Author: NY TIMES

Being raised during the Depression, we all learned to be creative with what we had on hand. At Christmas or on my birthday, I always got art supplies, and I was jealous that my siblings got bikes and stuff. I realize now that my parents were fostering my creativity.An early influence on my becoming an artist was Simon Rodia. My grandmother lived in Watts, and we would walk by the Watts Towers when they were being built. I was fascinated by how he used bottle caps and corn cobs and broken plates — trash, essentially — to make art, to…

It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.This eye-popping sum is an anomaly. Only a tiny fraction of college-going students will pay anything close to this anytime soon,…

On Feb. 26, 1998, hundreds of people gathered to watch a total solar eclipse.The crowd gasped as the moon gobbled up the sun. They oohed and aahed as the feathery streams of the top of the solar atmosphere burst into view. Applause erupted moments later, when the sun peeked back out from behind the lunar surface.“Saved again by the laws of celestial mechanics,” a host of the event said in a video recording with scenes from Aruba, one of the places where the eclipse crossed land.Except that crowd wasn’t actually in Aruba. They were thousands of miles away in San…

Bird flu outbreaks among dairy cows in multiple states, and at least one infection in farmworker in Texas, have incited fears that the virus may be the next infectious threat to people.The influenza virus, called H5N1, is highly pathogenic, meaning it has the ability to cause severe disease and death. But while its spread among cows was unexpected, people can catch the virus only from close contact with infected animals, not from one another, federal officials said.“It’s really about folks who are in environments where they may be interacting with cattle that are infected with this virus,” said Dr. Demetre…

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube4. Will Oldham: “I See a Darkness”If you’re looking for a moody and vaguely gothic eclipse soundtrack, I recommend this subtle, stirring ballad by the folk singer-songwriter Will Oldham, who often records as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Though Johnny Cash popularized the song when he covered it on his 2000 album, “American III: Solitary Man,” I’m partial to the cracked beauty of the original.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube5. Cat Stevens: “Moonshadow”Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam) said that this song came to him one night on vacation in Spain, when…

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and the prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on Monday in Haifa, the mixed Jewish-Arab city in Israel where he lived. He was 97.His wife, Rachel Michael, confirmed his death.Like many exiles, Mr. Michael (pronounced mee-KAH-ale) had one foot planted in the country where he settled and the other in the country he left behind. He fled Iraq in 1948 after the outbreak of war between the newly formed nation of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Iraq…

McDonalds says it will buy back all of its 225 franchised restaurants in Israel, weeks after the company warned that boycotts and protests over the Israel-Hamas war had hurt its business in the Middle East.The deal, announced on Thursday, would bring all of the stores under the direct management of McDonald’s Corporation. The company did not disclose terms of the deal but said the chain’s 5,000 workers in Israel would keep their jobs.The move highlighted the deepening political polarization that multinational corporations face during the war, including claims and counterclaims by activists and companies about what both sides say are…

In the olden days, before it was X and before many users decamped to alternative social media platforms, Twitter was the place to be for a collective experience. Election updates! Weather events! That time Oprah interviewed Meghan Markle! Whether these moments were fun or terrifying or both, the site was where millions of people went to ask “What’s happening?”On Friday morning, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8 shook New York City and beyond around 10:23 a.m., according to the United States Geological Survey. The U.S.G.S. also reported that the earthquake’s epicenter was northeast of Lebanon, N.J., and that…

Federal Reserve officials spent much of 2022 and 2023 worried that the job market was too strong to be sustainable. Employers were racing to snap up a limited supply of workers, the logic went, leading to rapid wage gains that would eventually prod those companies to raise prices to cover their labor costs.But instead of viewing rapid job gains as a potentially inflationary problem, the Fed has recently embraced them.That is because strong hiring has come alongside a marked pickup in labor supply. Immigration has been much stronger than expected, and millennial men and women in particular are trickling into…

Stripe, a payments start-up, is one of the most successful companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in a generation. Last year, it hit a valuation of $65 billion. But in the 15 years since it was founded, there has not been a way for most individuals to invest in it.It is a problem that has vexed retail investors for years, as start-ups like Stripe, SpaceX and OpenAI soar to enormous valuations in the private market. Only so-called accredited investors with a high net worth are allowed to invest in private tech start-ups. By the time the companies go public a…