Author: NY TIMES

It started like any other pick-up basketball game in an open gym—players sweating it out on the court, others waiting on the sidelines, and spectators watching nonchalantly. Jessica Brogan, who has participated in similar practice sessions with her two basketball-hungry sons, said it was just a “normal open game.”On this particular Saturday, however, there was an unusual electricity in the air at Life Time Arena in Folsom, Calif., as rumors circulated throughout the greater Sacramento community that a global basketball star was in town and might be stopping by. . Still, there are reasons to be skeptical.”I didn’t even tell…

When Ivy Karlsgodt set out to make her first vintage-inspired lampshade, she took her time: She sketched out a design, gathered her materials and spent hours carefully cutting and stitching pieces of chiffon, silk and velvet onto a metal frame in the shape of a drooping tulip. The end result had gold and red fabrics overlaid with sheer pleating and long black fringe.“I was very proud of how it turned out, and I’m still really proud of it,” Karlsgodt said.It was December 2020, and she had recently lost her job as a costume maker when Broadway went dark at the…

The E.U. bites into Apple Apple’s feud with global regulators escalated after the European Union on Monday charged the iPhone maker with stifling competition on its App Store, a breach that carries potentially big penalties and could upend a hugely profitable area of the tech giant’s business.The $3 trillion company is the first to be charged under the Digital Markets Act, a landmark 2022 E.U. law that was designed to reduce the dominance of six mostly American “online gatekeepers.” Of those, Amazon, Google and Meta are also under investigation, and The Financial Times reports that Microsoft could face charges tied…

Amy Conroy sat alone in a veterinary exam room, hands clutching a water bottle, eyes blinking back tears. Her 16-year-old cat, Leisel, had been having trouble breathing. Now, she was waiting for an update.The door opened, and Laurie Maxwell came in.Ms. Maxwell works for MedVet, a 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital in Chicago. But when she took a seat opposite Ms. Conroy on a Monday evening in May, she explained that she wasn’t there for the cat. She was there for Ms. Conroy.Ms. Maxwell is a veterinary social worker, a job in a little-known corner of the therapy world that focuses…

The title of the singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams’s second album, “The Secret of Us,” comes from this feverish duet with her friend and onetime tour mate Taylor Swift. “If history’s clear, someone always ends up in ruins,” Abrams, 24, sings breathily through a thicket of fingerpicked notes, the signature sound of her and Swift’s mutual collaborator Aaron Dessner, who co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff. (Dessner’s band the National gets a shout out toward the end of the song, when Abrams sings of being “mistaken for strangers.”) Midway through, the wise elder Swift swoops in to put Abrams’s youthful heartbreak in…

Iran’s supreme court has overturned the death sentence of a dissident rapper who backed nationwide protests, according to his lawyer, reversing an April decision that had brought widespread criticism and outrage from human rights organizations and others.Amir Raesian, the lawyer for the rapper, Toomaj Salehi, said in a post on X that by overturning the sentence, the court “avoided an irreparable judicial error.” He added that the court found that Mr. Salehi’s earlier prison sentence of six years and three months to be excessive, and that the case would be sent back to a lower court for review.Mr. Salehi, 33,…

At least 15 law enforcement officers and four civilians were killed in two seemingly coordinated attacks by gunmen in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan, Russian investigators said on Monday.Wielding rifles and Molotov cocktails, the attackers assaulted synagogues and Orthodox churches on Sunday night in two major cities of Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region on the Caspian Sea.One of the civilians killed was Nikolai Kotelnikov, a priest in the city of Derbent. The attackers also set fire to a synagogue in the city.For hours, the gunmen were on the loose, engaging in shooting sprees with members of the law enforcement, according…

On Sunday evening, in honor of International Olympic Day and just before the couture shows began, Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and global chief content director of Condé Nast, flexed her muscles.Metaphorically speaking, of course.Literally speaking, she shut down Place Vendôme — the gilded center of high jewelry brands in Paris and home of the Ritz hotel — for the third edition of Vogue World, the fashiontainment extravaganza she introduced in 2022 as a cousin to the Met Gala and as a potential path forward (and revenue stream) in the face of glossy magazines’ decline. Imagine P.T. Barnum…

Polls, enrollment statistics, social media posts and education economists agree: We are seeing a growing skepticism of college among many American teenagers and their parents.Whether that is a short-term trend spurred by a strong job market with plentiful opportunities or a longer-term change will be important for the future of the work force. It could also shape economic mobility, inequality and other facets of the economy in the years ahead.That is why we want to hear from people who have graduated high school in the past several years or who are graduating in 2025. How are you thinking about your…

Netflix has long been a company known for its secrets: no Nielsen ratings, little feedback on why shows are canceled, no box office numbers for the rare movies that are actually released in theaters.Yet for a place defined by its opaque approach to the outside world, the streaming giant has long been aggressively transparent internally. The company’s philosophy was immortalized in 2009 when Reed Hastings, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, first laid out the corporate ethos in a 125-slide presentation that introduced new buzzy phrases like “stunning colleagues,” “the keeper test” and “honesty always.”The presentation, with its insistence on…