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The idea that a single-celled bacterium can defend itself against viruses in a similar way as the 1.8-trillion-cell human immune system is still “mind-blowing” for molecular biologist Joshua Modell of Johns Hopkins University.

Scientists discovered 20 years ago that bacteria use an adaptive defense system called CRISPR that allows microbes to recognize and destroy viral invaders on repeat encounters. In a recent study published in Cell Host & Microbe, Modell and his team have deepened our understanding of how bacteria use this system to “vaccinate” themselves against phages, the viruses that try to kill them. The findings could help the development of treatments to fight antimicrobial resistance, which contributes to millions of deaths annually.

The CRISPR system allows bacteria to edit their own genome. After being exposed to a virus, bacteria can use a special enzyme to insert small pieces of the virus’s DNA, called spacers, into their genome, which helps them recognize and fight off the virus next time. Scientists now use this enzyme as a pair of “genetic scissors” to tweak DNA in everything from lab experiments to gene therapies, but researchers still knew little about how this process plays out in bacteria. “We called it the CRISPR mystery because we didn’t really understand what was happening inside,” Modell says.

To understand how bacteria manage to grab the DNA of invading viruses, the researchers ran controlled lab experiments using Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria and the phages that infect it. During the infectious phase, most phages rupture the cell immediately, a process known as lysis. On rare occasions, they can instead hide inside the bacterial DNA and become dormant, a state called lysogeny. This state is notoriously difficult to study.

In the lab, Modell’s team infected bacteria with phages that could go dormant as well as genetically engineered phages locked in an active state. The researchers then collected surviving cells and checked their genetic code to see if they had added new spacers taken from the viruses’ DNA.

They found that bacteria only added spacers from phages that could go dormant. During this lull, Modell explains, the bacteria have time to grab tiny pieces of viral DNA and store them in their genome. “The CRISPR system makes memories against an inactivated form of the virus just like a vaccine,” Modell says. To confirm their results, Modell and his team exposed spacer-carrying bacteria to the same phages again to observe whether the new genetic memories protected them from infection. The researchers observed that the bacterium can recognize the phages using those stored fragments and fight them off.

The findings are “pretty remarkable,” says molecular biologist Stan Brouns of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. Understanding the interactions between phages and bacteria is key to improving phage therapies, an approach where scientists use viruses to treat infections caused by bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics.

This new understanding could also help researchers design phages that more types of infection-causing bacteria will be susceptible to, says North Carolina State University molecular biologist Rodolphe Barrangou, who co-founded Locus Biosciences, a biotech company that develops antibacterial products, and who also was not involved in the study. Various bacteria can have any of more than 150 antiphage defense mechanisms that treatments have to dodge; understanding how this one works is “going to inspire people who work on [bacteria] to think about phage therapies on a broader range of infectious diseases.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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Back in the 1920s, Charles Mitchell — the swaggering head of National City Bank, the forerunner to Citigroup — had a ritual. He would take his bond salesmen to lunch at the Bankers Club, perched atop the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, and point to the city below, stretched out in miniature. “There are six million people with incomes that aggregate thousands of millions of dollars,” he’d say. “They are just waiting for someone to come to tell them what to do with their savings. Take a good look, eat a good lunch, and then go down and tell them.”

For Mitchell, finance and the new instruments of wealth — stocks, margin loans, investment trusts, and even exotic foreign bonds — were not to be hidden away but promoted like any other product. “It has always seemed to me that there is, and always has been, too much mystery connected with banking,” he liked to say.

He wasn’t alone in preaching the gospel of access. John Raskob — a top executive at General Motors, a born promoter and the man who built the Empire State Building — famously declared, “Everybody ought to be rich!” He explained: “I didn’t see why the working men and women of our country should not be let in on the tremendous profits being made in America today.” Raskob set out to create one of the first mutual funds, explicitly designed to give “the little fellows” a chance to join the boom.

