As the year’s end approaches, most Americans get bombarded by emailed and snail-mailed requests for donations to all manner of charities, A to Z. I’m an easy target, a softy readily seduced by impassioned pleas to help improve the well-being of people, animals and the environment, and I often respond to more appeals than my…
Mehdi Menouar, originally from Casablanca, Morocco, is a founder of Meska Sweets, created to share a taste of his homeland. His assorted cookies, classics like cornes de gazelle (gazelle horns or almond crescents), are traditional teatime treats, as are honey-sesame chebakia and a type of Moroccan macaron, though he innovates these with flavors like matcha.…
Back in 1872, a group of Norwegian immigrants formed the Nansen Ski Club in Berlin, N.H., at Mount Washington. It is still in operation. In 2015 Tamworth Distilling & Mercantile in nearby Tamworth — owned by Steven Grasse, who created the brand Hendrick’s Gin — produced an aquavit for the club as a fund-raiser to…
The sweet spot, when it comes to buying caviar, is quality that costs less than $100 an ounce. This season there are several options for sturgeon varieties like transmontanus (white sturgeon) and baerii at that price, and some for less than $50. At those prices, you can forget genuine osetra. Passmore Ranch sells Circle 41…
The hiking trail leading to the Morada del Diablo volcano (the Devil’s Dwelling) crossed a field of blackened lava, congealed during the last ice age. Black lizards covered with white speckles, known as lagartijas Magallanicas, skittered across the ground, and the desiccated corpse of a guanaco, a wild grazer related to the llama, baked beneath…
In mid-October, researchers in California published a study of Civil War prisoners that came to a remarkable conclusion. Male children of abused war prisoners were about 10 percent more likely to die than their peers were in any given year after middle age, the study reported. The findings, the authors concluded, supported an “epigenetic explanation.”…
As recently as the early 1960s, air travel was still glamorous and exciting; you dressed up to get on a plane, and looked forward to the food aloft. That was when Trans World Airlines opened a futuristic new terminal, designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen at what was then best known as Idlewild and…
For moneyed Americans, most of the past year has felt like 1929 all over again — the fun, bathtub-gin-quaffing, rich-white-people-doing-the-Charleston early part of 1929, not the grim couple of months after the stock market crashed. After a decade-long stock market party, which saw the stocks of the S. & P. 500 index create some $17…
WACO, Tex. — It’s an unlikely tourist town. A flat, dusty stretch, Waco was until recently best known in Texas as the halfway point between Dallas and Austin, or Baylor University’s college town. Nationally, it was most famous for its proximity to the 51-day standoff between the F.B.I. and Branch Davidians in 1993 that resulted…
When it comes to her career, the actress Felicity Jones is game for taking on a range of roles, including the fierce Jyn Erso in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “On the Basis of Sex,” the biopic on the Supreme Court justice that will be out on Dec. 24.…