For decades, the idea of standing properly upright carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decay. In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, the workplace and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of physicians, educators and health officials that formed…
Asiah Janai James was feeling spontaneous in August 2014 when she invited her co-worker, Gerald Leon Cannon II, to meet up with her at the Afropunk Festival in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Ms. James had been in a series of serious relationships, but when Mr. Cannon called, she was learning to “go with…
From the moment Marc Julius Reyes laid eyes on Elaiza Joyce Ramos, he was smitten. “Elaiza was the only girl at school that caught my interest on Day 1,” Mr. Reyes said. But this love-at-first-sight tale, which began on June 13, 2011, with two high school sophomores at a school in Quezon City, Philippines, didn’t…
In June 2018, Billy Jacobson met a guy on the dating app Grindr whom he recognized from the internet. At the time, he’d been watching a lot of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and had come across a video of Evan Ross Katz, then a senior style editor at the media company Mic, interviewing the contestants Trixie…
“You cannot use my dog to attract other girls,” my ex emailed from Taiwan. She could see on social media that I had been on a ski tour with a woman, and there were photos of the dog, Bhoga, bounding downhill in the broken snow of our ski tracks. Not that I believed she had…
It never bothered Benjamin Andrew Krauss in the slightest if Shana Gabrielle Mansbach took a call from Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, while they were out to dinner, and then ran off to draft a letter or a speech. “That happened not infrequently,” said Mr. Krauss, 40, who knew the situation all too…
Sometime in the late 18th century, a sign appeared outside a shambly butcher’s hut in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon: “The Immortal Shakspeare was born in this house,” it announced, using a then common spelling of his name. Devotees began making pilgrimages — dropping to their knees, weeping, singing odes: “Untouched and sacred be thy…
Federal regulators have discovered fragments of bird flu virus in roughly 20 percent of retail milk samples tested in a nationally representative study, the Food and Drug Administration said in an online update on Thursday. Samples from parts of the country that are known to have dairy herds infected with the virus were more likely…
A stone pulpit in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is no place the chef José Andrés expected to be when he created the food charity World Central Kitchen nearly 15 years ago. But on Thursday he stood there, eulogizing seven of the organization’s workers who were killed in the Gaza Strip while trying to…
Penny Simkin, a childbirth educator and author who was often described as the “mother of the doula movement,” died on April 11 at her home in Seattle. She was 85. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her daughter, Linny Simkin. Ms. Simkin, a physical therapist turned birth educator, was a pioneer in helping women have…