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      Palestinian American Family Grieves Loss of Over 100 Relatives Killed in Gaza

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      The call came in around 4 p.m., while Adam Abo Sheriah was still at work in his pharmacy in New Jersey. The voice on the other end was sobbing.It took a few minutes for Adam to understand: His uncle’s home in Gaza City had been hit by Israeli airstrikes. His parents and his brother’s wife and children were inside, taking shelter after their own homes were bombed. Also struck nearby was a block of multifamily buildings in a neighborhood of Gaza City, home to many relatives and their families, who were hunkered down together.It was the day before Thanksgiving, and Adam’s pharmacy in Paterson was packed with customers, some of them picking up turkeys he was giving away. But Adam couldn’t stay. After the call, he walked out in a daze. His mind swirling with questions, he got in his car and started driving nowhere in particular.While on the road, he picked up his phone and started calling his family in Gaza. His father didn’t answer. Neither did his mother. He tried his brothers. Nothing. He tried every relative and friend in Gaza.Taking his youngest daughter Taly to school gives Adam a few moments of normalcy.Over the next eight hours, his frantic calls continued, but few details emerged. Soon it was midnight in New Jersey. The sun was just rising in Gaza. Reports were finally starting to come in. His family’s Gaza home was flattened, the whole block was gone. Voices beneath the rubble cried for help, he was told. But there was no way to dig them out. Eventually, the voices fell silent. Adam’s youngest brother, Ahmed, 37, the ambitious, energetic civil engineer, the children’s favorite who brought toys and fireworks, was found dead in the street.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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      How Billy Joel Returned to Pop Music

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      Billy Joel’s first new pop song in nearly two decades was sparked by someone miles from the record business: a Long Island doctor.Joel, 74, has long made it known that he isn’t interested in making more albums. He released 12 studio LPs between 1971 and 1993 — most platinum several times over — and retired from the format, though he never stopped tinkering with classical music, or playing live.But new songs? “I have this fear of writing something that’s not good,” he said in an interview last month at his estate in Oyster Bay, N.Y. “I have a very high bar for myself. And the work to get there is intimidating. I don’t want to go through it anymore.”Joel’s influence as a songwriter has endured, drawing in new generations. (“He is everything,” Olivia Rodrigo, 20, who referenced him in her song “Deja Vu,” said last summer.) Over the years, the list of people who’d tried to cajole him back into writing and recording grew legion: Clive Davis. Rick Rubin. Elton John. Yet when Joel’s family doctor urged him to meet “a kid” interested in discussing music near his place out east in Sag Harbor, he agreed to a lunch.The eager man across the table two years ago was Freddy Wexler, now 37, a Los Angeles-based songwriter and producer who grew up in New York and sure knew a lot about Billy Joel. He’d been trying to track down his idol via industry channels with little luck, but his wife — secretly devoted to keeping this dream alive — found an improbable connection.Joel ordered clams on the half-shell and a BLT to go, Wexler recalled, so he knew he had to move fast: “I said, I don’t believe that you can’t write songs anymore or that you won’t write songs anymore. And he said something like, ‘OK, believe whatever you want.’”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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      These Keyboard Musicians Are Thinking Beyond the Piano

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      Phyllis Chen began studying the piano at age 5, learning from a strict, traditional teacher who taught her the standard repertoire. She was a passionate musician, but sometimes wondered how much of her playing was artistic, rather than purely athletic.“I never found it to be entirely fulfilling,” Chen said in a video interview. “I always thought there was something missing.”Chen, 45, was pursuing graduate studies at Indiana University when she first encountered the toy piano, an instrument with a brittle, xylophone-like sound usually around 20 inches long, with a range of three octaves. Her teacher, the virtuoso pianist André Watts, was a Liszt specialist but encouraged her to pursue her own interests.Once, Watts tried Chen’s toy piano; the keys were so small and his hands so big that he struggled to play a single note at a time. But for her, playing the unusual instrument was liberating. “I was very excited to be able to explore without all of the traditional boundaries being tied to it,” she said. “No one was going to tell me: ‘This is the canon of works. This is how it needs to be played.’”She is among the growing number of keyboardists expanding their practice beyond the modern piano — that instrument so central to classical music, with its large and historically important repertoire, orchestral heft and essential role in teaching. But for these pianists, learning to play other keyboards has been invigorating. On these less prominent instruments, they have explored unfamiliar timbral terrain, re-examined their approaches to canonical works and created new repertoire. They return to the modern piano with greater aural and tactile sensitivity, feeling a renewed sense of freedom and purpose at the instrument.Chen was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001. A few years later, she was extremely busy, traveling between New York and Chicago to perform and attending university in Bloomington, Ind., when she got tendinitis in both arms.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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      The Sunday Read: ‘The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyOf all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      The Question Trap

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      On This Week’s Episode:What we ask to find out what we really want to know.Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock, via Getty Images PlusThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling and provides news, depth and serendipity. It is available to Times news subscribers on iOS. If you haven’t already, download the app and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Our new audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time. More

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      Sandy Liang’s NYC Lunar New Year Party: Pink Bows, Red Gowns

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      On Wednesday night, more than 400 people flowed in and out of Sandy Liang’s Lunar New Year party held at Boom, the venue at the top of the Standard High Line Hotel.Some guests wore bright red, to symbolize good luck, but many were in looks adorned with bows and ballet flats, emblems associated with Ms. Liang’s playfully nostalgic namesake fashion brand.The evening was an early celebration of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Feb. 10; Ms. Liang grew up observing the holiday with her family in Queens. This is her second year hosting the event with the chef Danny Bowien, and she hopes her friends will embrace the holiday.“Maybe they’ll start their own traditions,” she said.Guests at Sandy Liang’s Lunar New Year party accessorized with red details and little bows.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDraped over Ms. Liang’s shoulder was a piece she was “test-driving” for her upcoming collection: a large baby-pink bow that served as a handle for a bag.“It just looks like a big bow, and then you pick it up and it’s actually a bag,” she said, while wearing an orchid hair bow and earrings from her new Lunar New Year collection.As Sandy Liang’s popular black and red Palermo bows floated around the room, guests crowded each corner of the dimly lit space, which was decorated with paper lanterns and flowers on each table.References to the Year of the Dragon abounded. Near the dance floor, there was a large floral arrangement shaped like a dragon egg. And guests were handed temporary tattoos that Ms. Liang said were inspired by a tattoo Angelina Jolie once had: These featured Ms. Liang’s name hovering above a dragon, instead of “Billy Bob,” the name of Ms. Jolie’s ex-husband.Ella EmhoffJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDanny BowienJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAliyah BahJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesYoung EmperorsJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDelia CaiJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAntoni BumbaJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesParker RadcliffeJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIvan LamJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAshleyJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIzzi AllainJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIsze CohenJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesPierce AbernathyJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAlia Ssemakula, left, and Faith KimJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesElla Emhoff, a model and artist (and the stepdaughter of Vice President Kamala Harris), slinked through groups elbow to elbow by the bar. Mr. Bowien, unintentionally matching Ms. Liang’s coat, lounged next to one of two fireplaces.Nearby, the fashion duo Young Emperors danced to classic hits by Kelis, Peaches and the Black Eyed Peas and modern singles by PinkPantheress and Aliyah’s Interlude, whose given name is Aliyah Bah. Ms. Bah was in attendance, mingling with the crowd wearing her signature “Aliyahcore” earmuffs and Y2K-era clothing.“I think my favorite thing about Sandy Liang, the person and the brand, is how unapologetically girly they are,” Ms. Bah said, while showing off her pink Hello Kitty bow and Lisa Frank-inspired nails.A dragon-egg-shaped floral arrangement for the Year of the Dragon.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesGirls often become alienated from girlhood, Ms. Bah said, but the Sandy Liang brand supports her in embracing it. “At the end of the day,” she added, “I’m literally just a girl.” More