It’s a big summer for 50th anniversaries: there’s Woodstock, the Stonewall riots and the Manson murders. But for watch geeks, only one matters: the Omega Speedmaster and its journey to the moon. Sure, three astronauts tagged along. And as every watch lover knows, they were outfitted with Omega’s storied Speedmaster Professional, known, forever after, as…
THE PANDEMIC CENTURYOne Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and HubrisBy Mark Honigsbaum448 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $29.95. Some of the scenes in Mark Honigsbaum’s “The Pandemic Century” were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head. Midway through the book, I was picturing a doctor climbing the front steps of a…
The Los Angeles-based perfumer Ezra Woods grew up in the 1990s surrounded by food and flowers. The florist business his parents ran — the Woods, which catered to celebrities and the Four Seasons Hotel — was across the street from Mezzaluna, the Brentwood trattoria that vaulted to notoriety during the O. J. Simpson trial. The…
FORT WORTH — The 3-year-old boy who could upend a 40-year-old law aimed at protecting Native American children barreled into the suburban living room, merrily defying his parents’ prediction that he might be shy. He had a thatch of night-black hair and dark eyes that glowed with mischievous curiosity. As he pumped a stranger’s hand…
Dolly Parton, dressed in a sequined lilac pantsuit with black piping and matching butterfly wings, stood on an outdoor stage on a recent Friday morning. Behind her was a 52-foot sculpture of a “Wildwood Tree,” with 620 acrylic butterflies. She was commemorating Wildwood Grove, a new six-acre addition to Dollywood, her theme park in Pigeon…
In July 2015, after the United States women’s national soccer team had won its third World Cup final, securing its place as the dominant women’s international soccer team; after its winning game became the most-watched soccer game in United States history, with an average of 25.4 million viewers (more than the N.B.A. finals, more than…
Nicole Darin had always dreamed of a Paris honeymoon. When she and her new husband, Michael Jenkins, arrived in the city in August 2017, they knew they wanted to capture their trip in the same way they did their Washington wedding: with a professional photographer. “Leaving it up to a random tourist to capture us…
Here’s a news flash: Guys don’t like shopping for underwear. Luckily, the same retail forces that disrupted razors, eyeglasses, luggage, mattresses and hair-loss treatments, have set their sights on men’s drawers. In the last decade, a handful of upstart labels are trying to dethrone old faithfuls like Hanes and Calvin Klein. Hate going to the…
An island of glacier-tumbled rock, covered in trees, sits in the cold waters of Lake Michigan. On the horizon, it looks like the gathering of night. This is Wisconsin’s Rock Island State Park, where my love of nature began. Thirty years ago I spent part of a summer there with a troop of the Polish…
If love is a kind of deep knowledge, then it’s possible no one loves beets more than Irwin Goldman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He once spent about 15 years developing a beet variety that was rainbow-hued and crunchy and sweet, like a carrot. “I’d been working with yellow beets…