I Tried a Waterless Pedicure, and I’m Never Going Back

A government minister says Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s condition is stable but serious as the man accused of trying to assassinate him faces his first court appearance

The Preakness Stakes returns Saturday to Pimlico Race Course as Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan looks to become the Triple Crown winner since 2018.

How the sister of one victim of the Sept. 11 attacks is navigating the trial of the men accused of orchestrating it.

Chinese-made electric vehicles aren’t widely available yet in the United States — and may never be after the Biden administration moved to quadruple import tariffs on them, to100 percent. Here are some Chinese EVs that are being shipped out of China.

As Chinese manufacturers try to sell as many cars as possible, their U.S. competitors are betting on making each vehicle sale more valuable.

There isn't enough lab-grown meat in the U.S. to supply a dozen restaurants, yet two Republican governors are scared enough to ban it.

What time does the 2024 Preakness Stakes start? Here's a breakdown of when the race starts and the TV and streaming options available.

Biden is supporting Israel by trying to restrain it.

“Why can’t everybody live in my world, in the middle,” he says, “where we’re not nuts?”

Readers of the Los Angeles Times sports section weigh in on LeBron James' future, as well as that of his son, the Lakers coaching search and the Dodgers.

She is utterly failing to keep the case moving along in a fair but timely manner.

In his second season with the Rangers, Vincent Trocheck has embodied that hard-to-play-against trait the organization had been chasing for years. 

Eight were wounded and according to preliminary information were from Norway, Australia, Lithuania and Spain.

NFL player Harrison Butker has received a considerable amount of attention in the days since he delivered the commencement speech at Kansas College.

An airport spokesperson said the airport had been fully closed to takeoffs and landings for nearly two hours.

Sitting down for lunch with Reese Witherspoon, whose book picks have become a force in the publishing industry.

Eighty-five percent of people surveyed said inflation is an important issue, and most trust Trump more than Biden to deal with it.

Critics reminded President Biden about his past support for school segregation after he praised the Brown v. Board of Education ruling Friday.

In a week that was once all about ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, Amazon and Netflix make their presence felt as they seek a piece of the $27-billion upfront ad market.

San Diego is enforcing a new ordinance that limits where people can hold outdoor yoga and fitness classes. Sunset Cliffs isn't on the approved list.

Scout Productions' latest fashion reality competition series where competing designers create looks from upcycled materials, and it features fashion's "it girl" Julia Fox and celebrity stylist Law Roach.

A video showing Sean “Diddy” Combs violently attacking his then-girlfriend in a Los Angeles hotel in 2016 is likely to add more urgency to a federal sex-trafficking investigation into the star.

Prosecutors say Johnny Martinez was caught on a wiretap boasting of several murders, but he still has prominent voices calling for his release, including two L.A. County probation officials.

Mohamad Abdelfattah, a critical-care doctor, was in the southern city of Rafah with no way of leaving. He was at the end of a two-week trip volunteering in one of the few hospitals that has remained open in the besieged city.

California’s Medicaid program is testing a novel approach for people addicted to methamphetamine, cocaine and other stimulants: For every clean urine test, they can earn money — up to $599 a year.

The Biden administration funding is among the "largest ever in American history to address legacy pollution," U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said.

Reparations proposals continue to sweep across the country as cities and states debate whether to give Black Americans

Oakland Unified announced Thursday that it is the first school district in the nation to use a fully electric bus fleet due to its partnership with electric bus startup Zūm, which is also providing bidirectional chargers. The district employs 74 buses.

Los Angeles police officials are seeking to fire a senior captain after an internal investigation determined he failed to disclose a romantic relationship with a civilian employee and then lied about it to internal affairs detectives, according to three department sources.

