DETROIT — Colorful little homes are springing up alongside an arid freeway bank in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood here, a few miles northwest of downtown. Although tourists sometimes think the buildings are playthings and knock on the doors, the site is actually intended to help solve desperate urban problems. “Every single house is different on purpose,”…
The listing for the properties — four five-acre parcels of desert scrub near Pioneertown, Calif. — landed in Dave McAdam’s inbox one morning before dawn. By 10 a.m., he was in contract to buy all the lots, sight unseen, for $320,000. One of the parcels had been planted with a cabin, a low-slung, concrete-block one-bedroom…
When Nina Edwards Anker was growing up, her family spent summers and weekends in a shingled cottage in Southampton, N.Y. An expansion of a carriage house originally designed in 1890 by Stanford White, it belonged to a genre typical of the Hamptons. But the version that Ms. Anker — the 48-year-old founder of the Brooklyn…
Women who have a hysterectomy may be at increased risk for depression and anxiety, a new study reports. Researchers used medical records of 2,094 women who had had a hysterectomy without removal of the ovaries, matching them with the same number of women of the same age who had not had the operation. None of…
They come by car and park in color-coded garages set along the perimeter of a cluster-model mall — stores arranged in Stepford neighborhood groupings: Niagara, Hudson Valley, Saratoga. The shops face inward around a series of walkways leading to open-air commons, framed by the pastoral backdrop of low wooded hills. They come by the millions,…
If you travel overseas, be warned: Pickpockets really are out to get you. I don’t mean the light-fingered thieves who try to grab your wallet. I am talking about digital pickpockets: hotels, restaurants and shops that systematically overcharge foreigners who use credit and debit cards in their establishments. A few weeks ago, my family ate…
Getting a lot of vitamin A in your diet is tied to a lower risk for squamous cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer, a review of studies has found. Squamous cell carcinoma, a slow-growing cancer usually found on sun-exposed areas, is easy to treat if found early, although in rare cases it can…
Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock…
ImageFriezes created by the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen wrap the newly renovated Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands.CreditDmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times LEIDEN, the Netherlands — The imposing red stone edifice rises from an otherwise empty area in this old Dutch city like a mesa in the American West, bound —…
Dietary guidelines from groups as diverse as the Department of Agriculture to the World Health Organization urge all of us to eat less red meat — much less. But the authors of four new studies, published on Wednesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, report there is no compelling evidence that reducing consumption of red…