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NEW YORK (AP) — Aside from a shared mop of wavy, dark hair, Miles Mitchell and Zander Dueve likely wouldn’t be mistaken for each other. Neither would Christian Conti and Spencer Delorenzo, or David Arkay, Vincent Panetta and Dempsey Bobbitt.
Yet they now call themselves brothers. The “Brothers Chalamet,” that is — connected by a passing resemblance to one Timothée Chalamet.
Mitchell placed first, and Dueve, second, in the unofficial look-alike contest that saw thousands — including, briefly, Chalamet himself — swarm New York’s Washington Square Park last October. The rest, if ranked at all, fell somewhere behind them in organizer Anthony Po’s lineup.
For some, that day in the park brought community — and opportunity. Over a dozen contestants, added to an Instagram chat dubbed “Brothers Chalamet,” sat front row with Po at a New York Jets game. Mitchell, then a college senior, revived his Goodwill-thrifted Wonka costume for “The Drew Barrymore Show” and was flown out by CBS for the Golden Globes, posing with the real Chalamet on the red carpet. Modeling opportunities followed. Some caught the acting bug themselves.
For Chalamet, the look-alikes became unexpected surrogates running an impromptu guerrilla campaign during his awards season push for the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.” Each viral moment gave the bit longevity, stretching the contestants’ proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
“Every now and again, I’m like, OK, five minutes up,” Dueve told The Associated Press in Los Angeles in March. “And then I’m like, oh, OK. There’s another thing, and then another thing, and then another thing.”
What’s left, a year after their meeting? A class, united by a weirder than usual day in Washington Square Park and a likeness — often, admittedly, vague — to one of Hollywood’s brightest stars.
Embracing ‘cultural hijinks’Bobbitt was in line at a food truck during a visit to New York when strangers told him to enter the contest. Arkay, aware he didn’t share a “striking resemblance” to Chalamet but nonetheless a fan, was sent the information by his identical twin brother. (“Anytime we hear the word ‘look-alike,’ our ears perk up,” he said.) Panetta was working as a background actor in Darren Aronofsky’s “Caught Stealing” when he spotted the flyers offering a $50 prize.
Sensing that bubbling interest, photographer Jonathan Hollingsworth came up with a plan: He’d go with a paper backdrop, a digital camera and release forms. Police quickly approached, asking if he was behind the gathering and if he had a permit. “The answer to both was, of course, no,” Hollingsworth said. A summons was issued, the setup came down, and his less-invasive backup — a Polaroid camera — came out.
As the story goes, there were arrests, a move to a nearby playground and a $500 fine, which the invite app Partiful covered (Po declined a similar offer from Chalamet’s team).
Kate Eberstadt had bussed in from Washington, hoping to promote her song “Timmy Chalamet.” She also considered entering — “I do actually look a little bit like I could be a Chalamet cousin,” she said, “maybe more like Pauline (Chalamet, also an actor)” — but opted to observe. That proved fruitful: A video she caught of the real Chalamet posing with Delorenzo, set to her song, was picked up by entertainment outlets. Delorenzo and Conti’s subsequent appearance at Eberstadt’s February concert thrilled the audience.
Hollingsworth’s resulting book, “Call Me Timothée,” was published two months later. “It’s sort of a highbrow presentation of something that you could argue is a little lowbrow,” he said. But “that sort of pure, simple, revelry and joyousness” — the accessible “cultural hijinks,” as he put it — was something he wanted to document.
YouTuber MrBeast included Mitchell and Po among his “Brainrot Avengers” in his 2024 rewind video. Later, Mitchell parodied Chalamet’s “College GameDay” appearance in a digital advertisement for Impossible Foods — an imitation Chalamet, selling imitation meat.
“It’s like a Doppler effect,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s not something everyone just thought, ‘Oh, well, that was fun,’ and walked away from.”
Harnessing Chalamet’s wide appealA two-time Oscar nominee, Chalamet has maintained appeal among mainstream and very-online audiences alike since he broke out, balancing critically acclaimed indies like “Call Me By Your Name” with blockbusters like “Dune.” Ahead of his “Saturday Night Live” appearance as host and musical guest, fans joked he should perform the infamous “Statistics” rap, a high school-era video that periodically resurfaces. Chalamet, whose representatives didn’t respond to the AP’s multiple requests for comment, opted instead for deep-cut covers of Dylan.
