My boyfriend, Jamie, was trying to return an uncomfortably soft mattress he had ordered online. He scheduled a pickup, but when the truck arrived, the driver said he could not accept it unboxed. The mattress had been delivered in an industrially compressed state, and its box was long gone (no mortal could have squeezed the…
It’s not unpaid labor itself that is problematic, research has found. Rather, it’s all the baggage around it — whether it conflicts with someone’s other responsibilities, like paid work, and whether it’s what someone wants to be doing. Social scientists first named these issues more than half a century ago, and they’ve only become more…
During fashion week, we will be spotlighting the small details we saw on the runways that surprised or delighted us. Bring on the sculptural shoes and antique fork jewelry. PARIS — Here is something tricky to accomplish in a shoe: Reminding anyone who sees it that overconsumption and waste are warming the planet and destroying…
Karl Lagerfeld, the culturally omnivorous, furiously prolific designer of Chanel, Fendi and his own line, who died in 2019, was, throughout his career, resolutely focused on the future. Obsessed, even. He believed, he once told The New York Times, in the “old German dictum: ‘no credit on the past.’” He had no truck with hagiographic…
“There’s something calming about her presence,” Mr. Shah said, that put him at ease. A month later, in May 2017, he invited her to spend a day with him and a group of their colleagues at a favorite hangout spot on the Russian River. Mr. Shah got to the location early and, to ensure she…
Tisza Ann Szeremy Bell and Brian Michael Guyer will never know with certainty what quirk of fate caused the dating app Tinder to match them in the spring of 2014. She lived at the time in Bozeman, Mont., while he was 440 miles away, in Park City, Utah. When they connected virtually, she was somewhat…
A month after Rachel Christine Koppelman purchased a mountain bike from Gregory Alan Saxton, in October 2016, it was stolen from the bicycle shop where Mr. Saxton was working as the head mechanic. “When I came into the shop one day while working on the bike, it was gone,” said Mr. Saxton, who was doing…
In the bonus round of a March 2016 episode of “Wheel of Fortune,” Shawn Christopher Tracey Jones had 10 seconds on the clock and very few letters on the board. Pat Sajak, the show’s host, was readying him for defeat. “Obviously it’s challenging, but you know, keep talking. Stranger things have happened,” Mr. Sajak said.…
After it was reported that a typical New York Fashion Week emits up to 48,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, there were calls for the fashion weeks in London, Milan, New York and Paris to rein in their harmful environmental impacts. The booming digital fashion industry, with its virtual runways and NFTs, promises to make…
Leonard Cole, a dentist who became an expert on biological weapons and chronicled in troubling detail a secret U.S. Army program that turned millions of Americans into unwitting germ-warfare guinea pigs in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 18 in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 89. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his…