Author: NY TIMES

‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the…

Israel’s defense minister has said that the country’s military has eliminated half of Hezbollah’s commanders in southern Lebanon. But analysts doubt whether Israel’s increasing use of targeted killings would weaken the militant group.Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and is Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, has had intense cross-border clashes with Israeli forces ever since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. With little sign of the conflict abating and with diplomatic talks yet to result in a cease-fire, Israel has in recent months begun killing Hezbollah fighters in targeted strikes, reflecting an apparent shift in military strategy.“Half of…

Plenty of people still think of Gloria Steinem as the tall, comely babe with honey-toned, center-parted hair who decades ago blazed a trail for second-wave feminism wearing aviator glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.Some of those people may be heartened to learn that, apart from a few steel-gray hairs and creases, Ms. Steinem, who turned 90 in March, looked much the same when she hosted a discussion this month in support of a new marketing campaign for Jones Road, her friend Bobbi Brown’s four-year-old beauty brand.“I was ‘the pretty one,’” Ms. Steinem said of her early days as…

Workers who make trucks and buses for Daimler Truck in North Carolina appeared poised to strike on Friday as contract talks remained deadlocked.A contract covering 7,000 Daimler employees represented by the United Automobile Workers will expire at the end of Friday. The German company has five factories in North Carolina, where it builds Freightliner and Western Star trucks, Thomas Built buses, and various components.A strike, which appeared likely barring a last-minute breakthrough, would open another front in the U.A.W.’s campaign to expand its power in Southern states where unions have long been weak.The U.A.W. scored a significant victory this month…

Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeOn Wednesday, President Biden signed a bill into law that would force the sale of TikTok or ban the app outright. We explain how this came together, when just a few weeks ago it seemed unlikely to happen, and what legal challenges the law will face next. Then we check on Tesla’s very bad year and what’s next for the company after this week’s awful quarterly earnings report. Finally, to boldly support tech where tech has never been supported before: Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab try to fix…

For decades, the idea of standing properly upright carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decay.In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, the workplace and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of physicians, educators and health officials that formed in 1914. In 1917, a study found that roughly 80 percent of Harvard’s freshman class had poor posture. Industrialists piled on with posture-enhancing chairs, products and gadgets.But the actual science doesn’t support the conventional wisdom about proper posture, Beth Linker argues in her new book, “Slouch:…

A photograph is a record of the past from the moment the shutter snaps, which lends the medium a bit of wistfulness. That emotion also permeates “Uncropped” (in theaters), D.W. Young’s documentary about the eminent photographer James Hamilton. It’s not a biographical movie, at least not in the usual sense, though Young keeps the filmmaking stripped-down and simple. For the most part, “Uncropped” involves conversations between Hamilton and various friends, mostly around tables in his apartment and others’. Journalists, photographers and the odd celebrity or two (Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, the director Wes Anderson) discuss Hamilton’s work and recount…

Before Israel’s invasion of Gaza last year, Dr. Mahmoud Al-Reqeb worked in one of the Palestinian territory’s largest hospitals and had a private clinic, caring for women throughout their pregnancies.Now, he lives in a plastic tent in Rafah, a Palestinian border town where roughly half of Gaza’s population has sought refuge, and treats patients for no charge in another tent. Living under Israeli bombardment, with shortages of food and clean water, the pregnant women he serves struggle to find basic safety and nourishment, let alone prenatal care.Since the Israeli military began bombarding Gaza six months ago following the Hamas-led Oct.…

Russian forces have razed dozens of towns and cities in Ukraine over the past 26 months — killing thousands of civilians, forcing millions from their homes and leaving a trail of destruction that is impossible to calculate.Sievierodonetsk. Bakhmut. Avdiivka. Cities and towns little known to the world have become the scorched-earth battlegrounds where two armies clashed for months to bloody effect before the Russians finally prevailed.Now Russian forces have set their sight on Chasiv Yar, a hilltop fortress town in eastern Ukraine. The campaign is part of an intense effort by Russia to achieve what could be its most operationally…

When we brought our baby home from the hospital, Bhoga, then 14, welcomed him with a sniff and a lick before easing herself arthritically onto her bed. Her ears stood up straight to compensate for her growing deafness, and on walks, when she came to cracks in the sidewalk, she would often leap extravagantly over them. We wondered what, exactly, she could still see. Strangers approached to pet her, drawn by her sweet sugar face and slow perseverance, and probably by the memories of the old dogs they themselves had lost.A dozen times a day we would help her off…