Let Texans brag about brisket and Carolinians extol pulled pork shoulder. For the rest of us, the ultimate emblem of barbecue — and test of a grill master’s mettle — is ribs. Picture meaty slabs stung with spice, bronzed with smoke and slathered with sticky sweet barbecue sauce. The meat is tender, but not too…
John Roney has been a waiter at J.G. Melon, the old-school burger joint on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, since 1986. He has worked through plenty of urban disasters, including Black Monday, Sept. 11 and Hurricane Sandy. But the coronavirus outbreak posed new challenges. “When the pandemic hit, everything was gone,” Mr. Roney said. “While the…
Christian Willmes surprised Lily Clare McElwee on May 7 with two wooden rings he hand carved from a tree that had fallen near their house during a rainstorm earlier this year in Oxford, England. They were symbols for the date they started dating in 2017 at Oxford College and the date they were supposed to…
My house is not what it used to be. On any given morning, passing through the living room, I might spot a random Amazon package here, a pile of discarded face masks there. There’s a good chance that an open box of art supplies for my daughter’s Zoom summer camp is sitting in a corner…
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — At Wansho Laundry in central Taiwan, most dirty clothes dropped off to be steamed or washed or dry-cleaned end up right back in the hands of their rightful owners, cleaner than when they arrived. Abandoned garments, however, can end up on Instagram. The blouses and skirts and trousers adorn the bodies of…
Ashley Beard was in the second semester of her first year of law school at Howard University in Washington when she accepted a wager from Claudy Bince, who was a second-year law student there. “The bet was that I could not wake up consecutively every day for a week, at some ungodly hour, to go…
Zach Sawyer and Rachel Lindstrom both ended up in Austin, Texas, on a whim. In 2015, Mr. Sawyer, now 33, had gotten out of a serious relationship on the East Coast and had a friend in Austin who offered him a couch. Ms. Lindstrom, also 33, had opted out of grad school for health care…
After 32 years together, it was the advice of a lawyer that finally pushed Susie Bright and Jon Bailiff into matrimony. “It was Covid-19 — we were already devoted but needed to pull the wedding trigger to cover every weird possibility in today’s existential apocalypse,” said Ms. Bright, a well-known vanguard in the sex-positive feminist…
The thread that connects the relationship of Henriette Myrthil, who is known to all as Hank, and Kenneth Balkaran, is their status as front-line medical workers. Ms. Myrthil, now 46, and Mr. Balkaran, now 38, first spotted each other in 2005 at NYU. Langone Health, where she was a unit patient associate and he was…
Bruktaweit Addis and Tif Slama were feeling pretty good about their second date, after having met on the dating app Bumble in March 2016. They had spent their first date chatting about Ms. Addis’s fear of earthquakes and Mr. Slama’s love of Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock, and were planning to spend their second date…