Author: NY TIMES

How do I dress to look more mature without looking stuffy? I’m in my 30s working in the tech industry but often get mistaken for someone in her early 20s. That may sound ideal to some, but it can be demoralizing at work, where I’m a director leading a team, and in my personal life, where I am looking for an age-appropriate date. Any advice? — KiraIt is true that, given society’s obsession with youth, the question of how to look older does not come up too often. But as you point out, looking young can be nearly as much…

When Pinduoduo, the Chinese discount shopping app, debuted nearly a decade ago, the tech giants Alibaba and JD.com dominated China’s e-commerce business.Pinduoduo felt more like a gimmick than a future rival. It was a combination of a game arcade, a shopping mall and a social network. Its main selling point was lower prices for shoppers who recruited other buyers to make group purchases. Customers could pass the time by playing video games or earn money by logging in daily to browse the app.Now, no one is taking the company lightly.Pinduoduo is the sister company of Temu, the bargain shopping app…

In her three decades of working with elephant seals, Dr. Marcela Uhart had never seen anything like the scene on the beaches of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula last October.It was peak breeding season; the beach should have been teeming with harems of fertile females and enormous males battling one another for dominance. Instead, it was “just carcass upon carcass upon carcass,” recalled Dr. Uhart, who directs the Latin American wildlife health program at the University of California, Davis.H5N1, one of the many viruses that cause bird flu, had already killed at least 24,000 South American sea lions along the continent’s coasts…

Lourdes Portillo, an Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues, died on Saturday at her home in San Francisco. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which she investigates the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry.“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a…

Israel abandoned plans for a much more extensive counterstrike on Iran after concerted diplomatic pressure from the United States and other foreign allies and because the brunt of an Iranian assault on Israel soil had been thwarted, according to three senior Israeli officials.Israeli leaders originally discussed bombarding several military targets across Iran last week, including near Tehran, the Iranian capital, in retaliation for the Iranian strike on April 13, said the officials, who spoke on the discussion of anonymity to describe the sensitive discussions.Such a broad and damaging attack would have been far harder for Iran to overlook, increasing the…

Ecuadoreans voted on Sunday to give their new president more powers to combat the country’s plague of drug-related gang violence, officials said, supporting his hard-line stance on security and offering an early glimpse of how he might fare in his bid for re-election next year.President Daniel Noboa, the 36-year-old heir to a banana empire, took office in November after an election season focused on the violence, which has surged to levels not seen in decades. In January, he declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered the military to “neutralize” the country’s gangs. The move allowed soldiers to patrol the streets…

One could easily mistake Alesong Brewing & Blending for a winery. The brewery, which opened in 2016 in Eugene, Ore., makes beer-wine hybrids with local grapes and sells barrel-aged beer through a membership club.“If you take the word beer out of our business model, we look a lot more like a winery,” said Brian Coombs, a founder and production manager at Alesong, who previously worked at the nearby King Estate Winery, in the Willamette Valley wine region. Last September, Alesong introduced its first wine, a pinot gris, in an effort to broaden the brewery’s creative ambitions and customer base.“It’s great…

Cher, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Frampton and Mary J. Blige are part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, along with Dave Matthews Band, Kool & the Gang, Foreigner and A Tribe Called Quest, the hall announced on Sunday.The latest crop of stars will officially join the pantheon in a ceremony on Oct. 19 at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, where the hall’s affiliated museum is also located.The 39th annual group of inductees matches the hall’s genre and demographic spread of recent years, with a pop diva (Cher), a metal idol (Osbourne), a top funk band of…

An early version of “Dovecote,” a short, nearly wordless film directed by Marco Perego for exhibition at the Biennale, has a scene that tracks a man in uniform as he drives a motorboat through a morning in Venice. The city is showing off its glories, with palazzos and domed churches reflected in the canals, a blue sky above. The film shifts to black and white as the action moves inside a building less adorned than the ones the man has boated past, but grand, even so. It’s his workplace, the Giudecca women’s prison.Perego said in a telephone interview that he…

Labor pains After a “summer of strikes” last year that stretched from Detroit to Hollywood, unions are on a roll, flexing their growing might. Friday will bring a new test of that power as workers at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee vote on whether to join the United Automobile Workers.Victory there would mark perhaps the first time a foreign carmaker’s U.S. plant became unionized and form a beachhead for organized labor in the anti-union South. But it could also resonate well beyond the car industry as President Biden cultivates labor in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.A yes vote would…