My wife is the second of four children who were raised in a frugal, middle-class household. To supplement her wardrobe, she babysat as a girl to earn money to buy clothes. She also sewed many of her outfits. Out of the blue — 50 years later — her younger sister confessed that she and their…
Peering through the windows of the storefront at the corner of Broadway and Canal Street, it might seem like just another upscale boutique. Inside, luxury handbags — Dior’s Lady D-lite, Louis Vuitton’s Loop, Loewe’s Puzzle bag, Telfar’s Shopping Bag, and several Hermès Birkins among them — are arranged on a grid of white shelves and…
In John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” there’s a scene in which a father asks a second-grade teacher, at parents’ night, why the art her students make is so especially brilliant. “Look at the first grade,” he says to her. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second…
To make a stodgy cake is human. To soak that cake in sweet milk is divine. The long and sometimes boozy history of soaked cakes is a varied and delightful category of the human baking experience. For reasons from old bread to stale pastry to clumsy baking, we have learned, with time and ingenuity, to…
On a crisp spring morning, I trusted a horse — a bay named Sino — to show me the vast Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico. Red rock walls rose beside us as we wove back and forth across a shallow creek separating ponderosa pine on the shady south side of Rocky Canyon from barrel…
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India abruptly changed her country’s constitution in 1971 and abolished the Privy Purse, a government allowance for the country’s former princely rulers, she also moved to nationalize their storied treasuries. Among the maharajahs, nizams and nabobs that once ruled the subcontinent, this set off a frenzy as they scurried…
This series of exercises focuses on important muscles in the legs and torso we use every day. No equipment (and very little space) necessary.
The Biden administration on Tuesday proposed removing medical debt from the credit reports of more than 15 million Americans, making it easier for them to qualify for car, home and small-business loans. The proposed rule, which will go through a public comment period, would not take effect immediately. It would forbid health care providers to…
He sits forlornly on a floating staircase, his body slightly slumped and his limbs in his lap, gazing out floor-to-ceiling windows into the summer foliage beyond. He seems to be contemplating something — perhaps the meaning of life itself — as the camera shifts around to the front to reveal his true condition. He’s not…
Morrie Markoff, a supercentenarian blogger and scrap-metal sculptor who was believed to be the oldest man in the United States and whose brain has been donated for research on what is known as super-aging, died on June 3 at his home in downtown Los Angeles. He was 110. He had two strokes in recent weeks,…