On New Year’s Day, Black American families around the country will sit down to eat a variation on green vegetables and cowpeas, joining in an enduring tradition meant to usher in opportunity in the year ahead. “I don’t let a New Year’s Day go by without having some form of greens, pork and black-eyed peas,”…
The setbacks were evident for travelers around the country. On Christmas Eve morning, mats, blankets and pillows lined the floors of the Twin Cities airport, where people had been forced to sleep the night before. Catherine Lynn, a sales specialist in Watersound, Fla., said she had spent more than two hours on Friday attempting to…
Welcome. When my streaming music service of choice fed me its annual report of my most-listened-to songs from the past year, many were by the pianist Hania Rani. I was unfamiliar with Rani’s work until one of my colleagues, the art director Jaspal Riyait, included Rani’s “F Major” in her Best of 2020 picks. This…
While sitting at a bar with her on-and-off fling, Melody Federer, the writer of this week’s Modern Love essay, gave a stranger the ugly Christmas sweater right off her back. In return for her good deed, he dug into his bag and offered them purple sex tape, used for light bondage. Could this be what…
Hi, old friends! Margaux here, filling in for Em today. Once I file this newsletter, I’m taking off for an almost two-week break. (But with kids at home and 892 presents to wrap before tomorrow morning, I use the term “break” very loosely.) I’m not traveling, but my goal is to watch too many holiday…
“Anguish arising from the inescapability of personal choice and the inability to avoid personal consequences may become a problem for many,” he wrote in a 2011 paper. “For others, exhilaration may come from recognizing that the goal of a vigorous long life may be an attainable one.” James Franklin Fries was born on Aug. 25,…
“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming…
Marriage is a solution to several problems that creates infinite additional problems. Marriage can cure your loneliness or exacerbate it. Marriage can make you feel a lot stronger than you really are and a lot weaker than you really are. Marriage can feel like a soothing meditation retreat or a dirty tryst or a very…
I was working backstage at a production of “The Nutcracker” that was being performed at the Tacoma, Wash., school where my daughter attends kindergarten. Since the company was using the school’s theater, they extended an invitation to the kindergarten ballet class to play Mother Ginger’s children. What an opportunity; I was stoked. But now that…
Joseph McCloud said he has so much love and respect for Emilia Gonzalez, a nurse he met six years ago, that he “could write a book about her.” Instead he wrote a 331-word tribute to her on Instagram, which won the couple a lavish wedding this past fall at the Meritage Resort & Spa in…