Good morning. A few summers ago, long before the pandemic came to upend our lives and economy, my friend and colleague Tejal Rao wrote a beautiful column for The Times about how she met the man who would become her life partner. The story was about how he enjoyed oysters — “keenly and quietly, without…
For some newlyweds, celebrating their first anniversary means eating a helping of their preserved wedding cake together. The cake-freezing ritual stems from a 19th-century convention in which partners saved the top tier for their first child’s christening (with some believing it to be an omen of good luck). Nearly 46 percent of brides and grooms…
COLD SPRING, N.Y. — I’ve been cheating, and it’s likely you have been too: Six feet apart is a lot farther away than most people seem to hope it is. I know this because at the recent reopening of Magazzino Italian Art, the museum of postwar and contemporary work here in the Hudson Valley, I…
While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state. The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus,…
If your town is partly closed or you’re wary of travel during the Covid-19 pandemic, it might feel as if your phone’s map app is just sitting there gathering digital dust. But even if you’re not tapping Apple’s Maps or Google Maps to explore an exotic vacation spot or to belt out turn-by-turn directions on…
The relationship between photographer and subject has been fraught since long before Susan Sontag characterized it as part of the “shady commerce between art and truth” in her 1977 collection of essays On Photography. Photographers, after all, make the eye of the beholder literal, placing the subject consistently at their mercy to be idealized, stripped…
In decades of writing about gardening, I have covered outbreaks and subsequent attempts at control of many invasive pests, from the hemlock woolly adelgid to the emerald ash borer. But there’s one I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I learned of it in 2013. Coming soon to a backyard or a forest…
This article is part of a series exploring how the Americans With Disabilities Act has shaped modern life for people with disabilities. Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Ask any expectant couple what they hope…
At the end of February, just as the coronavirus was beginning to cast its pall over Europe, an elite crowd that included the likes of Anna Wintour, Jeff Bezos and Seth Meyers gathered in the gilded 19th-century halls of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris to watch Diane von Furstenberg be awarded…
Dear Tripped Up, I’m booked on a Cunard Line trans-Atlantic cruise in May 2021. The reservation was made using credit from an April sailing that was canceled due to Covid-19. Because I canceled my reservation a week before Cunard itself canceled the sailing, I was not given the opportunity to get a refund. But I…