On a temperate fall afternoon, Vito Vacirca sported a black Borsalino fedora lined with dried turkey-tail mushrooms and violet-tinted sunglasses, a second pair of shades dangling from the neck of his “Fungus Among Us” sweatshirt. He surveyed the display table before him, where there were dozens of recently scavenged mushrooms, including beach-ball-size puffballs the shade…
Ennismore, the hotelier whose portfolio includes boutique brands such as Delano and Mondrian, offers a membership program more akin to a WeWork than a hotel brand. The chain’s Dis-Loyalty program offers no elite status tiers and no points to earn. Instead, for $18 per month (or $216 annually), guests receive 50 percent off stays at…
The last time I went to the Peking Duck House on Mott Street, I drank a lot of good wine. This has nothing to do with the restaurant’s own list and everything to do with its longstanding policy of letting diners bring in wine, free of corkage fees. One of my friends came with a…
In the 1970s and ’80s, when Rainer Judd was growing up at 101 Spring Street in New York’s SoHo with her father, the artist Donald Judd, she’d sit in the building’s open windows, “because no one told me not to,” she said, and because back then, SoHo was a “creaky, dirty, lovely place.” In 1971,…
“The likelihood of this sort of event occurring is extremely rare,” said Dawn Davies, the night sky program manager with the Hill Country Alliance. An amateur astronomer and a NASA eclipse ambassador, Ms. Davies is leading the alliance’s efforts to organize and support eclipse events in the area. Though Saturday provided a test run, she…
My flight to Lagos arrives at dusk, and I slide out to an airport buzzing with activity, commerce and community. For me, it’s also a confusion of crowds after the stillness of a 13-hour flight. Once I am in the car, driving to my parents’ house, I can see shadows along the roadside, forms emerging…
On Monday night in Midtown Manhattan, Neil Patrick Harris, Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Michael Kors danced in their seats, as J. Harrison Ghee, the Broadway actor, sang Aretha Franklin’s classic “Freeway of Love.” Ghee’s performance opened the 17th annual Golden Heart Awards, the major fall fund-raiser for God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that provides…
Pumpkin spice latte season, cuffing season, 12-foot Home Depot skeleton season — October has many an alias. But in my house, it’s borscht season. Growing up, my enjoyment of borscht was reserved to one day a year — Christmas, when my mom made a batch fit to feed a football team using the largest pot…
When Nora Helmer slammed the door on her husband, leaving her marriage with a bang in A Doll’s House, it was the sound heard round the world. And it continues to be: Look at Jessica Chastain’s Tony-nominated turn in the Broadway revival this year. The distance between an 1879 Henrik Ibsen play and a fashion…
The pickers began to arrive at 7 a.m. at the home of Greg and Emily Ernst in Geyserville, Calif., to help harvest their half-acre zinfandel vineyard before the October day reached its 95-degree high. These are not professionals. They are family and friends for whom helping the Ernsts is an annual social highlight. The Ernsts,…