new york — Over 8 million people live in New York City and yet lasting romantic relationships can still seem hard to come by.

Because of this, many singles in the city have ditched swiping on dating apps for socializing in real life through in-person events such as running clubs, reading parties and singles meetups.

In the early 2010s, dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge became a prominent way to meet potential partners, and though they have produced countless successful love stories, many New York City singles are beginning to grow weary of them.

“I think there’s some disenchantment with dating apps overall. A feeling like they’re an option, but maybe not the best option,” said Kathryn Coduto, assistant professor of media science at Boston University and dating researcher. “An in-person meeting, a group maybe, where there’s similar interests, allows people to connect in person and have that initial conversation without the phone as an intermediary.”

Dating app fatigue paired with recent years of COVID-19 isolation has contributed to a recent upward trend of in-person social events. According to Eventbrite, in-person dating activities in the United States saw a 42% increase in attendance from 2022 to 2023.

Amber Soletti, founder of in-person singles dating event company Single and the City, has seen this trend, too, noting that her business is up 67% in event attendance from a year ago.

“People have this app fatigue, this swipe fatigue,” Soletti said. “They are ready to go back to in-person events and make authentic connections with people in real life.”

This is exactly the goal of the viral Lunge Run Club, a running club based in Manhattan targeted toward singles looking for love.

Founded earlier this year by Steve Cole and Rachael Lansing, the club meets every Wednesday in Manhattan for a 5-kilometer run followed by drinks at a bar. Lunge Run Club started with only 30 people and has since taken the city by storm, raking in hundreds of attendees each week.

The club encourages people to wear black if single and colors if taken, hoping to take some of the mystery and fear out of in-person dating events.

“People always use run clubs or recreational sports, anything like that, as a way to meet people,” Lansing said. “We kind of just took away that mask of, ‘I’m going and maybe I’ll meet someone’ and now it’s the intentional, ‘I’m showing up. I’m wearing all black. I’m saying I’m single. I’m looking to either meet some great friends or someone special.’”

Lunge Run Club is not alone in its mission, but rather a part of a movement of people seeking connection in one of the largest cities in the world. Soletti’s Single and the City hosts speed dating events and specialized singles mixers focused on shared interests, hobbies or even physical characteristics, such as height.

“Having something in common is a great starting point for a relationship, and that could be a friendship, but could also be a romantic relationship,” Coduto said. “That makes a lot of sense when you have something in common with someone, it gives you something to talk about.”

While Lunge Run Club and Single and the City are specifically marketed as dating scenes, other events are more broadly focused on facilitating community in general.

In June 2023, Ben Bradbury, Tom Worcester, Charlotte Jackson and John Lifrieri founded Reading Rhythms, “reading parties” during which people meet at various venues to read and socialize, helping people build community, friendships and possibly even more.

Bradbury explained how in-person interactions, such as those at Reading Rhythms, can facilitate connection in a way that cannot always be replicated online.

“Authentic connection, you can’t fake it when you’re in person. It’s either authentic or it’s not,” Bradbury said. “I think people are really enjoying that, that feeling of having people together and, also, just remembering what it’s like to connect in person. I think society is really wanting that right now.”

Despite not necessarily being advertised as a place to find romantic love, Reading Rhythms has seen an outpouring of support and engagement similar to Lunge Run Club and Single and the City’s events. Reading Rhythms has hosted over 120 parties with 7,500 readers looking for an in-person connection over a shared interest.

“It’s hard to feel someone’s energy when you just see them online. I think with this day and age of social media, and curating our online presence, you get one layer of who someone is,” said Nikki D’Ambrosio, host and longtime participant of Reading Rhythms. “What I love about Reading Rhythms is it’s not just, ‘Hi, my name is Nikki and this is what book I’m reading.’ It’s really going deeper.”

From running to reading to speed dating, people are yearning for in-person connection and New York City has countless opportunities to offer.
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The United States said it was not involved in the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in an overnight strike in Tehran. Haniyeh is the second Iran-backed militant group leader assassinated this week. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is prodding Congress to help him do more to combat the scourge of fentanyl before he leaves office. 

