Author: NY TIMES

This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time reports regularly clocked in at more than five hours a day.That’s only an hour more than the average American, but I still found it staggering to think that I spent the equivalent of January, February and half of March looking at that tiny screen (April too, if we only count waking…

Monique Louvigny, an event coordinator in the San Francisco Bay Area, economizes where she can. She drives a 10-year-old Prius, brings a thermos of coffee to work instead of patronizing a place with baristas, and takes advantage of a drive-through food pantry once a month.Laid off at 57, “I kind of reinvented myself,” she said. She rebuilt her career as a freelancer, overseeing receptions and conventions for many companies and institutions, including the local de Young and Legion of Honor art museums.But her income fell to less than $30,000 last year. “It’s erratic,” she said. “In January, I have 12…

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up…

As Hollywood heads into the heart of its awards season — a three-month orgy of frothy self-celebration and pop culture glamour — celebrities and their handlers find themselves with a serious decision to make: what, if anything, to say about the Israel-Hamas war.Movie stars have become increasingly willing, even determined, to use award shows like the Golden Globes, scheduled for Sunday on CBS, to bring attention to progressive causes and concerns. In recent years, winners like Meryl Streep, Russell Crowe and Michelle Williams have incorporated topics like sexual harassment, the global refugee crisis, abortion rights, Trumpism, climate change, Black Lives…

Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that Russian missile strikes on a city and a village close to the eastern frontline had killed at least 11 people, including five children, and injured 10.Vadym Filashkin, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Donetsk region, said the Russian military hit the area with a barrage of missiles on Saturday evening, smashing private houses and trapping residents under the rubble. The Russian government did not immediately comment on the reports.“The enemy is cynically targeting civilians, trying to bring as much grief to our land as possible,” he wrote in a post on social…

Where will a former NFL coach with a Super Bowl title spend his New Year’s holiday? Wrexham, of course.Paul McCord and his family traveled from Florida to North Wales to watch the League Two match against Barrow after becoming passionate fans of the club through the documentary Welcome to Wrexham.That meant leaving Tampa’s sunshine and daytime temperatures of 22 degrees Celsius (71.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for 9 degrees Celsius heat, but Paul, his wife Mindy, a successful women’s lacrosse coach, and 9-year-old son LJ were delighted Extremely.”It means a lot to come to Wrexham and celebrate the New Year,” said Paul,…

After months of brainstorming how to have the most delicious wedding cake possible, Rachel Karten and Roxanne Rosensteel, a pastry chef based in Santa Barbara, Calif., concluded that only one kind of wedding cake could fit the bill: a big sheet cake. The original plan was to have four of them, but when Ms. Karten, the former head of social media at Bon Appétit, saw the 3-foot-long cake at the designer Sandy Liang’s wedding in June, she asked Ms. Rosensteel if it might be possible to combine four sheet cakes into one.It was. Ms. Rosensteel baked an olive oil chiffon…

A Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines made an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon on Friday evening after experiencing a midair pressure problem that passengers said blew out a chunk of the fuselage.The airline said that Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 had made a safe emergency landing carrying 171 passengers and six crew members at the Portland airport shortly after takeoff for Ontario, Calif. Within hours, the company said that it was grounding its fleet of 65 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft until it could inspect each plane. It said in a statement that it expected…

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company’s devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active.Specifically, investigators have examined how the…

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed Florida to import millions of dollars worth of medications from Canada at far lower prices than in the United States, overriding fierce decades-long objections from the pharmaceutical industry.The approval, issued in a letter to Florida Friday, is a major policy shift for the United States, and supporters hope it will be a significant step forward in the long and largely unsuccessful effort to rein in drug prices. Individuals in the United States are allowed to buy directly from Canadian pharmacies, but states have long wanted to be able to purchase medicines in bulk…