Author: NY TIMES

If you start at the middle C of a piano and strike every key on your way up to the next C on the keyboard, you will play each of the 12 notes that make up an octave. Those 12 semitones are the foundation of most Western music.But what if they were not? What if that same octave were equally divided into 14 tones, or 16? What if Beethoven had written the “Eroica” Symphony with a scale of 19 notes, or Schoenberg had written tone rows with 23? What would their music sound like?Those were the questions that the composer…

Imran Khan’s stunning performance in Pakistan’s national election has upended most traditional political forecasts in a country where leaders who run afoul of the powerful military rarely find electoral success.Supporters of Mr. Khan, the jailed former prime minister, are both electrified by the showing of candidates aligned with his party, who won the most seats in last week’s vote, and enraged by what they call blatant rigging and the possibility that other parties will ultimately lead the government.Here’s what to know about the uncertainty now hanging over Pakistan’s political system.What’s next for the government?Mr. Khan’s supporters are challenging the results…

Chocolate has long been synonymous with Valentine’s Day.But rather than buying one of those heart-shape boxes with lots of mystery sweets inside for loved ones and friends, what if you made your own?“Crafting candies is not just a sweet treat,” said Kirsten Fear, a Londoner taking a class at Melt, a chocolate shop in the Notting Hill neighborhood, “but it’s like weaving my affections and memories into each delicate piece.”On this particular day in January, the shop’s chocolatiers were busy creating sea salt chocolate truffles, orange slices dipped in dark chocolate and other confections. But in the back room, six…

“Drift,” a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents. She plays Jacqueline, a traumatized Liberian refugee whose cautious air is a gentle source of forward motion even as the film around her stalls.The story takes place during a season of vagrancy in Jacqueline’s life, tracking her efforts to find shelter and enough food to keep from fainting. She spends her days selling foot massages to sunbathers and her nights sleeping in sandy beach nooks, and is often pictured alone against the coastal scenery. Eventually, she meets Callie (Alia…

King Charles III on Sunday was seen publicly for the first time since Buckingham Palace announced last week that he was being treated for cancer, strolling into a church on the royal Sandringham estate where he has his residence.Charles, 74, waved and smiled at well-wishers who had gathered nearby to capture a glimpse of the monarch as news cameras flashed. He walked alongside his wife, Queen Camilla, before heading into the 11 a.m. service at St. Mary Magdalene Church.Later, both the king and queen smiled and waved for the cameras as they headed back to their home at Sandringham House.In…

When The Times recently invited five independent jewelry designers for a morning of conversation, they all arrived wearing their own creations.“We are our brands,” as Bernard James, one of the jewelers, put it. “We represent what we make.” The designer, 32, wore, among other pieces, rings from his namesake brand’s Flora collection, inspired by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and a diamond tennis bracelet.He was joined at Nine Orchard, a hotel in downtown Manhattan, by Jennifer Koche, 38 of Storrow Fine Jewelry, who had necklaces with vintage-inspired charms dangling from her neck, and Johnny Nelson, 35, of Johnny Nelson Jewelry, sporting…

COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a…

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, has spent the duration of the country’s electoral campaign in jail, disqualified from running in what experts have described as one of the least credible general elections in the country’s 76-year history.But from behind bars, he has been rallying his supporters in recent months with speeches that use artificial intelligence to replicate his voice, part of a tech-savvy strategy his party deployed to circumvent a crackdown by the military.And on Saturday, as official counts showed candidates aligned with his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., winning the most seats in a surprise result that threw…

For nearly two decades, Raphaele Canot worked at two of the best-known names in the luxury jewelry world: Cartier and De Beers Jewellers, the diamond specialist’s retail brand. In the process, she found that creating pieces for established jewelry houses has its limitations.“You’re not an artist when you work as a designer for a big company — you are a designer to the service of the brand,” Ms. Canot, 54, said in a phone interview from her office in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood. “You have a brief to follow, you have some big marketing components in it. You have to…

In 2018, The Pink Stuff was little more than a home cleaning product with a cute name. “The miracle cleaning paste,” as it said on every container, was sold by just two retail chains in Britain. At a factory near Birmingham, The Pink Stuff line operated for about two hours every month. That was plenty.“It was a brand with a lot of uses,” said Henrik Pade, a managing director at Star Brands, the company behind the product. “But nobody used it.”Actually, The Pink Stuff — which is, yes, bubble-gum pink — had some fans. One of them was Sophie Hinchliffe,…