The Democratic administration is making the new policy push as Republican former President Donald Trump steps up attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, painting her as Biden’s feckless lieutenant in the battle to slow the illegal drugs and immigrants without authorization coming into the United States from Mexico. 

The White House on Wednesday announced a series of proposals from Biden aimed at curbing the ongoing drug epidemic. These include a push on Congress to pass legislation to establish a pill press and tableting machine registry and enhance penalties against convicted drug smugglers and traffickers of fentanyl. 

Biden also wants to tighten rules on importers shipping small packages into the United States, requiring shippers to provide additional information to Customs and Border Protection officials. The move is aimed at improving the detection of fentanyl precursor chemicals that frequently find their way into the United States in relatively low-value shipments that aren’t subject to customs and trade barriers. 

The president’s new efforts at combating fentanyl may also benefit Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, as Trump and his surrogates are trying to cast her as a central player in the Biden administration’s struggles at the U.S.-Mexico border throughout his term. 

“Still, far too many of our fellow Americans continue to lose loved ones to fentanyl,” Biden said in a statement. “This is a time to act. And this is a time to stand together — for all those we have lost, and for all the lives we can still save.” 

Biden said he will also sign a national security memorandum on Wednesday aimed at improving the sharing of information between law enforcement and federal agencies to improve understanding about the flows of production and smuggling of the synthetic opioid that has ravaged huge swaths of America. In the last five months, more than 442 million doses of fentanyl were seized at U.S. borders, according to the White House. 

The Trump campaign launched its first television ad of the general election cycle on Tuesday, dubbing Harris the “border czar” and blaming her for a surge in illegal crossings into the United States during the Biden administration. After displaying headlines about crime and drugs, the video brands Harris as “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.” 

Border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration but have dropped more recently. 

The Trump campaign has so far reserved $12.2 million in television and digital ads through the next two weeks, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. 

Biden tasked Harris early in his administration with addressing the root causes of migration. Border crossings became a major political liability for Biden when they reached historic levels. Since June, when Biden announced significant restrictions on asylum applications at the border, arrests for illegal crossings have fallen. 

House Republicans passed a symbolic resolution last week criticizing Harris’ work on the border on behalf of the Biden administration. 

The White House reiterated its call on Congress to pass sweeping immigration legislation that includes funding for more border agents and drug detection machines at the border. GOP senators earlier this year scuttled months of negotiations with Democrats on legislation intended to cut back record numbers of illegal border crossings after Trump eviscerated the bipartisan proposal. 

The proposed pill-pressing registry floated by Biden aims to help law enforcement crackdown on drug traffickers who use pill presses to press fentanyl into pills. 

Authorities say most illicit fentanyl is produced clandestinely in Mexico, using chemical precursors from China. Synthetic opioids are the biggest killers in the deadliest drug crisis the U.S. has ever seen. In 2014, nearly 50,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to drug overdoses of all kinds. By 2022, the total was more than 100,000, according to a tally by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than two-thirds of those deaths — more than 200 per day — involved fentanyl or similar synthetic drugs. 

Meeting with China

Meanwhile, administration officials and Chinese government officials are expected to meet Wednesday to discuss efforts to curb the flow of chemical precursors coming from China, according to a senior administration official. 

Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at a November summit in California that Beijing had agreed to press its chemical companies to curtail shipments to Latin America and elsewhere of the materials used to produce fentanyl. China also agreed to a resumption of sharing information about suspected trafficking with an international database. 

But a special House committee focused on countering the Chinese government in April issued a report that China still is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country. 

The official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said China had taken “important steps,” but there is much more to do.
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Prague/Washington  — Portraits of Alsu Kurmasheva are scattered throughout the Prague apartment she shares with her husband and two daughters. But the journalist has not set foot here in more than a year.

Perhaps the most striking of the paintings, all of which were done by her husband, Pavel Butorin, is the one that remains unfinished, perched on an easel in the living room. Butorin started it after Kurmasheva, 47, was jailed in Russia in October 2023 on charges that are widely viewed as baseless and politically motivated.

