It started with “An Inconvenient Truth.” In 2006, Gregg Renfrew watched the Al Gore documentary on climate change, and became convinced that her next business would be one that introduced cleaner, less environmentally damaging products to the market. Ms. Renfrew, who grew up in New York City and its suburbs, had already had a successful…
Seven years ago I lost 60 pounds, but recently I’ve struggled with gaining it back. I’m not alone in my weight struggles. Nor am I alone in the eating disorder I have wrestled with for the last 40 years. It’s the most common eating disorder, according to a meta analysis in the Annals of Internal…
The “33 hour” sale at Dunham’s begins the morning after Thanksgiving and lasts through Monday, when the local schools are closed for deer-hunting season. There are no giant sales on flat-screen televisions or stockpiles of the hottest holiday toy. The big draw is the hot chocolate and the chance to win a $100 gift card.…
People with heart failure experience heart cell loss that can damage the heart muscle to such an extent that they need a transplant. One species of exotic fish, the tetra fish, has the amazing ability to repair its own heart. Can we apply this mechanism to healing human hearts? The tetra fish can regenerate heart…
ONCE, HERBS WERE weapons. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians recorded, in cuneiform, lifesaving prescriptions of myrtle and thyme. The oldest surviving text of Chinese herbal pharmacology, extolling the benefits of ginseng, camphor and cannabis, was set down in the first century A.D. Around the same time, the Greek physician Dioscorides documented the properties of…
MELBOURNE, Australia — On Nov. 9, a Somali-born man named Hassan Khalif Shire Ali set his car on fire in the heart Melbourne’s Central Business District, and then began to attack random bystanders with a knife. Before the police shot and killed Mr. Ali, he managed to kill one man and seriously injure two others.…
Late one night, in the early part of each November, there occurs an annual phantom hour. It creeps into the deserted region from 1 to 2 in the morning, and then vanishes, leaving everything changed. From this moment, 50 degrees is warm, not cold. Sunsets are confined to the realm of memory. Conclaves of blood-red…
Last fall, just a few days into my trip to the Shetland Islands, the Scottish subarctic archipelago across the sea from Norway, I found myself on the top of a cliff face, peering through the fog at a huge rock in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The rock was topped with a spike of white: the…
El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ¿Lo mejor? It’ll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tía, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). The paradox of working in media is that even…
Visitors to Old Havana usually come to the neighborhood to take in its faded beauty, the vintage cars cruising cobbled streets and the colonial buildings dating back to the city’s Spanish roots in the 16th and 17th centuries. This photogenic neighborhood, a Unesco World Heritage site, isn’t typically thought of as a shopping destination. But…