Author: NY TIMES

Who says you have to live in one place? Maybe a few tiny homes would be preferable.That’s what Robert Losonsky and Edith Wassenaar discovered when they traded a typical home in the Netherlands for several smaller ones, adopting a peripatetic lifestyle — one that prioritizes activities like surfing over work — in the process.Oddly enough, their embrace of small-scale living began with a hunt for more space.In 2017, they were living in a 1,500-square-foot apartment in an upscale neighborhood in The Hague. “But we started to work more and more from home,” said Mr. Losonsky, now 54, who had a…

In June 2021, the insurance plan for North Carolina state employees was paying for 2,800 people to take weight-loss drugs.Last year, it paid for nearly 25,000. Medications like Wegovy cost the North Carolina State Health Plan $100 million last year, rising seemingly out of nowhere to represent 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.“This is something we never anticipated,” said Dale Folwell, the state treasurer, whose office runs the health plan.Alarmed by the ballooning costs, the health plan’s governing board voted on Thursday to end all coverage of medications for weight loss, including Wegovy, which accounts for the vast…

On Tuesday, after days of tramping around Park City, Utah, griping about the movies and the logistical headaches this mountain resort town presents, I was transported into the Sundance Film Festival that I always hope for, the one in which a movie surprises and moves and maybe delights me, and so successfully makes good on its promise that, after the lights come up, the crowd delivers the festival version of hallelujah with a floor-shaking standing ovation. I admit, I wasn’t expecting that to happen when I walked into the new Will Ferrell joint.That would be “Will & Harper,” a documentary…

The director of the C.I.A. is set to make a renewed push for negotiations over the release of hostages held in Gaza and an extended cease-fire, according to U.S. officials, who said he would meet with senior Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials in Europe.The officials hope to close a wide gap between Israel and Hamas, especially on two issues: the length of any pause in fighting and the fate of Hamas leaders in Gaza, according to officials briefed on the talks.Here is a look at where the talks stand.How are the negotiations going?A weeklong truce in November allowed the release…

The derelict rail bridge stretches across a busy north London street, green foliage peeking out of the gaps between the beams overhead, where bright blue paint flakes from rusting steel.Farther east, the railway’s grand Victorian-era arches span a small slice of park wedged between two streets, where tents belonging to homeless people, a discarded mattress and broken bottles are scattered about.While the elevated train line and some of the areas it cuts through may look neglected now, if all goes according to plan, it will become the site of the Camden Highline, a planned public park that aims to turn…

The night of the wolf moon — the first full moon of the new year — also happened to be the last night of the couture, when John Galliano recreated a decaying Paris nightclub in the vaulted caverns beneath Paris’s Pont Alexandre III bridge across the Seine.Crepe paper streamers the color of Madeira wine were draped across walls and dangled from the ceiling amid banged-up wooden bistro chairs and scratched-up tables. Then a shirtless chanteur with a Freddie Mercury mustache rose to croon a love song, a grainy black and white film was reflected in the mirrors and the Maison…

Ultramodern factories churn out electric cars and solar panels in Hefei, an industrial center in the heart of central China. Broad avenues link office towers and landscaped parks. Subway lines open at a brisk pace.Yet at Hefei’s market for construction materials, which fills 10 city blocks, local merchants are gloomy. Wu Junlin, a vendor of doors, has closed two of his three stores and laid off all but one of his dozen employees.“I have been doing this for 20 years — after all these years, this year is the worst,” he said, sitting in his last store with no customers…

Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on…

Officials in Israel on Friday denounced the International Court of Justice’s order seeking to prevent genocidal acts in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza but also expressed relief the court did not order it to halt its military campaign.Israeli officials had feared the judges would order an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, as South Africa had requested in its initial petition. The U.N. court ultimately ordered Israel to act to ensure that its soldiers and leaders were adhering to the 1948 U.N. genocide convention, but stopped short of demanding an end to the war.Israel has strongly rejected the accusation that it…

This was the day that President Biden and his team had feared for more than three months, the day that relatively low-level attacks by Iranian proxy groups on American troops in the Middle East turned deadly and intensified the pressure on the president to respond in kind.With three American service members killed and two dozen more injured by a drone in Jordan, Mr. Biden must decide how far he is willing to go in terms of retaliation at the risk of a wider war that he has sought to avoid ever since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas touched…