Ryan Adams Dangled Success. Women Say They Paid a Price.
For nearly two decades, Ryan Adams, one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of his generation, has been heralded as a mercurial creative genius and a respected industry tastemaker.
For nearly two decades, Ryan Adams, one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of his generation, has been heralded as a mercurial creative genius and a respected industry tastemaker.
Her real name was Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence agent who had studied Persian and carried out covert missions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But by mid-2013, Ms.
Opportunity bounced to a stop on the Martian surface in 2004 and roamed from crater to crater for 14 years. NASA declared the mission over on Wednesday.
EVERY summer for many years now, my family has kept to our ritual. All 20 of us — my siblings, my dad, our better halves, my nieces and nephews — find a beach house big enough to fit the whole unruly clan. We journey to it from our different states and time zones.
IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others.
Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit.
Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media.
Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities.
Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message.
Jet lag makes everyone miserable. But it makes some people mentally ill. There’s a psychiatric hospital not far from Heathrow Airport that is known for treating bipolar and schizophrenic travelers, some of whom are occasionally found wandering aimlessly through the terminals.
What makes a great leader? Knowledge, smarts and vision, to be sure. To that, Daniel Goleman, author of “Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence,” would add the ability to identify and monitor emotions — your own and others’ — and to manage relationships.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.
Amazon employees entering the company’s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country.
The sequence of words is meaningless: a random array strung together by an algorithm let loose in an English dictionary. What makes them valuable is that they’ve been generated exclusively for me, by a software tool called MetaMask. In the lingo of cryptography, they’re known as my seed phrase.
We’re saving your reading progress so you can pick up where you left off later. You can log in to save your progress or resume reading where you left off.
ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus. I was horrified.
WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk. His message was brief, if alarming.
A few weeks after she realized her husband was finally leaving her, Sarah Pursglove flew down to the Bahamas to figure out how much money he really had. Like many women married to very wealthy men, she didn’t know much about the family accounts.
Most mornings as I leave the Y after my swim and shower, I cross paths with a coterie of toddlers entering with their caregivers for a kid-oriented activity. I can’t resist saying hello, requesting a high-five, and wishing them a fun time.
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies.
Editors’ note: This article, originally published in November 2016, was updated May 16, 2017. There are more reasons than ever to understand how to protect your personal information.
When my relationship unraveled nearly two years ago, I decided to suspend my career as an actuary in Boston and take a long vacation in Costa Rica, where I planned to learn how to surf and do yoga. Yes, it was the most clichéd response possible for a heartbroken 32-year-old Westerner like me.
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions.
Editors’ note: We hope you’re not totally miserable at the office tomorrow, but if you are, here’s one article from the archives that may explain why. THE way we’re working isn’t working.
Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description.
THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. Editor Tim Herrera emails readers once a week with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Monday morning. We’re all a little lazy sometimes.
Emotional and physical abuse are clear-cut grounds for divorce, but they aren’t the most common causes of failing marriages, at least the ones I hear about. What’s the more typical villain? Change. Feeling oppressed by change or lack of change; it’s a tale as old as time.
Note: Amy Krouse Rosenthal died on March 13, 2017, 10 days after this essay was published. You can read her obituary here. In June, 2018, her husband published this response.
AMERICANS work some of the longest hours in the Western world, and many struggle to achieve a healthy balance between work and life. As a result, there is an understandable tendency to assume that the problem we face is one of quantity: We simply do not have enough free time.
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.
After I wrote last year that diet, not exercise, was the key to weight loss, I was troubled by how some readers took this to mean that exercise therefore had no value. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Have you ever been to Enfield? I had never even heard of it until I was 23 and living in London for graduate school.
Are you spending time with the right people for your health and happiness? While many of us focus primarily on diet and exercise to achieve better health, science suggests that our well-being also is influenced by the company we keep.
Whether you love them or hate them, parties are important. They are where people meet future business and romantic partners and friends, where small talk becomes the stuff of life.
There are many moments throughout my average day that, lacking print reading material in a previous era, were once occupied by thinking or observing my surroundings: walking or waiting somewhere, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or before mustering the energy to get up.
