One overcast Sunday morning, Benjamin Talley Smith, an apple-cheeked 45-year-old with a thing for a Canadian tuxedo, was at the Rose Bowl flea market in Los Angeles shopping for jeans. He was wearing jeans — a beat-up pair of Levi’s and an equally worn Levi’s jeans jacket — and rooting through piles of jeans. He…
As artificial intelligence programs shake up the office, potentially making millions of jobs obsolete, one group of perpetually stressed workers seems especially vulnerable. These employees analyze new markets and discern trends, both tasks a computer could do more efficiently. They spend much of their time communicating with colleagues, a laborious activity that is being automated…
More fun, less drudgery. That’s my goal for the summer — and specifically for my summer cooking. In my dreams, I’m whisking together a vinaigrette in a seaside cottage with a big breezy kitchen and a farm stand down the road (think Diane Keaton’s place in “Something’s Gotta Give”). While that’s not the reality for…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Sunday that it has raised $6 billion, helping to close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other rivals in the red-hot industry. The funds would be used “to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,”…
These days “cottagecore,” the term for a popular aesthetic in recent years, may bring to mind several things. The early pandemic, say, when cottagecore started to spread rapidly on social media. Or the flouncy dresses, floral motifs, delicate décor and countryside settings that largely defined the aesthetic. Less often has the fairy-tale look been associated…
Two new surveys suggest a troubling trend: Young adults seem to be slacking on sun safety. In an online survey of more than 1,000 people published this month by the American Academy of Dermatology, 28 percent of 18- to 26-year-olds said they didn’t believe suntans caused skin cancer. And 37 percent said they wore sunscreen…
Do you believe neons are to be avoided? I love bright colors, but I’m worried about trending into “wacky” territory as I get older. How do you know when enough is too much? — Susie, San Francisco Neon, those blindingly bright colors otherwise associated with traffic cones, sports stars and Las Vegas lights, has been…
On the stunning Kenyan coast, about halfway between 15th-century ruins and the vibrant city of Mombasa, a small factory is helping to achieve one of Africa’s biggest health care goals: self-reliance. With fewer than 700 employees, Revital Healthcare makes 300 million syringes a year, enough to meet more than half of Africa’s routine immunization needs….
Fiction | Nonfiction We’re almost halfway through 2024 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following. We suspect that some (though certainly not all) will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year,…
When Betsy and Gabriel Martinez planned their wedding for April 23, 2023, at the Cordelle, an event space in Nashville, they envisioned an enchanted outdoor garden — with plenty of daylight. “We really wanted to be able to enjoy being outdoors in the spring,” said Ms. Martinez, 31, a nonprofit community outreach manager. “And then…
