Author: NY TIMES

If accidental matchmakers got Yelp reviews, Pamela Grace and Arnim Ludwig Kaiser would give five stars to the waitress who served them on Oct. 11, 2022, at Le Plaza-La Paillotte, a restaurant in Arles, France. A half-star deduction for one too many tableside visits might be justified, though.Ms. Grace and Mr. Kaiser were both out-of-towners having dinner alone when Ms. Grace, 80, got up to leave and felt unsteady. Mr. Kaiser, 79, seated nearby at his own table, invited her to sit for a moment. “It was the first time he’d ever asked a strange woman to his table and…

Alexandra McDaniel, 29, grew up in Scottsdale, the affluent suburb north of Phoenix. As she and her fiancé, Cameron Smith, 32, began their search for a home early this year, she hoped to live close to her parents, and near her job at a fashion retailer. Mr. Smith was intent on finding an area where Ms. McDaniel could safely walk their dog alone at night.Mr. Smith is a data analyst at Amazon. Together, he and Ms. McDaniel earn roughly $200,000 a year. They figured they could afford to pay as much as $550,000 for a home, though they aimed lower.But…

Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeThis week, we look at a mess of corporate drama in artificial intelligence. Stability AI has announced that its founder and C.E.O., Emad Mostaque, is leaving the company. Meanwhile, Microsoft hired away two of the co-founders and much of the staff of Inflection, without actually acquiring the company itself. Both moves surprised tech insiders. Then, we talked with listeners who had something to say about our interview with Jonathan Haidt on smartphones, social media and young people. And finally, we examine the true motives behind “Shrimp Jesus” and other…

On Aug. 21, 2017, Kiki Smith’s teenage sons giddily prepared to watch the partial solar eclipse in Rochester, N.Y. As Ms. Smith listened to their chatter, she felt excluded.“I felt very alone,” she said. Ms. Smith was diagnosed with a degenerative condition as a child and lost the last of her vision in 2011. The local buzz around the eclipse, and the national media attention, unexpectedly touched a nerve.The eclipse “was about experiencing a historic moment in community, and I wasn’t part of that,” she said.Ms. Smith, 52, who works for a community development organization in Rochester, determined to do…

At the St. Thomas Choir School in Manhattan the other morning, more than two dozen boys, dressed in matching white polo shirts and gray pants, gathered in a gymnasium to rehearse hymns for Holy Week services, as their predecessors have for more than a century.When Jeremy Filsell, the church’s organist and director of music, asked the boys for more precision when they sang the line about “the voice of an angel calling out” from “Sive Vigilem” by the Renaissance composer William Mundy, the boys tried again, their high, clear voices ringing out in Latin.“Lovely!” he said. “That’s it!”For 105 years,…

If Israel doesn’t heed the resolution, what can the U.N. do?The Security Council has few means to enforce its resolutions. The Council can take punitive measures, imposing sanctions against violators. In the past, such measures have included travel bans, economic restrictions and arms embargoes.In this case, however, legal experts said that any additional measure would require a new resolution and that passing it would require consent from the council’s five veto-holding members, including the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally.There may be legal challenges as well. While the United Nations says that Security Council resolutions are considered to be international law,…

The scene is as spectacular as it is dangerous: flowing rivers of shimmering lava and a dramatic plume of toxic gas.That image has been the reality for much of the past four months in the Reykjanes Peninsula in southern Iceland, which the country’s tourism website has called a “geological wonder where lighthouses outnumber villages.”A series of volcano eruptions began in December after hundreds of earthquakes shook the peninsula, cracking open a fissure that sent lava spewing into a residential neighborhood for the first time in more than four decades. The volcanic system has erupted several more times since then.Grindavik, a…

He, too, moved to Washington in 2019. Like Ms. Gamble, he was more attuned to his work than his dating apps when they matched the first time. That hadn’t changed much for either when she reached out to him on Bumble.What had changed was her dating profile, including her pictures. Neither recognized the other from the date that had been scotched when Ms. Gamble texted Mr. Copeland with her phone number days after they matched the second time. “His name was already in my phone,” she said. Hers was already in his, too. But both pretended not to remember what…

The decision by NBC News to hire Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a political commentator set off a round of sharp criticism from her new colleagues in recent days. Leading on-air figures at NBC and its cable cousin, MSNBC, including Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, took the unusual step of condemning their bosses’ decision in public.Those internal critics have said that by hiring Ms. McDaniel, the network was authorizing election denialism. In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. McDaniel promoted some false theories pushed by then-President Donald J. Trump, including that votes had…

It’s hard to tell the difference between the patients and staff in “On the Adamant,” Nicolas Philibert’s documentary about an alternative psychiatric facility in Paris. The treatment center, located in a large houseboat with louvered windows, floats tranquilly on the Seine.Inside the Adamant, a convivial atmosphere of disorder reigns. In the opening scenes, Philibert turns his camera on an unnamed toothy gentleman belting scratchy vocals during a jam session. The man is so at ease that he really goes for it — squinting his eyes and vigorously wagging his fist.“On the Adamant” is like a jam session, too — a…