Ever since my wife was a girl, she was close to her stepfather, a lovely man who has now passed away. She always said he was her one and only father, and she had no interest in knowing who her biological father was. Recently, though, she hinted to me that she would like to know…
For years, I dedicated an entire section of my closet to silver. Not jewelry, but clothes. Tube tops threaded with tinsel. Tanks weighted down in diamanté. Halters undulating with waves of sequins. They were advertised as “going-out tops”—flimsy things that I suspect would shudder and wilt if held too close to an open flame—but for…
The bird flu outbreak in American dairy cattle may have begun in January, or even as early as December, a new analysis of genetic data suggests. The Department of Agriculture announced in late March that dairy cattle in Texas and Kansas had tested positive for the virus, called H5N1. It has since reported cases in…
The chef Shota Nakajima goes to bed early and wakes up early. He walks his dog for an hour and a half every day. He doesn’t drink anymore, thriving on a diet of rice with grilled fish and pickles for most of his meals, especially breakfast. Getting to this place in life, a state of…
“Don’t throw it ‘away.’ There is no ‘away.’” That waste-conscious message was scrawled on the back of a decades-old pickup in the Nebraska town where Martha Keen grew up. The doctor who drove it could have afforded a new one, but no: The truck had plenty of life left in it. Onward. The phrase “there…
Laufey, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter, has risen to prominence by taking the trials of today’s dating world — casual relationships, no labels and seemingly endless swiping on apps — and turning them into timeless love songs. Today, Laufey reads Coco Mellors’s essay, “An Anxious Person Tries to Be Chill,” which is about a woman trying to…
The Unstoppables is a series about people whose ambition is undimmed by time. Below, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston explains, in her own words, what continues to motivate her. In a way, I don’t believe in old age. I hear people say, “this hurts” or “that hurts,” and they attribute that pain to old age.…
In the run-up to Meta’s first-quarter earnings report this week, a video image of Mark Zuckerberg suddenly started going viral. Not because of the artificial intelligence assistant he was touting or because of the expected ad revenue growth, but because of the silver chain he was wearing around his neck. “Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement…
This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel. Rabbits appear frequently at the New York Botanical Garden. The one that the public will soon see there, however, isn’t a typical little brown cottontail. About 12 feet tall, this creature…
The stone arches looped solemnly over their shadows, some teetering above the grass, some sinking into it. It was a dazzling January morning, and I was standing in the Park of the Aqueducts, about 20 minutes by metro from central Rome. Here, the ruined arcades of six of the 11 aqueducts that once supplied the…