Love Letter: Are You a Good Friend?

Love Letter is a weekly email about relationship highs, lows and woes. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. Let’s face it, we’re all busy and sometimes it’s easy to take our loved ones for granted, especially our friends. This week in Love Letter, our newsletter about the highs, lows and…

Chicken, Chickpeas, Lemon, Yes

Hi and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. Perhaps you or someone you know exclusively had candy for dinner last night? Or candy and French fries? Candy and string cheese? It happens. Yesterday, somehow, instead of lunch I had half a chocolate-chip scone, a slice of sourdough bread with paprika butter, a piece of cheesecake (a…

5 Rural Retreats Worthy of a Detour

There’s a town in Virginia called Rural Retreat, just off the old Lee Highway in Wythe County. The population: 1,500, give or take. As a concept, getting away from it all has broader appeal. This fall, Canyon Ranch — a pioneer in wellness long before it was a marketing bonanza — will open a dedicated…

These Ingredients Deserve Your Attention

I used to think that paprika and parsley were just for show — nothing more than powdery red dashes on creamy deviled eggs, and verdant speckles breaking up the brown monotony of beef stew. Pretty, but expendable. I understood the herbal intensity of parsley when I tasted whole leaves mixed into a butter lettuce salad.…

A Missed Flight Leads to a Connection

Once upon a “magical airline ticket,” Brooke Watson and Nelson Madubuonwu made a connection that brought them to a special place in each other’s hearts. “Everything happens for a reason,” said Ms. Watson, a 28-year-old senior data scientist with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. Ms. Watson and Mr. Madubuonwu, a 28-year-old product…

Should I Take Fish Oil?

In 1971, a team of Danish researchers found that an Inuit population in Greenland had lower cholesterol levels and incidence of heart disease than Danes and Inuits who lived in Denmark. A theory arose: The indigenous people’s high marine-fat diet gave them heart protections. Since then, fish oil and omega-3 fatty acids — the health-boosting…

The New Long Weekend

For most people, long weekends usually run from Friday to Sunday, a surge that often means higher travel costs. But what if we tinkered with the timing to reset the weekend as Saturday to Monday? Would we save money? Depending on where you go and stay, the answer is yes, from somewhat to substantially. The…