Author: NY TIMES

Describing their collaboration on “Last Night Reprise,” a jazzy interpretation of a poem by the 13th-century Persian writer Rumi, Karpeh recalled Aftab taking the vantage of a film director, using visual cues to encourage different takes. “There’s a trust in how we approach our music,” he said of their shared approach. “It felt very free and raw.”Aftab said Karpeh embodies her ideal player: someone who gravitates to the unique. “I search for people like that because that’s 80 percent of the thing,” she said. “There’s nothing I can write down and ask you to play if you don’t have that…

As the Israeli military stepped up pressure on what it calls Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza, fighting elsewhere in the Palestinian enclave on Sunday led to warnings that the militants might remain a force for a long time to come.Close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend, both sides said on Sunday, even as the world’s attention was largely focused on the southern city of Rafah, where Israel escalated military operations last week.It has become a familiar scenario in the Gaza Strip over the course of the seven-month war: After…

Two months before the Olympics are scheduled to begin in Paris, the global agency tasked with policing doping in sports is facing a growing crisis as it fends off allegations it helped cover up the positive tests of elite Chinese swimmers who went on to compete — and win medals — at the last Summer Games.The allegations are particularly vexing for the World Anti-Doping Agency, which has long billed itself as the gold standard in the worldwide movement for clean sports, because they raise the specter that the agency — and by extension the entire system set up to try…

In 2012, not long after he decided to dedicate his professional life to 18th-century wares, Casey Samson spent a weekend at a colonial-era fair in Bardstown, Ky., selling leather mugs out of a tent.On his first night there, Mr. Samson sat alone by a crackling campfire, smelled the wood smoke and felt as if he had been transported to a different time. He knew then, he said, that he had made the right choice.Today, Mr. Samson and his wife, Abbie, own and operate Samson Historical, a three-story business that doubles as a pseudo-museum on the downtown square in Lebanon, Ind.,…

The protests roiling college campuses are filled with all sorts of demands, but many of them have one thing in common: money.Many pro-Palestinian protesters want their school’s endowments to pull money from investments in companies that have financial ties to Israel. Most institutions have declined to do so.This form of financial protest is not new. We all want to live our values and have our colleges, employers and communities do so, too. We saw similar protests in the 1970s and ’80s with South Africa and in the continuing debate over climate change. Students, especially, can learn a lot about investing,…

For the first time in 30 years at the Cannes Film Festival, an Indian film will compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition, alongside new movies from Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold.The dry spell might come as a surprise for a country with film industries in multiple regions producing hundreds of films per year, including international sensations like last year’s Oscar-nominated “RRR.”But the inclusion of “All We Imagine as Light,” directed by Payal Kapadia, reflects a growing recognition of the independent cinema made in the shadow of the country’s mainstream hits.Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director…

For a few weeks, after extraordinary international pressure and warnings of an imminent famine in the Gaza Strip, Israel announced new steps to increase humanitarian aid and more supplies entered the territory.But the flow of aid, the vast majority of which goes through two border crossings in southern Gaza, has come to a near-total stop this week, first closed off by Israel and then further restricted, officials say, by Egypt.Israel shut down the Kerem Shalom crossing after a Hamas rocket attack nearby killed four Israeli soldiers last Sunday. The next day, Israeli forces seized and closed the Gaza side of…

This week, Chris Aylward, the national president of Canada’s largest public sector union, warned Canadians that they were facing “a summer of discontent.”Mr. Aylward, of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, had joined with leaders from three other public sector unions to announce that they had started a series of legal challenges over the federal government’s requirement that most of their members show up at their workplaces at least three days a week beginning in September. And they said that they would take “coordinated actions” leading to disruptions as a pressure tactic.For most Canadians, the ability to work chiefly from…

“We were more making sure that the concepts that we developed for the city infrastructure could house a great degree of variation of different kinds of architecture,” said Daniel Sundlin, a partner at BIG. (The firm also developed a community of 72 floating apartments in Copenhagen near a deserted island that had served as a shipyard, as part of a project called Urban Rigger.)The shape of the Busan platforms, basically rounded hexagons, keeps them stable; they won’t rock with every wave, as a houseboat would. BIG also worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and marine engineering firms to make…

Night skies in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere are expected to bloom again on Saturday night with the vivid colors of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, as a powerful geomagnetic storm caused by a hyperactive sun persists through the weekend.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors space weather, said in an update on Saturday that it continued to observe solar activity that could lead to periods of “severe-extreme” geomagnetic storms. The federal agency first issued a warning on Friday as bursts of material from the sun’s surface traveled into Earth’s atmosphere, causing irregularities in power, navigation and…