Nearly a century later, we are in the grip of a sweeping new age of financialization and innovation — the boldest transformation in money and investing since the 1920s — that is also driven by the idea of expanding access to markets. Private equity, venture capital, and private credit, once the preserve of institutions and wealthy individuals, are now about to be repackaged for the masses, even woven into 401(k) retirement plans. Crypto tokens are being sold as a way to buy slices of private firms like SpaceX and OpenAI, in the gray zone of securities law.

It all comes amid a new stock boom, fueled by a mania for A.I., and with a new administration in Washington that is determined to loosen rules — creating a permissive spirit similar to the one that passed for innovation in the 1920s. The Trump administration is working on rolling back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, easing capital requirements for midsize banks, and sidelining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency born after 2008 to police predatory lending. Congress, for its part, has advanced measures like the Genius Act and, more recently, the so-called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act — billed as modernization and, in practice, opening the gates for crypto and other speculative products.

And just as in Mitchell’s day, they have their boosters. “Only the biggest companies can go public, which limits opportunities for the little guy,” Vlad Tenev of Robinhood has said, insisting that “the next frontier is making sure these opportunities are open to retail investors.” Marc Rowan of Apollo is equally blunt about retirement savings, arguing that asset managers have “leveraged the future of retirement to four stocks,” which will prove to be “an irresponsible thing for us to have done.”

What has shifted are the buzzwords and the gloss; what has not is the promise — that the American dream itself could be remade into a get-rich fantasy, a promise first popularized in the 1920s. Mitchell’s belief that stocks and bonds were for everyone and should be sold “over the counter, just the same way a clerk sells a necktie,” helped elevate him alongside Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh as a symbol of American ambition. Financiers became celebrities and graced the covers of Forbes (started in 1917) and Time (started in 1923) for the first time. Those magazines may have declined in recent decades, but today this same message — of the thrill of a democratized financial sector where anyone can become rich — is fed to us in infinite scrolls on social media of aspiration and envy.

For decades, most Americans have missed out on the stock market’s riches: Nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t own any stock at all, and more than 90 percent of all equities are controlled by the wealthiest 10 percent of families. Access has long been fenced off by rules around “accredited investors,” a legal category created in the 1930s to protect households from risky, opaque offerings. The qualifications are strict: You need $1 million in net worth (excluding your home) or an income of at least $200,000 a year ($300,000 for a couple). The idea is that only the wealthy can afford to lose money in speculative deals. In practice, the definition gives the richest households — about 18 percent of American families — privileged entry into private markets. They can buy into companies like Facebook or Uber years before the public ever has the chance, capturing the overwhelming share of the gains. By the time the average investor can purchase shares on a stock exchange, much of the upside has already been taken.

Now that barrier is being steadily lowered. What was once a bright line meant to keep average investors out is being blurred in the name of access. It is not hard to see the appeal of breaking open those gates and allowing ordinary savers a shot at the kinds of returns that built fortunes for institutions and elites.

Yet history offers a blunt reminder: When transformation comes this quickly, it rarely benefits everyone unless it is paired with transparency, oversight, and regulation. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was pitched as a democratizing moment, too, until it collapsed under a wave of hype and fraud. The pattern is familiar, stretching back to 1929: Whenever access expands faster than safeguards, charlatans rush in and ordinary investors are often left holding the bag.

The greatest speculative asset class of the past decade has been cryptocurrency, a realm where risk itself is part of the appeal. For years it was dismissed by some of the most venerated investors, like Warren Buffett, as a plaything for gamblers and thrill-seekers. But under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, a new group of financiers is working to reimagine it as something every American should own — not just through exchanges and wallets but through investment vehicles built to slip into retirement accounts and mutual funds.

No one has embraced this idea more passionately than Michael Saylor of the business-software company Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy). With his silver beard, clipped diction, and unblinking certainty, Saylor carries himself less like a corporate manager and more like a prophet who believes he has glimpsed the future before anyone else.

