In 1848, the British East India Company gave the botanist Robert Fortune a mission: smuggle live tea bushes out of China against the emperor’s strict edicts and plant them in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, to propagate a new tea industry under British control. The heist took years. The plants struggled to flourish in…
The Gucci Cruise 2020 show is about to start in Rome, Italy. Catch all the action, from start to finish, below. Starr Bowenbank Editorial Fellow Starr Bowenbank is an editorial fellow at ELLE.com who writes about all things pertaining to news, pop culture, and entertainment.
While most athletes favor high-performing and comfortable garments for competition, Serena Williams also dresses with political intention. The tennis champion returned to the French Open in Paris Monday in a custom outfit decorated with inspiring words to silence her detractors and remind the world exactly who she is. “Queen,” “Champion,” “Mother,” and “Goddess” were the…
The powder room is the hummingbird of the home: a room so small you may wonder whether it’s a room at all. (There’s a reason real estate agents call it a half bathroom.) No matter how diminutive, though, it’s a space that can be used to create an outsize design statement. “A powder room is…
The scene played out for years. Twice a week, in the late afternoon, above the Shun Lee Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a creaky elevator would open, and out would step an elderly man. Thin as a rail, with a sparse mustache, he would sometimes have little idea about where or…
BUKCHON, South Korea — The soldiers descended upon the village, torching its homes and corralling residents into a schoolyard. After screening out relatives of military members and the police from the gathered crowd, the soldiers divided those remaining — men, women and children — into groups of 30 to 50, and dragged them away. When…
I was a month shy of turning 16 when a red-faced man in a white coat told me I had been born without a uterus. With a huge dark desk between us, he told me I would never menstruate, and would need plastic surgery to correct the anomaly of my vaginal opening that was a…
BEIJING — In all likelihood, the enduring physical legacy of China’s internet boom will not be the glass-and-steel office complexes or the fancy apartments for tech elites. It will be the plastic. The astronomical growth of food delivery apps in China is flooding the country with takeout containers, utensils and bags. And the country’s patchy…
PASADENA, Calif. — The engineer’s mantra, said Frances Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, is: “Keep it simple, stupid.” But Dr. Arnold, who last year became just the fifth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is the opposite of stupid, and her stories sometimes turn…
Inspired by reports of a second patient apparently freed of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, scientists are pursuing dozens of ways to cure the disease. But now, researchers must reckon with a longstanding obstacle: the lack of women in clinical trials of potential H.I.V. treatments, cures and vaccines. Women make up just…