Author: NY TIMES

The NCAA said Thursday it has reached an eight-year deal worth $115 million per year with ESPN to broadcast 40 college sports championships each year, including what many in the college athletics world hope will lead to a larger edition of Division I women’s basketball. championship. Given the recent wave of popularity, the returns are high.The $920 million deal ends years of speculation and debate over how the NCAA capitalizes on the massive fan base of women’s sports, including basketball. Powerful teams like South Carolina and UConn, as well as star players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Sabrina Ionescu,…

Celebrities streamed onto the lush red carpet to pose in front of the floral backdrop for the Golden Globes on Sunday night as the awards ceremony made a return to television (it wasn’t broadcast in 2022, and was moved to a Tuesday evening last year). With both the Writer’s Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes halting movie and television promotion for months last year, the industry seemed ready to celebrate its achievements and ask the vital questions: Will the box office bonanza “Barbie” rule the awards season? What will Timothee wear? Will Taylor Swift, whose film “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” was…

Typewriters vanished, and then cassette tapes and encyclopedias did, too. But paper checks are one piece of our analog past that persists.American consumers and businesses wrote 11.2 billion checks in 2021, far fewer than the 42 billion written at the start of the century. Despite the rapid decline, check fraud is exploding — costing financial institutions billions and throwing many check writers’ finances into disarray.After my colleague Ron Lieber and I wrote about rising check fraud, worried readers wrote to us with questions: Is there a safer way to write checks when we must? What about digital payments — aren’t…

A brand-new rocket lifted off early Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla., sending a robotic spacecraft toward the surface of the moon.The launch of the vehicle, the Vulcan rocket, was flawless. The spacecraft it carried, built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, separated 50 minutes into the flight, and its systems powered on successfully.However, a few hours later, Astrobotic reported on the social media service X that the spacecraft, known as Peregrine, was having trouble keeping its solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power.The company then said the likely cause of the problem was a malfunction of Peregrine’s propulsion…

A week ago, holiday titles dominated Billboard’s album chart, occupying half the top 10. But now that streaming playlists are no longer overindexing on roasting chestnuts, things have gone back to normal. Which means, of course, that Taylor Swift is (still) on top.Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her latest rerecording, holds at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, the sixth time the album has landed at the top since its release 10 weeks ago. In a slow week for music sales, though, the new “1989” held its perch with the equivalent of a modest 64,000 sales in the United States,…

Israel said its military is starting to shift from a large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip to a more targeted phase in its war against Hamas, and Israeli officials have privately told their American counterparts that they hoped the transition would be completed by the end of January, U.S. officials said. Israel’s disclosure came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was expected in Israel to press officials there to curtail their campaign in Gaza and to prevent the war from spreading across the region, particularly in the aftermath of an Israeli strike last week that killed…

Hezbollah said on Monday that one of its commanders had been killed in a strike in southern Lebanon, adding to concerns that Israel’s fight against Hamas in Gaza could erupt into a wider regional war.The killing of the commander, identified by Hezbollah as Wissam Hassan al-Tawil, came as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited troops near the border with Lebanon and vowed that Israel “will do everything to restore security to the north,” according to his office.Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, and Israel have traded increasingly intense and deadly cross-border fire since the Israel-Hamas war began three months ago, eliciting Israeli…

The NBA announced Saturday that Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green has returned to play following a 12-game suspension. Green has been in counseling for several weeks and has held progress meetings with the league and the Warriors.”During the suspension that began on December 14 and resulted in him missing 12 games, Green completed a number of steps that demonstrated his commitment to bringing his conduct into compliance with the standards expected of an NBA player,” executive vice president and head coach Joe Biden said in a statement. Joe Dumars said. The NBA Basketball Operations Department said in a statement.”He…

When is it appropriate (is it ever appropriate?) to wear a fully matching sweatsuit, top and bottom? When I see people wearing a paired sweatshirt and sweatpants, I sometimes think “cringe.” And sometimes I can’t help but want to wear it, too. Which side of me is right? — Pepper, New YorkKarl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer whose talent for dramatic pronouncements was equaled only by his talent for dreaming up extraordinary clothes, once declared sweatpants “a sign of defeat.”That pronouncement would suggest that the full sweatpants-and-sweatshirt look otherwise known as the sweatsuit, that shapeless pairing once synonymous with older gym…

Boeing’s share price fell sharply on Monday, in the first trading session after part of the fuselage of one of its 737 Max 9 jets blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday night.Boeing’s stock slipped nearly 7 percent and Spirit AeroSystems, which made the door plug that was torn from the plane, fell about 8 percent, recovering from a far steeper decline in early trading.The Alaska Airlines flight departing from Portland, Ore., lost the mid-cabin door plug midair, exposing passengers to howling winds and forcing an emergency landing. None of the 171 passengers and six crew members aboard…