Author: NY TIMES

Many designers working in the high jewelry sector take pride in crafting metallic settings that seem to disappear, allowing the color, fire and vivacity of extraordinary gemstones to shine through.Luxury houses like Van Cleef & Arpels and Cartier, among others, have patented their techniques for creating what is known as invisible settings. Skilled designers, including the India-based Viren Bhagat, can craft platinum settings so thin that the gemstones they hold appear to float on the skin.But others are now reimagining the place of metal by incorporating it into their pieces as a standout, aesthetic element. This fresh approach opens new…

On Thursday, “Young Sheldon,” the successful CBS spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory,” will air its final episode, concluding a seven-year run.“Young Sheldon” never quite captured the same spot in the zeitgeist as its predecessor. But the series does have an unusual distinction: The overall run of the show mirrors the story of the television business over the last seven years. Here’s how.A ‘Peak TV’ BeginningOn the one hand, “Young Sheldon” had the ingredients for a surefire hit. “The Big Bang Theory” was a big success, and could help bring a strong lead-in audience. The new show had the CBS…

Richard Strauss’s criteria for the ideal interpreter of his opera “Salome” have haunted the piece for the better part of a century: a “16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.”As oxymorons go, it’s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky’s famous syntactic puzzle “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Clear, simple, impossible. And yet here is the 37-year-old Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in the middle of her role debut as Salome in Paris, launching her voice like a rocket that opens into a parachute in the cavern of the Opéra Bastille.With a teenager’s sly mockery of her parents and a blooming sexual…

The U.S. military anchored a temporary pier on Gaza’s coast on Thursday, creating a point of entry for humanitarian aid for the enclave, where the flow of supplies through land borders has largely come to a halt since Israel began its incursion into Rafah last week.The aid will be loaded onto trucks that will begin moving ashore “in the coming days,” the U.S. Central Command said in a statement Thursday morning. U.S. officials had said last week that the floating pier and causeway had been completed, but that weather conditions had delayed their installation.Israel has long opposed a seaport for…

Why is this election important?The outcome of Venezuela’s presidential election, which will take place on July 28, will be consequential for the future of the country’s democracy, as well as for the more than seven million Venezuelans who have abandoned the country and have contributed to a migrant surge in the United States.For the past 25 years Venezuela’s government has been controlled by Chavismo, the socialist movement that began with the democratic election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and has since grown more authoritarian. When Mr. Chávez died in 2013 his protégé Nicolás Maduro narrowly won the presidency.Venezuela’s economy imploded…

UNCASVILLE, Conn. — As the clock ticked down before Caitlin Clark’s first WNBA game, she couldn’t stop. Waiting for the opening jumper, she paces along the free throw line. She pulled up her shorts and fixed her ponytail. She waved her arms, trying to free herself from the restraints.The referee then threw out the orange and white WNBA basketball, but the referee deemed a second throw was necessary. Unlike the official throw-in, Clark may not want to completely redo her debut. Still, at some point she’ll surely look to bounce back from a mixed individual performance and ultimately a disappointing…

Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs is one of the best place-kickers in the N.F.L. That is enough to make him somewhat famous in the football world, but players of his position aren’t typically known by more casual observers — unless they do something especially great or terrible on the field.Last weekend, with the N.F.L. solidly in its off-season, Mr. Butker found himself at the center of a great deal of vitriol on social media, and it had nothing to do with his job.On Saturday, Mr. Butker delivered a 20-minute commencement address to the graduates of Benedictine College, a…

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge on Thursday to the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, one that could have hobbled the bureau and advanced a central goal of the conservative legal movement: limiting the power of independent agencies.The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion.Had the bureau lost, the court’s ruling might have cast doubt on every regulation and enforcement action it had taken in its 13 years of existence, including ones concerning mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans and banking.The central question in the case was whether the way Congress chose…

Engineers and scientists have an enduring fascination with spider silk. Similar to typical worm silk that makes for comfy bedsheets, but much tougher, the material has inspired the invention of lighter and more breathable body armor and materials that could make airplane components stronger without adding weight. Researchers are even using examples drawn from spider webs to design sensitive microphones that can one day be used to treat hearing loss and deafness and to improve other listening devices.Spiders use their webs like enormous external eardrums. A team of scientists from Binghamton University and Cornell University reported in 2022 that webs…

The big “IF” — as in “imaginary friend” — in John Krasinski’s treacly kids dramedy is a grizzly-sized purple goon who goes by the name Blue. The boy who conjured him was colorblind, he explains. Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is one of dozens of dreamed-up creatures in Brooklyn who long for their now-grown BFFs to remember they exist.At the Memory Lane Retirement Community underneath Coney Island, there’s also a pink alligator (Maya Rudolph), a superhero dog (Sam Rockwell), a worn teddy (Louis Gossett Jr.), a retro cartoon butterfly (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a robot (Jon Stewart), an astronaut (George Clooney), a…