Five years ago, my 17-year-old daughter couldn’t secure a loan to study art and live on campus at our in-state public university. She needed me to co-sign her loans, which I did reluctantly. (I told her they were her responsibility, though.) She graduated with a degree in fine art and $100,000 in debt. She now…
It’s a spring ritual: shopping for plants to fill this year’s pots. The first plant I grab always involves a bit of a ritual, too, aimed at preventing impulse buys that won’t add up to anything visually coherent once I’m back home. I start with a plant with multicolored leaves — an especially showy Coleus,…
LOGANVILLE, Wis. — Brenda Statz remembers the rain on the day they lost Leon, her husband of 34 years. The deluge had fallen for weeks, flooding their fields, delaying the harvest, pounding the roof of the barn where Mr. Statz finished his morning chores, then ended his life. It was Oct. 8, 2018, a Monday.…
To buy or to wait? Given the wild fluctuations of airfare prices, that is a frugal flier’s persistent dilemma. A fare found today may tick up tomorrow, double next week or fall. Now Google and other online travel platforms aim to take the uncertainty out of the equation by offering guarantees or freezes, often on…
Restaurant meals have always been celebration meals for me, but a celebration doesn’t have to mean a birthday. When I was a graduate student, before big exam days, I would hole up in my apartment subsisting on Frosted Flakes and Cheez-Its, then emerge from the shadows to treat myself to what I called Brain Dinner…
The legal effort to ban mail-order abortion pills came along just as the fledgling telehealth industry became a more accepted and entrenched part of abortion care. This week, Hey Jane, one of more than a dozen virtual abortion providers that have no physical locations, began contracting with the insurers Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of…
Bun dau mam tom, the lunch that Hanoi lives for, is almost always bought on the street and often eaten there, too. Like many Vietnamese dishes, it is assembled by the individual diner from a somewhat flexible roster of components. Fried tofu and pressed cold bricks of rice vermicelli are indispensable, as are cucumbers and…
I have notifications turned on for only two Twitter accounts: One is for the city’s alternate-side parking days, and the other is @nymetrowx, an account dedicated to breathless coverage of New York City meteorology. To live here is to be incredibly attuned to the weather — after all, you’re probably going to be out in…
The News The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized an additional round of bivalent booster shots for adults who are 65 and over as well as people with compromised immune systems. The effort is to ensure ongoing protection against Covid, which is still claiming more than 1,300 lives each week. The bivalent shots target…
To See Clearly When people see my 20-year-old son George holding my hand, they often stare. I hold George’s hand as we cross busy streets or navigate through crowded grocery aisles. We learned that George had profound autism at age 3, an intellectual disability at age 6 and bipolar disorder at age 15. He is…