Oleg Cassini seduced me. It wasn’t his thatch of thick white hair, trim frame or silky continental drawl that sent my imagination into overdrive, but his outsize gift for spinning tales. Cassini was 91 when we spoke in 2005: best known then as Jacqueline Kennedy’s designer, the silver-tongued bon vivant who helped shape her image…
You’re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at dearmaya@nytimes.com. “There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now O.K. to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly…
Independence Day, or the Fourth of July as most of us call it, commemorates the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, a written resolution announcing the United States’ freedom from British rule. (The legal separation actually happened two days before, on July 2.) In our founding fathers’ honor, let’s…
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Last Tuesday, as men in penny loafers descended on this golfers’ paradise, Stephen Malbon surveyed the backyard of a Spanish Colonial mansion and lit up a fat blunt. A hundred or so people had come to celebrate a collaboration between his apparel brand, Malbon Golf, and Beats, the headphone maker. “There’s…
Booming out of a small speaker in the corner of the cafeteria at Avenues, a private school in Chelsea in Manhattan, a recorded voice asked, “Can you hear me?” It belonged to Woldy Reyes, 32, a hearing-impaired Filipino-American chef who as a child pretended to be fully deaf and didn’t speak, afraid that he sounded…
Headliner Lamia’s Fish Market Forget the typical seagoing décor often found in fish restaurants: running lights, ropes and nets, and taxidermied sailfish. Lamia Funti has taken an over-the-top approach, in the style of Farallon in San Francisco, to her restaurant’s dining areas. There’s a glittering mermaid amid gilded fish in relief, mirrors that look like…
Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, who founded and led a 47-year-long study that identified sex differences in the risk factors for major diseases of aging, died on June 9 at her home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. She was 84. The cause was cerebral small vessel disease, her daughter, Caroline Connor, said. Dr. Barrett-Connor’s…
WEST HARRISON, Ind. — If you see a steeple in southeastern Indiana, you can be pretty sure that fried chicken is nearby. If you see the steeple in West Harrison, about 20 miles from the Indiana-Ohio-Kentucky border, that chicken is fried across the street at St. Leon Tavern by the owner, Aaron Klenke. Most people…
When a batch of banh beo comes to the table at Van Da, any confusion about how to eat them does not last long. Banh beo, a species of small rice cake, are a favorite afternoon snack in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. Each one is steamed in a ceramic dish just big enough…
In Unhitched, couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward. Peter Genuardi and Olga Heifets met in 2002 in graduate school at Georgetown, where they both received a degree in communications, culture and technology. Their values seemed well matched at the time, and a mutual admiration led…