Author: NY TIMES

“God gave me the voice that people want to hear,” Paul Robeson, the great African American singer, actor and activist, told the Black newspaper “The New York Age” in a 1949 interview.Aware of his powers and obliged by his influence, Robeson inserted himself into an incredibly fraught moment in American history. His powerful advocacy for the rights of Black and working-class Americans made him a hero, but his political leanings put him at odds with the prevailing anti-Communist forces in Congress, which eventually impeded his career. Robeson’s fame was global, however, and he had plenty of opportunities abroad — until…

The National Rally party won a crushing victory in the first round of voting for the French National Assembly, according to early projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time.Pollster projections, which are normally reliable and are based on preliminary results, suggested the party would take about 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and its allies, which got about 21 percent.The scores, in a two-round election that will be completed with a runoff on July 7 between the leading parties in…

[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Me encantan las faldas cortas. Siendo una mujer profesionista que está en forma, ¿qué tan cortas las puedo usar? Me siento cómoda con unos cinco, tal vez siete centímetros por encima de la rodilla, pero temo con el paso de los años comenzar a vestirme “demasiado joven”. ¿Cómo sabré cuándo me he pasado de la raya? – Ann, Portsmouth, New HampshireIncluso antes de que Ally McBeal, en la comedia homónima de los años 90, detonara una tendencia en torno a debatir si es correcto o no usar faldas increíblemente cortas como las que llevaba…

“Inside Out 2” delivers a fresh crop of emotions for Riley, the film’s 13-year-old protagonist, who begins the story at the cusp of puberty. Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui join the core emotions from the original film: Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness.The most consequential of the new arrivals is Anxiety, whose well-meaning but chaotic influence pushes Riley and the other emotions to the edge of mental and social catastrophe. Voiced by Maya Hawke and bursting with discomfiting character details — unruly hair, bulging eyes, a grand-piano grin — Anxiety emerges as the hit sequel’s breakout star and unstable center…

Taliban officials attended a rare, United Nations-led conference of global envoys to Afghanistan on Sunday, the first such meeting Taliban representatives have agreed to engage in, after organizers said Afghan women would be excluded from the talks.The two-day conference in Doha, Qatar, is the third of its kind. It is part of a United Nations-led effort, known as the “Doha process,” started in May 2023. It is meant to develop a unified approach for international engagement with Afghanistan. Envoys from around 25 countries and regional organizations, including the European Union, the United States, Russia and China, are attending. Taliban officials…

A Russian missile attack on a small town in southeastern Ukraine and the fiery inferno that followed killed at least seven civilians, including three children, the country’s authorities said as they surveyed on Sunday the deadly toll of two days of fierce Russian assaults.Yuriy Borzenko, chief doctor of Zaporizhzhia Regional Children’s Hospital, said in a phone interview that, aside from those killed, dozens of others, including a pregnant woman and five 14-year-old girls, were being treated for wounds after the attack on the southeastern town, Vilniansk, which took place on Saturday.The girls were out for a walk together in the…

Last year, during the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air-conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.These were not the unglamorous window units familiar to Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan. His wealthier clients seemed to be upgrading to ACs that looked as if they had gotten plastic surgery: their harsh edges softened, their faces sculpted and smoothed.On Park Avenue, he installed an air-conditioner from July, a start-up that sells gracefully rounded window units with pastel covers. He scoured Home Depots for six curvy Midea ACs for a single client on…

He finds a grim humor in Madoff’s widow, Ruth, whose level of complicity remains undetermined. Behar interviews the lawyer who is trying, so far futilely, to return to her the canopied marital bed — “shorter than a queen” — and quotes the hard-boiled F.B.I. agent who chides her for smoking. “Ruth, that’s gonna kill you,” he says. “If only,” she replies.“No wonder Bernie doesn’t mind prison,” the agent says later. “She won’t shut the [bleep] up.”Perhaps most provocatively, Behar takes chapter-long issue with the characterization of Madoff’s wiped-out clients as “victims,” preferring the term “losers.” After all, he writes, “these…

Engineers in Japan are trying to get robots to imitate that particularly human expression — the smile.They have created a face mask from human skin cells and attached it to robots with a novel technique that conceals the binding and is flexible enough to turn down into a grimace or up into a squishy smile.The effect is something between Hannibal Lecter’s terrifying mask and the Claymation figure Gumby.But scientists say the prototypes pave the way for more sophisticated robots, with an outward layer both elastic and durable enough to protect the machine while making it appear more human.Beyond expressiveness, the…

In 2021, Marlene Brüggen, a concert planner in Germany, was listening to an episode of the podcast “Herrengedeck” and heard about a pop music festival with gender parity woven into its programming. The next day, she looked at her own festival’s planning chart, with some 200 concerts. Women were seriously underrepresented.“We hadn’t paid attention to that at all,” Brüggen said in an interview. “It was as if the bandages had been taken off my eyes.”That year, Brüggen applied for a job as director of artistic planning with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Her job interview included questions about the music she…