Painting, Butorin says, is just one way he has tried to cope with his wife’s absence.

“Even to say, ‘We miss Alsu,’ doesn’t quite convey the emotion that we go through,” Butorin told VOA at the family’s home. “I get up, and the first thing in my head is Alsu. I’ve just been really unable to escape this.”

With their lives intertwined — from raising their daughters Bibi and Miriam, to working at the same news network — he is never far from reminders that his wife is 1,700 miles away, in a prison in the city of Kazan.

“In the evening, we sit at this table. We see an empty chair,” Butorin said, his eyes fixed on the seat at the large, wooden table, as if he were willing his wife to appear. “It signifies a broken family, a family torn apart by an unjust, merciless, heartless regime.”

When Butorin spoke with VOA in Prague in July, his wife — who has dual U.S.-Russian citizenship — was approaching nine months in custody. Less than one week later, on July 19, she was convicted behind closed doors of spreading what Moscow says is false information about its military and sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

On the same day, about 450 miles east, in the city of Yekaterinburg, Russia, a secret Russian court convicted American journalist Evan Gershkovich to 16 years behind bars.

The U.S. government has called for the immediate release of both journalists. Press freedom groups, meanwhile, have condemned the trials as shams and said the cases underscore how Moscow’s war in Ukraine means American journalists are at a heightened risk of being used as political pawns by the Kremlin.

Kurmasheva and Gershkovich count themselves among the 22 journalists jailed in Russia at the end of 2023, more than half of whom are foreign nationals, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry and embassy in Washington did not reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment for this story.

Despite the international condemnation, Butorin has largely shouldered the responsibility of advocating for Kurmasheva’s release by himself. For months, he has found himself balancing the roles of father, journalist and advocate as he shuttles between Prague and Washington.

Hostage experts say his experience is common for American families who have a loved one held hostage or unjustly detained.

A decade ago, Diane Foley was one of them as she tried to navigate complex bureaucracy and conflicting information when Islamic State militants kidnapped and later killed her son, American journalist James Foley, in 2014.

Her experience led her to establish the Foley Foundation, which supports families and advocates for Americans unjustly jailed abroad.

“A lot of families don’t have any idea how to contact media or get their story heard, how to contact their congressman, how to get their voices heard through the bureaucracy. So we seek to help them navigate that,” she told VOA during one of her regular trips to Washington.

The U.S. government has made progress in these policy areas, she says. But so much more still needs to be done.

A longtime journalist at the Tatar-Bashkir Service of VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL, Kurmasheva had planned only a brief visit to Russia to care for her ailing mother.

Her desk at work remains relatively untouched. Business cards are still spread out on the table. And the calendar — still set to May 2023 — shows where she underlined in black ink the dates of the ill-fated trip.

In the weeks following Kurmasheva’s jailing, her colleague Ramazan Alpaut said he still turned around at his desk, half-expecting to see Kurmasheva sitting behind him.

“We miss her here as a person and as a colleague,” he told VOA.

Kurmasheva’s arrest came as a shock for the team, and a warning that travel to see family in Russia is no longer an option.

That fact, says Tatar-Bashkir Service chief Rim Gilfanov, crystallizes an already difficult reality for exiled Russians grappling with the fallout of the war in Ukraine.

But more immediately, he says, he just wants a key member of his team back.

“Alsu is our veteran journalist,” Gilfanov says. “The main quality that comes to my mind when I think of Alsu is constant eagerness and preparedness to help everyone.”

Authoritarian regimes have long targeted RFE/RL and its journalists. Russia has designated the outlet a foreign agent and an undesirable organization. And Kurmasheva is one of four of its journalists currently in prison, including two in Belarus and one in Russian-occupied Crimea.

“It’s a grim reality that starts to set in that we are targets,” RFE/RL president and CEO Stephen Capus told VOA. “They’re trying to make the pursuit of journalism a crime.”

“They are taking me to the investigative committee right now.”