For most of its life, Strategy sold analytics tools to corporations. But Saylor has completely recast it. Over the past few years, he borrowed more than $2 billion through debt offerings and convertible notes to buy over 200,000 Bitcoins — worth more than $13 billion at recent prices. Today, Strategy’s stock no longer trades on software sales; it rises and falls almost entirely with the price of Bitcoin. For investors, the appeal is obvious: It is an easy way to buy into Bitcoin’s upside, wrapped in the familiar clothing of a public stock.

Saylor himself has become more than a chief executive; he is Bitcoin’s evangelist in chief. On podcasts, TV hits and conference stages, he preaches the virtues of “digital gold” with a fervor that blends salesman and prophet. To his followers, he is a folk hero who showed Wall Street how to bet big on the future. And so far, he has been right: As Bitcoin recovered from its 2022 crash, Strategy’s shares have soared — rising even faster than the coin itself. Nearly half the company’s stock is now held by retail investors. It is such a popular stock that it was added to the Nasdaq 100 index in late 2024, further attracting almost $4 million a day from individual traders, cementing its status as a cult favorite on Main Street as much as on Wall Street.

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Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás

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For the nearly three-year-old female bat soaring into the Spanish skies in March 2023, it was just another night of striving to feed herself. But her overnight exploits were about to become the stuff that scientists’ dreams are made of.

The bat—a greater noctule (Nyctalus lasiopterus)—was equipped with a high-tech tag recording its behavior. And from one particular recording, researchers were able to reconstruct a story with both cinematic drama and scientific value. That’s because the tag captured the bat pursuing, killing and eating a migrating European robin (Erithacus rubecula)—all in midair and while echolocating to navigate.

“There was this crazy noise and movement and a lot of echolocation, and I thought, ‘I’ve never heard this before on any recording,’” says Laura Stidsholt, a biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of new research about the observation, published on October 9 in Science. “It was quite magical.”

Greater noctules are among the largest and most endangered bats in Europe. Their usual fare is meatier insects—beetles and moths and the like. But in previous work, scientists analyzing the DNA found in bat poop had been surprised to find evidence of greater noctules feasting on songbirds—which are much larger than insects—during spring and fall migrations, when birds are active at night instead of during the day.

The bats are typically difficult to study, but scientists at Doñana Biological Station, an outpost of the Spanish National Research Council, have microchipped the bats that nest locally and can track when they enter and leave a nest box. The researchers paired that system with cutting-edge recording tags that captured an animal’s altitude and movement, as well as the sounds around it. During the springs of 2022 and 2023, the researchers tagged 14 different bats, gathering incredible reports of the furry mammals’ adventures.

It’s like flying with the greater noctule bat,” says Elena Tena, a conservation biologist at Doñana Biological Station and co-author of the new research. “We could interpret everything that the bat was doing.”

And from that recording that startled Stidsholt, the researchers constructed quite an interpretation: The female bat soared to an altitude of three-quarters of a mile, searching for prey, until it apparently locked in on a migrating songbird. Then it engaged with the bird and made a steep dive, during which the bat made its echolocation calls amid the sounds of an ongoing tussle between the two animals. As the bat approached the ground, the bird let out a string of panicked cheeps before ominously falling silent.

Then—for an incredible 23 minutes—the bat’s echolocation squeaks were punctuated by chewing and crunching, even as the animal kept flying. “They’re basically screaming with their mouths full,” Stidsholt says, noting that, proportional to their body size, these bats’ calls are among the loudest noises known to scientists.

Haunted by the incredible recording, the researchers asked some additional questions. First, they compared the bird’s distress calls with existing recordings of songbirds gathered by other scientists whose work requires catching the birds in nearly invisible “mist nets” to handle them. The cries of the bird caught by the bat matched those of the European robin.

The researchers also gathered torn-off bird wings found on the ground of known greater noctule hunting grounds. DNA testing confirmed saliva from these bats on the wings—supporting scientific hypotheses that, just as the bats do with their usual insect prey, the animals bite off and discard songbird wings after making a kill, likely to reduce the weight they carry while snacking.

