Author: NY TIMES

Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (41.2 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe…

NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, on Saturday instructed leaders of the nonprofit he founded to take down a web page that mimicked the design of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site but laid out a case that vaccines cause autism.The page had been published on a site apparently registered to the nonprofit, the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. Mr. Kennedy’s action came after The New York Times inquired about the page and after news of it ricocheted across social media.The page was taken offline Saturday evening. “Secretary Kennedy has instructed the Office of the General…

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.

Israeli forces struck sites in southern Lebanon on Saturday that it said were linked to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, hours after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months.The attacks were the latest example of how the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza was rippling across the Middle East. They also disrupted months of relative calm in northern Israel, where residents displaced by more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah have begun returning home.The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon, and there were no reports of…

Printemps, a French department store that just opened its first American outpost in Lower Manhattan, is aiming to do what few stores of its ilk have lately done in that area: stay in business.The store at 1 Wall Street, about a five-minute walk from The New York Stock Exchange, is in a part of Manhattan that has recently had a poor track record with luxury retail emporiums. That may be why a marketing campaign emphasizes that it is “not a department store.”Saks Fifth Avenue’s store in the Brookfield Place mall was open for little more than two years before it…

When it comes to confronting global conflicts, President Trump is a man in a hurry.Even before his inauguration, the president claimed credit for what he called an “EPIC cease-fire” in Gaza. He has raced to get Ukraine and Russia to quickly embrace a pause in fighting. And with Iran, Mr. Trump wants an agreement within two months to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.It is the foreign policy version of the president’s “flood the zone” approach in Washington, where he and his lieutenants have used blitzkrieg-like tactics to dismantle the bureaucracy, consolidate executive power and attack his political enemies.…

Some lawyers said the deal was driven by profit. Others said it was enabling autocracy. One said the move had prompted her to quit her legal job in disgust.All over the legal world, lawyers on Friday were talking about the deal that Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, had made with President Trump to escape an onerous executive order that would have prevented it from representing many clients before the federal government. To avoid the hit to its business, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes favored by the…

On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency, it said, would “move out aggressively” to improve efficiency, with an “initial objective” of cutting the work force to 2019 levels.The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “reduction in force” memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: Some 80,000 jobs would be cut.Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered,…

Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.Still debated today, Dr. McCully’s theory was that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine in the blood, hardening the…