On a recent sultry Monday, Mark Schneider pulled up to a stable in Williamsburg, Va., ready to get back to the grind, 18th-century style. He was already wearing his leather breeches and ruffly linen shirt. After preparing his horse, he went back to the car for his waistcoat, swords, wig and plumed hat, before hoisting […]
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On a Friday morning in late July, the New York Giants were deep into training camp for the upcoming season, with dozens of athletes hoping to secure one of 53 spots on the team. Across the street, at MetLife Stadium, Sean Stellato swaggered through the largely empty corridors, totally at ease. Mr. Stellato, a sports […]
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Sunisa Lee, the all-around gold medalist in women’s gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics, woke up one morning last year and was startled by her reflection in the mirror. Her face looked as if it had been inflated with an air pump. Her leg joints were so swollen that she could hardly bend her knees or […]
Read MoreA king room at the Super 8 motel in Kingston, N.Y., is a forlorn place. Mismatched night stands. An armchair with visible stains. Soggy grass outside the window. “Resting for the journey ahead,” the do-not-disturb sign says. It shows a lone car on a two-lane road, sandy hills beneath fluffy white clouds in the distance. […]
Read MoreOver the course of his long career, President Biden has overcome personal tragedy and political odds, and he has used his resilience to power his ambition. But now that he is in the fight of his political life, his irrepressible pursuit of the comeback risks looking like blind defiance in the face of a rising […]
Read MoreWhen Representative Emilia Sykes arrived at the regional airport in Akron on a recent Thursday morning to meet with dozens of local elected officials, she was the only Black person in the room. It wouldn’t be long before two others took seats in the audience, but it soon became clear that they were both related […]
Read MoreA few years ago, the English artist Jesse Darling was standing in the vegetable aisle of a grocery store when he had a kind of epiphany. Staring at plastic-wrapped produce, he suddenly felt an acute awareness of the path the items had taken to get there: from cultivation to processing, to packaging and shipment, and […]
Read MoreAfter 14 years in the shadows, Britain’s Labour Party has returned to governing. And the country’s first female chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is faced with the tough job of restoring Britain’s economic growth prospects and ending a decade and a half of stagnation. For inspiration, she has turned to another glass-ceiling-shattering woman, on […]
Read MoreBy early this year, around the time a prosecutor called President Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Vice President Kamala Harris already knew something had to change. It was up to her, she had told allies, to finally distinguish herself in her job — something she had been struggling to do for […]
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Don’t call her a scream queen. Mia Goth may have amassed a filmography dominated by horror films like “A Cure for Wellness,” “Suspiria” and “Infinity Pool,” but she prefers not to limit herself. “I don’t want to be boxed in,” the 30-year-old actress from London said in a video interview. “I want to do everything.” […]
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When the gymnastics superstar Simone Biles tumbles and dances her way through her third Olympics this month, the choreography she performs in her floor routine will be seen on hundreds of millions of screens around the world. Grégory Milan, the man who created it, still shakes his head at its reach. “I can’t quite fathom […]
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Sarah Sze’s studio is an encyclopedic celebration of the human experience. Nineteenth century chronophotography of galloping horses, pre-Columbian cave paintings, and a reproduction of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) line the white walls of her split-level New York studio, a former carriage house used by the city’s Gilded Age barons. For Sze, whose cerebral environmental works […]
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Andrew Torrey has turned the front door of his New York apartment into a teleportation device, whisking visitors off to another place and time whenever they drop by. That, at least, was his intention. Mr. Torrey, an interior designer, was raised on a farm in rural Kansas, six miles from the closest neighbors. It’s a […]
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Keir Starmer, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, nodded sympathetically as a young mother recalled, in harrowing terms, how she had watched closed-circuit television footage of the fatal stabbing of her 21-year-old son, whose heart was pierced with a single blow. “Thank you for that,” a somber Mr. Starmer said to the woman and other […]
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David Metcalf’s last act in life was an attempt to send a message — that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself. He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he […]
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“I guess I’ll just need to win Wimbledon to shut everyone up.” — Andy Murray to The Daily Telegraph in June 2004 Mission accomplished, although it took nearly a decade for Murray to manage it. He had to scrap and scream through all sorts of tennis trouble before finally putting a halt to all the […]
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Last fall, senior partners at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, a New York law firm known for championing liberal causes, made a fateful decision: They were going to sideline their hard-charging and crusading founder, Roberta A. Kaplan. The reign of one of the country’s most prominent lawyers was coming to an end. Ms. Kaplan was already […]
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On the night of June 29, 1974, after a performance with a touring Bolshoi Ballet troupe in downtown Toronto, Mikhail Baryshnikov made his way out a stage door, past a throng of fans and began to run. Baryshnikov, then 26 and already one of ballet’s brightest stars, had made the momentous decision to defect from […]
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Just inside the door to the studio of the Brazilian artists Osgemeos is a self-portrait. Spray painted onto the concrete wall of the old metal workshop’s entryway, the image shows the identical twins Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo, 50, standing next to each other, hands at their sides and looking forward. They’re wearing colorful printed clothing, […]
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“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.” This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend. […]
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At least 11 Americans were among those who died while making the Islamic pilgrimage of hajj to Saudi Arabia this month in searing temperatures, the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday, adding that it was possible that more deaths could be confirmed in the coming days. In Maryland, the daughter of one couple was still […]
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On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after […]
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Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.” It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to […]
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When Ivy Karlsgodt set out to make her first vintage-inspired lampshade, she took her time: She sketched out a design, gathered her materials and spent hours carefully cutting and stitching pieces of chiffon, silk and velvet onto a metal frame in the shape of a drooping tulip. The end result had gold and red fabrics […]
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The dissident’s lone regret after his 200-mile escape across the Yellow Sea was not taking night vision goggles. Nearing the end of his jet ski journey out of China last summer, Kwon Pyong peered through the darkness off the South Korean coast. As he approached the shore, sea gulls appeared to bob as if floating. […]
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Don’t mellow my harsh, dude. I was coming to talk to Sean Penn, the notorious Hollywood hothead who helped launch the word “dude” into the American bloodstream when he played stoner surfer Jeff Spicoli in the 1982 classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” I was nervous because the Times photographer was already inside the Spanish-style […]
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The wallpapered-room is filled with antiques and a menagerie of blinged-out taxidermy. A 24-foot-long banquet table has been laid out, but the dinner guests seem to have disappeared, leaving their coats behind. On the table: nucleated eyeballs nestling in golden spoons, miniature torsos propped up on cake stands, and baby Kewpie dolls trapped in red […]
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It is an iconic image — a black-and-white photo of a blood-splattered student being clubbed by a paratrooper medic. It was the first photo to slip through the military cordon around Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980, exposing the brutal suppression of what would be known as the Gwangju Democratization Movement. But for years, the identity […]
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After hosting talk shows for nearly three decades, Conan O’Brien has come to believe that longevity is overrated. The first time he made this point to me was in April at a restaurant in New York, when he proposed that all statues and monuments should be made with durable soap that dissolves in seven years. […]
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For years, the singer Linda Thompson faced a problem that, for someone in her line of work, seemed insurmountable. Slowly over time, and then suddenly all at once, she lost the ability to hold a note surely enough to sustain even the simplest tune. “I first noticed something wrong back in 1972 when I got […]
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Lita Albuquerque made a strange sort of painting in 1978 that changed her course as an artist. An abstract painter at the time, she had felt the urge to get out of her studio and work directly on the land where she lived, an artist’s colony on the bluffs of Malibu. She dug a narrow, […]
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