Author: NY TIMES

Confined to cold, concrete cells and often alone with his books, Aleksei A. Navalny sought solace in letters. To one acquaintance, he wrote in July that no one could understand Russian prison life “without having been here,” adding in his deadpan humor: “But there’s no need to be here.”“If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar,” Mr. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, wrote to the same acquaintance, Ilia Krasilshchik, in August. “If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you.”Many details about his last months — as well as the circumstances of his…

The next World Cup will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico and will be held from June 11 to July 19, 2026.This will be the first time the tournament will feature 48 teams, up from the previous 32 teams, meaning there will be more games than ever – 104 in total.The game is still quite some time away so ticket details are scarce, but here’s what we know so far.Where is the competition?The World Cup will be held in 16 cities across three countries, more than any previous tournament.Three of the locations are in Mexico: Monterrey, Guadalajara…

Danielle Goldberg was sitting at a table with her eyes glued to a laptop screen. On it was the actress Greta Lee, who was trying on a satin gown the same color as the flesh of a banana.“This dress cannot puddle,” Ms. Goldberg, 40, said, squinting her eyes as she focused on a slight break at the bottom of the custom Loewe piece. (Ms. Lee is an ambassador for the brand.) It was just past 9 on a Saturday evening in January, the night before the Golden Globe Awards, and Ms. Goldberg, a stylist, was conducting a video fitting from…

Many of the world’s biggest financial firms spent the past several years burnishing their environmental images by pledging to use their financial muscle to fight climate change.Now, Wall Street has flip-flopped.In recent days, giants of the financial world including JPMorgan, State Street and Pimco all pulled out of a group called Climate Action 100+, an international coalition of money managers that was pushing big companies to address climate issues.Wall Street’s retreat from earlier environmental pledges has been on a slow, steady glide path for months, particularly as Republicans began withering political attacks, saying the investment firms were engaging in “woke…

In December 2022, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the key maker of the world’s most cutting-edge chips, said it planned to spend $40 billion in Arizona on its first major U.S. hub for semiconductor production.The much ballyhooed project outside Phoenix — with two new factories, including one with more advanced technology — became a symbol of President Biden’s quest to spur more domestic production of chips, the slices of silicon that help all manner of devices make calculations and store data.Then last summer, TSMC pushed back initial manufacturing at its first Arizona factory to 2025 from this year, saying local workers…

It started with mild anxiety.Emily, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she was discussing her mental health, had just moved to New York City after graduate school, to start a marketing job at a big law firm.She knew it was normal to feel a little on edge. But she wasn’t prepared for what came next: chronic insomnia.Operating on only three or four hours of sleep, it didn’t take long for her anxiety to ramp up: At 25, she was “freaking nervous all the time. A wreck.”When a lawyer at her firm yelled at her one…

Ye is almost exclusively rapping in the clipped, nonlinear style he’s largely used for the last decade — short bursts of words, verses that have very little narrative cohesion. It salts a track with his essence, with a minimum of emotional commitment. (“Beg Forgiveness,” on which he’s practically howling, is a notable exception.)Where “Vultures 1” makes more sense is in its production, which is scabrous and tense, moodily emotive and urgent. The music says things the words don’t, or can’t.It also indicates where Ye currently sees his legacy. Two of the dominant strains of contemporary hip-hop can be traced back…

When the Australian equestrian and three-time Olympic medalist Shane Rose mounted his horse for a costumed competition wearing only a G-string bikini, or “mankini,” he thought it was all in good — albeit somewhat uncomfortable — fun.Mr. Rose, 50, wasn’t expecting to receive a call from Australia’s governing equestrian body notifying him that he was under investigation and temporarily barred from competing. But he did, and for a few days after the competition on Feb. 11, he feared that the episode might derail his preparations for the Paris Olympics.On Monday, the body, Equestrian Australia, said it had cleared Mr. Rose…

The Pittsburgh Penguins of the early 1990s were great, a great team that should have won two more championships. Eight of the 20 players dressed the night the Minnesota Penguins won their first Stanley Cup on May 25, 1991, have been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. The coaches and general managers of these teams are also inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.So it’s fitting that Jaromir Jagr will one day become the team’s ninth player to have a bust displayed in Toronto.You can’t talk about the ’90s without the number nine, and you can’t discuss ’90s culture…

It was just 10 days after the Oct. 7 attack in Israel when the artist Zoya Cherkassky posted a drawing on her Instagram account. The drawing, “7 Oct. 2023,” depicts three generations of a family seemingly in hiding, the mother covering her baby’s mouth to keep it quiet; all stare desperately at the viewer, their horror unmasked. Above them a solitary lightbulb emits jagged illumination — a direct quotation from Picasso’s “Guernica,” the totemic Modernist depiction of war’s horrors.Shocked and terrified, like other Israelis, by Hamas’s early-morning attack, in which Israeli officials say militants killed around 1,200 people and kidnapped…