Sergio Slavnov, a former hairstylist for Elton John and Neil Sedaka, went to the contest looking for talent for his Avenue Man product line, operating on a premise he had seen play out in his salon chair: Even if they don’t look like Chalamet, people want his tousled waves. (Alas, the actor has recently shaved his head.)
On Oscars weekend in March, Slavnov flew Mitchell and Dueve to Los Angeles to film an advertisement. Surrounded by suited models and holding a 3D-printed Oscar statuette, the pair dressed as Wonka and Paul Atreides earned some nods, stares and at least one salute to “Lisan al-Gaib.” “He’s my idol too,” Slavnov laughed. “He increased my business.”
Slavnov also stepped in to purchase a ticket on the last possible flight for Dueve when the Atlanta security guard got a last-minute invite from the “SNL” team.
“If I didn’t make it, they would have given my spot to someone else,” Dueve said. “Go into Bushwick and I’m sure you can find 10 Timothée Chalamet look-alikes.”
In the January “SNL” promotional video, Chalamet calls for backup from Bobbitt, as Wonka, and Dueve, as Dylan.
“I genuinely can’t sing enough praises for him,” Bobbitt said. “He treated us with the respect that we would expect to give to him.”
“Even when we were on set, the director called out ‘Bob Dylan’ for my name and Timmy was like, ‘Nah, that’s Zander, call him Zander,’” Dueve said.
Kickstarting a trend — and finding friendsCopycat events around the world have honored everyone from Dev Patel and Glen Powell to Zendaya and Shohei Ohtani. A Stephen Colbert look-alike contest turned into a rally in early September, after his late-night show was canceled.
“I was making skits on the internet in 2021, getting like 5 or 6 million views,” Po said. “The greater impact of those is way less than bringing people together in real life. You know, the winner of whatever look-alike competition is going to tell their grandkids about it.”
The “Brothers Chalamet” chat — where invites to comedy gigs and magic shows are frequent — nowadays functions like a support group for the mostly 20-somethings. “We’re the graduating class of the Timothée Chalamet competition,” Dueve said, one bringing together “a bunch of people that probably wouldn’t bother to look past each other on the subway.”
Delorenzo now works at a movie theater that’s planning to put him to good use when Chalamet’s “Marty Supreme” comes out. Earlier this week, he interviewed at a chocolate store. “The joke writes itself,” he said in a text.
Many of the look-alikes indeed had their interest in entertainment careers confirmed or inspired by the response to the contest.
“Best-case scenario: If I do become a really successful actor, then I could say this all came from a YouTuber who made a look-alike contest of another actor,” Mitchell explained. “And then someone is going to make a look-alike contest of me in the future, and someone is going to win that, and then they’re going to become an actor. Just because that sounds so crazy, that is a motivator for me to become an actor.”
NEW YORK (AP) — More gains for Nvidia, Amazon and other AI superstars are propping up Wall Street on Monday, even as most U.S. stocks fall.
The S&P 500 rose 0.3% in afternoon trading and was holding near its all-time high set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 196 points, or 0.4%, as of 2:01 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.6% higher.
The losses were widespread, and two out of every three stocks within the S&P 500 fell. Kimberly-Clark led the way with a drop of 13.7% after it said it would buy Kenvue in a deal valuing it at $48.7 billion. Kenvue, which sells Tylenol, Band-Aids and Listerine, jumped 14.1%.
Beyond Meat tumbled 11% after the plant-based meat company delayed its report for the latest quarter’s results to Nov. 11 from Tuesday. It said it needs more time to assess how big of a non-cash charge it will take against its earnings due to issues it had previously disclosed with some of its assets.
Beyond Meat’s stock has been mostly falling since topping $4 in July, but it went on a wild ride last month where it suddenly soared from 52 cents to $3.62 in three days, a nearly 600% surge. It got swept up in the “meme stock” craze, where prices can rise solely due to online hype rather than any change to the company’s actual business.
A much longer-lasting frenzy on Wall Street has been the furor around artificial-intelligence technology, which proponents say is in the midst of changing the world.
Nvidia was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500 Monday, much like it has been for the year so far. The chip company rose 3.3% to bring its gain for the year to date to 55%.
Microsoft fell 0.2% after it announced a $9.7 billion contract with AI cloud service provider IREN that will give it access to some of Nvidia’s chips. The five-year deal will help Microsoft as it looks to keep up with AI demand. IREN jumped 8.8%.
