4 documentaries that explore how families cope with dementia
When his creative, funny, independent mother, Kathy, began to exhibit signs of dementia, writer Max Lugavere moved cross-country and picked up a camera to start documenting his journey to figure out how to help her. The result is “Little Empty Boxes,” a new documentary that’s strongest when it chronicles their relationship. Kathy’s memories of Max’s upbringing and his desire to be close to her bring them both a strange comfort. (She passed away in 2019.) The rest of the film — notably interviews with researchers studying links between nutrition, exercise and brain health — is uneven. Its visual language ranges from traditional, brightly lit talking heads to an observational approach, which can provoke whiplash for the viewer.
Before the violence, UCLA thought a tolerant approach would work
LOS ANGELES — It was an example of a tolerant campus, where a burgeoning pro-Palestinian encampment might be left alone even as student protesters were arrested across the nation. Free speech would be supported as long as things remained peaceful, officials said last week.
At Trump’s trial, a window into the golden era of tabloids
NEW YORK — Inside a staid Manhattan courtroom last week, flashes from a bygone era appeared, recollections of a celebrity-studded world of leveraged secrets and traded favors, and one in which publications sold at supermarket checkout counters wielded real cultural and political power.
Widowed before 40 and coping with the financial consequences
It was April 10, 2018, and Colin Brougham hadn’t sent his usual text to his wife that he was biking home. Instead, he lay dead a few blocks away after a commuter train struck him.
Inside the late-night parties where Hawaii politicians raked in money
HONOLULU — For the better part of a decade, some of Hawaii’s most powerful people huddled together at late-night parties in a cramped second-floor office where lobbyists and executives seeking government contracts lined up to drop cash and checks into a metal lockbox.
Good news and bad news for astronomers’ biggest dream
The United States should commit $1.6 billion to building an “extremely large telescope” that would vault American astronomy into a new era, according to the National Science Board, which advises the National Science Foundation.
OpenAI unveils AI that instantly generates eye-popping videos
SAN FRANCISCO — In April, a New York startup called Runway AI unveiled technology that let people generate videos, like a cow at a birthday party or a dog chatting on a smartphone, simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.
‘My Everything — Gone in a Matter of Moments’
LAHAINA, Maui — Twisted and charred aluminum mixed with shards of glass still lines the floor of the industrial warehouse where Victoria Martocci once operated her scuba diving business. After a wildfire tore through West Maui, all that remained of her 36-foot boat, the Extended Horizons II, were a pair of engines.
Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and a MAGA meltdown
For football fans eager to see a new team in the Super Bowl, the conference championship games Sunday that sent the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers back to the main event of American sports culture were sorely disappointing.
An explorer believes he found Amelia Earhart’s plane. Experts aren’t convinced.
It is one of the greatest enduring mysteries in aviation history: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart after she took off from Lae, New Guinea, in a Lockheed 10-E Electra on July 2, 1937.
Fire blanketed Lahaina in toxic debris. Where can they put it?
OLOWALU, Maui — When a firestorm consumed the Hawaii town of Lahaina last year, killing 100 people, it left behind a toxic wasteland of melted batteries, charred propane tanks, and miles of debris tainted by arsenic and lead.
Haley Looks to Fight on Home Turf, Which Her Rival Claims as Trump Country
CHARLESTON, S.C. — A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.
Sports Illustrated thrown into chaos with mass layoffs
Sports Illustrated, the venerable bible of sports journalism, has been in decline for years, as the internet annihilated print magazines and cost-cutting turned the weekly publication into a monthly and whittled its staff. But on Friday, the magazine received perhaps its toughest blow yet.
How coffee farmers fought counterfeit Kona beans
On the volcanic slopes of Kona, hundreds of farmers produce one of the most expensive coffees in the world.
Cancer deaths are falling, but with caveats
Cancer deaths in the United States are falling, with 4 million deaths prevented since 1991, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report.
Looking ahead to 5 things that will shape the 2024 election
It’s divisible by four. It’s a leap year. It’s a Summer Olympics year.
Members of Congress Head for the exits, many citing dysfunction
WASHINGTON — Eleven are running for the Senate. Five for state or local office. One for president of the United States. Another is resigning to become a university president. And more and more say they are hanging up their hats in public office altogether.
Infant deaths have risen for the first time in 20 years
The number of American babies who died before their first birthdays rose last year, significantly increasing the nation’s infant mortality rate for the first time in two decades, according to provisional figures released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Hawaii bribery scandal casts a shadow over Lahaina’s ruins
HONOLULU — After a major contracting scandal broke out in Hawaii last year, the mayor of Maui County appeared on television to express outrage and announce a sweeping audit of contracts awarded to a corrupt business owner.
For the future of Maui, Native Hawaiians push for honoring its past
To the outside world there has been no more vivid symbol of the storied history of Lahaina, and its potential for rebirth, than a 150-year-old banyan tree in the center of town whose scarred branches are now, two months after a devastating wildfire, sprouting new, green leaves.
