Author: NY TIMES

If Valentine’s Day sneaked up on you this year, do not worry. With overnight and even same-day shipping now commonly available, last-minute givers have plenty of options.To help spark your ideas, we asked nine tastemakers around the world to offer some 11th-hour recommendations. Their replies, edited for clarity, included experiential gifts ideal for romantic partners and practical items that could easily double as birthday presents for family and friends.Some can be given instantly, while others require a bit of planning. A couple of suggestions, provided by Liesl Clark, don’t involve spending money at all.Ms. Clark is a co-founder and the…

“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Days of Heaven,” “Before the Revolution,” “1900,” “The Untouchables,” “Kill Bill,” “Django Unchained,” “The Mission,” “The Thing,” “Fists in the Pocket,” “The Battle of Algiers,” “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” “Bugsy,” “Bulworth,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” — if you’ve watched a movie in the last half century there’s a good chance that you’ve heard music by Ennio Morricone, the titanic Italian composer and arranger who helped define films as we know and hear them.When Morricone died at the age of 91 in 2020, it seemed almost hard to believe given…

Firefighters were digging through the burned remains of a house Saturday morning searching for the body of a child, the last member of a family killed in a catastrophic fire caused by a Russian drone attack.Four bodies already lay in bags in the yard. Investigators had found the charred remains of the father in a corridor and the mother and two children in the bathroom.Seven people in total died when Russian drones struck a fuel depot late Friday night in one of the most calamitous attacks yet on the city of Kharkiv, the northeastern city that has suffered a series…

Cam vio por fin Oppenheimer casi un mes después de su estreno. Condujo seis horas, cruzando fronteras estatales, porque quería la sala (IMAX), el formato (70 mm) y el asiento (H8) perfectos. Su paciencia por lo que le importaba profundamente era inmensa. Cam calificó Oppenheimer con tres estrellas, “técnicamente increíble, pero en su mayor parte vacía”.Estaba decidido: yo no la vería.Enamorarse consiste en ver lo bueno que puede ser algo. Y con Cam aprendí a ir al cine: las palomitas grandes son imprescindibles, la importancia de una máquina Coca-Cola Freestyle es exponencial y, si existe la opción de ver algo…

Brazil is experiencing an enormous outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico.Brazil’s Health Ministry warns that it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, outstripping the 4.1 million cases the Pan-American Health Organization recorded for all 42 countries in the region last year.Brazil was due for a bad dengue year — numbers of cases of the virus typically rise and fall on a roughly four-year cycle — but experts say a number of factors, including El…

Adidas severed ties with him. His talent agency dropped him. But on Friday night, an arena on Long Island was filled with thousands of people who most certainly had not turned their backs on Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.Shortly before releasing “Vultures 1,” his first album since making a string of antisemitic remarks that cost him business deals and drew widespread condemnation, Ye previewed his new collaboration with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign at a listening party at UBS Arena, further testing the boundaries of his fandom with lyrics that did not tiptoe around the controversy.“‘Crazy,…

When the United Nations launched an investigation a decade ago into whether a handful of its employees in Gaza were members of Hamas, it was not long before a senior U.N. legal officer in the territory started receiving death threats.First there were emails, sent from anonymous accounts, according to three senior U.N. officials based in Gaza at that time.Then came a funeral bouquet, delivered to the main U.N. compound, labeled with the legal officer’s name.Finally there was a live grenade, sent to the compound with its pin still inside, according to two of the officials.The U.N. evacuated the legal officer,…

But he never stopped working at City Ballet, creating six ballets for the company, including “Concerto DSCH” (2008), “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement” (2010) and “Voices” (2020), that had a distinctly different flavor from those he made elsewhere — often more abstract, wilder, stranger, fleeter.Now, after almost 14 years at Ballet Theater, he has finally joined City Ballet, in its 75th anniversary season, as artist in residence, alongside the choreographer in residence, Justin Peck, who is also the company’s artistic adviser.“The idea that he might come to us was very exciting,” Whelan said of Ratmansky. “Especially for the dancers who had…

After Melissa, a 35-year-old event planner living in Chicago, masturbates, she sometimes studies a chart that resembles the output of a heart rate monitor or that of a seismograph capturing an earthquake.The data is generated by her vibrator, the Lioness, which measures her arousal and uploads information about her orgasm patterns to the company’s app. The sensors embedded in the toy track her pelvic floor movements. With each involuntary squeeze and release of her pelvic floor muscles, the app displays a graph showing her rhythmic pattern in a series of peaks and valleys. She typically uses it in tandem with…

Cher, Mariah Carey, Sinead O’Connor, Oasis and Sade are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, which were revealed Saturday.Other new names on the hall’s short list include Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & the Gang and Lenny Kravitz. Also on the list are Dave Matthews Band, Mary J. Blige, Jane’s Addiction, A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. & Rakim, each of whom has been nominated at least once before. Ozzy Osbourne, who is already part of the pantheon as a member of Black Sabbath, has gotten the nod as a solo…