To channel an unhinged cat lady, Isabelle Huppert wears pointy mustard mules. To embody a diva courting eternal youth, she wears electric purple pumps embellished with crystals. In the business of character building, these are very important details, even if the character appears only once, in a minute-long scene. Six of these scenes make up…
With 1.3 billion people jostling for space, India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases of every kind. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception: The country now has more than six million cases, second only to the United States. An ambitious study of nearly 85,000 of those cases and nearly…
This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences. When I realized March wasn’t going to end like it started, I developed two obsessions. The first was drinking water out of an empty antique whiskey bottle. I liked the feel…
In media appearances and talks with investors, Pfizer’s chief executive nearly always mentions a word that is so politically perilous, most of his competitors shy away from it: October. “Right now, our model — our best case — predicts that we will have an answer by the end of October,” the chief executive, Dr. Albert…
In the first two minutes of Netflix’s hit reality show “Indian Matchmaking,” Sima Taparia, a Mumbai-based matchmaker, declares, “In India, we don’t say arranged marriage. There is marriage and then love marriage.” A large majority of the country’s population that opts to be set up is a testimony to the popularity of this timeless tradition.…
In a sign of just how upside down and surreal the idea of fashion is at the moment, at the end of the Dior show on Tuesday — the first big show of the final week of the collections (yes, they are still going on) — a woman popped onto the runway waving a big…
It was only this past July, when talking to a friend who was quarantining in Tennessee, that I learned that periodical cicadas spend their whole lives underground until it’s time to mate and reproduce and then, almost immediately thereafter, die. She mentioned they were having “a cicada summer,” and she was having a grand old…
In the fall, it used to be you cleaned up every last leaf like mad. It was considered good garden sanitation. But now we know otherwise: That’s bad for the environment, killing beneficial insects that love all the leaf litter, which keeps them warm during the winter, and interrupting the food web. If we arm…
In the fall, it used to be you cleaned up every last leaf like mad. It was considered good garden sanitation. But now we know otherwise: That’s bad for the environment, killing beneficial insects that love all the leaf litter, which keeps them warm during the winter, and interrupting the food web. If we arm…
Jewel, the singer-songwriter, has four pieces of advice when dealing with anxiety: “One is: turn off the news,” she said. “Two is: watch what the environment and the mood that is in your house. Three is: start a gratitude practice. I’d say four is: learn to meditate.” Jewel, 46, who gained fame at the age…