Is Your Fireplace Ready for Winter?

If you’re lucky enough to have a wood-burning fireplace, cold weather comes with a silver lining: an excuse to build a roaring fire. “Fire becomes this really amazing focal point for a room, whether it’s traditional or modern,” said the New York-based interior designer Thom Filicia. “There’s just something poetic, sexy and inviting about gathering…

Margaret Atwood Offers Her Vision of Utopia

Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s foremost writers of dystopian literature, having imagined such worst-case horrors as a theocracy that forces fertile women to bear children for the rich (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and a bioengineered virus capable of eradicating humankind (“Oryx and Crake”). But she is also a profound optimist and pragmatist. Despite real-life…

Day 6: How the White Elephant Party Came to Be

White Elephant, Yankee Swap, Dirty Santa — depending on whom you ask, this holiday gift exchange game, by any name, is either a beloved and quirky custom that celebrates creativity and friendly competition or a depraved, cutthroat, miserly activity that brings out the worst in people. The reporter Jennifer Ashley Wright traces its history back…