The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
A FEW years ago, in a supermarket, I swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I watched the little screen, waiting for its prompts. During the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements.
Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks about it.
Sometime this spring, during the first half of the final season of “Mad Men,” the popular pastime of watching the show — recapping episodes, tripping over spoilers, trading notes on the flawless production design, quibbling about historical details and debating big themes — segued into a par
In a world as unmannerly as this one, how is it best to speak? There’s no need to be rude, I say to the man in the packed hall at passport control. There are people everywhere, and his job is to send them into the right queues. I have been watching him shout at them.
The secretive ride-hailing giant Uber rarely discusses internal matters in public. But in March, facing crises on multiple fronts, top officials convened a call for reporters to insist that Uber was changing its culture and would no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks.”
Insomnia is like a thief in the night, robbing millions — especially those older than 60 — of much-needed restorative sleep. As the king laments in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 2”: O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee.
At the kickoff for his postelection victory lap in Cincinnati this month, Donald J. Trump bluntly told men, “Hate to tell you,” but women, “generally speaking, they’re better than you are.” As a feminist, I disagree.
One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp.
When it comes to marriage, what you don’t know really can hurt you.
Yet again, your brain is working against you, and it’s because of a phenomenon called the urgency effect.
The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.
In many ways, there has never been a better time to be alive. Violence plagues some corners of the world, and too many still live under the grip of tyrannical regimes.
SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.
Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet. The science of climate change was settled. The world was ready to act.
Joy points upward, according to Marie Kondo, whose name is now a verb and whose nickname is being trademarked and whose life has become a philosophy.
So here’s a mildly embarrassing personal truth I will admit: I’m 29 and I have no idea how money works. Budgets? Investing? Interest rates? I think the Fed does something important? Totally lost on me. I am aware that these things exist, but that is the extent of my financial acumen.
A friend of mine once had a curious experience with a job interview. Excited about the possible position, she arrived five minutes early and was immediately ushered into the interview by the receptionist. Following an amicable discussion with a panel of interviewers, she was offered the job.
ONE of the biggest complaints in modern society is being overscheduled, overcommitted and overextended. Ask people at a social gathering how they are and the stock answer is “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy.” Nobody is just “fine” anymore.
The film critics of The New York Times — Manohla Dargis, A. O. Scott and Stephen Holden — share their picks for the best movies of the year. It was the best of times, it was — well, you know.
Emma Seppala was working as an intern at The International Herald Tribune (the past iteration of The International New York Times) one summer in college in Paris, shuttling between the newsroom writers and editors on the second floor and the workers at printing presses in the basement. Ms.
The disintegration of Jake’s life took him by surprise. It happened early in his junior year of high school, while he was taking three Advanced Placement classes, running on his school’s cross-country team and traveling to Model United Nations conferences.
You dash into the supermarket for a few necessities. You figure it will be 10 minutes — tops — before you are done and on your way home. Then you get to the checkout lanes and they are brimming with shoppers. Your plan for a quick exit begins to evaporate.
At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate. In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men.
The flabby, unkempt Seth Rogen is no one’s dream date, especially when he’s playing the unemployed guy in “Knocked Up” who spends his days smoking pot and ogling naked celebrities. He has none of the obvious qualities that make a mate valuable: good looks, money, social status.
The Cisco Meraki office in Mission Bay, San Francisco, is 40 paces from the water, and just as nice as Google’s.
New Year’s Eve is a time to set goals: to eat better, to save more money, to work harder, to drink less. It’s Day 1 on the road to a “new you.” But this road, as we all know, is difficult to follow.
On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies.
A few months ago my boyfriend and I poured ourselves two beers and opened our laptops. It was time to review the terms of our relationship contract.
Given the choice between more time or more money, which would you pick? For a beach vacation, you might pay more for a direct flight to gain a couple of extra hours getting sand between your toes. On the other hand, you might take a better-paying job that requires late nights at the office.
Over lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me about two decisions she and her husband were considering. They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school.
