How a Salon Host Spends Her Sundays

“There’s a huge hunger among people to connect in real time and to look in people’s eyes,” said Susan MacTavish Best, the founder of Posthoc, a salon series with notable speakers, home-cooked meals and music presented in the SoHo loft where she also lives. “The city can be lonely,” she said. “There’s such a sense…

A Muffin to Top Them All

When was the last time you saw a plain corn muffin out in the wild? Not a blueberry corn muffin. Not cornbread. Not fancy Italian polenta cake. I mean a simple, golden-domed corn muffin, like the ones my grandmother used to bake from a Jiffy box mix, except preferably made from scratch. You may not…

‘Our Love Is Built to Last’

On Easter Sunday in 2014, Anthony Hemingway, a director and producer, was mingling with fellow congregants after a service at the Potter’s House at One LA in Los Angeles. Through the crowd gathered outside on La Brea Avenue, he noticed a friend chatting up a handsome stranger in a black suit, bow tie and round-frame…

Inside the Fashion Bubble

PARIS — When a parade of black-robed figures files solemnly by, each wielding a long, narrow black scepter, or spear (it was hard to tell), and then carefully mounts the walls of a giant reflecting pool and begins to dip the sticks into the water — and all this happens on the same day that…

The Gift of the Missing Men

I am the daughter of a “holiday man,” a term my grandmother used to describe three generations of our family’s absentee fathers who, like clockwork, would return around Christmas before disappearing again to whereabouts unknown. Back when I was coming-of-age and grappling with the absence of my own father, my grandfather, a former holiday man,…