All those long-lasting, juicy vegetables in my fridge — the celery, radishes, fennel, turnips, carrots — have come in handy these past weeks (four, but, hey, who’s counting?). They’ve kept me rich in salad when the lettuces run out between market runs. The trick is to turn these sturdy roots practically into gossamer — or…
Condé Nast, the most glittering of all magazine publishers, is the latest media casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. Roger J. Lynch, the chief executive of the company behind Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, sent a memo on Monday to 6,000 employees around the world to inform them of an austerity plan that includes…
Some people are perfecting their laminated pastry, their sourdough boules or, at the very least, simmering through their stash of dried beans. But others of us are relearning multiplication tables or bouncing a baby on one hip while fielding emails with a nondominant hand. The cooking projects may call us, but they’ll have to wait.…
SHITARA, Japan — More than three centuries of tradition rest on Mao Takeshita’s narrow shoulders. Mao is 6 years old and swaddled in a heavy kimono, her face covered in the thick white greasepaint of a Kabuki actor. Before her, an audience of hundreds sits on tatami mats. She steps forward, toward the footlights, and…
Good morning. I miss restaurants. I miss the bustle of them when everyone in them is in sync, from the customers in the dining room to the cooks in the kitchen, the hosts and captains and servers seeing around corners, hospitality phasers set to stun. I miss the clatter and hum, the music of conversation,…
On a rainy day in November I dropped a postcard into the “international” slot outside the post office in Greymouth, a quiet town on the western coast of New Zealand’s South Island. It was perhaps the most ambitious of the 145 postcards I sent in 2019, not because of its content, but because of how…
At midmorning, Lisa Carfagna, a marketing staffer for the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, took a brief break from working at home on Long Island and called the Rubins on the Upper East Side. They were doing fine, Seymour Rubin, 89, assured her over a speakerphone. “We try to have a project every day,” said…
Long ago, my man and I agreed to do what’s called “Living Apart Together,” or LAT. Even if we ever marry, I intend to keep my pad in Manhattan and spend a couple nights there alone every week. During this global tragedy, however, we are, by necessity, now living together full time. It has its…
OxyContin, and the aggressive, misleading way that Purdue Pharma marketed it, might have been even more damaging than was previously understood. Recent research shows how the company focused its marketing in states with lighter prescription regulation — to devastating effect. Also, a new version of OxyContin introduced a decade ago — which was meant to…
The question of whether “anyone else” has “been having” strange dreams (“lately”) is perennially popular online. It is a spooky yet comforting query: Has anyone else stumbled onto possible evidence that the universe possesses a finite metaphysical infrastructure occasionally detected by the subconscious? In recent weeks, however, the question has been posed with increasing frequency.…