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    ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Review: Singing, Slinging and Slashing

    Beyond the somewhat silly premise of this Netflix animated film is a charming, funny and artfully punchy original universe.Lest you roll your eyes and think of it as a four-quadrant-friendlier version of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” “KPop Demon Hunters” immediately establishes its premise, getting any prospective scoffing out of the way.For generations, a voice-over intro explains, girl groups have used their popular songs to secretly trap hordes of demons underground and keep the world safe. The latest group on their trail? Huntrix, a K-pop girl band that, in its fight against the sinister Gwi-ma (Lee Byung-hun) and his demons, is close to completing the Golden Honmoon, a protective barrier that will permanently keep evil forces at bay. But the girl group soon faces its toughest challenge yet: a demon boy band.With that somewhat silly logline behind us, what we’ll find in this Netflix animated film, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, is an original universe that is charming, funny and artfully punchy.It’s a Sony Pictures Animation film that shares a kind of lineage with the studio’s recent hit “Spider-Verse” franchise that is most apparent in the similar visual style. But otherwise what it borrows mostly is a more holistic and technical sense of the cinematic, a philosophy of approach that is rare in big-budget animation films. The action sequences are fluid and immersive, the art is frequently striking and the music (catchy, if formulaic earworms) is a properly wielded and dynamic storytelling tool.And as for the cheesy girl group vs. boy band story, Kang and Appelhans have a sly sense of humor about it all, too; the movie is funniest when it pokes at pop culture that is highly manufactured, from K-pop to K-dramas to mass-produced singing competitions — the very things the film itself would never stoop to.Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Vera Rubin Observatory Brings Universe’s Darkest Mysteries Into Focus

    To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain’s base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes.The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it.From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate.They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, “faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,” said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars.The Rubin Observatory; a camera integration area; the view through the Rubin Auxilary Telescope of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.But the most valuable discoveries, astronomers say, lie beyond the reaches of their imagination.“The universe always throws us surprises,” said Michael Strauss, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. With Rubin, he said, “we don’t yet know what those surprises will be.”Rubin’s 3.2 Gigapixel CameraAt the heart of the Rubin observatory is the largest digital camera in the world, a supercooled grid with hundreds of high-resolution sensors. See how the camera works. More

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    French Lawmaker Says He Was Denied Entry Into the United States

    Pouria Amirshahi, a leftist member of Parliament, hopes that the decision will be reversed so that he can travel to meet lawmakers to understand life under President Trump. A French member of Parliament has urged American authorities to reverse a decision to deny him entry to the United States, after he said they rejected his request for a visa to meet with progressive lawmakers and intellectuals about life under the Trump presidency. Pouria Amirshahi, a member of the Green party, said he had planned to travel to Washington D.C., New York and Boston this month. The trip was supposed to be the first taken by a member of La Digue, or The Dike, a group that he created a month ago with a handful of other leftist and centrist French lawmakers, to “counter the spread of neo-fascism” in liberal democracies. At a news conference at the French National Assembly on Thursday morning, Mr. Amirshahi said he had told U.S. authorities that the purpose of his trip was to ask lawmakers, activists, professors and journalists to understand “what the new situation was in the country since Mr. Trump came to power.” He was set to meet with progressive lawmakers, he said, including Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Representative Maxine Dexter, Democrat of Oregon. But, he said, on Tuesday, he was told that his visa application had been rejected. “The door was shut in a rather abrupt and unexpected manner,” Mr. Amirshahi said in a telephone interview. “This is a decision that we consider to be both hostile and unfriendly.”A member of his team said later on Thursday that the embassy was “reconsidering the reasons for the refusal.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At Chile’s Vera Rubin Observatory, Earth’s Largest Camera Surveys the Sky

    <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>When Times reporters visited the observatory on top of an 8,800-foot-high mountain in May, the telescope was undergoing calibration to measure minute differences in the sensitivity of the camera’s pixels. The camera is expected to have a life of more than 10 years.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>A single Rubin image contains roughly […] More

