Author: NY TIMES

For much of my childhood in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts, I didn’t give a hoot about the Housatonic River. In contrast to the many lakes where my brother and I would swim or skate, attend Scout camps or sprawl out for family picnics, the hushed and shaded Housatonic seemed unfamiliar and at times downright eerie. Notions of Edenic riverbanks came from my mom reading “The Wind in the Willows” out loud after dinner — not from encounters with the actual river that flowed 330 yards from our front door.Later, I came to associate the Housatonic with sorrow. An…

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In the dining room of her cozy home in Washington, D.C., Mary Timony retrieved her lute from an instrument case that, she joked, “looks like a cat coffin.” Timony, 53, has been on a learning kick recently. “Literally all I’m working on is this,” she said, demonstrating how the so-called thumb-under fingerpicking method strays from traditional guitar technique.Timony is well known as a guitarist and frontwoman: In the 1990s she headed up the bands Autoclave and Helium, then released solo records before joining Wild Flag, an indie-rock supergroup. Ex Hex, her classic rock and power-pop trio known for catchy songs…

The crowd of 800 cheered as pyrotechnics lit up the theater stage in Clacton-on-Sea, a faded English seaside town, and the lyrics of an Eminem song boomed out: “Guess who’s back, back again?”The answer is Nigel Farage, supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, Brexit campaigner and Britain’s best known political disrupter, who leads a new insurgent party that rails against immigration and promises to upend Britain’s impending general election. Never before elected to the British Parliament, Mr. Farage is running to represent the Clacton area, and opinion surveys suggest he has a strong chance of winning.“The establishment are terrified,…

The actor Alec Baldwin is scheduled to go on trial next month for involuntary manslaughter in Santa Fe, N.M.Baldwin’s long journey to the courtroom started on Oct. 21, 2021, on the set of the western movie “Rust,” when the gun he was holding while blocking out a shot discharged, firing a live round that injured the movie’s director, Joel Souza, and killed its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.It was an almost unimaginable tragedy, but Baldwin soon found himself in legal jeopardy, too. The subsequent saga has amounted to a high-stakes version of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial;…

After ChatGPT came out in 2022, the marketing team at Reckitt Benckiser, which makes Lysol and Mucinex, was convinced that new artificial intelligence technology could help its business. But the team was uncertain about how, so it turned to Boston Consulting Group for help.Reckitt’s request was one of hundreds that Boston Consulting Group received last year. It now earns a fifth of its revenue — from zero just two years ago — through work related to artificial intelligence.“There’s a genuine thirst to figure out what are the implications for their businesses,” said Vladimir Lukic, Boston Consulting Group’s managing director for…

The assignment was clear: Test how well artificial intelligence could plan a trip to Norway, a place I’d never been. So I did none of my usual obsessive online research and instead asked three A.I. planners to create a four-day itinerary. None of them, alas, mentioned the saunas or the salmon.Two assistants were, however, eager to learn more about me in order to tailor their initially generic recommendations, which they had spewed out within seconds. Vacay, a personalized travel planning tool, presented me with a list of questions, while Mindtrip, a new A.I. travel assistant, invited me to take a…

This article is part of our Pets special section on scientists’ growing interest in our animal companions.Over the last two decades, a flurry of scientific studies have demonstrated, over and over again, that dogs are social savants, highly attuned to human cues.But even as canine cognitive science flourished, few researchers bothered to probe the social skills of cats. After all, dogs were descended from the social gray wolf and had been intentionally engineered to perform specific roles alongside humans. Cats, on the other hand, were descended from the solitary African wildcat and had not been under the same selective pressure…

“When a girl loves her shoes, she always makes them fit,” Dion says, imparting the wisdom of a true diva. “Every time I went to a store and I loved the shoes they said, ‘What size are you, ma’am?’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand, what size do you have? I’ll make them work, I’ll make them fit.’”It’s a hilarious moment, but it’s also bittersweet. Again, there is that sense of self-sacrifice — the insistence that even in the face of discomfort the show (and the shoe) must go on. As she walks among her old stage clothes, delighting in…

Mark Rutte, the long-serving Dutch prime minister, was formally named the new secretary-general of NATO on Wednesday, putting an experienced, strongly pro-Ukraine leader with a reputation for conciliation at the head of the alliance.Mr. Rutte, 57, will take over from Jens Stoltenberg on Oct. 1, at a difficult time for NATO in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine and in the midst of a tight race for the American presidency that could bring Donald J. Trump, who disparages the alliance, back into power.The decision, sealed by NATO ambassadors during a meeting at the 32-nation alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, removes…