Author: NY TIMES

Charles St-Arnaud, the chief economist at Alberta Central, the central bank for the province’s credit unions, started out his inquiry with a simple question: How far would prices need to fall, or would incomes need to rise, to make housing affordable again in Canada?The answer for most cities in Canada is “too much.”Mr. St-Arnaud’s research, published this month, presents a major obstacle to efforts to make housing in Canada more affordable. It suggests that the proposals being offered by many politicians — building more houses to lower prices by increasing supply — are unlikely to make a big difference.By most…

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in central Tokyo, 50 or so Chinese people packed into a gray, nondescript office that doubles as a bookstore. They came for a seminar about Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist poet and revolutionary who was beheaded more than a century ago for conspiring to overthrow the Qing dynasty.Like them, Ms. Qiu had lived as an immigrant in Japan. The lecture’s title, “Rebuilding China in Tokyo,” said as much about the aspirations of the people in the room as it did about Ms. Qiu’s life.Public discussions like this one used to be common in big cities…

At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.Such perilous voyages, taken each year by countless Africans seeking a new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no…

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary on Friday declared an end to a monthslong spat with Sweden over the expansion of NATO, saying that a visit by his Swedish counterpart had rebuilt trust and paved the way for the Hungarian Parliament to vote on Monday to ratify the Nordic nation’s membership in the alliance.“We are ready to fight for each other, to give our lives for each other,” Mr. Orban said at a joint news conference in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, with the visiting Swedish leader, Ulf Kristersson. Hungary has been the last holdout in formally endorsing Sweden’s NATO membership.The…

Hacía tiempo que un poco de barriguita no llamaba la atención de la moda.En el siglo XVII, el pintor flamenco Peter Paul Rubens hizo arder los salones con sus bellezas carnosas. Ahora, la pancita y los hoyuelos en la piel están a punto de ser reivindicados. ¿Cómo? Con el lanzamiento de Panty, una línea de lencería y prêt-à-porter de Michaela Stark, artista y diseñadora australiana conocida por distorsionar su carne usando corsés, ligueros y cintas como si fueran sistemas de poleas y cabrestantes.“Panty fue creada por una pareja de lesbianas”, dijo Stark, refiriéndose a la colaboración con su pareja, la…

In the early morning in November, with a chill still in the air, three lines of cars inch across the open, cracked parking lot at the Sumter Mall in Sumter, S.C.It’s still hours before the doors open at Belk, a department store with roots in the Southeast and the mall’s last remaining anchor tenant. The mall, which is about 60 percent vacant, has a hodgepodge of other tenants. Call center workers are parking or being dropped off for their shifts. People are making their way into a nearby Planet Fitness.But on the other side of the parking lot, scores of…

‘Blind War’Stream it on Hi-Yah!During a hostage crisis gone wrong, the SWAT captain Dong Gu (Andy On) loses his eyesight and Cena (Yang Xing), a villainous murderess, sees her sadistic lover die. As she’s hauled off to prison, Cena promises revenge against Dong Gu and the criminal gang who betrayed her. Months later, when Dong Gu’s violinist daughter is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring, he unwittingly teams with the disguised Cena, who’s recently escaped from prison, to retrieve her.Yang and On are a fascinating pair: Yang plays a corrosive open wound of a woman, while On portrays an honorable…

My life, like yours, I suspect, can feel like it has been ingeniously designed for the sole purpose of strangling serendipity. Work days are built around back-to-back meetings and video calls; evenings revolve around children’s bedtimes; date nights have to be scheduled weeks in advance; even phone calls to catch up with friends can take multiple rounds of back-and-forth coordination by text.I have found a secret antidote to all that structure, a magic portal that has no clock or key. It is a neighborhood stoop, or rather, the discarded books that gather there. For you, maybe that translates into a…

Conor Thomas Cahill was wearing a Santa suit and a cast boot when he made eye contact with Jenna Ann Wynne at the Public House in Midtown Manhattan in December 2015.A group of mutual friends had met at the bar for drinks during SantaCon, a yearly Santa Clause convention in Manhattan. Ms. Wynne, a wedding singer, had to work that night, but she stopped by the bar before heading to her gig.The two started chatting, and Mr. Cahill explained that he had broken his foot while playing basketball a few weeks earlier. They exchanged numbers, and for their first date,…

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Dan Perkin and Scott Bissmeyer, work buddies on vacation, sat on metal bleachers watching the Portland Timbers play the San Jose Earthquakes in the first of four preseason Major League Soccer games that day.They had spent $125 each on V.I.P. day passes, which included food, drink and access to tents to keep cool. Self-described “M.L.S. road trippers,” they have visited numerous M.L.S. stadiums, and have watched teams in Tucson, Ariz., where as many as 11 clubs came together for preseason training in the past.But this year, with 12 M.L.S. teams — along with two from…