Author: NY TIMES

For her latest movie, “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a drab, standoffish, occasionally obnoxious office worker. Strangely enough, she found it exciting.“Fran is a woman who loves her job; she loves her routine,” Ridley said in a video interview from London. “She thinks about dying, but she doesn’t want to die. She has just created this very rich inner world for herself because she struggles to connect with people in a real-life way.”Then a new guy moves into a cubicle near hers.“I would not say the film is one of fireworks,” she said. “I would describe…

On a sunny January day, dozens of Israelis and Palestinians crowded into a small house in a town outside Bethlehem, as their compatriots fought in the Gaza Strip, to talk about a subject that has become nearly taboo in their cities and towns:How to build a lasting peace.“This thing is not appropriate in the community we live in,” said Aya Sbeih, a Palestinian member of the group that was meeting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Combatants for Peace. “So I keep it a secret.”Many peace groups have been struggling since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza,…

It was customary when I was in grade school to bestow a valentine upon every person in one’s class. These valentines were not of the handmade or heartfelt variety, but rather bought in bulk from CVS, from the red-cellophane aisle, on the shelf next to the seasonal Whitman’s Samplers and conversation hearts.Each box of cards had a theme — Disney characters, Garfield, the Berenstain Bears — but were otherwise generic, bearing anodyne tidings of holiday cheer. You’d scrawl your signature on each of the 25 cards, stuff them into their flimsy red envelopes and address them, painstakingly, to each member…

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…

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…

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it. Source link

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…

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…

‘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…

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…