That makes the finding particularly interesting, says Riley Bernard, a bat biologist at the University of Wyoming, who was not involved in the new research. “Even though these species do eat insects, and that might be their predominant food behavior, they have this behavioral plasticity to be able to tap into resources when they’re available,” she says. Such flexibility could help see the bats through the many challenges they face, she hopes.

Bernard admits to some envy of the European researchers, noting that North America’s bats are all much smaller than the greater noctule—too small to carry the tags used in this experiment.

Danilo Russo, an ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II, who was also not involved in the new research, agrees. “I’d really love to fit a small bat with this kind of technology,” Russo says.

“Now we have this amazing means of penetrating the darkness and their hidden world,” he says. “I think it would be a complete game-changer, just like in this case.”

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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi gave a playful response to actress Amy Poehler’s parody of her on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Poehler, who hosted Saturday’s episode, appeared in the cold open as Bondi during her testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing last week.

“My name is Pam Bondi. I spell it with an ‘i,’ because I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions,” Poehler said. “My time is valuable. The DOJ has many ongoing operations, and we’re moving like Kash Patel’s eyeballs—very quickly in multiple directions at once.”

Snl Says Trump’s Been In Office ‘100 Years’ While Mocking Papal Ambitions And Executive Order Frenzy

During the skit, Poehler was later joined by her fellow former “SNL” cast member Tina Fey, who played Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem carrying an AR-15 rifle.

“That’s right. It’s me, Kristi Noem,” Fey said. “I spell my name with an ‘i’ because that’s how I thought it was spelled. And I’m the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: a brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”

Though the show took many jabs at Bondi’s demeanor during the hearing, Bondi appeared to enjoy the parody on Sunday morning and invited Noem to respond on X.

Amy Poehler Says ‘We All Played People We Should Not Have’ As She Reflects On Controversial SNL Skits

“@Sec_Noem, should we recreate this picture in Chicago? Loving Amy Poehler!” Bondi wrote.

In a comment to Fox News Digital, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin simply responded, “SNL is absolutely right—the Democrats’ shutdown does need to end!”

The long-running sketch comedy series has often mocked President Donald Trump and his administration, usually with some backlash from Trump himself. However, the show’s 51st season premiere went largely unremarked on by the president despite another parody of him by cast member James Austin Johnson.

Snl Compares Trump To Jesus In Easter Sketch Mocking Economy And Faith: ‘Donald Jesus Trump’

In a comment after the premiere, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed the show, saying she has “more entertaining” things to do with her time.

“Reacting to this would require me to waste my time watching it,” Jackson said. “And like the millions of Americans who have tuned out from SNL, I have more entertaining things to do — like watch paint dry.”

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Tina Fey (left) as Kristi Noem and host Amy Poehler (right) as Pam Bondi during the “Bondi Hearing” Cold Open on Saturday, October 11, 2025.

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Now, many Israelis said, with an open-ended cease-fire in place and all the living hostages back home, it was time for the country to heal.

“This is a momentous day, a day of great joy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an address in the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament, on Monday alongside President Trump.

Quoting from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, which Jews traditionally read this week, Mr. Netanyahu said there was a time for war and a time for peace.

“The last two years have been a time of war,” he added. “The coming years will hopefully be a time for peace — peace inside Israel and peace outside Israel.”

People began packing Hostages Square in Tel Aviv early Monday morning to watch the release unfold on giant screens. They lined the road, waving Israeli flags outside the Re’im military base in southern Israel, the first stop for the returnees after they crossed into Israeli territory. And they ran onto balconies and rooftops to cheer as helicopters brought the former captives to hospitals.

The military released footage of emotional reunions between the hostages and their family members, as well as extraordinary encounters among the former captives themselves.

Gali and Ziv Berman, 28, twins who were kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, together with their neighbor, Emily Damari, from Kfar Aza, a rural community, were separated by their captors on their first day in Gaza, according to Ms. Damari, who was released during a brief cease-fire in January.

