Author: NY TIMES

There were at least two versions of the email from the arts endowment. Some said that “the tentative funding recommendation for the following application” had been withdrawn. Those emails went to groups that had already received offer letters and been recommended for grants, but had not yet gotten their official awards. Others were sent to groups whose grants had been approved, and said, “This is to inform you that the above referenced National Endowment for the Arts award has been terminated, effective May 31, 2025.” The N.E.A. did not respond to requests for comment.The future of the arts endowment has…

Sirens blaring, a truckful of armed men trailing in its wake, the black sport utility vehicle that sliced sharklike through the Syrian town of Ashrafieh Sahnaya on Friday morning was impossible to miss.Government forces had retaken control from the armed groups that turned the town into a sectarian battlefield for two days this week, killing dozens and exposing for all to see the new Syrian leaders’ shaky grip on security. Now, government representatives had arrived to pledge peace to a skeptical town.In an airy, echoing religious meeting hall, two officials in suits sat shoulder to shoulder with white-bearded leaders of…

“It’s definitely that vibe,” Ms. Ehrenkranz said. “The whole point of Laid Off is to show that it’s not a personal failure.”Anu Lingala, 33, spoke to Ms. Ehrenkranz about losing her job at Nordstrom in a feature published in March. “Her interviews are so humanizing,” said Ms. Lingala, who lives in Brooklyn and now works in marketing at a jewelry company. “They unpack the shame around being laid off.”The newsletter has a confessional-like quality that Lindsey Stanberry, a former editor of the Money Diaries column on the website Refinery29, appreciates. “There’s a voyeuristic element to it,” said Ms. Stanberry, 44,…

After more than three years of war, President Trump proposed a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine in late April that would have the United States recognize Moscow’s 2014 takeover of the Crimean peninsula. Michael D. Shear, a former White House correspondent for The New York Times in London, explains how the proposal, which Ukraine has rejected, is a reversal from Mr. Trump’s first term as president.

The expansion of the loophole for tariff-free shipments of goods nearly a decade ago gave rise to Temu, Shein and other low-cost online retailers offering items straight from Chinese factories at unfathomable discounts.It also unleashed something else — a cascade of billions of dollars of digital advertising that provided a windfall for Meta, Alphabet and other technology industry giants. Temu and Shein, jockeying for the attention of American shoppers, blanketed seemingly every inch of the internet with their ads. In the last two years, only Amazon spent more on online advertising in the United States than Shein or Temu.Now, the…

Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum.You may even find yourself, as I did on Wednesday night, standing in a crowded room in the Marina district, gazing into a glowing white sphere known as the Orb, having your eyeballs scanned in exchange for cryptocurrency and something called a World ID.The event was hosted by World, a San Francisco start-up…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has said that tackling a chronic disease “epidemic” would be a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, often invoking alarming statistics as an urgent reason for reforming public health in this country.On Friday, President Trump released a proposed budget that called for cutting the funding of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by almost half. Its chronic disease center was slated for elimination entirely, a proposal that came as a shock to many state and city health officials.“Most Americans have some sort of ailment that could be considered chronic,”…

Buddy Guy would do just about anything for the blues. So when the guitarist and singer got the call for a role in Ryan Coogler’s musical horror period-drama “Sinners,” the answer was an easy yes.Then the nerves kicked in.“Man, I had goose pimples everywhere. I couldn’t hardly sleep that night after shooting and the night before,” Guy, who turns 89 in July, said in a phone interview from his home in Chicago. In his main scene opposite Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, in a bar after the film jumps from the 1930s to the ’90s, he said he almost…

Israeli fighter jets struck near the Syrian presidential palace in the capital, Damascus, on Friday, in what Israel’s leaders said was a warning to President Ahmed al-Shara’s government to protect the Druse minority after a recent wave of sectarian violence.More than 100 people were killed this week in clashes involving a number of parties including Sunni Muslim extremists not fully under the government’s control, forces of the new government and militia members from the country’s Druse minority.Both Israel and Syria have large Druse communities. Israel has offered before to protect the Syrian Druse should they come under attack during the…

The first thing you need to know about Italian brain rot is that it isn’t strictly Italian.The second thing you need to know is that any discussion of what it means will most likely make you seem very uncool (you’re just supposed to get it) and will probably involve a lot of head scratching.You have been warned.A little etymology, to start. Last year, the Oxford University Press designated “brain rot” the word of the year. The phrase refers to the deteriorating effect of scrolling through swathes of “trivial or unchallenging” content online. It can also be used to describe the…