Author: NY TIMES

So, she said: “I took sort of a back seat, willingly, because I could. But I didn’t realize what I was really doing.”Conners kept working on her own, turning to trusted collaborators and friends for intellectual stimulation. Matthew Specktor, a writer and longtime friend of Conners, used words like “forceful” to describe her. When they met in the late ’90s, before she was married, Specktor said they would go out after work with their partners and talk about books and movies. “She was an incredibly complete, culturally and cinematically literate person,” he said. “She has a kind of beautiful willfulness,”…

Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans.The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not…

In the sprawling flatlands of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula, near the small town of Give, a family-owned company called Welcon has been gearing up to build giant, cylindrical wind turbine towers for a multibillion-dollar project.The project, a wind farm called Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor in the waters off Long Island, N.Y. But those plans were thrown into disarray last month when the Trump administration, which is skeptical about offshore wind power, ordered an indefinite halt to construction.The pause shocked Carsten Pedersen, who owns Welcon with his brother Jens, and the wind industry.“It’s, in my…

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, is in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion, up from $80 billion little more than a month ago, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.The talks are in the early stages, and xAI’s valuation could rise or fall as the talks progress, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Investors have discussed putting $20 billion into the company, though that figure could also change.The talks follow a large fund-raising effort by OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that makes ChatGPT, which said…

Every year, tens of thousands of young women opt to freeze their eggs, an expensive and sometimes painful procedure. As more Americans postpone childbearing, the numbers are growing.But there are many unknowns: What is the optimal donor age for freezing? What are the success rates? And critically: How long do frozen eggs last?The answers to those questions may be harder to find. In its drastic downsizing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration abolished a federal research team that gathered and analyzed data from fertility clinics with the purpose of improving outcomes.The dismissal of the six-person…

The last time Lencia Kebede lived in New York, in 2015, she was a 21-year-old college intern at the United Nations, taking and translating notes for the ambassador from Guatemala, who was working on an anti-poverty initiative.What a difference a decade can make. Instead of pursuing a career as a human rights lawyer, Kebede is now a working actress in New York defying gravity eight times as week as the first Black actress to play Elphaba full time in “Wicked” on Broadway.It’s a dream role that is also allowing her to tend to her two passions. “The place where Elphaba…

Airstrikes pounded the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing dozens of people, health officials said, as Israel reaffirmed its plans to capture more land in the enclave and force all two million Gaza residents to live in the south. The single deadliest bombing hit near a popular cafe in Gaza City where young people gathered to use the internet, killing 33, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Hospitals across the Gaza Strip reported casualties caused by other airstrikes throughout the day, said a ministry official, Zaher al-Wuhaidi. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the target of…

Do you care where a diamond comes from?Historically, consumers didn’t have a choice. Natural diamonds were formed billions of years ago, deep beneath the earth’s surface, and were then thrust hundreds of kilometers to its crust by volcanic eruptions before eventually being extracted from mines in South Africa, Russia and elsewhere. Companies like De Beers convinced the world that a diamond is forever, made the stones synonymous with engagement rings and encouraged people to spend at least three months’ salary on a rock when they wed.But in recent years, the natural diamond industry has been upended by laboratory-grown diamonds, which…

Russia will celebrate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat on Friday with visiting heads of state and a show of armed might in Red Square, staged as a display of global clout, grandiose and intimidating, and a portent of eventual triumph in the war against Ukraine.The annual military parade below the walls and towers of the Kremlin is expected to be the largest since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a commemoration the government and its cheerleaders have used to raise support for the war, conflating what may be the greatest source of national pride with the far more divisive…

Clarence O. Smith, who convinced skeptical advertisers of the power and worth of the Black female consumer market in becoming a founder of Essence, the first general-circulation magazine directed at Black women, died on April 21. He was 92.Mr. Smith, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., died in a hospital after a short illness, his niece Kimberly Fonville Boyd said. She provided no other details.Essence began publication as a monthly in May 1970, in an era when negative and sometimes hateful stereotypes of Black women were commonplace, said Edward Lewis, who was one of four founders of Essence and who became…