At the end of my recent trip to Japan, I found myself at Haneda Airport in Tokyo with an hour or so to kill. So I went to the onsen. On the 12th floor of the Villa Fontaine Grand, a hotel attached to the departure terminal, I paid 4,800 yen, or about $33, for access…
Though it was nearly five decades ago, Gay Blackstone can still vividly recall the first time she was sawed in half onstage. Her screams were an intended element of the illusion, but nerves and fear made them genuine that time. For Ms. Blackstone, that gig assisting the master illusionist Harry Blackstone Jr. turned into a…
Last year Charlene Truong Launer, a social media content creator, bought a real Christmas tree from a seller on a sidewalk in Manhattan. Ms. Launer, 29, and her husband carried the tree 15 minutes to their apartment in TriBeCa and spent hours setting it up. “I was so excited,” she said. The next morning, however,…
El año pasado, dos días antes de cumplir 29 años, me resbalé con hielo en el restaurante donde trabajaba y me torcí el tobillo. Me dijeron que me quedara en casa para recuperarme, pero enseguida me aburrí e hice lo que haría cualquier soltera con tiempo libre: volver a descargar mis aplicaciones de citas. En…
Deep inside the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, I stood in a corridor observing a melee. The soap opera where I worked was going off the air, and the wardrobe department had filled an empty suite of offices with piles of designer purses and handbags. With a limit of four per person, everything was…
The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, which erupted in early October, has halted international tourism to Israel and severely blunted travel to neighboring countries in a ripple effect spreading across the entire Middle East. While the slowdown in international visitors is only one of the war’s economic repercussions in the region, it poses a…
Stuck at home in 2021, and unsure if he would perform again, he began to write in a more personal way about the place he was from. He turned Strafford into his version of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley. He name-checked Alger Brook Road, his childhood address, and sang, “I’m mean because I grew up in New…
In the end, it may have been the luxury goods that brought down George Santos. Not the lies about going to Baruch College and being a volleyball star or working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Not the claims of being Jewish and having grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust and a mother who died…
Five years ago, the National Institutes of Health abruptly pulled the plug on an ambitious study about the health effects of moderate drinking. The reason: The trial’s principal scientist and officials from the federal agency’s own alcohol division had solicited $60 million for the research from alcohol manufacturers, a conflict of interest and a violation…
The British musician Yazmin Lacey, 35, sings in a mellow, textured voice, often just behind the beat. Her music interlaces jazz, soul, electronica and lovers rock — a style of reggae that nods to her Caribbean heritage (her mother’s from Antigua, her father from Bequia). Even as her arrangements gain layers and intensity, her voice…