said while Carey's gospel and soul-inflected vocal exercises worked well with the traditional songs, "the album's real strength is the conviction she brings to otherwise corny fare like "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town", while the way she augments "Joy to the World" with a bit of the Three Dog Night hit is pure genius." Steve Morse from "The Boston Globe" argued that it was perhaps Carey's best record, on which she abandoned the overly polished sound of her previous albums and "cut loose with unbridled soul".


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In a retrospective review, Barry Schwartz of "Stylus Magazine" believed "Merry Christmas" may have been "the definitive Mariah Carey album", finding the singer at "her absolute creative and commercial peak, her voice still a marvel, her songs and performances still undeniably brilliant". AllMusic editor Roch Parisien deemed "All I Want for Christmas Is You" the record's highlight while lamenting Carey's "high opera" pretensions on "O Holy Night" and her dance/club rendition of "Joy to the World".


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Merry Christmas" was released in the United States on November 1, 1994, and debuted at number thirty on the US "Billboard" 200 with 45,000 copies sold in its first week. In its fifth week, the album peaked at number three, with sales of 208,000 copies, but experienced its highest sales in its sixth week (when it was at number six), with another 500,000 copies sold. The album was the second best-selling holiday album that year with a total of 1,859,000 copies sold. It remained in the top twenty for eight weeks and on the "Billboard" 200 for thirteen weeks, reentering the chart three times; peaking at number 149 the first time, 115 the second and at 61 the third (it has spent a total of 100 weeks on the chart). On December 14, 2020, "Merry Christmas" was certified eight-times Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipment of eight million copies in the US. As of December 2019, the album has sold 5.7 million copies in the US and is one of the best-selling holiday albums in the United States. In 2021, the album was named by "Billboard" as the third Greatest Holiday Album of All Time.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: "Merry Christmas" became Carey's first number-one album in Japan, where the album experienced its highest sales, where it sold 2.8 million copies and became the fourth best-selling album by a non-Asian solo artist.


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In Europe, "Merry Christmas" experienced success, peaking at number one in Latvia and Lithuania; at number two in Sweden and the Netherlands; at number three in Italy; at number four in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland; and at number five in Estonia. It also reached the top-ten in Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and the European Top 100 Albums. To date, "Merry Christmas" was certified three-times Platinum in Denmark and Norway, both by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. It was also certified Platinum in Italy and the Netherlands; and Gold in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In the United Kingdom, "Merry Christmas" peaked at number 32 on the UK Albums chart, and it was certified Platinum. Additionally, "Merry Christmas" became the first Christmas album to reach number one on the UK R&B Albums chart, as the album topped the chart during the week of November 8, 2019, becoming Carey's eleventh number-one album on the chart, replacing Kanye West's "Jesus Is King", and being replaced by Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding".


title: Merry Christmas (Mariah Carey album)

text: In Australia, the album peaked at number two, and was certified six-times Platinum, denoting shipments of 420,000 copies and finishing 11th on the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) 1994 End of Year Chart. "Merry Christmas" has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and stands as one of the best selling holiday albums in world history.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The Fisher–Yates shuffle is an algorithm for generating a random permutation of a finite sequence—in plain terms, the algorithm shuffles the sequence. The algorithm effectively puts all the elements into a hat; it continually determines the next element by randomly drawing an element from the hat until no elements remain. The algorithm produces an unbiased permutation: every permutation is equally likely. The modern version of the algorithm is efficient: it takes time proportional to the number of items being shuffled and shuffles them in place.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The Fisher–Yates shuffle is named after Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates, who first described it, and is also known as the Knuth shuffle after Donald Knuth. A variant of the Fisher–Yates shuffle, known as Sattolo's algorithm, may be used to generate random cyclic permutations of length "n" instead of random permutations.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The Fisher–Yates shuffle, in its original form, was described in 1938 by Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates in their book "Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research". Their description of the algorithm used pencil and paper; a table of random numbers provided the randomness. The basic method given for generating a random permutation of the numbers 1 through "N" goes as follows:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Provided that the random numbers picked in step 2 above are truly random and unbiased, so will be the resulting permutation. Fisher and Yates took care to describe how to obtain such random numbers in any desired range from the supplied tables in a manner which avoids any bias. They also suggested the possibility of using a simpler method — picking random numbers from one to "N" and discarding any duplicates—to generate the first half of the permutation, and only applying the more complex algorithm to the remaining half, where picking a duplicate number would otherwise become frustratingly common.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The modern version of the Fisher–Yates shuffle, designed for computer use, was introduced by Richard Durstenfeld in 1964 and popularized by Donald E. Knuth in "The Art of Computer Programming" as "Algorithm P (Shuffling)". Neither Durstenfeld's article nor Knuth's first edition of "The Art of Computer Programming" acknowledged the work of Fisher and Yates; they may not have been aware of it. Subsequent editions of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" mention Fisher and Yates' contribution.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The algorithm described by Durstenfeld differs from that given by Fisher and Yates in a small but significant way. Whereas a naïve computer implementation of Fisher and Yates' method would spend needless time counting the remaining numbers in step 3 above, Durstenfeld's solution is to move the "struck" numbers to the end of the list by swapping them with the last unstruck number at each iteration. This reduces the algorithm's time complexity to formula_1 compared to formula_2 for the naïve implementation. This change gives the following algorithm (for a zero-based array).


