Tony Bennett followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century, and carried the torch for them into the 21st.Credit...Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around

A.O. Scott started as a film critic at The New York Times in January of 2000. Next month he will move to the Book Review as a critic at large. Who the heck are you, anyway? That was the first question I heard after The New York Times hired me as a film critic in the final weeks of 1999. A reporter from Variety found my home phone number and gave me a call — the late-20th-century equivalent of slid

WASHINGTON — For actors, it is the most gripping, feared line ever written. “It is the Mona Lisa of literature,” said Simon Godwin, the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company here. “It is something we’re so deeply familiar with, it is hard to bring new context to, and to make it live again.” So it was stunning when an actor not known for classical performance spoke the opening of Hamlet’s sol

Quoting Churchill and Shakespeare, Ukraine Leader Vows No Surrender In a dramatic video address to Britain’s House of Commons, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he would never capitulate to the invading Russians. Some of the last remaining Ukrainian civilians being evacuated from the town of Irpin across the bridge into Kyiv on Tuesday.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times LOND

Kate Fassett, left, and Rachel O’Doud-Vega, masked and chatting at Mt. Tabor Park in Portland, Ore., in April.Credit...Kristina Barker for The New York Times Once Americans return to crowded offices, schools, buses and trains, so too will their sneezes and sniffles. Having been introduced to the idea of wearing masks to protect themselves and others, some Americans are now considering a behavior s

A narrow idea of invincibility and invulnerability “traps most men in images of ourselves that have failed most of us,” argues the author Anand Giridharadas. “There has been a very dominant strain of men who clearly feel that wearing a mask would so expose their vulnerability that they would rather risk death from the virus.”— Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of C

Shakespeare’s King Lear berates his daughter Regan as “a plague-sore or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood.”Credit...Cassell and Company, Limited, 1899/Print Collector, via Getty Images OXFORD, England — Twitter has been taunting us: When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear.” He had an advantage, of sorts: Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague. Just

Brown M&Ms and Male PoliticiansThe rock band Van Halen famously included a clause in its tour rider that required venue managers to place bowls of M&Ms in their dressing room. But “WARNING” it said in underlined capital letters, “ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES.” The clause’s true purpose had nothing to do with chocolate. Rather, it was an easy-to-spot signal of whether the venue’s managers had taken car