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This Swedish satire from Ruben Ostlund, the director of “Force Majeure,” won the top prize at Cannes.

George Clooney stays off camera to direct Matt Damon and Julianne Moore in a caustic comedy about the good old American days of fear, hate and rage.

By analyzing Sinosauropteryx specimens found in China, paleontologists found that certain camouflage patterns have a deep evolutionary history.

Giving a computer program responsibility over sentences doesn’t eliminate bias.

For all the talk of the White House chief of staff as a moderating force, Mr. Kelly has strong feelings about patriotism and immigration that mirror those of his boss.

Carl Lentz, lead pastor of Hillsong NYC, sidles up to the idea of Christian self-help with his book, “Own the Moment,” then aims for something different.

With permission from President Trump, the federal government on Thursday will begin releasing the final documents on the 1963 killing of John F. Kennedy.

Even when overweight people are healthy, they are still more likely to develop heart disease than their peers who aren’t overweight, a new study reports.

A writer put himself through four haunted houses and theater experiences to see if he could hack it. Here is his (haunted) story.

Did last year’s surprise nostalgia phenomenon need a sequel? Not really, but we’ll take it anyway.

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

It’s the deadliest drug crisis in American history. It kills about 90 Americans every day. Here are answers to some key questions about the crisis.

That’s going straight in my basket

NO COMPANY WANTS to replicate what happened to Hachette in 2014, when the publisher balked at Amazon’s terms. Suddenly its book shipments seemed to be delayed and Amazon was recommending titles from other publishers. The dispute ended with Hachette getting more control over pricing. But the deal showed the risks for producers of all kinds as online platforms gain strength.

The old system suited many businesses. Clothing manufacturers followed a predictable calendar for when goods would be produced and distributed. Giant makers of household products and food had to deal with stingy retailers such as Walmart, but they could also swat away smaller competitors with spending on expensive television ads.

E-commerce is changing all this. Companies that sell dresses and shoes to conventional retailers like Macy’s find them in turmoil, threatened both by online sellers and by nimbler bricks-and-mortar ones such as Zara. For...

ON AN AVERAGE morning a young urban professional anywhere in the world might wake up, check her social-media feed and order a cab on her mobile. While sitting in traffic, she might use her phone to purchase groceries and watch a video, and later to pay the driver and buy a coffee. Once at work, she might make an online payment to reimburse a friend for a concert ticket. So far, so normal. But if that young urbanite were living in China, every one of these activities could have been powered either by Alibaba or a company in which it has a stake.

E-commerce in China is sweeping the board. Last year online sales in China hit $366bn, almost as much as in America and Britain combined. Growth has slowed from its eye-popping pace of a few years ago, but Euromonitor predicts that online shopping’s share of total retail will rise to 24% by 2020; Goldman Sachs, whose forecast includes sales from one consumer to another, puts the figure at 31%. That will mean selling more to existing shoppers and gaining new ones in smaller cities and towns. About 80% of adults in China’s biggest cities already shop online.

Alibaba, the company leading this transition, makes most of its money from advertising. But it has permeated consumers’ lives in ways not yet seen in America or Europe. Westerners should picture a combination of Amazon, Twitter, eBay and PayPal, but broader....

WHEN AMERICA’S RETAIL bosses gathered in New York earlier this year for the annual shindig of their trade association, the National Retail Federation, there was much talk about new technology to improve the industry’s prospects, from sensors that read consumers’ facial expressions to machine-learning software that can optimise prices. The ghost at the banquet was the company that gave no presentations but made its presence felt everywhere: Amazon.

Traditional retailing has had a tough time lately. Traffic in shopping centres in Europe’s biggest markets has been declining. In America, which has about five times as much space in shopping centres per person as Britain, the pain is acute. Chains that were faltering even before Amazon’s ascent are now in even deeper trouble. Macy’s, a department store, last year said it would close 100 of its 728 shops. Fung Global Retail & Technology, a consultancy, expects nearly 10,000 stores in America to close this year, about 50% more than at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. And there will be more to come.

Shops used to compete by offering a combination of selection, price, service and convenience. E-commerce’s most obvious edge is in selection and convenience. Even the biggest store cannot hold as many items as Amazon can offer. Walmart conquered America by saving consumers money; Amazon is doing the...

