Author: NY TIMES

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLady Gaga’s sixth solo pop album, “Mayhem,” was released last week, and its retro palette immediately connected with many of the singer’s most devoted longtime fans.Produced by Gaga, the rock revivalist Andrew Watt and the pop fixture Cirkut — with what Gaga has described as substantial input from her fiancé, Michael Polansky — the LP gestures pointedly back at the sounds of the pop star’s ascent in the late aughts and early 2010s. In a surprising amount of promotional interviews for a modern star of her caliber, Gaga has also cited a…

A delegation of Syrian Druse made a rare trip to Israel this week and visited a shrine revered by the faith as Israel seeks to extend its influence inside Syria after the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.Both Israel and Syria have sizable communities of Druse — an Arabic-speaking religious minority scattered across the Levant region. But with the two countries formally at war for decades, Syrian Druse were generally unable to enter Israel to visit sites holy to their faith.Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, a Druse leader in Israel who helped organize the two-day visit, said roughly 100 people arrived on…

At his job at an apparel store in SoHo, Thomas Lanese uses phrases that he would never utter outside of a work setting, like, “I’ll shoot this email to you by end of day.” Sometimes, he said, it feels like he is living two separate lives.It is something fans of “Severance” might relate to. In the buzzy show that concludes its second season on Apple TV+ next week, the characters literally live two distinct lives.Their “innies” (no relation to belly buttons) are their work selves. Their “outies” exist anywhere outside of work. They have chosen to work for Lumon Industries,…

Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, set European pigeons flying in circles when he suggested last month that given rising mistrust in President Trump’s commitment to NATO, he wanted to talk to France and Britain about extending nuclear deterrence over Germany.Warning that a “profound change of American geopolitics” had put Poland, as well as Ukraine, in an “objectively more difficult situation,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland suggested the same, while hinting that Poland, with its long history of Russian occupation, might eventually develop its own bomb.Then Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, said this week that it was time for the United…

In late 2022, New York freelance star Breanna Stewart held a meeting at a New York City steakhouse to hear ideas about changing the professional women’s basketball landscape.Stewart is preparing to spend another WNBA offseason abroad. Alex Bazzell, husband of Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier, also saw his wife playing overseas for several seasons. He made a business proposition to Stewart to keep most of the WNBA stars in the United States during the winter.On the wine, Stewart is immediately interested in the unrivalled concept, a 3×3 league for professional women that will promise the highest salary in the American…

The price of gold set a record high on Friday, breaking above $3,000 per troy ounce for the first time as investors reckon with President Trump’s seesawing tariff policy, fears of an economic slowdown and a sinking stock market.Gold is often sought out by investors as a safe haven during times of turmoil, and the price has risen by about 14 percent this year. By contrast, the S&P 500 index tumbled into a correction on Thursday, falling more than 10 percent over the past month as investors fret about Mr. Trump’s economic agenda.Market watchers have upgraded their forecasts, predicting that…

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after…

Maybe that was a true reflection of reality. Our dogs regularly romped through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, swapped germs with playmates and scarfed down rogue chicken bones, while our cats lived cosseted, indoor lives.Now I suspect that we may have missed signs of illness in our cats. I had worried that we were overreacting when we took Olive to the vet for seeming maybe, slightly, sort of not herself. In fact, she was critically ill.Indeed, cats are talented at masking their symptoms, which may also present differently from those in dogs, experts told me. Arthritic dogs often develop noticeable limps,…

It’s not every day that a critic gets to review a premiere by Ravel.He died almost a century ago, after all. And while some previously unknown works have come to light over the years, it happens considerably less than once in a blue moon.So my pen was out and alert on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic’s delightful concert at David Geffen Hall, practically vibrating with the opportunity to be among the first to weigh in on a piece by the creator of some of music’s most enduring and gorgeous classics.The work that the Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, its incoming…

Hamas said on Friday that it had agreed to free Edan Alexander, an American Israeli soldier who has been held in Gaza for 17 months, and return the remains of four other hostages holding foreign passports, without specifying when they would be released or what it was demanding in exchange.The Israeli government said that Hamas was engaged in “psychological warfare,” suggesting a deal was unlikely to be imminent. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Hamas was “continuing to reject” other proposals that Israel had deemed acceptable.Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he would convene Israeli ministers on Saturday…