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: An equivalent version which shuffles the array in the opposite direction (from lowest index to highest) is:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: As an example, we'll permute the letters from A to H using Fisher and Yates' original method. We'll start by writing the letters out on a piece of scratch paper like this:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Now we roll a random number "k" from 1 to 8—let's make it 3—and strike out the "k"th (i.e. third) letter on the scratch pad and write it down as the result:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Now we pick a second random number, this time from 1 to 7: it turns out to be 4. Now we strike out the fourth letter "not yet struck" off the scratch pad—that's letter E—and add it to the result:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Now we pick the next random number from 1 to 6, and then from 1 to 5, and so on, always repeating the strike-out process as above:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: We'll now do the same thing using Durstenfeld's version of the algorithm: this time, instead of striking out the chosen letters and copying them elsewhere, we'll swap them with the last letter not yet chosen. We'll start by writing out the letters from A to H as before:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: For our first roll, we roll a random number from 1 to 8: this time it is 6, so we swap the 6th and 8th letters in the list:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The next random number we roll from 1 to 7, and turns out to be 2. Thus, we swap the 2nd and 7th letters and move on:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The next random number we roll is from 1 to 6, and just happens to be 6, which means we leave the 6th letter in the list (which, after the swap above, is now letter H) in place and just move to the next step. Again, we proceed the same way until the permutation is complete:


