The noted shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis was annoyed: Her hearing amplification headset, which had been provided by the New Amsterdam Theatre on occasion of the New York Times Company annual shareholder meeting, was not working, and she would not allow the meeting to begin until she was situated. "The woman gave me a broken one!" she yelled into the audience in her thick Dutch accent. At the podium, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. looked perturbed but spoke gently to the woman, as one might speak to one's great-aunt who is being kept in a sanitarium high in the Swiss Alps: "Evelyn, you have to sit down or you have to leave."