Playful Waves at Rockaway Beach

Keziah Weir swam and bobbed around the water at Rockaway Beach on the southern edge of Queens in August 2014 while Daniel James Feller surfed playful waves on his white shortboard nearby. Their mutual friend, who Mr. Feller knew from high school, and Ms. Weir knew from Bard College, from which she graduated, introduced them…

An Instant Connection Needed No Translation

In the last four months, Senay Imre and Robert Kris, both 34, have had to contend with travel bans, quarantines, flight restrictions, safety distancing and a rescinded curfew order — all ramifications of the coronavirus — before they finally married June 9 in Istanbul. Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, officiated at the Florya lstanbul…

Toxic Ghosts

My father is dying, besieged by both emphysema and a metastatic colon cancer that’s migrated to his lungs. I shudder in recognition because I’ve nearly been killed twice by raging diseases: An unusually aggressive prostate cancer, and an uncontrollable ulcerative colitis. What haunts Dad and me all these decades later, as we help each other…

Food That’s a Business and a Comfort

This article is part of Owning the Future, a series on how small businesses across the country are coping with the coronavirus pandemic. Azalina Eusope cries every day. “But the food comforts me,” said the 41-year-old chef and owner of Azalina’s, a Malaysian restaurant business in San Francisco. “Ten years ago, my business started off…

Missing Those Old Familiar Places

OK, I’ve finally gone around the bend. I’m sitting in my Manhattan studio and listening to the “Colonel Bogey March” from “The Bridge on the River Kwai” on YouTube. I’m checking out other Mitch Miller hits that were on some record my parents had more than a half-century ago. I’m even singing along to old…