Author: NY TIMES

In the most heartbreaking scene of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the title character waits. A teenage geisha married off to an American naval lieutenant, she remains devoted to him long after he abandons her. He will return, she believes — one fine day.When she sees his ship approaching the shores of Japan, she and her maid ecstatically prepare the home for him. They gather flowers and spread them at the door; Butterfly rouges her cheeks and puts on the wedding garments she wore the night she and the lieutenant fell in love. Then she, their son and the maid look…

She became a writer because her country vanished overnight.Jenny Erpenbeck, now 57, was 22 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall cracked by accident, then collapsed. She was having a “girls’ evening out,” she said, so she had no idea what had happened until the next morning. When a professor discussed it in class, she said, it became real to her.The country she knew, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, remains a crucial setting for most of her striking, precise fiction. Her work, which has grown in acuity and emotional power, combines the complications of German and Soviet history with…

Around 11:40 on a cool spring day in early April, students began to stream into the lunchroom at Haleyville High School in Alabama.Cheerleaders, soccer and baseball players, and other members of the student body filed through the lunch line and sat at their tables. They chatted and laughed about upcoming games (go, Roaring Lions!) and prom as they dug into plates of chicken Alfredo, green beans and salad.Emma Anne Hallman, standing in a corner, watched the teenagers carefully. As the child nutrition director for the Haleyville City School District, she has the job of feeding 1,600 students, in prekindergarten through…

The convoy rolled out of the military base before dawn into the mist-shrouded mountains straddling Guatemala’s border with Mexico. Its mission: destroy opium poppies used to make heroin.Armed with rifles and machetes, the caravan’s nearly 300 soldiers and police officers from elite counternarcotics units scaled steep hillsides and waded through bone-chilling streams. They chased leads from drone pilots and inhaled dust as they rode in the back of pickup trucks barreling down washboard dirt roads.But after scouring village after village, they found only tiny plots of poppies here and there — a fraction of the region’s cultivation in previous years.“The…

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.If there is one word that defines Pittsburgh, it is steel.Steel is in Pittsburgh’s DNA. It’s embedded in the name of the city’s football team and is the source of the industrial wealth that put Pittsburgh on the map.This month, steel is being celebrated in a different way at the city’s Carnegie Museum of Art. As part of its Forum Series of commissioned art from living artists, the museum will present “Land Stitches Water Sky,” a multiton…

A terrorist attack of 2015 that left her city angry and heartbroken persuaded Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to campaign for the Olympic Games.“I said to myself, ‘We need to do something that is unifying,’” she said in an interview this month, remembering the horrifying afternoon when masked gunmen charged into the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and opened fire that January, killing 12. “Something that is very powerful, very peaceful and allows us to move forward. So, I threw myself into it.”Nine years later, the Summer Olympics are set to open in Paris in July with France at…

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.Michigan State University and Yale University are very different types of higher education institutions, but they have at least one thing in common: They have been spending millions of dollars to revamp their museums.So have New York University. And Princeton. And Penn State. And Utah State University.At a time when many museums and colleges are grappling with financial challenges as well as their changing role in society, it may seem surprising that universities and donors are willing…

Landing by helicopter at a women’s prison where the Vatican has mounted its pavilion for the Venice Biennale international art exhibition, Pope Francis on Sunday told the women incarcerated there that they had a “special place in my heart.”“Grazie,” one woman called out. Others applauded.Many of the women had participated with artists in creating works that hang throughout the prison for the exhibition, titled “With My Eyes.” Francis, the first pope ever to visit — if briefly — a Venice Biennale, said that it was “fundamental” for the prison system “to offer detainees the tools and room for human, spiritual,…

The men in the starting line at Hyrox in Berlin in April practically hummed with nervous enthusiasm. A few dozen racers, part of an early morning heat, stood watching the steady tick of a five-minute countdown, displayed on a huge television overhead. Dramatic string music played on tinny loudspeakers. A booming voice intoned a rallying cry, “This is the moment you’ve been training for!” Lights twinkled. Spectators cheered.For the founders of the fitness race Hyrox, Christian Toetzke, 55, and Moritz Furste, 39, this kind of kitschy spectacle was always part of the plan. The original brief, when they introduced the…

On a December morning in central London, more than two dozen people drawn from influential institutions across the Middle East, Europe and the United States gathered in a conference room to pursue an aspiration that, at that moment, verged on preposterous. They were there to plan for the reconstruction and long-term economic development of Gaza.Gaza was under relentless bombardment by Israeli military forces in response to terrorist attacks launched by Hamas in October. Communities throughout the territory were being reduced to rubble, and tens of thousands of people had been killed. Families confronted the immediacy of hunger, fear and grief.Yet…