Carter Williams, Who Unshackled Nursing Home Residents, Dies at 97

In journal articles, conferences, congressional hearings and meetings with regulators, Carter Catlett Williams illuminated the miseries of nursing home residents with the sympathetic and descriptive powers of a novelist. She told stories like that of Miss Cohen, whose restrictive diet prohibited the “warm, fragrant chunk of challah” she had eaten on Friday nights her whole…

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What I Learned From Loving Mapo Tofu

Anyone who says tofu is bland or boring hasn’t eaten mapo tofu, the intoxicatingly spicy, fragrant dish from the Sichuan Province of China. Unlike the gentle Vietnamese tofu dishes I grew up with in Southern California, “mapo,” as some casually refer to it, first captured my attention as a teenager in the early 1980s, when…

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The Sunset Strip Stirs Again

Few patches of America have had a greater influence on pop culture than a storied 1.7-mile stretch of Los Angeles, where movie stars, mobsters and musicians all went to blow off steam. From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s first dates to John Belushi and River Phoenix’s final speedballs, the Sunset Strip saw it all. But…

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Shopping for Footstools

When it’s time to kick back and put your feet up at the end of the day, one piece of furniture is essential: the footstool. But the usefulness of a footstool, sometimes called an ottoman or pouffe, doesn’t end there. It’s a versatile piece of furniture that supports any number of activities. “They’re very multifunctional,”…

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