Butorin was at work when he got this distressed voice message from his wife. It was October 18, 2023, and agents dressed in black and wearing balaclavas had arrived at the home of Kurmasheva’s mother to arrest the journalist.

The next time he heard his wife’s voice was in April 2024, when she spoke to reporters from a glass defendant’s box about the poor prison conditions she was experiencing.

“We love to hear her voice. But it’s also painful to see her in a glass cage,” Butorin said.

Butorin, director of Current Time TV, a Russian-language television and digital network led by RFE/RL in partnership with VOA, was at work when he listened to the message.

His office is now part shrine, filled with photos and posters and newspaper articles about his wife. On the whiteboard, Free Alsu magnets depict a cartoon of her face. Butorin drew the image for Kurmasheva’s Gmail profile picture, he said. Now it’s on magnets and buttons — like the one pinned to the lapel of his dark blue suit jacket this July afternoon.

In a corner, next to a Lego diorama of the set of the TV show “Seinfeld” — a series the family loves to watch — is a stack of copies of No to War. The book, which Kurmasheva helped edit, features stories of 40 Russians who opposed Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Pro-Russian media have reported that Kurmasheva’s arrest is linked to that book. But to date, authorities have failed to publicly provide evidence to substantiate its charges against her.

“It’s a harmless little book,” Butorin said. “It just reminds me how incredibly arbitrary this detention is.”

Butorin has spent an unknown number of hours thinking about his wife’s captors. Are they evil personified? Or, à la Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, are they just bureaucrats “thoughtlessly” doing their jobs?

The answer likely lies somewhere in the middle, he recognizes, but Butorin still finds himself wondering whether the judges and prosecutors once listened to her deep voice on the radio, back when she hosted a show for audiences in Tatarstan.

Kurmasheva’s long absence has been marked by bittersweet birthdays and holidays, more media interviews than Butorin can count, and five trips to Washington to press lawmakers and U.S. government officials to do more for his wife.

In his office, just a few days before he departs for one of those trips, he admits that, like many journalists, he prefers to be behind the camera instead of being the story.

But that preference for privacy is no more.

“I fear if I don’t keep this story in the news, and if I don’t keep Alsu’s story alive, that U.S. policymakers, members of the administration, of any administration, will just start forgetting about her,” Butorin said. “I see a problem there.”

Butorin, who is also a U.S. citizen, is quick to voice appreciation for the support officials and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have offered. It turns out that press freedom is one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

But the trips to the American capital are also stained with frustration.

Requests to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been denied, Butorin said. (Blinken also serves as an ex officio member of the board that oversees the entities under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including RFE/RL and VOA.) To date, the highest-ranking official Butorin has met with is Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter.

Feeling optimistic can be difficult, Butorin said, when, in meeting after meeting, the same officials regurgitate the same talking points and offer little concrete information.

“Sometimes I walk out with a sense of desperation, and sometimes I find these meetings very unsatisfactory,” he says.

It’s a problem familiar to Diane Foley.

When Islamic State militants kidnapped her son in 2012, she says, the process was even more opaque.

“Our government doesn’t seem to trust these desperate families, who want their loved one back, with what information they have,” she said.

To Foley, “an undue burden” is still placed on families to fight for the U.S. government’s attention.

“It’s all on the family in the U.S. That hasn’t changed a whole lot,” she said. “It was all on me, all on our family, when Jim was taken — all on us to figure it out. And now it’s still all on the family.”

Foley and her foundation are helping Butorin navigate the process, including by working behind the scenes to push the State Department.

In that time, she has grown close to the couple’s daughters. “When I see Bibi and Miriam, God bless them. They shouldn’t, as teenagers, be dealing with this,” she said.

In late July, she and Butorin took part in a Foley Foundation event in the Capitol Building, to mark the release of its annual report on U.S. hostage policy. The foundation counts 46 Americans held hostage or unjustly detained around the world.

At the panel, Dustin Stewart, the deputy special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, spoke about the support the government offers.

