Author: NY TIMES

So far in 2024, the Billboard album chart is looking a lot like 2023.For the first two weeks of the year, Taylor Swift held at No. 1 with her “1989” remake. Now, the country star Morgan Wallen returns with “One Thing at a Time,” which dominated the chart for 16 weeks last year and now logs its 17th time in the top spot.“One Thing at a Time,” which had a blockbuster opening last March and remained a steady hit for months, rose to No. 1 with the equivalent of 61,000 sales in the United States, including 80 million streams and…

Hamas fighters in the northern Gaza Strip fired at least 25 rockets toward a nearby Israeli city on Tuesday, renewing right-wing criticism in Israel of the government’s decision to scale back some military operations in the war.Hamas said in a statement that it had targeted the Israeli city of Netivot, about six miles from the Gaza border. Most of the rockets were either intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system or fell into open areas, and there were no immediate reports of casualties. But the Israeli police said that at least one building had been damaged.The attack highlighted Hamas’s continuing ability…

Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a creamy beige Empire armchair.A stylist removed the custom-made sturdy boots on her feet and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing red lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped hairstyle as another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to…

Fashion criticism, if you’re privileged enough to do it, is a pretty cool practice. It brings you into constant contact with creativity and beauty. It allows you to think and write about the ways that what humans choose to put on their bodies affect almost everything about how we move through social and cultural space. Often enough, it’s fun.Yet there’s a flaw in the process, and it is that, unlike those who write about art, music, dance, architecture and, especially, food — fashion critics approach their subjects at an unfortunate remove. We look at clothes all the time, and yet…

Airbus cemented its position last week as the world’s biggest plane maker for the fifth straight year, announcing that it had delivered more aircraft and secured more orders than Boeing in 2023. At the same time, Boeing was trying to put out a huge public-relations and safety crisis caused by a harrowing near disaster involving its 737 Max line of airliners.In the long-running duel between the two aviation rivals, Airbus has pulled far ahead.“What used to be a duopoly has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing,” said Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory in Washington, D.C. “A lot of…

“Harmony,” Barry Manilow’s long-in-the-works musical about an early-20th-century German sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime, will end an abbreviated Broadway run on Feb. 4.Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman have been working on the show for more than a quarter-century, inspired by a documentary film about the Comedian Harmonists, an ensemble that included some Jewish members, which was unacceptable to the Nazis.The musical, directed by Warren Carlyle, opened on Nov. 13; at the time of its closing it is expected to have played 24 previews and 96 regular performances. It was capitalized for up to $15 million,…

The United States carried out a new military strike against Houthi ballistic missiles in Yemen on Tuesday, the U.S. military said, but the latest salvo against the Iran-backed group left the White House grappling with how to stop a battle-hardened foe from disrupting shipping lanes critical for global trade.The strikes on Tuesday, the third overall against the group since a U.S.-led air and naval barrage hit dozens of targets last week, destroyed four missiles that the Pentagon’s Central Command said posed an imminent threat to merchant vessels and Navy ships traveling through the Red Sea and nearby waters.But the pre-emptive…

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s movie about the development of the atomic bomb, on Thursday received the highest number of nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.The film secured 13 nods for Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including for best film, where it is up against four other titles including “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s sexually charged take on a Frankenstein story starring Emma Stone. “Poor Things” followed “Oppenheimer” with 11 nominations overall.The other titles nominated for best film are “Anatomy…

He and his fiancée never got married. I moved away. But we stayed close. It’s been almost a decade since graduate school, and he and I have not lived in the same state since. He has a partner and a family. I have a budding career in television and a busy social life. The last time we had sex was five years ago. (Ethically, that time!)A while back, I texted him to see if he wanted to chat on the phone. I love talking on the phone and ask for it often. It was Monday. He said he was visiting…

An unlikely coalition of banks, community groups and racial justice advocates is urging federal regulators to rethink the plan they proposed in July to update rules governing how U.S. banks protect themselves against potential losses.Regulators are calling for an increase in the amount of capital — cash-like assets — that banks have to hold to tide them over in an emergency to avoid needing a taxpayer-funded bailout like the one in the 2008 financial crisis. The demise of three midsize banks and a fourth smaller one last year, under pressure from rising interest rates and losses from cryptocurrency businesses, bolstered…