It is nighttime in Paris. We are more than a year into Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and tonight, her fans are once again trying to figure out what her clothes mean.The star is in a glittering yellow-and-red two-piece set, a possible reference to the colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, the football team Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays on. This is also the 87th performance in the tour, and—aha!—Kelce wears jersey number 87. The hundreds of thousands of fans watching along through bootlegged livestreams on TikTok and YouTube have solved another mystery.This is the beginning of the European leg of Eras, which will stretch on and on until Swift returns to North America this fall and plays the final show of the tour on December 8 (that is, assuming she doesn’t extend it, as she has multiple times already). You’d think people would have lost interest by now. But Taylor Swift has kept fans’ attention by tapping into an algorithmic machine unlike anyone has before her.Swift is savvy, and leverages social-media culture to her advantage. Over her 18-year career, she has trained her fandom to inspect everything she does for Easter eggs; she knows that even a small reveal can send people into a frenzy. She likes to leave clues about upcoming music in her outfits, in music videos, even in commercials she films with brands. She knows people are interested in her personal life—her romances, her feuds—and capitalizes on that, leaving them hints in her liner notes or in song titles.In response, fans analyze dates and look for numbers that add up to 13, her favorite number. They create spreadsheets of every single outfit she’s worn on tour, methodically tracking each surprise song she’s played. They chat nonstop across platforms, swapping elaborate theories to try to decode when the next album is coming or whom each song is about. For more than half a decade, they’ve been convinced that there’s a lost album called Karma, which was shelved in the mid-2010s amid Swift’s feud with Kanye West (now known as Ye) and Kim Kardashian. According to one theory, the orange outfits she’s been wearing in Paris are a sign that she’ll release music from Karma. It’s like QAnon, if QAnon involved a lot of DIY rhinestone boots.[Read: The real Taylor Swift would never]Swifties don’t storm the Capitol, but they will flood Kardashian’s Instagram with snake emoji in response to Swift talking about the pain their fight brought her, just as they will fight Ticketmaster when the company botches her concert-ticket rollout. Their thinking is often conspiratorial. In one recent TikTok, a fan argued that Swift would be releasing something on May 3, according to this logic: A recent screenshot of a music-video still posted to Swift’s team’s Instagram included the letter-and-number combination 14.3V—Swift’s latest music video was for “Fortnight,” and a fortnight is two weeks; two weeks is 14 days. One plus four equals five. The three rounds it out: Something’s happening on the 3rd. The V is actually the Roman numeral for five. (May 3 came and went without a release.)Extreme cliques might be one side effect of our digital culture. “Our algorithms and media are designed to produce fandoms around consumption goods,” Petter Törnberg, a professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, told me over email. “There is hence a fundamental similarity between Swifties, Apple-fans and MAGA Republicans: our current era has the tendency of turning our preferences into identities, and shaping a form of postmodern tribes around both consumption goods and political leaders.” (See also: fans of Beyoncé and BTS.)In other words: Social platforms can have a radicalizing effect on fandoms. When we study algorithmic radicalization, we tend to do so in the context of politics, but the same systems might also calcify our beliefs about cultural products. Yet we still have a fairly limited understanding of how all of this works. “The very best studies we have are still really struggling to detect effects, because there’s so many challenges when you try to study this stuff,” Chris Bail, the founding director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University, told me.No one single algorithm powers this fandom. It operates across platforms; in a single day, a Swift fan might stream her music on Spotify, watch her music videos on YouTube, and consume posts about her on TikTok. All of these sites have distinct recommendation systems. Companies also tend to keep these systems a secret, making them hard to research.But we can say this: Algorithms tend to reinforce what’s already popular, because attention attracts more attention. Growth begets growth, as Törnberg put it. In this way, Swift also demonstrates how platforms that supposedly target content based on an individual’s interests can, in fact, end up clustering around one monolithic force. “It just seems like, Oh, that’s sort of weird, I thought everybody was supposed to have their own algorithmic niche now,” Nick Seaver, the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, told me. “And instead—I mean, maybe in addition to that—we also all have Taylor Swift.”[Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore]Our modern Swiftocracy is a reminder that we are still subject to strange algorithmic forces, even as the web is supposedly fractured. Yet the consequences of this can be as hard to decode as an Easter egg dropped by Swift. On her final show in Paris, she opted for a “berry”-red dress for the Folklore section of her set. It may be a sign of something to come. Or not.

The Washington Post has obtained emails and other documents showing that police in Austin and San Francisco skirted city bans against using facial recognition by asking officers in other cities to run the AI-powered programs for them.

Netflix knows how to dial up the drama—and the agony.

Angela Alsobrooks beat David Trone in Maryland's Senate primary despite liquor tycoon's $60 million campaign.

As the unruly graduate was escorted off the stage, he chucked his graduation binder at his unsuspecting victim.

Coleman’s characters frequently displayed the kind of antagonistic demeanor familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a bad boss or a disgruntled customer.

The former president’s criminal trial has underscored what he values: loyalty, beauty, press coverage and using allies as bullies.

Western leaders looking for signs that the Chinese leader used his influence on President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war in Ukraine are likely to be disappointed.

Majd Kamalmaz disappeared in Syria in early 2017. American officials recently disclosed to his family that they had intelligence indicating that he was dead.

After Mercedes workers voted against joining the United Automobile Workers, the union will have less momentum as it campaigns to organize Southern factories.

Even in the president’s favorite political stomping ground, his standing has slipped with Democrats who will be vital to a repeat victory, interviews with nearly two dozen Black voters showed.

His narrow win there in 2020 was seen as a sign of Georgia’s emergence as a battleground state. But in 2024, President Biden faces a much different climate there.

The stunning incursion into the Kharkiv Region lays bare the challenges facing Ukraine’s weary and thinly stretched forces as Russia ramps up its summer offensive.

Investors in the world’s biggest asset manager are asking how much more room it has to grow and who will drive that growth once its chief executive retires.

When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.

The “Colder Weather” artist is seeking emergency injunctive relief in the shape of a temporary restraining order that will force her to remove the post.

Amid the destruction, a marketplace of survival has arisen focused on the basics: food, shelter and money.

The beginning of the work brings increasing sunshine and warmth.