Amazon rallied 4.4% after announcing a $38 billion agreement with OpenAI, which will use Amazon’s cloud computing services to run its AI workloads.
Palantir Technologies, which came into the day with a stunning 165% gain for the year so far, rose another 3.3%. Traders are pushing up the AI darling in the final hours before the data platform company reports its latest quarterly results after trading closes for the day.
It and companies across the U.S. stock market will need to hit expectations in order to justify the big gains for their stock prices since hitting a low in April. Criticism has been rising that the broad U.S. market, and AI stocks in particular, have become too expensive and could be inflating into a dangerous bubble similar to the 2000 dot-com bust.
For the most part, companies have been meeting high expectations for profits. Four out of every five companies in the S&P 500 that have delivered their results for the latest quarter so far have topped analysts’ forecasts, according to FactSet. With the reporting season roughly two-thirds done, companies in the S&P 500 are on track to deliver healthy growth of nearly 11% from a year earlier.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.11%, where it was late Friday.
It recovered from an earlier stumble following a discouraging report on U.S. manufacturers. Activity for them shrank by more last month than economists expected, with several telling surveyors for the Institute for Supply Management that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are creating financial pain.
“Wonder has turned to concern regarding how the tariff threats are affecting our business,” a chemical products manufacturer told the survey. “Orders are down across most divisions, and we’ve lowered our financial expectations for 2025.”
“In general, business is really strained,” another manufacturer told the survey.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe following a stronger finish in Asia.
South Korea’s Kospi jumped 2.8% to another record. SK Hynix soared nearly 11%, helped by recent moves to team up with Nvidia in developing the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure and capabilities. South Korean shipbuilders also logged gains after China said it would cancel added port fees on U.S.-invested or U.S. flagged vessels after Trump met last week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
___
AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump sees tariffs — or the threat of them — as a powerful tool to bend nations to his will.
He has used them in an unprecedented way, not only as the underpinning of his economic agenda, but also as the cornerstone of his foreign policy in his second term.
He has wielded the import taxes as a threat to secure ceasefiresfrom countries at war. He has used them to browbeat nations into promising to do more to stop people and drugs from flowing across their borders. He has used them, in Brazil’s case, as political pressure because its judicial system prosecuted a former leader who was a Trump ally, and in a recent blowup with Canada, as punishment for a television ad.
This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments on whether the Republican president has overstepped federal law with many of his tariffs. A ruling against him could limit or even take away that swift and blunt leverage that much of his foreign policy has relied on.
Trump increasingly has expressed agitation and anxiety about the looming decision in a case he says is one of the most important in U.S. history.
He has said it would be a “disaster” for the United States if the justices fail to overturn lower court rulings that found he went too far in using an emergency powers law to put his tariffs in place.
Trump had said he wanted to take the highly unusual step of attending the arguments in person, but on Sunday said he had ruled it out, saying he didn’t want to be a distraction. “I wanted to go so badly — I just don’t want to do anything to deflect the importance of that decision," he told reporters on Air Force One.
The Justice Department, in its defense of the tariffs, has highlighted the expansive way Trump has used them, arguing that the trade penalties are part of his power over foreign affairs, an area where the courts should not second-guess the president.
Earlier this year, two lower courts and most judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that Trump did not have power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to set tariffs — a power the Constitution grants to Congress. Some dissenting judges on the court, though, said the 1977 law allows the president to regulate imports during emergencies without specific limitations.
The courts left the tariffs in place while the Supreme Court considers the issue. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to wield them as he has tried to pressure or punish other countries on matters related — and unrelated -- to trade.
“The fact of the matter is that President Trump has acted lawfully by using the tariff powers granted to him by Congress in IEEPA to deal with national emergencies and to safeguard our national security and economy,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “We look forward to ultimate victory on this matter with the Supreme Court.”
Still, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Trump trade team is working on contingency plans should the high court rule against the Republican administration.
“We do have backup plans,” Leavitt said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “But ultimately…we are hopeful that the Supreme Court will rule on the right side of the law and do what’s right for our country. The importance of this case cannot be overstated. The president must have the emergency authority to utilize tariffs.”
Most presidents haven’t used tariffs as a foreign policy toolModern presidents have used financial sanctions such as freezing assets or blocking trade, not tariffs, for their foreign policy and national security aims, said Josh Lipsky, a former Obama White House and State Department staffer who is now the international economics chair at the Atlantic Council.
