Author: NY TIMES

PHILADELPHIA — Late Thursday night, Joel Embiid stepped off the podium and into a row of hallways at Wells Fargo Center, his face covered in dark black sunglasses. He wore the shoes all night long after the Philadelphia 76ers kept their season alive with a tough Game 3 victory over the New York Knicks. While icing his legs in the locker room and at press conferences in front of reporters and cameras.For the past week and a half, Embiid has been suffering from Bell’s palsy, which weakened the muscles on the left side of his face. It started with a…

Divya Jakatdar imagined that she would spend her senior year of high school celebrating college acceptances with her friends, attending prom and walking across the stage at graduation to the cheers of her family members.Instead, her senior spring arrived at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic. She said goodbye to high school classmates over Zoom; her graduation was a drive-through.Ms. Jakatdar, 21, thought her senior year at the University of Southern California might be a kind of do-over. But it has erupted into unrest in recent weeks after the school initially canceled commencement speeches by its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum,…

Rogelio Villarreal knew nothing about the French jeweler Cartier, he said, when an ad popped up on his Instagram feed last December. He clicked on it, perusing the pages of bling and other luxury items, including handbags, watches and necklaces, each listed for thousands of dollars.Then Mr. Villareal, who lives in Mexico, noticed a pair of earrings: slender studded 18-carat rose-gold cuffs lined with diamonds, priced at just 237 Mexican pesos, or about $13.He bought two pairs. Later, the price for the earrings was adjusted on the Cartier website to 237,000 pesos — more than $13,000.The purchase initiated a monthslong…

The Biden administration said on Friday that it was delaying a decision on whether to ban menthol cigarettes as federal officials take more time to consider the move.The White House has faced considerable opposition from the big tobacco companies that could lose billions of dollars from the move. But the proposal has also posed risks for President Biden in an election year because of his weakening support among Black voters, some of whom view it as heavy-handed.“This rule has garnered historic attention, and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the…

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music“The Tortured Poets Department,” the new album from Taylor Swift, will have the biggest opening week of any album this year. Critical reaction to the release has been mixed, but fan interest has remained extremely high. And questions about Swift’s music and motivations abound.On this week’s Popcast, a listener mailbag episode full of questions prompted by Swift’s latest turns, includingHow does “TTPD” mark the return to an earlier, far more personal version of Swift’s music?What are the pros and cons of turning “TTPD” into a sudden double album?To what degree is Swift…

A senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on Thursday on the condition of anonymity under official ground rules blamed Hamas solely for blocking the deal. The official said that while Israel had signaled it would accept those terms, the response from Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader hiding underground in Gaza, had been “totally nonconstructive.”Hamas has since signaled that it was not completely rejecting the deal and was willing to return to talks again, the official said, adding that the United States and its partners would test that signaling in coming days.With more than 34,000 people killed in Gaza amid…

King Charles III will return to public duties next week, Buckingham Palace announced on Friday, an encouraging sign of his recovery, nearly three months after he disclosed that he had cancer, and a palpable relief to a country anxious about another wrenching change in the British monarchy.Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, will mark his return with a visit to a cancer center on Tuesday, where they will meet with patients and staff, the palace said. He will appear at other engagements later, not least welcoming Emperor Naruhito of Japan, and his wife, Empress Masako, for a state visit in…

“This line is crazy,” said the broadcast journalist Don Lemon, as he walked toward the red carpet crush at just after 7 p.m. on Thursday night.He was bound for the Time 100 Gala, the annual black tie schmoozefest in Manhattan where a 100-person smorgasbord of luminaries — tech titans, activists, Oscar winners, pop stars, athletes and artists — was celebrated by the magazine as the most important people of the year.If you honor them, they will come. And the celebrities who were feted at the event included Colman Domingo, Taraji P. Henson, Dev Patel, Patrick Mahomes and Dua Lipa.Mr. Lemon,…

Peter Chu, a retired lawyer living in Portland, Ore., pays nearly $400 a month for his storage unit in Seattle, where he used to live. That rate has gone up by roughly $150 since 2022.Mr. Chu is caught in an industry that was booming a few years ago during the coronavirus pandemic but now finds it has built way too many rental units. As the industry cuts so-called street rates to entice new customers, its existing customers are paying substantially higher rates that are sometimes raised twice or more in a year.The demand for self-storage cooled right as a glut…

Johnny Cash wasn’t always the stoic Man in Black. He also had a droll side, as revealed in this song reconstituted from demos he recorded in 1993; a latter-day band, including Marty Stuart on guitar, now fills out the original tracks. In “Well Alright,” previewing “Songwriter,” an album due June 28, Cash is deadpan and droll, singing about a liaison that starts at a laundromat. Even the Man in Black had clothes to wash. JON PARELES“I run away, ’cause I’m on precious time,” the British musician Nilüfer Yanya sings on the first single she’s released since her excellent 2022 album…