Author: NY TIMES

Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum.You may even find yourself, as I did on Wednesday night, standing in a crowded room in the Marina district, gazing into a glowing white sphere known as the Orb, having your eyeballs scanned in exchange for cryptocurrency and something called a World ID.The event was hosted by World, a San Francisco start-up…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has said that tackling a chronic disease “epidemic” would be a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, often invoking alarming statistics as an urgent reason for reforming public health in this country.On Friday, President Trump released a proposed budget that called for cutting the funding of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by almost half. Its chronic disease center was slated for elimination entirely, a proposal that came as a shock to many state and city health officials.“Most Americans have some sort of ailment that could be considered chronic,”…

Buddy Guy would do just about anything for the blues. So when the guitarist and singer got the call for a role in Ryan Coogler’s musical horror period-drama “Sinners,” the answer was an easy yes.Then the nerves kicked in.“Man, I had goose pimples everywhere. I couldn’t hardly sleep that night after shooting and the night before,” Guy, who turns 89 in July, said in a phone interview from his home in Chicago. In his main scene opposite Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, in a bar after the film jumps from the 1930s to the ’90s, he said he almost…

Israeli fighter jets struck near the Syrian presidential palace in the capital, Damascus, on Friday, in what Israel’s leaders said was a warning to President Ahmed al-Shara’s government to protect the Druse minority after a recent wave of sectarian violence.More than 100 people were killed this week in clashes involving a number of parties including Sunni Muslim extremists not fully under the government’s control, forces of the new government and militia members from the country’s Druse minority.Both Israel and Syria have large Druse communities. Israel has offered before to protect the Syrian Druse should they come under attack during the…

The first thing you need to know about Italian brain rot is that it isn’t strictly Italian.The second thing you need to know is that any discussion of what it means will most likely make you seem very uncool (you’re just supposed to get it) and will probably involve a lot of head scratching.You have been warned.A little etymology, to start. Last year, the Oxford University Press designated “brain rot” the word of the year. The phrase refers to the deteriorating effect of scrolling through swathes of “trivial or unchallenging” content online. It can also be used to describe the…

It’s almost 5 a.m. on March 23 in Rafah, southern Gaza. Two Red Crescent medics are out searching for a missing ambulance crew. Driving is Asaad al-Nasasra and sitting beside him and filming is Rifaat Radwan. Both have worked with the Red Crescent for years. Rifaat worries their missing colleagues have come under attack. They haven’t heard from them for an hour. They will soon discover that Israeli soldiers have fired on the crew, killing two of them. Before long, Rifaat will also be killed along with 12 other staff from the Red Crescent, Civil Defense and the United Nations.…

The Trump administration on Friday officially eliminated a loophole that had allowed American shoppers to buy cheap goods from China without paying tariffs. The move will help U.S. manufacturers that have struggled to compete with a wave of low-cost Chinese products, but it has already resulted in higher prices for Americans who shop online.The loophole, called the de minimis rule, allowed products up to $800 to avoid tariffs and other red tape as long as they were shipped directly to U.S. consumers or small businesses. It resulted in a surge of individually addressed packages to the United States, many shipped…

As much as Amazon may have wanted to dodge the spotlight in President Trump’s trade war, there was no avoiding it for America’s largest online retailer.First, the e-commerce company was entangled in the fleeting spat Tuesday with the White House over a faulty report that Amazon was going to show shoppers the costs of tariffs.Two days later, the economic reality arrived when Amazon reported among the slowest growth ever in its North American retail business.The region, Amazon’s largest, contributed to first-quarter financial results that showed the slowest overall sales growth since the depths of the pandemic, the company reported Thursday.…

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Joyce Brown’s New York minute lasted longer than most. A onetime secretary, Brown became homeless in 1986 and began camping on a heating grate on Second Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan.A year or so passed before she was picked up by city officials, involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital — where she was declared mentally ill — and forcibly given medication. Brown, who was better known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless person to become the…

This is an introduction to jazz. And so the idea is, if you like it, if you love it, if you show us you love it by watching it, then absolutely, I think there are a lot more stories to tell in a full, fledged-out series.What we’re trying to do with the shorts is try to give people sort of a quick slice of what this universe, this rooster jazz universe, is like.Does Acoustic Rooster represent you at all?My advanced-creative-writing professor, sophomore year [at Virginia Tech], was Nikki Giovanni, may she rest in peace. And I thought I knew everything…