Author: NY TIMES

At the Cannes Film Festival, much is made of the standing ovation. Every round of applause earns breathless headlines, with outlets racing to report which movie received the most prolonged cheers.But sometimes at Cannes, where you sit is just as important as when you leap to your feet.This is something Lily Gladstone found out Sunday night at Kering’s annual Women in Motion dinner, a star-studded bash that drew the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Julianne Moore, Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, Greta Gerwig. As one of Gerwig’s fellow jurors, Gladstone will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or. It’s…

What does Raziq’s story tell us about why the United States failed in Afghanistan? Although the immediate cause of the republic’s collapse might have been the precipitous U.S. withdrawal in 2021, the real question is why the Afghan government could not stand on its own despite the hundreds of billions of dollars invested over 20 years by America and its allies. How did hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police officers, armed with modern equipment, lose to insurgents who rode their motorcycles in sandals?Many corrupt and unpopular governments survive insurgencies. And it’s clear that the Taliban’s violence against civilians did…

Britain’s inflation rate slowed last month to its lowest level in about three years, approaching the Bank of England’s 2 percent target.Consumer prices rose 2.3 percent in April from a year earlier, down from 3.2 percent in March, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The rate, which declined slightly less than economists expected, was the lowest since July 2021.It was pulled down by a decrease in the cap on household energy bills set by a government regulator. Food inflation also slowed to 2.9 percent, from 4 percent.The steep decline in headline inflation, closing in on the central bank’s…

A 10-time winner at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the annual industry event often called the “Oscars of watchmaking,” Kari Voutilainen is among the most prestigious figures in independent horology.And in March, his work actually went to the Academy Awards: Cillian Murphy, who won best actor for “Oppenheimer,” wore a yellow gold brooch by the Hong Kong design house Sauvereign that Mr. Voutilainen had finished in guilloché, the decorative patterning that has become his signature.But Mr. Voutilainen, who has lived and worked in Switzerland for more than 30 years, has not forgotten his roots. In late April, he visited…

OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson problemWhen OpenAI unveiled the latest version of ChatGPT last week, a chatbot that can listen to spoken questions and respond verbally, many users had one question: Is that Scarlett Johansson?The actress, who provided the voice for an A.I. assistant in the movie “Her,” has now made clear that she did not do the same for OpenAI — and she demanded that the company stop using the sound-alike. It’s another sign of eroding trust in OpenAI, which has taken fire from creative industries and former employees.“I was shocked, angered and in disbelief,” Johansson said in a statement on…

But in its own way, theirs is a “Star Is Born” dynamic: As Trump rises, Cohn falls on harder times, and the protégé who was once so easily impressed now seems sickened to spend time with someone no longer on his level. By the time we reach the 1980s, Trump has married his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), and broken ground on his crowning real estate achievement, Trump Tower. Still, Cohn won’t be dispatched from his high-flying life quite so easily.Is the movie sympathetic to Trump? Not exactly, though it labors to at least explain him. At first, Stan’s performance…

None of the food and supplies that has entered the Gaza Strip through a U.S.-built temporary pier in its first five days of operation has been distributed to Palestinians by aid organizations, Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.General Ryder said that 569 metric tons of aid had made it onto Gaza’s shore but that those supplies had yet to be parceled out by humanitarian organizations.On Saturday, hungry crowds looted several World Food Program trucks transporting aid that had been delivered through the pier, prompting the agency to suspend deliveries of aid arriving…

The French film star Gérard Depardieu repeatedly punched Rino Barillari, known as the “king of paparazzi,” on Tuesday at Harry’s Bar on the Via Veneto, the grand hotel and cafe-lined avenue that was a lively haunt for celebrity-hunting paparazzi decades ago, according to the photographer and a journalist who witnessed the altercation.It could have been a scene straight out of “La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s early 1960s film that introduced the character of an annoying and eccentric photographer who hounded the movie stars that swelled the casts of Cinecittà film studios when Rome was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.”Seeing…

The commissioning of architects to design watches has been a thing at least since the 1950s. In more recent times, some brands have asked winners of architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, to design a timepiece.Thus far 10 of the 53 recipients of the award, given annually since 1979, have taken a horological detour at least once, the most recent being the Canada-born U.S. citizen Frank Gehry who won in 1989.In the early 2000s, a Fossil collaboration used Mr. Gehry’s handwriting to create an LCD font for a digital watch. This past March he entered into high horology’s world of…

According to the OpenAI presenters, ChatGPT-4o brings “a bit more emotion, more drama” to the program. Users can even ask it to moderate its tone to match their mood — and it complies, with gusto. When ChatGPT is asked to interpret a user’s state of mind based on a facial expression, it correctly intuits that a smile means the user is happy. “Care to show a source of those good vibes?” it asks. Told the user is happy because ChatGPT is so good, it responds, “Oh, stop it, you’re making me blush.”This is, in its essence, the response of a…