There are other laws that presidents can use to impose tariffs. But they require a monthslong process to justify the rates.
Trump, citing the IEEPA, moves faster and more dramatically. He signs executive orders imposing new rates and fires off social media posts threatening additional import taxes, as he did in late October when he was angered by an anti-tariff television ad aired by the province of Ontario.
“Presidents have typically treated tariffs as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” Lipsky said.
In contrast, Trump has used tariffs as the backbone of his national security and foreign policy agenda, Lipsky said. “All of it is interconnected and tariffs are at the heart of it,” he said.
For example, earlier this year Trump had threatened a 30% tariff on European imports, a major increase from 1.2% before he took office. Seeking to secure Trump’s support for the NATO military alliance and for security guarantees for Ukraine in its war with Russia, the European Union struck a deal to settle for 15% tariffs.
The EU Commission faced criticism from businesses and member states for giving away too much. But Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič argued the settlement was “not only about the trade. It’s about security. It’s about Ukraine.”
Trump has been able “to use it in specific circumstances to get better deals — not just trade deals — but better deals overall than he might otherwise,” Lipsky said. “On the other hand, you would say there’s probably some backlash.”
Supreme Court decision could rattle geopolitics — and walletsTrump’s tariff strong-arming has rattled relationships with America’s friends and foes. Some have responded by becoming more protectionist or looking to foster relations with China, which has tried to be seen as a promoter of free trade.
There also is the impact on pocketbook. Some businesses have passed on some of the costs to consumers by raising prices, while others have waited to see where tariff rates end up.
Tariffs traditionally have been used just as a tool to address trade practices.
“There’s literally no precedent for the manner that President Trump is using them,” said Emily Kilcrease, who was a deputy assistant U.S. trade representative and earlier worked on trade issues at the National Security Council as a career civil servant during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations,
“The use of tariffs the way that President Trump is using them is like — just broadscale attack on an economy as a way to incentivize a foreign government to change their posture,” said Kilcrease, now a director at the Center for a New American Security think tank.
But she said the case is not clear-cut. Kilcrease said she thinks there is a “decent chance” the Supreme Court could side with Trump because IEEPA gives the president “broad, flexible emergency powers.”
The case is also coming before a Supreme Court that has thus far been reluctant to check to Trump’s wide-ranging use of executive powers.
If the court constrains Trump, it could leave foreign governments questioning whether to try to renegotiate trade agreements recently struck with the Trump administration, experts said. But there are political realities at play too, because reneging on deals could affect other foreign policy or economic priorities.
The administration could pivot to try to use other laws to justify the tariffs, though that could mean a more complex and bureaucratic process, Kilcrease said.
“It certainly doesn’t take tariffs off the table,” she said. “It just makes them a little bit slower.”
___
Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s antitrust watchdog said Monday that it is escalating its investigation of plans by Getty Images to buy rival Shutterstock, stepping up scrutiny of the $3.7 billion deal that would create a visual content giant.
The Competition and Markets Authority said that it was opening an in-depth merger investigation after its preliminary inquiry raised concerns that the deal would result in higher prices, worse commercial terms, or lower quality of editorial and stock images.
The proposed merger was announced in January with companies that make money from still images created by humans face increasing competition from those generated by artificial intelligence.
The CMA said it was taking a closer look after its initial inquiry found that the combination of the two U.S. companies might “result in a substantial lessening of competition within a market or markets in the United Kingdom.”
Getty said it’s “disappointed” but “remains committed” to the deal and will continue to work with regulators and with Shutterstock to secure approval.
Both companies license content including photos, illustrations, music and videos to major British media companies, advertisers, publishers and designers, as well as small and medium businesses in the creative industry, the CMA said.
After businesses and trade groups voiced concerns to the CMA during the preliminary inquiry about the supply of editorial and stock content, Getty and Shutterstock responded with a “complex package of remedies,” according to the British regulator. The watchdog escalates its investigation because the offers didn’t “fully address” the concerns.
Shutterstock said Monday that Getty offered “comprehensive remedies” to avert further review, but that it too, remains committed to the merger.
The CMA has until April 16 to make a final decision on the deal, which it said the U.S. Department of Justice was also reviewing. The watchdog could decide to either clear the transaction, or impose its own remedies, including selling off parts of the business or blocking it.
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