Author: NY TIMES

Getting to know someone used to take many forms: handwritten letters, phone conversations, in-person heart-to-hearts. Today, we text. We slide into D.M.s. Dating apps and social media have made it effortless to start a conversation. Still, it can be hard to know what exactly to say. We asked readers of the Modern Love column to share the early messages — the banter, emojis and wit — that made them fall for each other. — Kate LaRue The texts below are from real threads that have been carefully excavated (screengrabbed) from the phones of readers. They’ve been lightly edited — and…

Bill Bradley, the basketball Hall of Famer and former United States senator known as a staunch opponent of legalized sports betting, was speaking about the topic back in January. But he might as well have been predicting the future.“Well there hasn’t been a scandal, yet,” he said, discussing how professional sports have become ever more entwined with the gambling industry in recent years. “So the worst has been avoided, but all of the conditions are there for the untoward to occur.”On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association confirmed the untoward had occurred, issuing a lifetime ban to Jontay Porter, a seldom-used…

Beyond this reminder of Britten, Neuwirth folds in nods to other styles and works — crisp, courtly echoes of Baroque music; touches of louche, dirty blues; the solemn bells of Wagner’s “Parsifal” — in the eclectic manner of Berio’s 1968 “Sinfonia” or Mahler’s symphonies, to give a sense of the weight of history on modernity, sometimes oppressive and sometimes inspiring.It struck me that the main structural challenge of “Hippogriff” is that, with the voices representing activism and virtue, Neuwirth looks to her orchestra to provide evocations of both the world’s repressive forces and the fertile, creative wildness out of which…

The Greek government on Friday published a list of 198 “untrodden beaches” that it said are now off limits to bars, restaurants and large public gatherings in its latest attempt to contain development and address the backlash to the throngs of tourists that descend on the country’s coastlines each year.The move comes amid growing frustration among residents of Greek islands and parts of the coastal mainland that are popular with foreign visitors. Protests ballooned into a nationwide “beach towel movement” last summer as disgruntled locals complained that they were being pushed off their own beaches by businesses seeking to take…

It was shape that drove the development of the Cut, the women’s wristwatch recently introduced by Hermès.“The transformation and the creation of the shape was really the starting point for me,” said Philippe Delhotal, director of creation at Hermès Horloger. “We didn’t want to go back to an icon of the maison — the stirrup-shape lugs for Arceau or something obvious with the anchor chain link on the Cape Cod.“We really wanted to have something special and singular with its own personality.”So Hermès created a shape all its own by taking four slivers off the sides of a round case,…

Researchers who study social networks in workplaces have found that having friends at work can make employees more productive and successful, not to mention happier. Friends can hold one another accountable in ways that acquaintances can’t, and a friend can help a new employee understand the workplace more quickly.So it was when Donte DiVincenzo signed with the N.B.A.’s New York Knicks in July. He didn’t need to figure out on his own how to get to know Julius Randle, one of the team’s leaders, or how to decode Coach Tom Thibodeau’s idiosyncrasies. He had a pair of tour guides already…

Israeli airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Saturday killed several civilians, including women and children, according to Palestinian state media, sending more fear through an area where over one million displaced Palestinians are crowded into tents and temporary quarters.For many weeks, Palestinians have been bracing for an announced Israeli ground offensive on Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, where more than half of the strip’s 2.2 million residents fled after being forced from their homes by more than six months of Israeli bombardment and a ground invasion.The airstrikes hit two family homes, killing 10 residents, and missiles…

A hand-embroidered strap embedded with microcapsules of bespoke perfume is the highlight of a new concept watch, Égérie — The Pleats of Time, created by Vacheron Constantin in collaboration with the Paris couturier Yiqing Yin.Ms. Yin, an ambassador for the brand who designed its Égérie model in 2020, worked for several months with the Parisian perfumer Dominique Ropion and the brand’s creative team to develop a fragrance for the timepiece.“It was important to add layers of emotional and sensory depth to the Égérie collection that could resonate with my own creative universe,” she said, referring to scent as “something really…

Who wouldn’t grab an income tax refund if they had one coming?About 940,000 people, it turns out — because they haven’t filed returns for the 2020 tax year, even though they may be due money back for that year. But there’s still close to a month left to file and collect the refunds. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the typical refund for the people in this group is more than $900.“There’s money remaining on the table for hundreds of thousands of people who haven’t filed 2020 tax returns,” the I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel Werfel, said in a statement. The deadline…

Palestinians in the West Bank on Sunday went on a general strike to protest an Israeli military raid at a refugee camp a day earlier in which at least 10 people were killed, in an episode that illustrated the continuing unrest in the territory.The raid was the latest operation in a sweeping economic and security clampdown in the territory occupied by Israel, even as it prosecutes its war against Hamas in Gaza. Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and detained in raids in the West Bank, which Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism…