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    After Lego Theft, LAPD Finds More Than 2,800 Boxes

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    Just to confirm, the theft ring’s focus is, indeed, Lego.It may not be the kind of hard-boiled Los Angeles crime that attracts the likes of Sam Spade or Jake Gittes, but the police say they have arrested the perpetrators in a series of thefts.Of Lego.To be clear, Lego is not a new slang term for cars, diamonds or heroin. The thefts were of literal Lego.A Target store in San Pedro, Calif., reported some of the thefts, and the police observed Blanca Gudino, 39, of Lawndale, stealing Lego sets at branches of the retailer in Torrance and Lakewood, they said. They followed her to the home of Richard Siegel, 71, in Long Beach, where she delivered the items, they said.Upon searching the home on Wednesday, the police said they found 2,800 boxes of Lego, with individual values ranging from $20 to “well over” $1,000. They included Star Wars, Harry Potter and Marvel sets, KTLA reported.The items were being sold to buyers found through online ads, the police said. While the police were on the scene, some prospective buyers showed up at the home.Ms. Gudino was charged with organized retail theft, a felony, and held on a $20,000 bail. Mr. Siegel was charged with grand theft, also a felony, and was released on his own recognizance.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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      Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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      Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe 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 Power of Cute: Sweet, Cuddly and Taking Over the World

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      There is plenty of fun and truly adorable stuff in “Cute,” a new exhibition in London. But there are some creepy and unsettling things, too.Try this: Ask someone you know to define “cute.” They are not allowed to simply give an example of a cute thing, so no babies or sweet little rabbits singing a song about being brave; they must try and give a definition for the adjective itself. See how long it takes before words give way to gestures (hands making clutching motions, arms squeezing tightly around invisible teddy-bear-size objects) or inarticulate noises (cries of anguished delight, high-pitched vowel sounds). See how long it takes before they are scrunching up their faces in what looks a lot like pain.It’s not just that the term is difficult to define, it’s that there is often a confounding gap between the smallness, or seeming irrelevance, of the cute object, and the strength and range of the feelings it invokes. Words alone don’t seem to cover it.Cuteness — its properties, its uses and its increasingly dominant position in culture — is the subject of a dazzling new exhibition in London called simply “Cute,” running at Somerset House through April 14. Not exactly a history of an aesthetic and not exactly, or not only, a collection of particularly cute commodities, the show explores the unsettling power of apparently powerless things, looking at the fantasies that cuteness enables and creates, and making us think about how and why it has come to saturate our world.“Go On and Hit a Lick of Benevolence” by Sean-Kierre Lyons. The exhibition features several works of contemporary art.David Parry/Press Association for Somerset HouseWhy does everything have to be so cute now? What does it mean that we have so enthusiastically allowed ourselves to be manipulated by an aesthetic that prioritizes the infantile, the teeny-weeny, the doe-eyed? Why, when I saw a can of Hello Kitty-branded motor oil in one of the show’s first rooms, did I desperately want to pick it up and give it a big hug while shouting, “Awwwwwww?” Why am I trying to buy one on eBay right now? I don’t even have a car.If these questions give off a strong smell of the seminar room, do not be cast down: There is plenty of fun, and truly adorable stuff, to be consumed. Just ask the group of girls who were giddily twirling around taking selfies in the Hello Kitty disco room on the morning that I visited. (The show, in fact, is sponsored by Sanrio, the Japanese company that created Hello Kitty, and is timed to coincide with her 50th birthday this year. She’s 50 years old! According to a sign at the show, she was born in London on Nov. 1, dreams of becoming a poet and is the height of five apples! She doesn’t have a mouth!)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?  More

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      For ‘Barbie’ Fans Online, a Bitterly Ironic Oscar Snub

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      Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed Academy Award nominations for director and actress, respectively — a fact that was a little too on the nose for some.When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced this morning, the snubs of the two most prominent women involved in “Barbie” — the director, Greta Gerwig, and the lead actress, Margot Robbie — became the breakout story.The top-grossing film of 2023, passing the $1 billion mark worldwide, is based on the imagined life and times of the iconic Mattel doll. A cultural phenomenon on its own terms, “Barbie,” along with “Oppenheimer,” became half of an unusually thoughtful summer blockbuster duo released on the same day in July (“Barbenheimer”): nothing to sneeze at.As it turns out, the internet has strong opinions about today’s announcement.“Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated ‘Barbie’ for Best Picture (eight nominations total) — a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures — but not the woman who directed the film. Okay then,” read a viral X post by the writer Charlotte Clymer.The film wasn’t completely shut out — it was nominated for best picture, while Ms. Gerwig picked up a nomination with Noah Baumbach for adapted screenplay, Ryan Gosling for supporting actor, and America Ferrera for supporting actress. But the fact that Mr. Gosling was tabbed for his towheaded Ken, who discovers the idea of patriarchy and then attempts to dominate Barbieland, before Ms. Robbie’s character destroys gender-based oppression, was too much for some to take.“We’re actually doing patriarchy very well,” the writer Jodi Lipper wrote in an Instagram story, quoting a Ken line from the film.(In a statement released today, Mr. Gosling wrote, “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”)Indeed, because “Barbie” functions as a commentary on sexism and a metacommentary on its own place in feminist discourse, the movie itself was the first place some of its fans reached to express their outrage over the snubs.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?  More