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: At this point there's nothing more that can be done, so the resulting permutation is G E D C A H B F.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The Fisher–Yates shuffle, as implemented by Durstenfeld, is an "in-place shuffle". That is, given a preinitialized array, it shuffles the elements of the array in place, rather than producing a shuffled copy of the array. This can be an advantage if the array to be shuffled is large.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: To simultaneously initialize and shuffle an array, a bit more efficiency can be attained by doing an "inside-out" version of the shuffle. In this version, one successively places element number "i" into a random position among the first "i" positions in the array, after moving the element previously occupying that position to position "i". In case the random position happens to be number "i", this "move" (to the same place) involves an uninitialised value, but that does not matter, as the value is then immediately overwritten. No separate initialization is needed, and no exchange is performed. In the common case where "source" is defined by some simple function, such as the integers from 0 to "n" − 1, "source" can simply be replaced with the function since "source" is never altered during execution.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The inside-out shuffle can be seen to be correct by induction. Assuming a perfect random number generator, every one of the "n"! different sequences of random numbers that could be obtained from the calls of "random" will produce a different permutation of the values, so all of these are obtained exactly once. The condition that checks if "j" ≠ "i" may be omitted in languages that have no problems accessing uninitialized array values. This eliminates "n" conditional branches at the cost of the "H" ≈ ln "n" + "γ" redundant assignments.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Another advantage of this technique is that "n", the number of elements in the "source", does not need to be known in advance; we only need to be able to detect the end of the source data when it is reached. Below the array "a" is built iteratively starting from empty, and "a".length represents the "current" number of elements seen.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: A very similar algorithm was published in 1986 by Sandra Sattolo for generating uniformly distributed cycles of (maximal) length "n". The only difference between Durstenfeld's and Sattolo's algorithms is that in the latter, in step 2 above, the random number "j" is chosen from the range between 1 and "i"−1 (rather than between 1 and "i") inclusive. This simple change modifies the algorithm so that the resulting permutation always consists of a single cycle.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: In fact, as described below, it is quite easy to "accidentally" implement Sattolo's algorithm when the ordinary Fisher–Yates shuffle is intended. This will bias the results by causing the permutations to be picked from the smaller set of ("n"−1)! cycles of length "N", instead of from the full set of all "n"! possible permutations.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The fact that Sattolo's algorithm always produces a cycle of length "n" can be shown by induction. Assume by induction that after the initial iteration of the loop, the remaining iterations permute the first "n" − 1 elements according to a cycle of length "n" − 1 (those remaining iterations are just Sattolo's algorithm applied to those first "n" − 1 elements). This means that tracing the initial element to its new position "p", then the element originally at position "p" to its new position, and so forth, one only gets back to the initial position after having visited all other positions. Suppose the initial iteration swapped the final element with the one at (non-final) position "k", and that the subsequent permutation of first "n" − 1 elements then moved it to position "l"; we compare the permutation "π" of all "n" elements with that remaining permutation "σ" of the first "n" − 1 elements. Tracing successive positions as just mentioned, there is no difference between "π" and "σ" until arriving at position "k". But then, under "π" the element originally at position "k" is moved to the final position rather than to position "l", and the element originally at the final position is moved to position "l". From there on, the sequence of positions for "π" again follows the sequence for "σ", and all positions will have been visited before getting back to the initial position, as required.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: As for the equal probability of the permutations, it suffices to observe that the modified algorithm involves ("n"−1)! distinct possible sequences of random numbers produced, each of which clearly produces a different permutation, and each of which occurs—assuming the random number source is unbiased—with equal probability. The ("n"−1)! different permutations so produced precisely exhaust the set of cycles of length "n": each such cycle has a unique cycle notation with the value "n" in the final position, which allows for ("n"−1)! permutations of the remaining values to fill the other positions of the cycle notation.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The asymptotic time and space complexity of the Fisher–Yates shuffle are optimal. Combined with a high-quality unbiased random number source, it is also guaranteed to produce unbiased results. Compared to some other solutions, it also has the advantage that, if only part of the resulting permutation is needed, it can be stopped halfway through, or even stopped and restarted repeatedly, generating the permutation incrementally as needed.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The naïve method of swapping each element with another element chosen randomly from all elements is biased and fundamentally broken. Different permutations will have different probabilities of being generated, for every formula_3, because the number of different permutations, formula_4, does not evenly divide the number of random outcomes of the algorithm, formula_5. In particular, by Bertrand's postulate there will be at least one prime number between formula_6 and formula_7, and this number will divide formula_4 but not divide formula_5.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: An alternative method assigns a random number to each element of the set to be shuffled and then sorts the set according to the assigned numbers. The sorting method has the same asymptotic time complexity as Fisher–Yates: although general sorting is "O"("n" log "n"), numbers are efficiently sorted using Radix sort in "O"("n") time. Like the Fisher–Yates shuffle, the sorting method produces unbiased results. However, care must be taken to ensure that the assigned random numbers are never duplicated, since sorting algorithms typically don't order elements randomly in case of a tie. Additionally, this method requires asymptotically larger space: "O"("n") additional storage space for the random numbers, versus "O"(1) space for the Fisher–Yates shuffle. Finally, we note that the sorting method has a simple parallel implementation, unlike the Fisher–Yates shuffle, which is sequential.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: A variant of the above method that has seen some use in languages that support sorting with user-specified comparison functions is to shuffle a list by sorting it with a comparison function that returns random values. However, "this is an extremely bad method": it is very likely to produce highly non-uniform distributions, which in addition depends heavily on the sorting algorithm used.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: For instance suppose quicksort is used as sorting algorithm, with a fixed element selected as first pivot element. The algorithm starts comparing the pivot with all other elements to separate them into those less and those greater than it, and the relative sizes of those groups will determine the final place of the pivot element. For a uniformly distributed random permutation, each possible final position should be equally likely for the pivot element, but if each of the initial comparisons returns "less" or "greater" with equal probability, then that position will have a binomial distribution for "p" = 1/2, which gives positions near the middle of the sequence with a much higher probability for than positions near the ends. Randomized comparison functions applied to other sorting methods like merge sort may produce results that appear more uniform, but are not quite so either, since merging two sequences by repeatedly choosing one of them with equal probability (until the choice is forced by the exhaustion of one sequence) does not produce results with a uniform distribution; instead the probability to choose a sequence should be proportional to the number of elements left in it. In fact no method that uses only two-way random events with equal probability ("coin flipping"), repeated a bounded number of times, can produce permutations of a sequence (of more than two elements) with a uniform distribution, because every execution path will have as probability a rational number with as denominator a power of 2, while the required probability 1/"n"! for each possible permutation is not of that form.