Author: NY TIMES

Agencies are struggling to deliver food and other basic necessities, and a report concluded that the territory was at high risk of famine. Source link

There was a Cybertruck parked on Main Street in East Hampton, outside the Altuzarra store. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, and traffic stalled for a moment. Even the rich are not immune to rubbernecking a brutalist behemoth.The monster truck marked the end of an avenue of monograms — the island’s main luxury shopping drag, with $850 raffia handbags and $15,000 decorative surfboards. You know their names: Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Lululemon.Two and a half miles down this same street, however, quaintness emerged. East Hampton turned into Amagansett, and that flashy boutique strip became a town square with white wood-paneled…

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…