Author: NY TIMES

What happened to fun? In the clinical white of the gallery, art can be forbidding, aggrieved, elite, academic. Shouldn’t it also, sometimes, be joyous?The collaborators behind Luna Luna thought so. This was the amusement park staged in Hamburg, Germany, in 1987, where nearly 30 professional artists including Basquiat, Hockney and Dalí designed the rides. About 250,000 people attended that summer — families, children, students, hipsters seeking reprieve. But shoestring funding and a thwarted tour let the production sit, disassembled and forgotten in storage, for 35 years.Now, at a staggering cost nearing nine figures, about half the attractions have been restored,…

And on X, Elon Musk argued that the basis of D.E.I. was “literally the definition of racism.”Others are pushing back. The billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban challenged Musk in a series of posts on X, defending the three principles of D.E.I. as good for business:On diversity, “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed.”On equity, “Put your employees in a position to succeed. Recognize their differences and play to their strengths where ever possible.”And on inclusion, “Great companies create environments that reduce unnecessary stress of their employees.”Meanwhile,…

The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time,…

Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy Hamas leader who the group said was assassinated in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, was accused of masterminding attacks on Israel and had helped usher in a closer relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon.The chief of Hamas’s West Bank operations, Mr. al-Arouri was killed in an explosion that also killed two leaders of its armed wing, Hamas said, blaming a “Zionist raid.”In recent years, Mr. al-Arouri spent much of his time in Beirut, where he served as a sort of Hamas ambassador to Hezbollah, according to regional security officials. He was…

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last year for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a Moscow court launched a surprise counterattack: It ordered the arrest of a 70-year-old retired judge in Lithuania.The judge, Kornelija Maceviciene, was not connected in any way to the case against Mr. Putin in The Hague or to investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.Her “crime,” as the Moscow court sees it, was handing down “unjust” guilty verdicts against former Soviet officers, nearly all Russians, for their role in a brutal crackdown against pro-independence protesters who had gathered at a television tower…

Fi Cotter Craig, a television producer in Britain, was scrolling through Instagram one day when she was struck by a photo. “I saw my friend wearing a jacket that I actually thought I would kill her for,” Ms. Cotter Craig said. “Rather than kill her, I rang her up and said, ‘Where did you get that jacket?’”Chloe Shattock, who lives in Amsterdam and works in marketing for Nike, envied her husband’s new blue chore coat and poached it for herself. “The color was so iconic and beautiful,” Ms. Shattock said. “Every time you wear it, it gets a little softer…

The national railways are also involved. In September, the German transport minister, Volker Wissing, vowed to free up 40 billion euros, about $43.6 billion, to revitalize the country’s rail network. “The rail infrastructure has been neglected for decades and brought to its absolute limits,” Dr. Wissing said in a statement. “This is no longer acceptable and unworthy of a progressive economic nation. We need the railroads as a climate-friendly mode of transport.”In Spain, the government has opened up its high-speed rail network to private competition with great success. And the national rail operator, Renfe, recently started direct services between Madrid…

When Menuhin was navigating young love, Cather was a font of advice — “I always have your future very much at heart,” she told him in one letter — and gushed over his marriage to Nola Nicholas. “No artist ever made such a fortunate marriage,” Cather wrote to her friend Zoë Akins. “Yehudi loves goodness more than anything, (I mean beautiful goodness) and she has it.”When Cather was homebound for four weeks with bronchitis, Yehudi and Nola Menuhin visited her nearly every day; he tended to the fire, and she made tea. He was even more of a solace as…

The killing of Saleh al-Arouri deprives Hamas of one of its most skilled tacticians, who helped route money and weapons to its operatives in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East and integrated the group more tightly into Iran’s network of forces committed to fighting Israel, according to analysts.But it was far from clear that his death would be a debilitating blow to the organization, which has rebuilt again and again after assassinations of its leaders, and remained agile enough to plot the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks despite years of Israeli military and intelligence efforts to weaken it.Still, Mr. al-Arouri’s…

Iran was holding a national day of mourning on Thursday to honor victims of the twin explosions that killed 84 people a day earlier during a memorial ceremony for Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who was killed four years ago in an American drone attack.General Suleimani, the powerful military leader regarded as a malign force in the West, is revered among many Iranians, especially those who support the government.Iranian officials had put the death toll for the two blasts, which occurred at the cemetery where General Suleimani is buried in the southern city of Kerman, at 103 on Wednesday. But the…