Author: NY TIMES

Barbie’s evolution is more abstract than Bella’s; Barbie’s adolescence begins with her doubts, self-consciousness and thoughts of death. Her hero’s journey is a quest from her fantasy playland to the real world, where she hopes to find Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the girl who used to play with her. Though Barbie locates her, she realizes Sasha is not the cause of her recent changes. Barbie is psychologically linked to the girl’s mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), a Mattel employee whose thoughts of cellulite and death transferred to Barbie in Barbieland.Barbie is the bridge between this mother and daughter, embodying the abandoned childhood…

The airdrops, which some aid experts criticized as insubstantial and largely symbolic, contribute “to ongoing U.S. government efforts to provide lifesaving humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza,” the statement said. “We are conducting planning for potential follow-on airborne aid delivery missions.”One of the U.S. officials briefing reporters on the operation on Saturday said that 66 pallets had been dropped over Gaza. The official said that drop sites had been chosen in relatively safe areas where people are sheltering and in need. The U.S. did not coordinate its operation with Hamas or any other group on the ground, the official…

King Harald V of Norway received a temporary pacemaker in Malaysia on Saturday to help him return home, according to the Norwegian Royal House, after contracting an infection while on the trip.The monarch, 87, had been hospitalized for an infection at a hospital on the Malaysian island of Langkawi, the Royal House said earlier in the week. The decision on Saturday to insert a pacemaker was made because the king had a “low heart rate,” the house said in a statement, calling the procedure “successful.”The plan was to medically transport the monarch back to Norway in the “next couple of…

It was an evening in late January, and Raquel Cecilia Mendieta was dining at the Parador, the 12th-century monastery-turned-hotel where she was staying while she installed artwork for a new survey of Ana Mendieta, the famous Cuban-born performance artist — and Ms. Mendieta’s maternal aunt — at a nearby museum.It had been a long day of assembling logs, soil, pine cones and branches into a reimagining of the artist’s “Untitled: Silueta Series” inside the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, and her dinner companions — her 15-year-old daughter, Anabella, and Grace Hong, the assistant director at Galerie Lelong,…

When Shawn Fain, the United Automobile Workers president, unveiled the deal that ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, he framed it as part of a longer campaign. Next, he declared, would be the task of organizing nonunion plants across the country.“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” he said at the time. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six.”Four months later, the first…

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon.He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March.In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do.It was a bold…

Last weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years after he was fired from the show before ever appearing on it, when old podcast appearances in which he’d used slurs were brought to light. During his opening monologue, Gillis showed how he had evolved since then, which is to say, only slightly. In a tame bit about his parents, he fondly recalled spending time with his mother when he was younger, noting sweetly, “Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend.”For the past two weeks, Ye — formerly Kanye West — has sat at the…

Two scientists who worked at Canada’s top microbiology lab passed on secret scientific information to China, and one of them was a “realistic and credible threat to Canada’s economic security,” documents from the national intelligence agency and a security investigation show.The hundreds of pages of reports about the two researchers, Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, who were married and born in China, were released to the House of Commons late Wednesday after a national security review by a special parliamentary committee and a panel of three retired senior judges.Canadian officials, who have warned that the country’s academic and research institutions…

“I think Frieze is fantastic,” James Corden said. “I went to the one in London before anyone in L.A. even knew what it was.”It was Tuesday in Los Angeles, and Mr. Corden, the former late-night host who now lives in London, was standing inside the Holmby Hills home of Jimmy Iovine, the co-founder of Interscope Records and the former chief executive of Beats Electronics. About 225 people had gathered for an art auction hosted by Mr. Iovine and Dr. Dre and organized by Sotheby’s.The event was part of a week of art talks, exhibitions and dinners culminating in Frieze Los…

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