Author: NY TIMES

On Wednesday night, a throng of actors, cycling through a swirl of events — awards season, New York Fashion Week and the Super Bowl — assembled in Midtown Manhattan, wearing Chanel, dressed by Chanel and for Chanel.Over cocktails, guests mingled for the opening of the brand’s first U.S. watch and fine jewelry flagship boutique on Fifth Avenue near 57th Street, designed by the architect Peter Marino with elements from Coco Chanel’s apartment in Paris.America Ferrera greeted Natasha Lyonne. Kerry Washington chatted with Elizabeth Olsen. Katie Holmes posed for photos with Michelle Williams. Zazie Beetz convened with Rachel Brosnahan. Dianna Agron…

Last spring, it seemed Tucker Carlson might have reached the end of his fiery path through American media and politics.Fox News canceled his top-rated show, depriving Mr. Carlson of his nightly platform in prime time. But it kept him under a contract, worth more than $15 million a year, that prohibited him from taking a job with a rival.Under the old rules of the legacy media, Mr. Carlson would have been off the air and out of sight through the end of the 2024 election, when his contract runs out. But Mr. Carlson is no typical television star. And what…

MS. DUNCAN AND MS. HOOPER’S RELATIONSHIPS with Mr. Majors briefly overlapped, though neither initially realized it.When Ms. Hooper and Mr. Majors began dating, she said that he quickly expressed deep love for her but also became controlling, dictating where she could go, who she could socialize with and how she could behave. She was “not allowed to speak to anyone about their relationship, isolating her from a support system,” according to the pretrial statement. She became a shadow of herself, a Yale classmate said.Ms. Chaudhry described Mr. Majors as “young and insecure” at the time of his relationship with Ms.…

Airstrikes hit a southern Gaza border city crowded with civilians on Thursday, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced a cease-fire proposal by Hamas and signaled that the Israeli military was preparing to move into the area.The strikes on two houses in Rafah killed and injured multiple people, according to Palestinian news outlets, and heightened fears among the more than one million Palestinians who have sought refuge in the city as Israel’s army has repeatedly warned that it plans to push farther south in its ground invasion.“There is no place for the people to run to,” said Fathi Abu…

President Vladimir V. Putin called on the United States to “make an agreement” ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia in order to end the war, speaking for two hours with a former Fox News host in an interview broadcast Thursday that was the Kremlin’s most direct appeal to American audiences since his invasion began two years ago.“Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement,” Mr. Putin told Tucker Carlson, the American conservative commentator, in the Russian leader’s first interview with an American outlet since 2021. “Start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions.”Much of…

The estimated price tag for President Biden’s clean-energy and climate agenda has effectively doubled since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law a year and a half ago.Nearly all of the increase is attributable to forecasters’ belief that the law will be more popular than they had originally expected, in part because of the way the Biden administration wrote certain regulations. That rising price tag may actually be good for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and for the U.S. economy.The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed on a party-line vote in summer 2022, includes tax credits and other subsidies…

RAY WAS MAC’S MUSIC DIRECTOR for “The Lily’s Revenge,” a sprawling theatrical work from 2009. Since then, their collaborations have been prolific; Mac traced the inspiration for “Bark of Millions” to that show, but also to “24-Decade.”“Almost all of those 240 songs are centered around straight people” and cisgender people, Mac said. “And there was this desire to give us some of the things that we’ve missed in life.”“Bark of Millions,” which will feature supernova-spectacular costumes by another frequent Mac collaborator, Machine Dazzle, is considerably shorter but still unusually substantial — “party-length,” Mac called it. “We say this in the…

Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, who was appointed commander of the Ukrainian military on Thursday, led two successful counteroffensives in the war against Russia before his troops became bogged down in one of the most contentious and costly battles of the conflict.It was a strung-out, vicious spell of urban combat in the eastern city of Bakhmut last winter, and even as Ukraine was clearly losing ground in the fight, General Syrsky, then commander of the ground forces, had argued that the decision to defend was sound since Russia was losing more soldiers than Ukraine.Ukraine maintained what military parlance calls a favorable attrition…

In November, just as she was about to open her second boutique in London, the jewelry designer Jessica McCormack welcomed the first client to the new “snug” in her flagship store.The word is a traditional term for a small private room at a pub. But Ms. McCormack has been using it for the renovated workshop, where she has created what she sees as a different kind of jewelry retail experience: A way of putting craftsmanship front and center, in its rightful place “at the top of the food chain,” she said.Since March 2015, when the designer installed a basement workshop…

The Academy Awards is introducing an Oscar for casting, the ceremony’s governing organization announced Thursday, making it the first new category in more than 20 years.Casting directors have been pushing for the category for decades, arguing that their work is critical to the success of a film, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars, has rejected the idea — until now.The new category will be introduced for films released in 2025, meaning that fans won’t see a statuette given out until the ceremony in 2026. The Academy tends to be conservative when it…