Author: NY TIMES

He has had a fashion business in New York since the late 1980s, the same decade that Michael Kors and Donna Karan started their namesake lines. He was inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1998. From 1999 to 2018, he showed two collections each year, some on the schedule at New York Fashion Week.But Michael Brown, 66, and his brand, B Michael, are not household names. While the designer, who goes by B Michael, has made capsule collections for Saks Fifth Avenue and has sold other pieces at a few specialty stores, many of his clothes…

Read More

During a recent dinner at a cozy bar in Upper Manhattan, I was confronted with an age-old question about gender norms. Over bowls of ramen and sips of gin cocktails, my date and I got into a debate: Who should pay for dates?My date, a 27-year-old woman I matched with on Hinge, said gender equality didn’t mean men and women should pay the same when they went out. Women, she said, earn less than men in the workplace, spend more time getting ready for outings and pay more for reproductive care.When the date ended, we split the bill. But our…

Read More

As a teenager, Collin Martin felt he had to make a choice. For as long as he could remember, his ambition had been to become a professional soccer player, to make a living doing the thing he loved. He had a sense, though, that it was not compatible with who he was. Martin was gay, and there were — as far as he knew — no gay soccer players.The two things, he came to believe, could not coexist. He could either play soccer, or he could be himself. In his telling, he approached the choice with a cool rationality.“This doesn’t…

Read More

Technology has played a major role in our romantic lives since the invention of the telephone. But in the decades since, some watershed moments have shifted the terrain of dating and relationships. Pornography migrated to the internet; online dating shifted from our desktop computers to our mobile devices; social media apps made it easier to keep tabs on our exes; and our phones were equipped with the ability to sync to Bluetooth-enabled sex toys.I document our ever-shifting dating lives in my weekly column, Third Wheel. As technology grows more powerful, I’m wondering: How is it affecting the way we form…

Read More

‘So Long, My Son’Stream it on Mubi.The scenes that open this ravishing drama by Wang Xiaoshuai feel like pieces of a cryptic puzzle, gesturing evocatively at a whole that remains out of view. A pair of boys play beside a lake, a death is seen from a distance, and years later, in some other place, a grieving couple struggle to raise a wayward son. Slowly, these fragments swirl together into a decades-spanning epic about two couples in China, brought together in the 1980s by their factory jobs and then torn apart by a series of losses, including those inflicted by…

Read More

As Panama jumps into its boisterous Carnival period, the celebrations this weekend come amid a bizarre political drama playing out in the capital.A former president, who is also a top contender in this year’s presidential election in May, has holed himself up in the Nicaraguan Embassy in Panama City, accompanied by his furniture, including a sofa and a desk, as well as his dog, Bruno.Ricardo Martinelli, a 71-year-old conservative businessman who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, was granted asylum by Nicaragua this week after Panama’s Supreme Court denied his appeal of a money-laundering conviction that carried with it a…

Read More

Another benefit is that guests — particularly out-of-towners, who make up half of the couple’s 150-person guest list — will have a guaranteed place to watch the game. The brewery will close at 6 p.m. on Sunday for the watch party. “We didn’t want people to have to scramble to find a bar or cram into a hotel room to watch,” she said. “We’ll have a big projection screen and pub subs and chicken tendies and watch amongst barrels of beer.”Ashley Morris, a destination wedding specialist who worked with Ms. Arvizu and Mr. Marquez to find a Super Bowl-friendly resort,…

Read More

Remember the old “Arrested Development” axiom that “there’s always money in the banana stand”? For streamers, that banana stand is true crime, judging from the rate at which these movies are turned out. Many of the lurid tales of kidnapping, murder and stolen identities have been covered already in podcasts, but documentaries add tantalizing visual elements — photographs of the deceased, talking-head interviews, archival footage — that apparently keep fans coming back.Of course, as entertainment goes, this is nothing new. Flicking through cable stations years ago would reveal plenty of documentaries and docudramas that retold similar tales. What’s changed is…

Read More

Poking up through the snow drifts on the Finnish-Russian border lies a symbol of Moscow’s biggest provocation yet toward NATO’s newest member: a sprawling heap of broken bicycles.The battered bikes are sold for hundreds of dollars on the Russian side to asylum seekers from as far away as Syria and Somalia. They are then encouraged — sometimes forced, according to Finnish guards — to cross the border. Finns say it is a hybrid warfare campaign against their country, using some of the world’s most desperate people, just as it is staking out a new position in a shifting world order.“Some…

Read More