On Monday, they hugged. The twins, who had lived close by and worked together before their abduction, were transferred to a hospital wearing matching yellow shirts of their favorite soccer team, Maccabi Tel Aviv. They were flown over the Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv, where fans had gathered to cheer them.

Another pair of brothers, Ariel Cunio, 28, and David Cunio, 35, were released and reunited with their partners in Israel, both former captives themselves. Ariel Cunio had been kidnapped with his partner, Arbel Yehud, from their home in Nir Oz, a small community near the Gaza border that was ravaged in the Hamas assault. Ms. Yehud was released in January.

“My Ariel is home, and I am overwhelmed with emotion and joy,” Ms. Yehud said in a statement.

“From the moment of my release, I devoted everything I had to the struggle to bring my Ariel home, to bring David home, and to bring all the hostages back,” she added. “Now that Ariel and David are home, we can focus on our long journey of healing and recovery together as a couple and as a family.”

David Cunio was kidnapped from Nir Oz with his wife, Sharon Cunio, and their twin daughters, Yuli and Emma, 5, who were returned in November 2023.

And the brothers Eitan Horn and Iair Horn let out cries of joy as they embraced. Taken from Nir Oz, they spent time in the tunnels together until Iair was released in February, with Eitan left behind.

The 20 living hostages released on Monday were exchanged for nearly 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. There are no more living captives in Gaza, but Israel was still waiting for Hamas to return the remains of 28 deceased ones. The Israeli military said it had received four coffins later Monday and that the authorities would work to identify the remains.

The government has said that locating some of the bodies might take some time.

“We do not forget them for a moment,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said.

Israeli officials said about 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 251 others were abducted to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 that ignited the war. Hamas had already been holding two Israeli civilians for almost a decade and the remains of two soldiers killed in ambushes in Gaza in 2014.

Four women were released early on in October 2023, and a female soldier was rescued in a military operation that month. During two temporary cease-fires, in November 2023 and early this year, a total of 135 hostages were freed, according to government data. The Trump administration negotiated the release of an Israeli-American soldier in May. Seven more hostages were rescued alive by the Israeli military.

The remains of 59 captives who did not survive were returned to Israel for burial before Monday’s exchange, according to the Israeli government.

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Alon Ohel’s friends speaking with his family in a video call after receiving the news of his return to Israel from Gaza on Monday.Credit…Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Alon Ohel was kidnapped by Hamas after fleeing the Nova music festival in October 2023. More than two years later, Hamas freed Mr. Ohel as part of a cease-fire deal with Israel.CreditCredit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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A time crystal is a form of matter that shows continuous, repeating patterns over time, much like how atoms in a normal crystal repeat in space. Examples once existed in only complex, quantum matter, but now physicists have found a way to make a time crystal that can be seen, under certain conditions, with the naked eye.

The feat, accomplished by physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder, and published in Nature Materials on 4 September, involved liquid crystals — bar-shaped molecules with properties between those of a liquid and those of a solid. Simply by shining a light on the liquid crystals, the team created ripples of twisting molecules through them. The ripples kept moving for hours, undulating with a distinct beat, even when the researchers changed the conditions. The rhythm was also out of sync with any incoming force — fulfilling the two defining criteria for a time crystal.

Although some of this behaviour of liquid crystals was already known, no one had previously considered whether it could be harnessed to make a time crystal, says Young-Ki Kim, a materials scientist at the Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea.

The macroscopic scale of the time crystal — at millimetres to centimetres across — creates opportunities “to provide deeper understanding” of the phenomena, he says. The distinctive patterns in the crystals could also allow them to be used in anti-counterfeit devices, say the authors.

Impossible machines

Nobel-prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of a time crystal in 2012. Wilczek’s version was almost like a perpetual-motion machine; something that cycled endlessly while in its natural resting state. A team later published a paper that mathematically proved this concept was impossible, but researchers soon found that other kinds of time crystal were possible. Ordered time crystals could exist, for example, in bizarre systems that were perpetually in flux, rather than at rest.

