Author: NY TIMES

In the early hours of Friday, Mehrdad, an engineer in Isfahan, Iran, woke to the sound of explosions rattling the windows and shaking the ground. In Tehran, passengers about to board flights were abruptly told the airspace was closed. Israel, they soon learned, had attacked Iran.As booms and gunfire went off in the distance, Mehrdad, 43, came to realize that the Israelis’ target was a military base on the outskirts of the city. He and his pregnant wife remained fearful that war would break out, he said in an interview by phone.“I think Israel wanted to test the water and…

Its towering smokestacks once puffed out clouds of steam. In gigantic machine rooms, turbines whirled around the clock. Furnaces burned trainloads of coal.In the Soviet era, the Kurakhove Heating and Power Plant gave rise to the town around it in Ukraine’s east, driving the local economy and sustaining the community with wages and heating for homes.“Our plant is the heart of our city,” said Halyna Liubchenko, a retiree whose husband worked his entire career in nearby coal mines that fed the facility.That heart is barely beating now, partly destroyed by artillery. The plant is among the last still operating in…

For months, the shelves of Carrefour, France’s biggest supermarket chain, have been dotted with bright orange signs placed in front of Pepsi bottles, Lays potato chips and a variety of other foods whose packages are suspiciously smaller than they used to be.“Shrinkflation,” the signs say. “This product has seen its volume decrease and the price charged by our supplier increase.”On Friday, the French government took steps to require every food retailer in the country to follow suit. By July 1, stores will have to plaster warnings in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding…

Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki), the protagonist of Daishi Matsunaga’s “Egoist,” is a lonely fashion magazine editor in Tokyo, with high cheekbones and deep pockets. When he meets and falls for Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), a fresh-faced personal trainer, it all seems like a dream — until Ryuta reveals that he moonlights as a prostitute to make ends meet, and that their romance complicates his livelihood. Kosuke makes a proposition: He’ll give Ryuta a monthly stipend to cover his expenses.It’s the perfect set up for a juicy erotic thriller. But “Egoist,” adapted from the novel of the same name by Makoto Takayama, has…

If I’m not working or around other people, more often than not, I want to be reading. The rise in availability of audiobooks has made this easier to achieve. One can read a physical book when stationary, then listen to an audiobook when driving, tidying up, walking or otherwise in motion. I like to get the same book in both formats for complete immersion: read the book over breakfast, switch to the audiobook on the stereo while getting ready for work, listen on headphones during my commute.My fall-asleep routine always, inviolably, involves reading either a physical or Kindle book. It’s…

In early December, Nicolò Villa, a jeweler from Milan, was in Manhattan for a trunk show when he spotted a pre-owned Rolex Lady-Datejust with a blue-green opal dial in a shop on West 47th Street. At 26 millimeters in diameter, the watch’s two-tone case was only slightly larger than a 25-cent piece.Mr. Villa bought the relatively diminutive watch for his mother but had a change of heart before giving it to her.“I felt comfortable wearing it,” Mr. Villa said at a gem show in Tucson, Ariz., in February, as he gazed down at the Lady-Datejust, now at home on his…

Less than a year ago, CubicPV, which manufactures components for solar panels, announced that it had secured more than $100 million in financing to build a $1.4 billion factory in the United States. The company planned to produce silicon wafers, a critical part of the technology that allows solar panels to turn sunlight into electrical energy.The Massachusetts-based company called the investment a “direct result of the long-term industrial policy contained within the Inflation Reduction Act,” the 2022 law that directed billions of dollars to develop America’s domestic clean energy sectors. CubicPV was considering locations in Texas, where it would employ…

The two boys in the gauzy nostalgia piece “We Grown Now” are total charmers. They’re also worryingly vulnerable, something you clock soon after the movie opens. Set in 1992, it takes place primarily in Cabrini-Green, at the time a public housing development in Chicago. There, the boys frolic and dream amid cinder block walls. Every so often, they wander outside to the concrete playground and to a jumble of old mattresses that the local kids use as cushioning. One boy likes to vault through the air and onto the mattresses; he likes to fly.The two boys are around 10 years…

All it took for the crookie to take shape was a baker looking for a diversion, his time-tested croissant recipe and a few cookies for inspiration. It took TikTok to make it go viral.Stéphane Louvard created the crookie almost a year and a half ago when he came up with the idea of putting cookie dough into a croissant and then baking it again. But demand for his crookies has exploded in recent months after TikTok videos flaunted his creations. On one day in February, Mr. Louvard sold 2,300 of the pastries at his bakery in a bustling Paris neighborhood.“The…

Lo que nos separó estaba sobre una mesa en la sala del tribunal: un teléfono. Como dijo el juez para que constara en el acta, yo comparecía en mi divorcio “por teléfono”.Eso fue hace 17 años, antes de que existiera Zoom. Desde mi casa en Oakland, California, a 3218 kilómetros del tribunal del Medio Oeste donde estaba mi marido, me acerqué el auricular al oído y oí toses y murmullos, sillas que se arrastraban y puertas que se cerraban. El juez le preguntó a mi marido la fecha de nuestro matrimonio. No supo contestar.“¿Por qué siempre es el hombre el…