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    Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea’ Merges Opera’s Past and Present

    A Monteverdi masterpiece and a new work by George Lewis are played simultaneously in an American Modern Opera Company production at Lincoln Center.When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Fed’s Interest-Rate Approach Keeps It on Collision Course With Trump

    The central bank signals little urgency to cut interest rates despite demands from President Trump for lower borrowing costs.Just hours before the Federal Reserve was set to announce its latest decision on interest rates on Wednesday, President Trump unleashed a barrage of attacks on its chair, Jerome H. Powell.“I call him every name in the book trying to get him to do something,” Mr. Trump said at an event at the White House, where he bashed Mr. Powell for not slashing interest rates.“I’m nasty, I’m nice — nothing works,” he lamented as he called Mr. Powell a series of names, including “stupid” and “Mr. Too Late.”The central bank’s resolve in the face of what has been an unrelenting pressure campaign from the president was on full display on Wednesday. Policymakers held interest rates steady for a fourth straight meeting, and nearly half of them signaled in new projections less scope to cut interest rates this year in anticipation of resurgent inflation. The Fed’s benchmark interest rate is currently in a range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent.Mr. Powell was also unwavering in his message that the Fed could afford to take its time on interest rate cuts and would stick to a “wait-and-see” approach until officials had more clarity about how Mr. Trump’s policies were affecting the economy.That could take months, keeping the White House and the Fed on a collision course that economists say stems directly from Mr. Trump’s policies, including his global trade war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In Appalachia, a Father Got Black Lung. Then His Son Did, Too.

    Denver Brock and his son Aundra used to spend early mornings hunting rabbits in the wooded highlands of Harlan County, Ky. But they don’t get out there much these days. They both get too breathless trying to follow the baying hounds.Instead, they tend a large garden alongside Denver Brock’s home. Even that can prove difficult, requiring them to work slowly and take frequent breaks.“You get so dizzy,” Denver Brock said, “you can’t hardly stand up.”The Brocks followed a long family tradition when they became Appalachian coal miners. For it, they both now have coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, a debilitating disease characterized by masses and scarred tissue in the chest, and better known by its colloquial name: black lung.Mr. Brock, 73, wasn’t all that surprised when he was diagnosed in his mid-60s. In coal mining communities, black lung has long been considered an “old man’s disease,” one to be almost expected after enough years underground.But his son was diagnosed much younger, at just 41. Like his father, he has progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of the disease. And today, at 48, he’s even sicker.When he followed his father into mining, he thought he was entering a safer industry than the one prior generations had worked in. By the 1990s, safety standards and miner protections had nearly consigned the disease to history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    New Digital Comics Store Takes Aim at Amazon

    Two veterans of Comixology, a site that the e-commerce colossus bought in 2014, are now starting a rival to compete with it.For decades, comic book fans have had only one option for getting digital editions of Spider-Man, Batman, the Transformers or many other colorful characters on the same day they hit comic book shops.That platform, Comixology, was acquired by Amazon in 2014 and eventually absorbed into its Kindle service. The takeover left some fans grumbling that comics shouldn’t get the same treatment as eBooks.Now, two industry veterans, David Steinberger and Chip Mosher, are betting they can beat Amazon at e-commerce by catering more intentionally to die-hard comic book fans. Next month, they plan to launch Neon Ichiban, a site they intend to be “a dedicated experience for comics,” Mr. Steinberger said, after raising more than $7 million from investors in the game and movie industries.“Understanding how comic book fans and people who should be fans want to shop and think about and browse doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “The Comixology app, where you can have all your comics in one place, does not exist anymore. It’s all just part of Kindle.”It is a head-turning statement from Mr. Steinberger, who also founded Comixology — and approved its sale to Amazon. Mr. Mosher was the head of content at Comixology.“At the time, it seemed like the right decision,” Mr. Steinberger said. “Our mission was to make everyone on the planet a comic fan, and Amazon clearly had the resources and the population connected to Kindle that we thought would carry that mission.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More