Love Letter: Knowing Your Trigger

For two decades, Julie Buckner Armstrong would walk into the street to avoid the staghorn ferns that thrived in her Florida neighborhood. She didn’t know why. In her Modern Love essay, “Who’s Afraid of a Lovely Fern?” Ms. Armstrong pieces together why the sight of a staghorn fern would make her shudder. [Like this newsletter?…

The Pasta You Need

This isn’t a newsletter about Thanksgiving. But it is a newsletter about the days leading up to Thanksgiving, three weeknights for fast, easy dinners. My personal guidelines for those days: Make everything as simple as possible. Don’t cook or eat anything that echoes the sweet and mushy dishes (I say this with love) of the…

Celebrate the Season ‘20s Style

Paris in the 1920s was a continual celebration of of creativity, of artistry, culture, and joie de vivre all set to the rhythm of jazz. As effervescent as champagne and as exuberant as a weekend-long fete, the sophisticated decade sparkles with sartorial influence. Once revolutionary and now iconic, the fashion trends of les années folles…

How to Manage a Holiday Gift List in 2022

Olatowun Candide-Johnson Founder and chief executive of Gaia Africa; Lagos, Nigeria Buying smaller, more useful gifts like books and planners for family members is Ms. Candide-Johnson’s gifting strategy this year as, she said, “the naira is shaky” and she has less disposable income than in the past. “This time it’s not going to just be,…