ON ANY GIVEN night, the neon-lit streets of Akihabara, an entertainment district in central Tokyo, are packed with visitors. Inside windowless shopping malls, they flock to stalls selling used Hello Kitty or Astro Boy figurines, Pokémon trading cards and vintage video game consoles. At the idol bars and theaters — venues …
Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous. But the studio was feeling cocky. It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as …
When Matt Zerai heard that his favorite team, the Dallas Mavericks, had traded Luka Doncic, their 25-year-old superstar, to the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend, he was devastated. “It kind of did feel like I lost a family member,” Zerai said. “No one trades a franchise player in their …
Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast …
For about a week leading up to the A.F.C. championship game, Meredith Nolan had been living on a hulking research vessel parked in an Antarctic port. The ship, called the Noosfera, had been waiting for favorable sea conditions before plowing into the icy waters below the southern tip of South …
One day last summer, Harrison Barnes, a longtime N.B.A. veteran, was finishing up an off-season workout with Victor Wembanyama, his 7-foot-4, then-20-year-old San Antonio Spurs teammate and one of the league’s most dazzling young stars. Barnes was new to the team — he had recently been traded from the Sacramento …
Last January, Todd Lansky was in the stands of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., with his son Tyler before the Detroit Lions’ most momentous N.F.L. game in about a half-century. The Lions were about to face the San Francisco 49ers in the N.F.C. Championship Game when Mr. Lansky’s phone …
The megahits of 2024 were inseparable from their back stories. And that was exhausting. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which racked up hundreds of millions of streams and helped propel him to the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, was the ferocious culmination of his battle, via quickly released singles, with …