Jordan Fletcher

The NFL is down to its final four teams, and the San Francisco 49ers (+145) remain favorites to win Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas.After narrowly escaping with a win against the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round, the 49ers host the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship game next week. The 49ers are favored by a touchdown.Baltimore has the second-best odds after cruising to a 34-10 win over Houston in the divisional round. Lamar Jackson should win the MVP trophy this season, and he showed why in a second-half domination that saw the Ravens outscore the Texans 24-0…

Every August, after the NBA releases its schedule for the upcoming season, Michael McCullough, the Miami Heat’s chief marketing officer, thinks about the next 82 games. He not only considers ticket sales and promotions but also sets a meeting with the team’s equipment manager and focuses on an essential part of his job: uniforms.Laying out the right jerseys used to be an easy exercise across the NBA. There were just two choices. When Rob Pimental, the Heat’s equipment manager and travel coordinator, began his career with the Sacramento Kings in the 1980s, it was just white and blue: white jerseys…

“Were you burned out,” I asked.Her face was flat. “I still am,” she said. “Yeah. Yes, and I still am.” Worcester is famous for the snow dumps it receives in the winter. It has something to do with where the city is in relation to the Appalachian Mountains. The clouds bear down when the temperature drops, and then the snow is relentless and the weather is brutal. All winter, it’s brutal, brutal, brutal, and then somehow, slowly, it’s not anymore. That’s kind of how the end of W.P.I.’s crisis arrived. No one I spoke to could quite explain how they…

Aissam Dam, an 11-year-old boy, grew up in a world of profound silence. He was born deaf and had never heard anything. While living in a poor community in Morocco, he expressed himself with a sign language he invented and had no schooling.Last year, after moving to Spain, his family took him to a hearing specialist, who made a surprising suggestion: Aissam might be eligible for a clinical trial using gene therapy.On Oct. 4, Aissam was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, becoming the first person to get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness. The goal…

Steven Valdez thought he recognized the woman in the Medellín park. Chatting, the two realized they had matched on the dating platform Tinder. They exchanged numbers and made plans.On their date last spring, he said the woman suggested that he try a typical Colombian dish — a creamy soup called ajiaco. She carried it from a restaurant counter to their table.He had two spoonfuls, Mr. Valdez, 31, said. “And that’s the last thing I remember.”Like scores of visitors to the Colombian city last year, Mr. Valdez, a travel blogger, said he was told at the hospital that he had ingested…

Cold, almost naked and surrounded by Israeli soldiers with M16 assault rifles, Ayman Lubbad knelt among dozens of Palestinian men and boys who had just been forced from their homes in northern Gaza.It was early December and photographs and videos taken at the time showed him and other detainees in the street, wearing only underwear and lined up in rows, surrounded by Israeli forces. In one video, a soldier yelled at them over a megaphone: “We’re occupying all of Gaza. Is that what you wanted? You want Hamas with you? Don’t tell me you’re not Hamas.”The detainees, some barefoot with…

Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office.The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” were manipulated to seem as if they had been sent by an officer of a Democratic committee, the office said.The attorney general’s office stressed that voting in the primary would not rule out voters from also casting ballots in the general election in November.“These messages…