Social Responsibility

Rite Aid, one of the largest pharmacy chains in the United States, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, weighed down by billions of dollars in debt, declining sales and more than a thousand federal, state and local lawsuits claiming it filled thousands of illegal prescriptions for painkillers.The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New Jersey. Its largest creditors include the pharmaceutical company McKesson Corporation and the insurer Humana Health. The pharmacy has raised $3.45 billion to fund its operations while it is in bankruptcy, during which it expects to continue to operate its stores and serve its customers.The company…

It was the type of tough question a Republican presidential candidate might get on a Sunday morning talk show, only the person asking it was 15: Quinn Mitchell wanted to know if Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida believed that former President Donald J. Trump had violated the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021.Video of the uncomfortable exchange at a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H., for Mr. DeSantis, who dodged the question, ricocheted online. So did the pair’s next encounter at a July 4 parade in Merrimack, N.H., where a video showed Quinn, an aspiring journalist, being…

Marva and Myriam Babel spent much of the past few years thinking about the concept of a space, especially how to sustain one in a gentrifying borough. Now that they have a new one, a membership club in Brooklyn called Babel Loft, they have been mulling over how to fill it.The main area, a space with living-room furnishings, two bar areas, books from Questlove and the comedian Dick Gregory lying about, as well as D.J. equipment atop white marble, could be a work space during the day and a dance spot by night. Past the D.J. booth is a smaller…

Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the cause was cancer.Ms. Glück (pronounced glick) was widely considered to be among the country’s…

When workplaces are remade by a tectonic shift — women flooding into the work force, the rise of computing — it typically takes some time for economists, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars to gather data on its effects.So when employers moved suddenly to adopt remote work during the pandemic, with the share of employed Americans working exclusively from home rising to 54 percent in 2020 from 4 percent in 2019, researchers leaped to examine the effects of remote work on employees and the economy at large. Now the early results are emerging. They reveal a mixed economic picture, in which…

Follow live updates on the 2023 ring of fire solar eclipse.Millions of people across the Americas are preparing for an experience like no other on Saturday. The moon will interrupt the sun, casting a shadowy veil from Oregon to Brazil during an annular solar eclipse.This weekend’s astronomical marvel is set to swoop over the Western United States, through the Yucatán Peninsula and across many nations of Central America, before its sunset finale off the South American coast. Like the solar eclipse in 2017, which crossed 14 American states, people from diverse walks of life will gather for a fleeting reminder…

House Republicans on Friday nominated Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the hard-right chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to be their next speaker, but quickly postponed a floor vote to elect him as scores of their members refused to commit to backing him.By a vote of 124 to 81, Mr. Jordan defeated Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, a mainstream conservative and an ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy who had decided just hours earlier to seek the nomination. Mr. Scott had effectively put himself forward as a protest candidate against Mr. Jordan, the co-founder of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and…

Technological progress is a key source of economic growth, but its effects aren’t always fully captured by its effects on gross domestic product. Sometimes a new technology changes everything — the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to one another in society.Consider, for example, the effects of the birth control pill.If it never occurred to you that modern birth control was a transformative technology, or more broadly that expanding women’s ability to choose had profound economic as well as social effects, you have plenty of company. There have been innumerable books and articles about the…