Author: NY TIMES

Grocery store shoppers are noticing something amiss. Air-filled bags of chips. Shrunken soup cans. Diminished detergent packages.Companies are downsizing products without downsizing prices, and consumer posts from Reddit to TikTok to the New York Times comments section drip with indignation at the trend, widely known as “shrinkflation.”The practice isn’t new. Sellers have been quietly shrinking products to avoid raising prices for centuries, and experts think it has been an obvious corporate strategy since at least 1988, when Chock Full o’Nuts cut its one-pound coffee canister to 13 ounces and its competitors followed suit.But outrage today is acute. President Biden tapped…

‘Get On Up’ (March 16)Stream it here.The current vogue of jukebox biopics shows no sign of slowing, thanks to the impressive grosses of films like “Bob Marley: One Love,” even though most of these dramas are still trafficking in tropes that should have been decimated by the pitch-perfect satire of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” a decade and a half ago. But credit where due: Tate Taylor’s biopic about the “Godfather of Soul,” the hardest-working man in show business, the one and only James Brown, zigs where most of these movies would zag. The inventive screenplay by Jez and…

When Aleksei A. Navalny was alive, the Kremlin sought to portray him as an inconsequential figure unworthy of attention, even as the Russian authorities vilified and attacked him with a viciousness that suggested the opposite.In death, little appears to have changed.President Vladimir V. Putin has not said a word in public about Mr. Navalny in the two weeks since the opposition campaigner’s death at age 47 in an Arctic prison.Russian state television has been almost equally silent. Coverage has been limited to a short statement by the prison authorities the day of Mr. Navalny’s death, plus a few fleeting television…

But that, in the end, might be the biggest fantasy that attaches to clothes — namely, that any of us can ever have it figured out, arriving at a place of such self-knowledge that we no longer err. The way you look in clothes is, in fact, a profoundly flawed and paradoxical marker of self-knowledge, because the way you look in clothes is, ultimately, not just up to you. It’s up to other people. What’s more, as with any social compact, it’s subject to an endlessly shifting, inescapable array of historical contingencies and aesthetic renegotiations — or, as we familiarly…

Musk takes aim at OpenAI The gloves have really come off in one of the most personal fights in the tech world: Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, accusing them of reneging on the start-up’s original purpose of being a nonprofit laboratory for the technology.Yes, Musk has disagreed with Altman for years about the purpose of the organization they co-founded and he is creating a rival artificial intelligence company. But the lawsuit also appears rooted in philosophical differences that go to the heart of who controls a hugely transformative technology — and is backed by one…

In interviews, Glazer has spoken of “The Zone of Interest” as being made up of two films. One is what we see in the foreground: the family members going about their day, doing chores, celebrating birthdays, playing in the yard. The other is what you hear, and it sounds like the pit of hell.The background is a conglomeration of sound, tuned down low enough that it almost seems like manipulated room tone, or like the whirrings of a very orderly and well-run factory. There are dogs barking; there’s some yelling. At times there’s the sound of buzzing electrical wire, of…

The German police conducted a raid in Berlin on Sunday in their longtime search for three fugitives connected to the Red Army Faction, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, Germany’s most infamous postwar terrorist group.The police arrested one of the three last week. That woman, Daniela Klette, had been on the run for decades, and was found in Berlin. The police were seeking two accomplices, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg.But Mr. Staub and Mr. Gaweg were not among the 10 people arrested in Sunday’s raid in the trendy Berlin district of Friedrichshain. All were released on Sunday after the police…

The Los Angeles Clippers have struggled for years to shed their reputation as one of the N.B.A.’s most woebegone franchises. Operating in a perennial shadow cast by the Lakers, the Clippers actually have a decent team this season, with hopes of winning their first championship.But the job of transforming their image has been no easy task, and the Clippers last week announced their latest crack at it: a new logo that, defying conventional wisdom, reaches into their past.The logo, which the team will begin using next season when it moves into a new arena in nearby Inglewood, Calif., depicts the…

Navigating the byzantine U.S. tax rules and completing your return may be enough of a headache.But you can count on fresh tax stress coming from Washington not far down the road.On Dec. 31, 2025, critical parts of the 2017 federal tax law are scheduled to expire. After that sunset, they would revert to what they would have been if that sweeping tax legislation, passed in the first year of the Trump administration, had never taken effect.Core features of the tax code will be up for grabs: what tax rate you have to pay, how big the standard deduction will be,…

Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,”…