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: In principle this shuffling method can even result in program failures like endless loops or access violations, because the correctness of a sorting algorithm may depend on properties of the order relation (like transitivity) that a comparison producing random values will certainly not have.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: While this kind of behaviour should not occur with sorting routines that never perform a comparison whose outcome can be predicted with certainty (based on previous comparisons), there can be valid reasons for deliberately making such comparisons. For instance the fact that any element should compare equal to itself allows using them as sentinel value for efficiency reasons, and if this is the case, a random comparison function would break the sorting algorithm.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Care must be taken when implementing the Fisher–Yates shuffle, both in the implementation of the algorithm itself and in the generation of the random numbers it is built on, otherwise the results may show detectable bias. A number of common sources of bias have been listed below.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: A common error when implementing the Fisher–Yates shuffle is to pick the random numbers from the wrong range. The flawed algorithm may appear to work correctly, but it will not produce each possible permutation with equal probability, and it may not produce certain permutations at all. For example, a common off-by-one error would be choosing the index "j" of the entry to swap in the example above to be always strictly less than the index "i" of the entry it will be swapped with. This turns the Fisher–Yates shuffle into Sattolo's algorithm, which produces only permutations consisting of a single cycle involving all elements: in particular, with this modification, no element of the array can ever end up in its original position.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Similarly, always selecting "j" from the entire range of valid array indices on "every" iteration also produces a result which is biased, albeit less obviously so. This can be seen from the fact that doing so yields "n" distinct possible sequences of swaps, whereas there are only "n"! possible permutations of an "n"-element array. Since "n" can never be evenly divisible by "n"! when "n" > 2 (as the latter is divisible by "n"−1, which shares no prime factors with "n"), some permutations must be produced by more of the "n" sequences of swaps than others. As a concrete example of this bias, observe the distribution of possible outcomes of shuffling a three-element array [1, 2, 3]. There are 6 possible permutations of this array (3! = 6), but the algorithm produces 27 possible shuffles (3 = 27). In this case, [1, 2, 3], [3, 1, 2], and [3, 2, 1] each result from 4 of the 27 shuffles, while each of the remaining 3 permutations occurs in 5 of the 27 shuffles.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: The matrix to the right shows the probability of each element in a list of length 7 ending up in any other position. Observe that for most elements, ending up in their original position (the matrix's main diagonal) has lowest probability, and moving one slot backwards has highest probability.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: Doing a Fisher–Yates shuffle involves picking uniformly distributed random integers from various ranges. Most random number generators, however — whether true or pseudorandom — will only directly provide numbers in a fixed range from 0 to RAND_MAX, and in some libraries, RAND_MAX may be as low as 32767. A simple and commonly used way to force such numbers into a desired range is to apply the modulo operator; that is, to divide them by the size of the range and take the remainder. However, the need in a Fisher–Yates shuffle to generate random numbers in every range from 0–1 to 0–"n" almost guarantees that some of these ranges will not evenly divide the natural range of the random number generator. Thus, the remainders will not always be evenly distributed and, worse yet, the bias will be systematically in favor of small remainders.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: For example, assume that your random number source gives numbers from 0 to 99 (as was the case for Fisher and Yates' original tables), and that you wish to obtain an unbiased random number from 0 to 15. If you simply divide the numbers by 16 and take the remainder, you'll find that the numbers 0–3 occur about 17% more often than others. This is because 16 does not evenly divide 100: the largest multiple of 16 less than or equal to 100 is 6×16 = 96, and it is the numbers in the incomplete range 96–99 that cause the bias. The simplest way to fix the problem is to discard those numbers before taking the remainder and to keep trying again until a number in the suitable range comes up. While in principle this could, in the worst case, take forever, the expected number of retries will always be less than one.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: A related problem occurs with implementations that first generate a random floating-point number—usually in the range [0,1]—and then multiply it by the size of the desired range and round down. The problem here is that random floating-point numbers, however carefully generated, always have only finite precision. This means that there are only a finite number of possible floating point values in any given range, and if the range is divided into a number of segments that doesn't divide this number evenly, some segments will end up with more possible values than others. While the resulting bias will not show the same systematic downward trend as in the previous case, it will still be there.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: An additional problem occurs when the Fisher–Yates shuffle is used with a pseudorandom number generator or PRNG: as the sequence of numbers output by such a generator is entirely determined by its internal state at the start of a sequence, a shuffle driven by such a generator cannot possibly produce more distinct permutations than the generator has distinct possible states. Even when the number of possible states exceeds the number of permutations, the irregular nature of the mapping from sequences of numbers to permutations means that some permutations will occur more often than others. Thus, to minimize bias, the number of states of the PRNG should exceed the number of permutations by at least several orders of magnitude.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: For example, the built-in pseudorandom number generator provided by many programming languages and/or libraries may often have only 32 bits of internal state, which means it can only produce 2 different sequences of numbers. If such a generator is used to shuffle a deck of 52 playing cards, it can only ever produce a very small fraction of the 52! ≈ 2 possible permutations. It is impossible for a generator with less than 226 bits of internal state to produce all the possible permutations of a 52-card deck.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: No pseudorandom number generator can produce more distinct sequences, starting from the point of initialization, than there are distinct seed values it may be initialized with. Thus, a generator that has 1024 bits of internal state but which is initialized with a 32-bit seed can still only produce 2 different permutations right after initialization. It can produce more permutations if one exercises the generator a great many times before starting to use it for generating permutations, but this is a very inefficient way of increasing randomness: supposing one can arrange to use the generator a random number of up to a billion, say 2 for simplicity, times between initialization and generating permutations, then the number of possible permutations is still only 2.


