Author: NY TIMES

When Jesmyn Ward was writing her 2013 book, “Men We Reaped,” she could feel the presence of her brother, who had been killed years earlier by a drunk driver. She still talks to him, as well as to her partner, who died in 2020.“This may just be wishful thinking, but talking to them and being open to feeling them answer, that enables me to live in spite of their loss,” she told me.While filming the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” Bridget Everett, playing a woman mourning the loss of her sister, was grieving the loss of her own. Working on the…

President Biden said flatly on Monday that Israel’s military assault in Gaza in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks “is not genocide.” “We reject that,” he said, telling an audience of Jewish leaders and activists that Americans “stand with Israel.”Speaking at a celebration of Jewish Heritage Month in the Rose Garden at the White House, Mr. Biden condemned a decision by the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for top Israeli officials for crimes against humanity, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he requested warrants for three Hamas leaders on the same accusation on…

This week, The Times published a profile of Tems, a 28-year-old Nigerian singer-songwriter who, in recent years, has: become the first African artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, appeared on the Beyoncé album “Renaissance” and earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing “Lift Me Up” for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” She will release her debut album next month.To me, Tems’s music — which straddles R&B and Afrobeats — has an honesty: Her tone is earthy and her lyrics are direct, often set to production that isn’t particularly ornate. Her hooks, though, are the killer; they are…

It seems to be all about the timing for the British tenor Freddie De Tommaso.In late 2021, at 28, he stepped into the role of Cavaradossi in “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House in London when the scheduled tenor had to bow out. Mr. De Tommaso saved the evening, garnering huge applause in what one British critic called a “had to be there” moment.Mr. De Tommaso, a rising name in the opera world, is also a collector of watches as a connection to his past and to milestones of his personal and professional lives.Timing has also been on his side…

The immediate takeaway from the landmark $2.8 billion settlement that the N.C.A.A. and the major athletic conferences accepted on Thursday was that it cut straight at the heart of the organization’s cherished model of amateurism: Schools can now pay their athletes directly.But another bedrock principle remains intact, and maintaining it is likely to be a priority for the N.C.A.A.: that players who are paid by the universities are not employed by them, and therefore do not have the right to collectively bargain.Congress must “establish that our athletes are not employees, but students seeking college degrees,” John I. Jenkins, the president…

TikTok can add a new skill to its résumé: disco time machine.The social platform, normally populated with an endless scroll of Gen Z-ers dancing — mostly in short choreographed routines that have been practiced and perfected — has recently been infused with the energy of a surprising demographic: their Gen X parents.In the viral videos, parents are asked by their adult children to dance as they would have back in the day to the 1984 sonic ear worm “Smalltown Boy,” by the British synth-pop band Bronski Beat. Most posts are tagged #momdancechallenge, #daddancechallenge or #80sdancechallenge, and they have racked up…

Shortly before embarking on a fatal helicopter ride on Sunday, Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and his delegation of senior officials held a communal prayer. Someone suggested having lunch, but the president demurred, saying he was in a hurry to reach his next destination.Mr. Raisi boarded the aircraft and sat by a window. The foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, stopped for a picture with a crowd that was swarming the tarmac. He smiled and placed one hand over his chest while holding a brown briefcase in the other.Around 1 p.m., a convoy of three helicopters took off from a helipad on…

But in the broader picture, said Gabi Siboni, a reserve colonel and a fellow of the conservative-leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, the main problem is that the army is only dealing with dismantling the Hamas military system and not the civilian one. Hamas’s control over the civilian sphere will be its launchpad for rebuilding its military, he said.In his view, there is no alternative to an interim period of Israeli military rule in Gaza that could last several years.Mr. Hayman said that while the military effort to take Rafah city at this pace could last another two to…

With the NBA closing in on a new media rights deal, much of the focus has been on what it means for the league and its teams. But there is another beneficiary of this series of deals, which will reportedly pay the league an average of $6.9 billion over 11 years: the players.Those new deals — whether they end up with Warner Bros. Discovery Channel, NBC or Amazon as a partner with Disney — should be more than double the current deal, which is expected to pay the league about $30 million next season in the final year of its…

When Denise Carroll jumps into her pond from its ledge, she swims alongside kois named Cutie, Baby and Jason (names chosen by her two young children). She’s not crazy about sharing the water with the scaled swimmers — “I’m afraid that I’m going to jump in and land on the fish” — but Ms. Carroll, who is 44 and works in biotech sales, feels that the benefits of swimming in a chlorine-free body of water surrounded by natural plants outweigh any potential ick.After all, this pond is the swimming pool Ms. Carroll wanted, and she worked with Sarita Landscape Design…