Author: NY TIMES

Sakamoto filmed the concert over a week in September 2022. He and the film’s director, his son, Neo Sora, meticulously designed the look of the movie, including storyboards to show how the lighting would change. It is a kind of monochromatic take on the shifting of light as morning turns to afternoon, then evening. By the end, Sakamoto appears to be playing in inky blackness, with one light standing in for the moon shining over his left shoulder.The reason for this interest in invoking the passage of time is simple: Sakamoto knew his days were numbered. In 2014, he was…

The fear has been building for weeks.More than one million Palestinians fled into Rafah, the southernmost region of Gaza, hoping to escape the war. Now, Israel has threatened to extend its invasion there, too.Amid days filled with struggles to secure food, water and shelter, uncertainty has dominated people’s conversations, said Khalid Shurrab, a charity worker staying with his family in a leaky tent in Rafah. “We have two options, either to stay as we are or face our destiny — death,” said Mr. Shurrab, 36. “People literally have no other safe place to go.”Rafah, which so far had been spared…

Why does this election matter?The presidential vote in Russia, which begins Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny, a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month.Still, the vote is significant for Mr. Putin as a way to cement…

Alexa Valavicius is 28, single and off dating apps since 2021. How come?She quit Hinge and Bumble, the only two platforms she was on, when she realized that getting a good read on people was difficult based on their profiles.“I’m someone who is very attracted to someone’s energy, and it’s very hard to gauge that in an app,” Ms. Valavicius, a seventh-grade teacher who lives in Chicago, said in an interview.Although she has never been in a relationship, she doesn’t believe she’s going to meet the love of her life via a screen: “I feel like my ideal partner is…

The European Union’s upcoming ban on imports linked to deforestation has been hailed as a “gold standard” in climate policy: a meaningful step to protect the world’s forests, which help remove planet-killing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.The law requires traders to trace the origins of a head-spinning variety of products — beef to books, chocolate and charcoal, lipstick and leather. To the European Union, the mandate, set to take effect next year, is a testament to the bloc’s role as a global leader on climate change.The policy, though, has gotten caught in fierce crosscurrents about how to navigate the economic…

What happens next with TikTok?The video social media app isn’t disappearing from smartphones any time soon. The legislative process is still in its early stages after the House’s passage of a bill mandating a sale by the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, or be banned. Next, the bill is heading to a skeptical Senate, after which President Biden would need to sign it into law. Even after that, it might not happen.Here’s what to expect.What happens next in the legislative process?The bill needs to be approved by the Senate, which could also make changes to the text of the legislation.Several senators…

After he was paralyzed by polio at age 6, Paul Alexander was confined for much of his life to a yellow iron lung that kept him alive. He was not expected to survive after that diagnosis, and even when he beat those odds, his life was mostly constrained by a machine in which he could not move.But the toll of living in an iron lung with polio did not stop Mr. Alexander from going to college, getting a law degree and practicing law for more than 30 years. As a boy, he taught himself to breathe for minutes and later…

The year 2026 will mark James Conlon’s 20th anniversary as music director of the Los Angeles Opera. That seemed to him like it would be the right time to step down.“I’ve had 20 years — that’s a good round number,” Conlon, 73, said in a telephone interview. “I want to stop when I’m at my full capacity and I want to be able to go on loving the company the way I do.”His final season, the 2025-26 season, will coincide with the company’s 40th anniversary, and Conlon said that he “wanted to be there to celebrate that with them.”“It will…

Iranians have looked for opportunities in recent months to display defiance against the rules of the clerical government. In Tuesday night’s annual fire festival, many found a chance.Across Iran, thousands of men and women packed the streets as they danced wildly to music and jumped joyfully over large bonfires, according to videos on social media and interviews with Iranians. The police said the crowds were so large in Tehran and other cities that traffic came to a standstill for many hours and commuters had difficulty reaching public transportation, according to Iranian news reports.Dancing, especially for men and women together, is…

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority intends to appoint Muhammad Mustafa, a close economic adviser, as prime minister in the coming days, according to two Palestinian officials, a European Union diplomat and a fourth person with knowledge of the matter.If Mr. Abbas officially appoints Mr. Mustafa, it would amount to a rejection of international efforts to encourage the octogenarian Palestinian leader to empower an independent prime minister who can revitalize the sclerotic authority, officials and analysts said.While Mr. Abbas was set on appointing Mr. Mustafa, a longtime insider within the authority’s top ranks, he was still holding final consultations…