title: Fisher–Yates shuffle

text: A further problem occurs when a simple linear congruential PRNG is used with the divide-and-take-remainder method of range reduction described above. The problem here is that the low-order bits of a linear congruential PRNG with modulo 2 are less random than the high-order ones: the low "n" bits of the generator themselves have a period of at most 2. When the divisor is a power of two, taking the remainder essentially means throwing away the high-order bits, such that one ends up with a significantly less random value. Different rules apply if the LCG has prime modulo, but such generators are uncommon. This is an example of the general rule that a poor-quality RNG or PRNG will produce poor-quality shuffles.


title: Gregg Henry

text: Gregg Lee Henry (born May 6, 1952) is an American character actor and rock, blues and country musician.


title: Gregg Henry

text: He is best known for his performance as serial killer Dennis Rader in the made-for-television film "The Hunt for the BTK Killer", and for playing various "heavies" in various films, such as in "Payback" (1999) and Brian De Palma's "Body Double" (1984), the latter of whom Henry has collaborated with frequently over the years, acting in six De Palma films.


title: Gregg Henry

text: Henry was born May 6, 1952, in Lakewood, Colorado. He has been featured in over 75 television programs, including "The Riches"; "Firefly"; "Gilmore Girls"; "24"; "Airwolf"; ""; "Murder, She Wrote"; "Gilmore Girls"; "Matlock"; "In The Heat Of The Night"; "L.A. Law"; "Falcon Crest"; "Designing Women"; "Moonlighting"; "Magnum, P.I."; "Rich Man, Poor Man Book II"; "The Mentalist"; "Castle"; "Glee"; "Burn Notice" and "Breakout Kings".


title: Gregg Henry

text: He played Hugh Pannetta alongside Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver on the FX television series "The Riches". He played the role of Dobbs in the USA Network series "White Collar" and Hollis Doyle on the ABC series "Scandal". Starting June 10, 2013, he played Detective Carl Reddick in "The Killing". In 2014, he had a small role in the Marvel film "Guardians of the Galaxy" as well as its sequel as Peter Quill's grandfather. He appeared in recurring roles in "Hell on Wheels" and "The Following". He also portrayed the title role in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in 2017's Shakespeare in the Park in New York City.


title: German orthography

text: German orthography is the orthography used in writing the German language, which is largely phonemic. However, it shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the case.


title: German orthography

text: Today, Standard High German orthography is regulated by the (Council for German Orthography), composed of representatives from most German-speaking countries.


title: German orthography

text: The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus four special letters.


title: German orthography

text: German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut () and one is a ligature of and (; called "ess-zed/zee" or "sharp s"), all of which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet, and have their own names separate from the letters they are based on.


title: German orthography

text: While the Council for German Orthography considers distinct letters, disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (considering special letters as variants of ) and 30 (counting all special letters separately).