There were few greater sins in my childhood home than going to bed dirty, though I could sometimes appease my mother by just washing my feet before slipping between the clean sheets. Now, as an adult, I cannot bear to get in bed with the grime of the day clinging to my skin. And I’m not alone.
Have you heard the story of the architect from Shiraz who designed the world’s most beautiful mosque? No one had ever conjured up such a design. It was breathtakingly daring yet well-proportioned, divinely sophisticated, yet radiating a distinctly human warmth.
Improve the way you make decisions to prevent future regrets. “We don’t always have control over outcomes, but we do have control over our process,” says Amy Summerville, a psychology professor at Miami University.
This is a story that involves lots of public intrigue, a futuristic wearable technology, a secret laboratory, fashion models, sky divers and an interoffice love triangle that ended a billionaire’s marriage. This is the story of Google Glass.
THERE’S an adage you hear most any time you mention con artists: You can’t cheat an honest man. It’s a comforting defense against vulnerability, but is it actually true? No, as it turns out; honesty has precious little to do with it.
FOR most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Do you have a clutter problem? If you have to move things around in order to accomplish a task in your home or at your office or you feel overwhelmed by all your “things,” it’s a strong signal that clutter has prevailed. And it might be stressing you out more than you realize.
“Be more confident,” a friend once told me as we made the rounds at a swanky networking event where I felt terribly out of place. Faking confidence is easy: I pulled my shoulders back and spoke louder and with more assertiveness.
I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped. Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage.
Tweets from a Twitter bot look just like those of a normal user, but a bot’s tweets are generated by a computer program, rather than a person. Below are three examples of common bot types you might encounter on Twitter and an approximation of the code controls them.
We are now approximately one-sixth of the way through the 21st century, and thousands of movies have already been released. Which means that it’s high time for the sorting – and the fighting – to start.
In a new book, “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked,” the social psychologist Adam Alter warns that many of us — youngsters, teenagers, adults — are addicted to modern digital products. Not figuratively, but literally addicted. Dr.
One night in early January, a little after 9 o’clock, a dozen Netflix employees gathered in the cavernous Palazzo ballroom of the Venetian in Las Vegas.
We have an intimate relationship with our phones. We sleep with them, eat with them and carry them in our pockets. We check them, on average, 47 times a day — 82 times if you’re between 18 and 24 years old, according to recent data.
Editors’ note: Here’s one of our favorite stories from the archives, now being featured in our Smarter Living collection. Managing your money should be pretty straightforward, but that doesn’t make the task all that easy.
WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.
I have the reputation of living what Marie Kondo might call a magically tidy life. My tights are rolled like sushi, my tabletops are bare and my kitchen is so clean I could perform surgery in it. I wasn’t always this way.
Millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own.
Modern Love is not an advice column, but the stories frequently offer lessons in how to navigate relationships.
The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of sounding grandiose — I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline.
Here’s a reading challenge: Pick up a book you’re pretty sure you won’t like — the style is wrong, the taste not your own, the author bio unappealing. You might even take it one step further.
FOR many Americans, life has become all competition all the time. Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion.
Running may be the single most effective exercise to increase life expectancy, according to a new review and analysis of past research about exercise and premature death.
On a Monday morning in November, students at Harvard Business School convened in their classroom to find Gwyneth Paltrow.
How to increase your chances of living longer, learn the secret to aging well or just look younger. Some advice from Well on what research can teach us about living longer, and better.
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin.
Open your Facebook feed. What do you see? A photo of a close friend’s child. An automatically generated slide show commemorating six years of friendship between two acquaintances. An eerily on-target ad for something you’ve been meaning to buy. A funny video. A sad video. A recently live video.
As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country.
In a particularly low moment a few years back, after arriving friendless and lonely from Britain to live in the United States, I downloaded a “happiness app” onto my phone. It was surprisingly hard to choose one.
ALPHAGO, the artificial intelligence system built by the Google subsidiary DeepMind, has just defeated the human champion, Lee Se-dol, four games to one in the tournament of the strategy game of Go.