Time crystals have since been made in a variety of ways, using interacting nanoscale defects in diamonds, trapped ions, and simulated on Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. But most examples have been at the microscopic scale.

The latest system involves shining a light, even that from a normal light bulb, on a liquid-crystal film trapped between two glass plates. When the light hits photosensitive dye molecules on the glass plates, they switch their orientation, which triggers molecules in the liquid crystal to begin twisting.

Intermolecular forces between rod-like liquid crystal molecules mean that they usually all point in the same direction. If some begin twisting, this sets off a domino effect: the molecules reorient themselves in a complex interaction that moves across the sample like a Mexican wave.

From this soup of molecules arise stable twisted formations that behave like particles. These particles interact with each other to create observable ripples. “We were surprised and excited to see that such time-crystalline order can be readily observed in soft matter systems,” says Ivan Smalyukh, a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who led the work.

To observe the molecular dance in detail, the authors looked at the time-crystal system using a kind of microscope that transmits only polarized light. The amount of light that passes through depends on a molecule’s alignment, revealing the time crystal’s ripples as a series of dark and bright stripes.

The time crystal maintained its distinctive rhythm for hours, even when the researchers varied its temperature and the light intensity. Because the set-up can be tweaked to create patterns that are centimetres across, the effect can be seen by the naked eye, albeit with less contrast and resolution than with the microscope, says Smalyukh.

Because the pattern changes across both space and time, the system is technically a space-time crystal, say the authors. It unquestionably fits the definition of a time crystal, adds Smalyukh, but it does pose the question of whether other periodic effects also fit the bill.

The authors say that these time crystals are not just a curiosity. The thin layers of crystal could be embedded in bank notes as a way to verify their authenticity. Light passing through stacks of different crystals, each with a different characteristic pattern, would create not just a ripple in one direction, but a changing 2D barcode that would be extremely difficult to counterfeit and could also be used to store information, they say.

“We don’t want to put a limit on the applications right now,” added Smalyukh, in a statement. “I think there are opportunities to push this technology in all sorts of directions.”

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She accepted her Oscar wearing a linen jacket, two full linen skirts, a scarf over a white shirt and black string tie, and high heels with socks. In her 2014 memoir, “Then Again,” she looked back on the moment, with some regret, as “my ‘la-de-da’ layered get-up.”

“Annie Hall,” which won three other Oscars, including best picture, brought Ms. Keaton a shower of additional honors, including acting awards from the National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle and the British Academy of Film and Television Artists.

The Hollywood Reporter’s review of the movie called Ms. Keaton “the consummate actress of our generation” and observed that she “adds the charm and warmth and spontaneity” that make “Annie Hall” plausible.

Ms. Keaton received three other Oscar nominations. One was for the sweeping Oscar-winning drama “Reds” (1981), in which she played Louise Bryant, an intense 1910s writer hanging out with Greenwich Village socialists and Bolshevik revolutionaries, notably the activist journalist Jack Reed (Warren Beatty, who directed).

Another was for “Marvin’s Room” (1996), in which she played the selfless daughter who is taking care of her slowly dying father and her scatterbrained aunt when she receives a diagnosis of leukemia and needs a bone-marrow transplant. Her co-stars included Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Hume Cronyn.

The third was for “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), a comedy about a successful playwright who turns an extremely tearful breakup into a new hit comedy. She attracts the attentions of a handsome, much younger doctor (Keanu Reeves) and inspires a sexist man in his 60s (Jack Nicholson) to fall in love with a woman his own age.

Ms. Keaton was also a director. Her first film was “Heaven” (1987), a documentary on beliefs about the afterlife. In her last, she directed herself, Meg Ryan, and Lisa Kudrow in the comic drama “Hanging Up” (2000), based on a novel by Delia Ephron.