title: German orthography

text: The accented letters are used to indicate the presence of umlauts (fronting of back vowels). Before the introduction of the printing press, frontalization was indicated by placing an after the back vowel to be modified, but German printers developed the space-saving typographical convention of replacing the full with a small version placed above the vowel to be modified. In German Kurrent writing, the superscripted was simplified to two vertical dashes (as the Kurrent consists largely of two short vertical strokes), which have further been reduced to dots in both handwriting and German typesetting. Although the two dots of umlaut look like those in the diaeresis (trema), the two have different origins and functions.


title: German orthography

text: When it is not possible to use the umlauts (for example, when using a restricted character set) the characters should be transcribed as respectively, following the earlier postvocalic- convention; simply using the base vowel (e.g. instead of ) would be wrong and misleading. However, such transcription should be avoided if possible, especially with names. Names often exist in different variants, such as and , and with such transcriptions in use one could not work out the correct spelling of the name.


title: German orthography

text: Automatic back-transcribing is wrong not only for names. Consider, for example, ("the new book"). This should never be changed to , as the second is completely separate from the and does not even belong in the same syllable; () is (the root for "new") followed by , an inflection. The word does not exist in German.


title: German orthography

text: Furthermore, in northern and western Germany, there are family names and place names in which lengthens the preceding vowel (by acting as a ), as in the former Dutch orthography, such as , which is pronounced with a long , not an . Similar cases are and .


title: German orthography

text: In proper names and ethnonyms, there may also appear a rare and , which are not letters with an umlaut, but a diaeresis, used as in French and English to distinguish what could be a digraph, for example, in , in , in , in and (although Hoëcker added the diaeresis himself), and in . Occasionally, a diaeresis may be used in some well-known names, i.e.: (usually written as ).


title: German orthography

text: Swiss keyboards and typewriters do not allow easy input of uppercase letters with umlauts (nor ) because their positions are taken by the most frequent French diacritics. Uppercase umlauts were dropped because they are less common than lowercase ones (especially in Switzerland). Geographical names in particular are supposed to be written with plus , except . The omission can cause some inconvenience, since the first letter of every noun is capitalized in German.


title: German orthography

text: Unlike in Hungarian, the exact shape of the umlaut diacritics – especially when handwritten – is not important, because they are the only ones in the language (not counting the tittle on and ). They will be understood whether they look like dots (), acute accents () or vertical bars (). A horizontal bar (macron, ), a breve (), a tiny or , a tilde (), and such variations are often used in stylized writing (e.g. logos). However, the breve – or the ring () – was traditionally used in some scripts to distinguish a from an . In rare cases, the was underlined. The breved was common in some Kurrent-derived handwritings; it was mandatory in Sütterlin.


title: German orthography

text: or () represents the “s” sound. The German spelling reform of 1996 somewhat reduced usage of this letter in Germany and Austria. It is not used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.


title: German orthography

text: As derives from a ligature of lowercase letters, it is exclusively used in the middle or at the end of a word. The proper transcription when it cannot be used is ( and in earlier times). This transcription can give rise to ambiguities, albeit rarely; one such case is "in moderation" vs. "en masse". In all-caps, is replaced by or, optionally, by the uppercase. The uppercase was included in Unicode 5.1 as U+1E9E in 2008. Since 2010 its use is mandatory in official documentation in Germany when writing geographical names in all-caps. The option of using the uppercase in all-caps was officially added to the German orthography in 2017.


title: German orthography

text: Although nowadays substituted correctly only by , the letter actually originates from a distinct ligature: "long s" with "(round) z" (). Some people therefore prefer to substitute by , as it can avoid possible ambiguities (as in the above vs example).


title: German orthography

text: Incorrect use of the letter is a common type of spelling error even among native German writers. The spelling reform of 1996 changed the rules concerning and (no forced replacement of to at word’s end). This required a change of habits and is often disregarded: some people even incorrectly assumed that the had been abolished completely. However, if the vowel preceding the is long, the correct spelling remains (as in ""). If the vowel is short, it becomes , e.g. "I think that…". This follows the general rule in German that a long vowel is followed by a single consonant, while a short vowel is followed by a double consonant.


title: German orthography

text: This change towards the so-called Heyse spelling, however, introduced a new sort of spelling error, as the long/short pronunciation differs regionally. It was already mostly abolished in the late 19th century (and finally with the first unified German spelling of 1901) in favor of the Adelung spelling. Besides the long/short pronunciation issue, which can be attributed to dialect speaking (for instance, in the northern parts of Germany is typically pronounced short, i.e. "Spass", whereas particularly in Bavaria elongated may occur as in which is pronounced "Geschoß" in certain regions), Heyse spelling also introduces reading ambiguities that do not occur with Adelung spelling such as (Adelung: ) vs. (Adelung: ). It is therefore recommended to insert hyphens where required for reading assistance, i.e. vs. .


