Author: NY TIMES

The first time I met Neil Diboll, he set his front yard on fire. On purpose.It was part of a lesson that Mr. Diboll, a prairie ecologist and nurseryman, was eager to share about native plant communities. The prairie species that had replaced his lawn were adapted to fire, he informed me, because regular wildfires had influenced their evolution.That was more than 30 years ago. Since then, Mr. Diboll has continued to find dramatic ways to capture gardeners’ attention and educate them. That’s essential, he knows, when you’re dealing with ideas that are unfamiliar to most people.Mr. Diboll is now…

This year began with three uncomfortably hot inflation readings in a row. Economists are hoping that fresh data on Wednesday will finally bring signs of a cool-down.Forecasters expect the Labor Department report to show that the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.4 percent in April from a year earlier. That would mark a slight slowing from the 3.5 percent inflation rate in March.Economists tend to focus on a separate measure of inflation that strips out volatile food and fuel prices to give a better sense of the underlying trend. They expect that “core” measure to show prices rose 3.6 percent from…

Over the last 10 months, Chelsea Prudencio, a junior at Baruch College in Manhattan, got a crash course in artificial intelligence through a new program for lower-income, Latina and Black young women majoring in computing.As part of the program, called Break Through Tech A.I., Ms. Prudencio completed an intensive class developed by Cornell Tech faculty with input from a few tech executives. She threw herself into a student A.I. project for Pfizer to create heart disease prediction models. And she was mentored by a cybersecurity executive at Citigroup on how to ace technical job interviews.These are the kinds of important…

There’s quite a good body of research now on the neuroscience of meditation, showing that it improves self-awareness, emotion regulation, self-control and many other things. Most people, if they’re honest with themselves, reach for some kind of coping habit when they are feeling stressed or down. Think food, alcohol, doomscrolling, entertainment, shopping, even overworking and overexercising. Most adults have never received formal education about what to do with negative emotions.Addiction is not just about substance use. It’s about trying to avoid a feeling. It’s about trying to escape. You know it’s not good for you, but you do it anyway…

Daniel Kramer, a photojournalist who captured Bob Dylan’s era-tilting transformation from acoustic guitar-strumming folky to electric prince of rock in the mid-1960s, and who shot the covers for his landmark albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” died on April 29 in Melville, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his nephew Brian Bereck.Rolling Stone magazine once described Mr. Kramer as “the photographer most closely associated with Bob Dylan.” But that designation seemed highly improbable at the outset.Although Mr. Dylan had already begun his rise to global fame —…

After drawing up a plan for 20 hires this year by the city administration, the head of the municipal personnel department plugged it into the Balancer — a website run by the government of the Balkan nation of North Macedonia.Seconds later, he received a chart giving the mandatory ethnic breakdown of the people to fill the jobs: 16 ethnic Albanians, three ethnic Macedonians and one Roma.The computer-generated quotas, which match the size of different communities in the heavily ethnic Albanian city of Tetovo, in the country’s northwest, are part of one of the world’s most comprehensive and rigidly mathematical government…

On the Emmy- and Peabody-winning series “The Bear,” Liza Colón-Zayas plays Tina Marrero, a cook at the Chicago restaurant at the center of the story. Tina and her fellow workers are in a constant struggle for the survival of their restaurant, and they fight just as fiercely with one another. Only at rare moments do we see them drop the tough exterior and show one another love or respect.Today, Colón-Zayas reads “A Web Between Her Body and Mine,” by Karen Paul. It’s a Modern Love essay about two friends who also met at work, but have a different kind of…

The Department of Justice said on Tuesday that Boeing was in violation of a 2021 settlement related to problems with the company’s 737 Max model that led to two deadly plane crashes in 2018 and 2019.In a letter to a federal judge, the department said that Boeing had failed to “design, implement and enforce” an ethics program to prevent and detect violations of U.S. fraud laws in the company’s operations. Creating that program was a condition of Boeing’s settlement, which also carried a $2.5 billion penalty.The determination by the Justice Department opens the door to a potential prosecution of a…

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined three other board members to force out Sam Altman, the company’s high-profile chief executive, before saying he regretted the move, is leaving the San Francisco A.I. company.Dr. Sutskever’s departure, which the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday, closes another chapter in a story that stunned Silicon Valley and that raised questions about whether Mr. Altman and his company were prepared to lead the tech industry into the age of artificial intelligence.After returning to OpenAI just five days after he was ousted, Mr. Altman reasserted his control…

John Barbata, the drummer for the Turtles, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who walked away from rock music at the height of his career, has died. He was 79.His death was announced in a social media post by Jefferson Airplane on Monday. A cause of death was not given and a list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Barbata joined the Turtles after leaving his high school band and enjoyed success almost immediately, drumming on the band’s best-known track, “Happy Together,” released in 1967.“I heard that the Turtles were looking for a drummer, they called me down…