“Unstrung Heroes” (1995), her first foray into fictional filmmaking, starred Andie MacDowell, John Turturro and Michael Richards. The story of a teenage boy’s idiosyncratic uncles was selected for Un Certain Regard, the prestigious sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival. The Rolling Stone review said, “The movie works like a charm.” The Washington Post called it “sweet madness,” a “sensitive coming-of-age story.

A film career was always Ms. Keaton’s goal. She explained her aversion to theater as a lifelong pursuit on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2010. “Night after night? Doing a play?” she said, putting an imaginary gun to her head. “That’s my idea of hell.”

Diane Hall was born on Jan. 5, 1946, in Los Angeles. She was the eldest of four children of John Newton Ignatius Hall, known as Jack, a civil engineer, and Dorothy Deanne (Keaton) Hall, an amateur photographer who was also crowned Mrs. Los Angeles in a beauty pageant for homemakers.

Diane’s father gave her the nickname Perkins and often addressed her as “Di-annie,” Ms. Keaton wrote in her memoir.

She grew up in Santa Ana, Calif., near Los Angeles, and briefly attended community colleges, first Santa Ana and then Orange Coast. At 19, she dropped out and moved to New York to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

She made her Broadway debut in the hit musical “Hair,” first as a member of the ensemble and then as Sheila, the female lead. (She turned down the $50 bonus offered to actors who were willing to appear nude in one scene.)

Her Broadway career continued, and her partnership with Mr. Allen began with “Play It Again, Sam” (1969), in which she played a romantically desirable married woman opposite Mr. Allen as a nebbishy divorced friend. That performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for best featured actress in a play.

Her film debut came the next year, when she played an unhappy young wife at a suburban wedding in “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970). Then, after a handful of television appearances, she played Kay Adams, the clearly non-Sicilian girlfriend turned trusting wife of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino), in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972). (She and Mr. Pacino began dating in 1974, the year “The Godfather, Part II” was released.)

For all the acclaim that “The Godfather” drew, Ms. Keaton, ever self-effacing, hardly raved about her own performance in it. “Right from the beginning I thought I wasn’t right for the part,” she told The Times after the movie was released. “I haven’t seen the film. I just decided I would save myself the pain. I had to see a few scenes because I had to loop — dub in some dialogue — and I couldn’t stand looking at myself. I thought I looked so terrible, just like a stick in those ’40s clothes!”

Three years later, the same year “Annie Hall” was released, she starred in the wrenching drama “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” as a young teacher who prowls singles bars almost every night. Molly Haskell’s review in New York magazine called Ms. Keaton’s “the performance of a lifetime” and the movie itself “harrowing, powerful, appalling.” Some observed that although she won the Oscar for “Annie Hall,” many voters had been influenced by “Mr. Goodbar,” which they considered brilliant but too hard to take.

She appeared regularly in Mr. Allen’s films, starting with the movie version of “Play It Again, Sam” (1972); “Sleeper” (1973), a comedy set in a dystopian future; and “Love and Death” (1975), set in czarist Russia. She also starred in two of Mr. Allen’s more serious contemporary films, “Interiors” (1978) and the multiple-award-winning “Manhattan” (1979).

Although she dismissed her early singing ambitions as foolish, she sang two numbers in “Annie Hall” and made a cameo appearance as a 1940s nightclub singer in Mr. Allen’s “Radio Days” (1987). Their last film together was “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993).

In addition to “Reds,” “Marvin’s Room” and the sequels to “The Godfather” (1974 and 1990), she starred in several other dramas, some with satirical undertones. They included “Shoot the Moon” (1982), in which she co-starred with Albert Finney, the story of an unhappy California couple and their divorce; Beth Henley’s Southern Gothic “Crimes of the Heart” (1986), playing the spinster sister of Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek; and the mini-series “The Young Pope” (2016), as a nun who is personal secretary and confidante to the pope, played by Jude Law.

But her talent for sophisticated farce didn’t go to waste. Before “Something’s Gotta Give,” she appeared in three other comedies directed by Nancy Meyers: “Baby Boom” (1987), opposite Sam Shepard, as a big-city executive who inherits a baby and moves to Vermont; and “Father of the Bride” (1991) and its 1995 sequel, opposite Steve Martin.