title: German orthography

text: In the Fraktur typeface and similar scripts, a long s () was used except in syllable endings (cf. Greek sigma) and sometimes it was historically used in antiqua fonts as well; but it went out of general use in the early 1940s along with the Fraktur typeface. An example where this convention would avoid ambiguity is () "guardhouse", written and () "tube of wax", written .


title: German orthography

text: Microsoft Windows in German versions offers the choice between the first two variants in its internationalisation settings.


title: German orthography

text: A sort of combination of nos. 1 and 2 also exists, in use in a couple of lexica: The umlaut is sorted with the base character, but an in proper names is sorted with the umlaut if it is actually spoken that way (with the umlaut getting immediate precedence). A possible sequence of names then would be in this order.


title: German orthography

text: In rare contexts (e.g. in older indices) (phonetic value equal to English ) and likewise and are treated as single letters, but the vocalic digraphs (historically ), and the historic never are.


title: German orthography

text: German names containing umlauts () and/or are spelled in the correct way in the non-machine-readable zone of the passport, but with and/or in the machine-readable zone, e.g. becomes , becomes , and becomes . The transcription mentioned above is generally used for aircraft tickets et cetera, but sometimes (like in US visas) simple vowels are used (). As a result, passport, visa, and aircraft ticket may display different spellings of the same name. The three possible spelling variants of the same name (e.g. ) in different documents sometimes lead to confusion, and the use of two different spellings within the same document may give persons unfamiliar with German orthography the impression that the document is a forgery.


title: German orthography

text: Even before the introduction of the capital , it was recommended to use the minuscule as a capital letter in family names in documents (e.g. , today's spelling: ).


title: German orthography

text: German naming law accepts umlauts and/or in family names as a reason for an official name change. Even a spelling change, e.g. from to or from to is regarded as a name change.


title: German orthography

text: A typical feature of German spelling is the general capitalization of nouns and of most nominalized words. In addition, capital letters are used: at the beginning of sentences (may be used after a colon, when the part of a sentence after the colon can be treated as a sentence); in the formal pronouns "Sie" 'you' and "Ihr" 'your' (optionally in other second-person pronouns in letters); in adjectives at the beginning of proper names (e. g. "der Stille Ozean" 'the Pacific Ocean'); in adjectives with the suffix '-er' from geographical names (e. g. "Berliner"); in adjectives with the suffix '-sch' from proper names if written with the apostrophe before the suffix (e. g. "Ohm'sches Gesetz" 'Ohm's law', also written "ohmsches Gesetz").


title: German orthography

text: Compound words, including nouns, are written together, e.g. "Haustür" ("Haus" + "Tür"; "house door"), "Tischlampe" ("Tisch" + "Lampe"; "table lamp"), "Kaltwasserhahn" ("Kalt" + "Wasser" + "Hahn"; "cold water tap/faucet"). This can lead to long words: the longest word in regular use, "Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften" ("legal protection insurance companies"), consists of 39 letters.


title: German orthography

text: Even though vowel length is phonemic in German, it is not consistently represented. However, there are different ways of identifying long vowels:


title: German orthography

text: Even though German does not have phonemic consonant length, there are many instances of doubled or even tripled consonants in the spelling. A single consonant following a checked vowel is doubled if another vowel follows, for instance "immer" 'always', "lassen" 'let'. These consonants are analyzed as ambisyllabic because they constitute not only the syllable onset of the second syllable but also the syllable coda of the first syllable, which must not be empty because the syllable nucleus is a checked vowel.


title: German orthography

text: By analogy, if a word has one form with a doubled consonant, all forms of that word are written with a doubled consonant, even if they do not fulfill the conditions for consonant doubling; for instance, "rennen" 'to run' → "er rennt" 'he runs'; "Küsse" 'kisses' → "Kuss" 'kiss'.


title: German orthography

text: Doubled consonants can occur in composite words when the first part ends in the same consonant the second part starts with, e.g. in the word "Schaffell" ('sheepskin', composed of "Schaf" 'sheep' and "Fell" 'skin, fur, pelt').