Tag: internal-storyline-no

Wanted in South Korea: Imperialism-Free Cherry Blossoms

Shin Joon Hwan, an ecologist, walked along a road lined with cherry trees on the verge of blooming last week, examining the fine hairs around their dark red buds. The flowers in Gyeongju, South Korea, an ancient capital, belong to a common Japanese variety called the Yoshino, or Tokyo cherry. Mr. Shin’s advocacy group wants […]

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Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss Plan to Revive Life Magazine

Kushner and Kloss take over Life magazine Life, the iconic photography-focused chronicler of the 20th century, has taken on many forms, including a weekly magazine, a website and the occasional special issue. Now, it is set to resume regular print publication, thanks to a deal between Barry Diller’s IAC and Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist […]

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Why Biden, Macron and More Leaders Have Low Approval Ratings

By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term. Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my […]

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America’s Affordable Housing Crisis

President Biden worries about high housing costs. So do Republicans in Congress. The consensus reflects a major problem: Tens of millions of families, across red and blue states, struggle with rent and home prices. The reason is a longstanding housing shortage. But action in Washington won’t make a huge difference. America’s affordable housing crisis is […]

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Why BlackRock’s Larry Fink Wants to Rethink Retirement

BlackRock’s chief wants to rethink a fiscal time bomb As the chairman and C.E.O. of the asset management giant BlackRock, Larry Fink commands attention from companies and governments, helping spearhead movements like socially driven business and the need for companies to fight climate change. In his latest letter to investors, published on Tuesday, Fink weighs […]

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Trump’s Financial Squeeze

Donald Trump has 10 days to come up with a $175 million bond in his New York civil fraud case. After that, he may be on the hook for the full penalty in the case: almost half a billion dollars. Could this situation affect his presidential campaign? Yes, it could. I will explain how in […]

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A New Game from The Times

I still hear from readers who learned about the Connections game from this newsletter and now play it every day. Today, I want to tell you about The Times’s newest game, called Strands. It’s another quick, entertaining way to exercise your brain. Strands is a word search with a few twists. Each day, the puzzle […]

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‘Cherry on the Cake’: How China Views the U.S. Crackdown on TikTok

Dan Wang has been a leading observer of contemporary China for years. As a tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, and through his well-read newsletter, Wang has charted the country’s rise as a fast-growing high-tech economy and, more recently, its slowdown and rising tensions with the United States. Wang is now a visiting […]

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Race and Politics

After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many political scientists and pundits came forth with a simple explanation. Trump had won, they said, because of white Americans’ racial resentment. These analysts looked at surveys and argued that the voters who had allowed Trump to win were distinguished not by social class, economic worries or […]

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The Hotel That Owed Over $300,000 in Water Bills

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about the city’s efforts to collect on what it says are delinquent water bills. We’ll also see why a judge decided not to punish Donald Trump’s onetime fixer for fake legal citations concocted by an artificial intelligence program. The Hotel Hayden promotes itself as “a buzz-worthy boutique […]

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The Activist Investor Dan Loeb Enters The Chip Wars

A different kind of battle for Third Point A small computer chip design company, R2 Semiconductor, has been notching wins in a potentially big patent fight against Intel over the past few months — a dispute that could force Intel to stop selling several chip lines in Europe. Behind R2’s legal war is one of […]

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The Realtors’ Big Defeat

Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades. Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. The typical commission in the U.S. has been almost 6 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in Germany, 2.5 percent in Australia and […]

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Selection Sunday

Happy Selection Sunday! Green beer and lucky leprechauns aside, today is one of America’s great (unofficial) holidays. It’s the day the 68-team brackets for the N.C.A.A. men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are revealed. Tonight’s unveiling of the matchups may bring back a feeling you haven’t had since digesting the prompt for that 10th grade U.S. […]

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The Big Dilemma Facing ByteDance’s US Investors

What’s next for ByteDance’s U.S. investors? As Beijing makes it increasingly clear that it opposes efforts by Congress to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular video app — government officials in China said American lawmakers were acting like a “bandit” — the tech giant’s U.S. backers are increasingly finding themselves in […]

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America Pulls Back from Ukraine

For two years, Ukraine has relied on American weapons to fight Russian invaders. It has bombarded Russian lines with U.S. artillery, destroyed tanks with Javelin missiles and stopped aerial attacks with Patriot launchers. But American support has sharply declined. House Republicans have blocked additional aid to Ukraine, and the Biden administration cannot send many more […]

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Convicting Politicians

In the last decade, it has proved surprisingly hard to put politicians accused of corruption behind bars. Appeals courts have reversed several convictions. And juries have occasionally thought the officeholders’ behavior didn’t meet the high standard for corruption. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who was arraigned yesterday in a federal bribery case, is both […]

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Could Donald Trump Save TikTok?

Trump’s TikTok U-turn TikTok users have continued to flood the social media platform — and lawmakers’ inboxes — with pleas to halt a bill that would force its Chinese owners to divest or face a ban in the U.S. That effort to keep TikTok online has now attracted some unlikely backers, including Donald Trump. A […]

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The Fourth Anniversary of the Covid Pandemic

Four years ago today, society began to shut down. Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump […]

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Cramming for the Oscars

I’m in competition with no one but myself in trying to view all the major-category nominees for the Oscars before the ceremony tomorrow night. I’m doing well this year, probably because the slate is fairly small: Most of the films with acting and screenplay nominations are also contenders for best picture. If I can get […]

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President Biden’s Economic Optimism

A year ago, few economists believed that President Biden could come before Congress and make the boast that he did last night: “I inherited an economy on the brink,” he said. “Now our economy is literally the envy of the world.” Back then, many experts expected a recession. They worried that America’s central bank, the […]

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