Butorin rebutted that because Kurmasheva has not been declared wrongfully detained, his family is not receiving any of that support.

At the panel, Stewart told VOA, “On the process, I’ll just say, it’s ongoing.”

The designation opens up extra resources and support for families and commits the government to secure their release.

It is the biggest difference between the cases of Kurmasheva and Gershkovich, the other American journalist jailed in Russia. In the latter case, the United States declared The Wall Street Journal reporter wrongfully detained within two weeks of his arrest. Press freedom groups have criticized the State Department for not declaring Kurmasheva wrongfully detained, too.

When pressed as to if and when Kurmasheva will be designated, the State Department has on several occasions sent VOA identical or nearly identical statements that say the Department “continuously reviews the circumstances” of Americans detained overseas to determine if they are wrongful. Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, has denied VOA’s multiple requests for an interview about Kurmasheva’s case.

To cope, Butorin says compartmentalizing has become a necessary strategy.

“It may come across as a little disingenuous, but you do have to treat all these little areas of your life as projects,” he said. Those “projects” range from calling on Blinken to declare his wife wrongfully detained to dealing with the “Kafkaesque bureaucracy” of the Czech postal system that prevents him from collecting his wife’s mail.

In public events and interviews, Butorin leans toward the stoic, which he notes is unlike Kurmasheva, who can go into a room and “walk away with five or 10 new friends.”

“Some people may think that I lack emotion,” Butorin said. “But it’s all a front. I’m hurting on the inside.”

It’s when Butorin is by himself that he says he feels the most pain. “When the girls go to bed, I usually go to bed soon, too,” Butorin said, “so I’m not left alone with my thoughts.”

And when he is with the couple’s daughters, there are glimpses of the joy and the humor the family still manages to share.

After an interview in Washington, Butorin excitedly showed videos from an Olivia Rodrigo concert he attended with his daughters. Nearby, Bibi, 16, and Miriam, 12, were writing postcards to friends in Prague. Butorin made fun of one of them for how she wrote the number seven.

“You cross your sevens? That’s un-American,” he said with a smirk, provoking laughter from both girls.

When Kurmasheva eventually returns, Butorin quipped that she will find their daughters taller than she is. “But more importantly, she will see very strong young women who have had to grow up really quickly,” he said.

Sometimes, when Butorin sees videos or photos of his wife in court, he finds himself wondering whether she’s still the same person. In any case, he and his daughters aren’t.

“It’s hurting my family a lot that my mom isn’t here with us,” Bibi said. “It’s been so long already, and we just don’t want to get used to our mom not being here, because we’re getting close to that, unfortunately.”

Back in the family’s Prague apartment, the teenager alternates between talking about Taylor Swift and calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release her mother. On the wall opposite her, an abstract painting by her father depicts Kurmasheva pregnant with Bibi.

“At the dinner table, I always feel like there’s something missing because she’s not there. And it’s weird having to cook for one less person. And it’s weird being in the car with one less person. And it’s weird, because we were always a family of four. And now there’s one of us missing,” Bibi said.

Butorin doesn’t like to dwell on the past, and by that he primarily means Kurmasheva’s decision to travel to Russia in the first place. They were both well aware of the risks, he said.

She had traveled there without incident in 2022. But the day she left in 2023, he recalls Kurmasheva saying to him, “Tell me everything will be OK.”

Some days, Butorin wishes he hadn’t let her go. But then, Kurmasheva wouldn’t be Kurmasheva if she hadn’t gone.

“She is known as a selfless friend,” Butorin said. “That empathy and her responsibility as a devoted daughter, that was what really drove her to go to Russia.”

Bibi agreed. “She pays attention to every single person around her, and she’s really willing to give up so many things about her and her life to help others.”

As the family waits for any progress in her case, Butorin channels his wife’s unselfishness and his daughters’ resiliency.

“I don’t have the luxury of just falling apart. Honestly, that’s not an option for me,” Butorin said. “It’s just something that we have to live with. I think I’m a fairly unremarkable person. It’s just something that a father — any father — I think would do.”
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