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His latest novel to appear in English is “Herscht 07769,” published last year in the United States. The book, which unfolds in a single sentence, evokes fears about the rise of fascism in Europe, and imagines a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction. It features only one period in its 400 pages.

Krasznahorkai told The New York Times in 2014 that he had tried to develop an “absolutely original” style, adding, “I wanted to be free to stray far from my literary ancestors, and not make some new version of Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.”

Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the committee that awarded the prize, praised Krasznahorkai’s “powerful, musically inspired epic style” at the news conference announcing the Nobel.

“It is Krasznahorkai’s artistic gaze, which is entirely free of illusion and which sees through the fragility of the social order, combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art that has motivated the academy to award the prize,” Sem-Sandberg added.

A spokeswoman for Krasznahorkai’s German publisher said in an email on Thursday that the author was not conducting any interviews, although earlier in the day he briefly spoke to Swedish radio: “I’m very happy, thank you,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what’s coming in the future.”

Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, a small town about 120 miles from Budapest, in 1954. His family’s Jewish roots were kept a secret — his grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai to assimilate — and Krasznahorkai didn’t know about his Jewish heritage until his father told him when he was 11.

He was a musical prodigy and worked as a professional musician for several years in his youth, playing piano in a jazz band and singing in a rock group.

His father was a lawyer, and his mother worked in the social welfare ministry. Inspired by Kafka, an author he revered, he planned to study law and was fascinated by criminal psychology, but ended up studying Hungarian language and literature.

After school, Krasznahorkai undertook military service but, he has said in interviews, deserted the army after being punished for insubordination. He then took on odd jobs — including working as a miner and as a night watchman for 300 cows, a post that allowed him to read work by Dostoyevsky and Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” a book he called his “bible.”

When he began writing, his aim was to complete one book, then pursue a career in music. At the time he published his first short story, artists and writers were subject to censorship under Hungary’s Communist regime, and he was taken in for questioning by the police, who interrogated him about his anti-Communist views and took away his passport.

Krasznahorkai was undeterred. In 1985, he published his subversive debut novel, “Satantango,” about life in a poor, crumbling hamlet, which was a literary sensation in Hungary. “Nobody, myself included, could understand how it was possible to publish ‘Satantango’ because it’s anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system,” he said in a 2018 Paris Review interview.

“Satantango,” set on a collectivist farm that hasn’t functioned in years, centers on many of the themes that define Krasznahorkai’s work — it features ordinary people who are filled with an ambient sense of paranoia and confusion, facing uncertainty as social systems start to fray.

“He doesn’t deal with grand politics, he’s dealing with the experiences of people who live within societies that are decaying and falling apart,” said the poet George Szirtes, who translated “Satantango” and several other works by Krasznahorkai.

Tarr filmed an adaptation, which lasts for over seven hours, in 1994. In an interview on Thursday, he recalled reading the book in one night and asking if he could turn it into a movie, only to find the author annoyed to be woken up during Easter holidays. The novel was filled with “these poor people, these miserable people,” Tarr said, but Krasznahorkai gave them a rare “dignity.”

Szirtes said that Krasznahorkai never expected his books — filled with endless clauses and sub-clauses — to catch on with a wide international audience.

“The books can look daunting in some ways, simply because there is no break in them,” Szirtes said.

In recent decades, Krasznahorkai has received a stream of accolades outside his home country. In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize, which at the time was awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific novel.

In the United States, New Directions has published a dozen of his books in translation, and more are forthcoming, including “Zsömle Is Gone,” a satire about an elderly retired electrician living in the countryside who believes he’s a descendant of Hungarian royalty.

Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, said one of the most striking things about Krasznahorkai’s work is his ability to weave unexpected humor into bleak stories.

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Laszlo Krasznahorkai is known for a prose style that captures confusion and paranoia. Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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Imagine a humanoid robot that walks as you do… and never stops working.

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