Author: NY TIMES

The Justice Department joined 16 states and the District of Columbia to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday, the federal government’s most significant challenge to the reach and influence of the company that has put iPhones in the hands of more than a billion people.In an 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple had violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and less likely to switch to a competing device.The tech giant prevented other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallet, which could diminish…

Reddit shares opened up about 38 percent on Thursday in their first day of trading, in a sign of investor eagerness that set the stage for more tech companies to reach the stock market this year.Shares of the social media company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $47 after pricing at $34 on Wednesday in its initial public offering and continued to rise. The listing is a milestone on a long road for Reddit, which was founded in 2005 in San Francisco. The site is best known for its message boards, where users can congregate on forums…

Before he died last year, Roland Griffiths was arguably the world’s most famous psychedelics researcher. Since 2006, his work has suggested that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, can induce mystical experiences, and that those experiences, in turn, can help treat anxiety, depression, addiction and the terror of death.Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University received widespread recognition among scientists and the popular press, helping to pull the psychedelic field from the deep backwater of the 1960s hippie movement. This second wave of research on the hallucinogenic compounds bolstered political campaigns to decriminalize them and spurred biotech investment.Dr. Griffiths…

One drunken evening in 2019, Abigail Morris and Georgia Davies rushed into a discount store in Brixton, south London, and bought a cheap notepad to write down their band’s manifesto.At that point, the rock group, then called the Dinner Party, only had three members, and had never actually rehearsed any songs. But Morris and Davies — the singer and bassist — knew exactly how they wanted to look and sound: “Gothic,” “Indulgent” and “Decadence” were at the top of their list.As the English literature students went from pub to pub, they added to their proclamation, including modest ambitions (playing shows…

One of Israel’s longest and deadliest hospital raids of the Gaza war stretched into a fourth day on Thursday, as the military said that it had killed dozens of people it described as terrorists in the previous 24 hours in its operation at Al-Shifa Hospital.Israel has staged a series of raids on Al-Shifa in northern Gaza, the largest medical facility in the territory, arguing that Hamas used it as a command center and concealed weapons and fighters in underground tunnels there. Since the latest attack began on Monday, the Israeli military has reported killing more than 140 people it said…

Few parents would describe the smells emanating from their adolescent children as redolent of sandalwood. But one of the distinct components of teenage body odor is a compound that evokes that warm, woody fragrance, according to a small new study, which compared the scents of adolescents to those of infants and toddlers.Unfortunately, that’s just about where the good news ended for teenagers (and their parents). Although there were many similarities between the chemicals wafting from teens and tots, the differences tended to favor the younger children, whose body odor samples had higher levels of a compound with a flowery fragrance.…

As a trillion-dollar global industry, fashion is hardly the magic factory sometimes depicted in the press. Yet it does produce wizards. One such is the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, whose announcement this week that he would be hanging up his smock and retiring after 40 years at his namesake label occasioned an outpouring of reminiscences, particularly from fashion pros like the men’s wear experts interviewed below.Michel Gaubert, sound director: “I did all the Dries shows from 1999 to 2005, and what I admired is that his was a very strong voice of independence. He wasn’t owned by a big…

The Montana Club, a celebrated bar, dining room and gathering place in Helena that was founded by frontier movers and shakers in 1885 — four years before Montana became a state — will close its doors after one final toast on March 29.The club, which also holds a notable place in Black history, has been in financial straits in recent years, leading to a bankruptcy filing in November. (The club is not associated with the Montana Club restaurant chain.)Before it reorganized in 2018 as a cooperative open to the public, the private club attracted an elite membership that would be…

Redditors howled at these changes — and Mr. Wong’s successor as C.E.O., Ellen Pao, was chased out by a horde of angry users — but the company’s pivot to respectability was an undeniable success. Reddit’s image has gradually improved under a co-founder, Steve Huffman, who came back in 2015 to run the site as chief executive, and Reddit was able to build the ad-based business model that sustains it today.In particular, I want to single out three steps Reddit took to clean up its platform, all of which were instrumental in paving the way for the company’s public debut.First, the…

Black henbane has been found at archaeological sites in the Netherlands that date back to the Neolithic Period. But because it is a wild plant that readily grows in the disturbed soil near settlements, experts have been unable to ascertain whether it was used by people or was just part of the environment.In 2008, for example, archaeologists found a Roman-Era ceramic beaker in Voorburg that had been filled with dirt over time. In the dirt, they found one black henbane seed along with 26 hazelnuts and a single grain each of corn, barley, wheat and various other seeds. “The overall…