Author: NY TIMES

There are a few essentials for any child’s birthday party: a theme, a cake, some balloons, a piñata created in the image of a convicted killer.At least that was the checklist for Alana Elizondo of Eagle Pass, Texas, when her daughter Raelynn requested a Selena Quintanilla theme for her eighth-birthday party. Ms. Elizondo and Raelynn had bonded over their shared love of the singer, a Tejano music superstar who died at age 23 in 1995. Rather than whacking at a piñata in the likeness of their idol, Ms. Elizondo thought, why not take a swing at her killer, Yolanda Saldívar?With…

Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in…

There is busy, and then there is Isabela Merced.On an afternoon last month in Los Angeles, the actress — who had just returned from Vancouver, where she was learning to ride horses for a role in Season 2 of HBO’s postapocalyptic survival drama “The Last of Us” — was preparing to meet Vice President Kamala Harris that night, while also doing this interview and, as an alarm that went off in the middle of the phone call revealed, laundry.“It’s a work in progress: I know how to get on the horse and not panic, and that’s about it,” said Merced,…

When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant.…

“You get disoriented, and all of a sudden pressure builds and anxiety builds,” Rainy Lehrman, 47, a woodworker, said. She and her husband, Leonard White, 44, a teacher, had dropped off their two children in Ikea’s child care area and were splitting the cod. “It seemed like the fanciest thing,” Mr. White said.While most guests were dressed casually, Tiffany Shum and Lani Wang, both 19-year-old students at the Cooper Union, had wore coordinating pale blue dresses for the occasion. The two friends had chosen to skip their computer architecture class in favor of something more fun and head to Red…

Kevin Rezvani came of age in kitchens: spending summers at his grandfather’s bakery in Japan, doing work-study in his college cafeteria and working for years as a line cook at mid-tier restaurants, along with some stints in fast food.By his late 20s, the biggest takeaway Mr. Rezvani had from his experience “working in every kind of thing in food” was the industry’s widespread inability to reconcile the art of a kitchen, and the science of a restaurant, with the math of a business.Too many ventures, he says, are not profitable enough to justify all the work hours needed from managers…

Bob Marley, the beloved and singular reggae luminary, was a dreadlocked Rastafarian from Jamaica who sang and played guitar. Kingsley Ben-Adir is a Brit with close-cropped hair who doesn’t sing or play guitar, and stands seven inches taller than Marley did. Despite the lack of external similarities, Ben-Adir was cast as Marley in a new Hollywood biopic, the culmination of a yearlong search for the right actor.“We tried to find someone from Jamaica who could speak the dialect we needed,” said Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s oldest son as well as a Grammy-winning musician, and a producer on “Bob Marley: One…

The death of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, at a remote Arctic prison on Friday ended one of the most audacious political careers of modern times and left wartime Russia without its most charismatic antiwar voice.Mr. Navalny, whose death was reported by Russian authorities, stood as the most outspoken critic of President Vladimir V. Putin for more than a decade, harnessing broad opposition to the Russian leader more successfully than any other foe of the Kremlin. After surviving a poisoning widely seen as the Kremlin’s doing in 2020 and recovering in Germany, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia…

When Ann Maddox agreed to become the personal assistant for a Bravo reality TV star in December 2020, she thought she would be organizing closets and running errands while building out her acting résumé. Three years later, that gig has evolved into her being the primary mediator between a couple at the heart of one of reality television’s most explosive breakups.Until just a few weeks ago, Ms. Maddox, 42, worked as the personal assistant for Tom Sandoval, one of the stars of “Vanderpump Rules,” who broke the internet last year when the news emerged that he had cheated on his…

The pandemic created an economic crisis unlike any recession on record. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the aftermath, too, has played out in a way that almost no economists expected.When unemployment soared in the first weeks of the pandemic, many feared a repeat of the long, slow rebound from the Great Recession: years of joblessness that left many workers permanently scarred. Instead, the recovery in the labor market has been, by many measures, the strongest on record.In early 2021, some economists foresaw a surge in inflation. Others were skeptical: Similar predictions in recent years — in some cases…