Angela Duckworth was teaching math when she noticed something intriguing: The most successful students weren’t always the ones who displayed a natural aptitude; rather, they displayed something she came to think of as grit. Later, as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she defined the term — a combination of passion…
Michael C. Fina helped popularize bridal registries, and its Park Avenue store was a destination for Manhattan elites. It provided silver for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration festivities and catered to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Lennox Lewis. But with foot traffic falling more than 80 percent in the last decade, the writing on the…
Photo Credit iStock Q I’ve been reading a lot about rebounding as an excellent exercise for all ages. The benefits seem almost miraculous, but I don’t find any articles in Well about this form of exercise. Have you looked into it? A Many websites do tout almost miraculous benefits from jumping on a rebounder or,…
Photo Credit Illustration by Ben Wiseman This article appeared in the May 25, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Losing weight is simple: Ingest fewer calories than your body burns. But how best to do that is unclear. Most experts advise small reductions in calories or increases in exercise to remove weight slowly…
Photo Credit Illustration by Ben Wiseman This article appeared in the March 9, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Bones should be jarred, for their own good. Past experiments have definitively established that subjecting bones to abrupt stress prompts them to add mass or at least reduces their loss of mass as people…
Photo Credit Got seven minutes? We’ve got the app. Today The New York Times is offering a free mobile app for the popular Scientific 7-Minute Workout and the new Advanced 7-Minute Workout. The workouts, reported by Gretchen Reynolds, our Phys Ed columnist, can now be installed on your smartphone or tablet, or used on your…
Photo Credit Lars Blackmore When The New York Times started Motherlode in 2008, the name was a play on words that marked our entry into the world of parenting blogs. But like many readers, I questioned the name of a parenting report that, by definition, seemed to exclude half of all parents. Over the years,…
Photo Credit Illustration by Abigail Gray Swartz “Can you tell me again, Mommy? Can you tell me who decides whether I get to stay here?” I turn to see my 4-year-old foster son staring at our house through the back window of my car. We’ve just returned from dropping my 5-year-old biological son, Ryan, off…
Photo Credit Joyce Hesselberth Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” after reporting in a newspaper column that she had allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire…
Photo Credit Getty Images Middle school parent-teacher conferences are tomorrow and I can’t bring myself to think about going. It’s not the two hours I’ll wait sitting on hard chairs in the hallway, anticipating my allotted five minutes of playing musical chairs with each teacher. It’s that I haven’t heard a teacher say one nice…