Author: NY TIMES

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeFor the second weekend in a row, the box office was dominated by “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s horror-drama musical about the tension between the ground-level cultural revolution of the blues and the parasitic music industry, depicted here as literal vampires.For Coogler, it’s a return to original content following a long detour making extremely lucrative intellectual property films. “Sinners” reunites him with Michael B. Jordan, who plays a pair of twins, known as Smoke and Stack, whose creative, emotional and instinctual tugs lead them down deeply fraught and unclear pathways.On this week’s…

When rebel forces took over Syria, they pledged to unite the country’s disparate armed groups into a unified national army.The biggest challenge for them by far has been in northeastern Syria, an autonomous region run by the country’s Kurdish minority where suspicion of the new leadership runs deep.In past years, the rebels and the Kurds fought each other. But with the rebels now governing Syria, they are working to form an alliance and merge the powerful Kurdish-led military into the new national force.Interviews with dozens of people in the northeast in late March revealed that Kurdish distrust of the new…

Brittany Romano, 32, was not looking to start her own long-distance rom-com last September when she showed up to JetBlue’s lounge at LaGuardia Airport 10 minutes before her flight was set to board — but she did.That’s where she met Matt Harrington, 35, a schoolteacher from Pasadena, Calif. He had spied her rushing through security, and when she stopped in the lounge for her usual routine — “take a shot and use the restroom” — he sent her a tequila shot and took one himself. Then the two jogged to catch their plane, as it turned out they were on…

Canada’s Monday polls are broadly seen as the most important election in a generation.One of the world’s most prosperous nations and America’s closest ally and trading partner, Canada has found itself in recent months unexpectedly in the cross hairs of President Trump, targeted with tariffs and annexation threats.But the country has also seen many of its coveted national accomplishments in regard to the economy and social issues slip, including higher costs of living, high unemployment, rising housing costs and a surge in homelessness and substance abuse. Many of these problems, not just in Canada but in other advanced economies, were…

President Trump’s shake-up of the global trade system has sent tremors through the long-held view that the United States is the source of the world’s safest financial assets. That’s created an opportunity for Europe.The market tumult in which investors simultaneously sold off the U.S. dollar, American stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds eased last week as Mr. Trump backed off his threats to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure foreign officials that trade deals would be struck.But many European officials attending the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World…

Google might be threatened with a breakup after losing two antitrust cases, but in the meantime it can console itself with piles of money.Alphabet, Google’s parent company, posted results on Thursday that included a large jump in profit. Net income for the first quarter was $34.54 billion, up from $23.66 billion a year earlier.Much of that increase, however, stemmed from equity investments, not operations. It’s still money, but less exciting to investors and analysts. Google shares rose modestly in trading after the news was released.Revenue was $90.23 billion for the quarter, up 12 percent from a year earlier. That was…

When a person develops solid tumors in the stomach or esophagus or rectum, oncologists know how to treat them. But the cures often come with severe effects on quality of life. That can include removal of the stomach or bladder, a permanent colostomy bag, radiation that makes patients infertile and lasting damage from chemotherapy.So a research group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, using a drug from the pharmaceutical company GSK, tried something different.The researchers started with a group of 103 people. The trial participants were among the 2 to 3 percent of cancer patients with tumors that should respond…

When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means it.The admission comes near the start of “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened on Saturday at Circle in the Square. It’s a warning to the 22 audience members seated at cabaret tables in the middle of the action that they may want to don raincoats as he sings and dances, sweating and spitting, a-splishin’ and a-splashin’.But Groff is wet in another sense too: He’s a rushing pipeline, a body and voice that seem to have evolved with the specific goal of transporting feelings from the inside to…

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington had fewer big-name celebrity guests than it did during the Biden presidency, when Scarlett Johansson, Jon Hamm and Sean Penn mixed with journalists and politicians. But on Saturday a red carpet was rolled out nonetheless.President Trump, who skipped the annual black tie dinner during his first term, made no plan to attend the gathering before leaving Washington to attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome.An appearance by the comedian Amber Ruffin, who had been booked as the host, was scrapped last month “to ensure the focus is not on the politics…

The 25 percent tariffs imposed by President Trump on imported cars have added to the pressures on vehicle manufacturers around the world, but the pain could be particularly acute in Britain’s venerable but flagging auto industry.Britain exports more than 70 percent of the cars that it makes. In 2024, it sent about 101,000 of those vehicles — about 17 percent of car exports, worth 7.6 billion pounds (about $10.1 billion) — to the United States, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, an industry group. Tariffs now threaten to close what had been one of Britain’s largest markets.Over…