IN WAREHOUSES AROUND the globe, they wait: toys, phones, dresses, televisions, blankets, trainers, laptops and much more. In China, online retailers are gearing up for “Singles Day”, November 11th, the world’s busiest shopping day. Last year Alibaba, much the biggest of the country’s e-commerce giants, rang up sales of $18bn on that occasion, the most ever spent in one day anywhere on Earth. Much of the rest of the world is preparing for the Christmas rush. Present-hunters used to wear themselves out tramping around crowded shops. Now, increasingly, they order from the comfort of their homes or offices.

Over the past decade global e-commerce has been expanding at an average rate of 20% a year as bricks-and-mortar shops have languished. Yet its share of total retail trade last year, at 8.5% worldwide, was still modest. Even in South Korea, the country with the highest percentage of retail sales online, it amounted to only 18%, according to Euromonitor, a research firm. In America, the world’s...

Amazon’s spheres of influence

FOR SHOPPERS IN 2017, it can be hard to remember what life was like in the early 1990s. There was mail order, but by and large if you wanted to buy something you went to a shop. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, who was then working for a New York hedge fund, noticed the exponential growth of the internet. His idea was to create an online company that would bring together shoppers and manufacturers around the world, starting with books.

Not everyone was convinced. A cover story in 1999 in Barron’s, a business weekly, entitled “Amazon.bomb”, argued that the company would struggle to compete with mighty Walmart and Barnes & Noble. But like many of Amazon’s competitors, it failed to predict the firm’s ever-expanding scope, the feverish pace of its spending and the enthusiastic support from investors.

For much of its life Amazon has bled red ink. As recently as 2014 it lost $241m on sales of...

IN SEPTEMBER 2014 Jeff Bezos announced his first big investment in India, hopping aboard a colourful bus in Bangalore. It was the start of a rapid $5bn investment in India, part of Mr Bezos’s plans to take Amazon global. Two months later Alibaba’s Jack Ma appeared in Delhi. “We will invest more in India,” he declared. The following year Alibaba put $500m into Paytm, an Indian digital-payments company. This year it led a fundraising round for Paytm’s e-commerce arm. The two giants seem set for an epic clash in India.

But in their home markets they have so far stayed out of each other’s way. Amazon has only a tiny business in China. Alibaba’s strategy in the United States has been to help American businesses sell in China and vice versa. “People always ask me, when will you go to the US?” says Alibaba’s CEO, Mr Zhang. “And I say, why the US? Amazon did a fantastic job.” The two firms have mostly invested in different foreign markets: Alibaba across South-East Asia and Amazon across...

YANG MING IS standing beside his red electric tricycle in a courtyard in Beijing. A former factory worker from an industrial town outside the capital, he and dozens of other men are awaiting the arrival of a lorry. As it pulls in from JD’s warehouse, the men form an assembly line to unload boxes. They reload the packages to their tricycles and are off, weaving through the traffic. JD has about 400 such delivery stations in Beijing alone. Across the country, 2.5m couriers are at the ready to shuttle packages to their final destinations. When he first started several years ago Mr Yang made about 80 deliveries a day. Now the number is closer to 130 and still rising.

To a consumer, e-commerce’s rapid delivery seems like magic: a few clicks, and within an hour or two a package can land on your doorstep. Behind this, however, lies an enormous amount of investment, engineering and hard work as firms face ever-rising expectations of fast, cheap delivery. Delivery networks are likely to be...

Cainiao has developed a waist-high robot called Little G to undertake the final leg of delivery

A STRETCH OF Bleecker Street, in Manhattan’s West Village, is among the loveliest in New York, with quaint shopfronts opening on to tree-lined pavements. Until recently a landfill across the Hudson river, in New Jersey, was among the region’s most repulsive. For years smouldering hazardous waste sparked fires among the rubbish. But Bleecker Street is now dotted with empty shops, their landlords unable to find tenants. The lot in New Jersey has been cleaned up and turned into a giant warehouse by Prologis, the world’s biggest industrial-property firm. The chemical fires are out. Delivery trucks are in.

E-commerce will not obliterate all retail trade. Stores that are distinctive in one way or another—because they offer excellent service, for instance, or unique products—will remain. But consider the change already wrought in America, where e-commerce accounts for...