Most older Americans want to live at home as long as they can, but finding and affording the help they need often isn’t easy. There are severe shortages of home health aides in many parts of the country. Hiring them is costly. And most middle-class people will have to pay for home care themselves if…
It’s a good day when Frank Lee, a retired chef, can slip out to the hardware store, fairly confident that his wife, Robin, is in the hands of reliable help. He spends nearly every hour of every day anxiously overseeing her care at their home on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island near Charleston,…
“I really want to be friends with a whale,” Mikey Day, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, said this week as he stood inside the American Museum of Natural History and discussed his favorite displays. “They just look so magical.” “Sorry, it’s Thursday,” he continued. “I just came from work, and my brain is fried.”…
At the end of my recent trip to Japan, I found myself at Haneda Airport in Tokyo with an hour or so to kill. So I went to the onsen. On the 12th floor of the Villa Fontaine Grand, a hotel attached to the departure terminal, I paid 4,800 yen, or about $33, for access…
Though it was nearly five decades ago, Gay Blackstone can still vividly recall the first time she was sawed in half onstage. Her screams were an intended element of the illusion, but nerves and fear made them genuine that time. For Ms. Blackstone, that gig assisting the master illusionist Harry Blackstone Jr. turned into a…
Last year Charlene Truong Launer, a social media content creator, bought a real Christmas tree from a seller on a sidewalk in Manhattan. Ms. Launer, 29, and her husband carried the tree 15 minutes to their apartment in TriBeCa and spent hours setting it up. “I was so excited,” she said. The next morning, however,…
El año pasado, dos días antes de cumplir 29 años, me resbalé con hielo en el restaurante donde trabajaba y me torcí el tobillo. Me dijeron que me quedara en casa para recuperarme, pero enseguida me aburrí e hice lo que haría cualquier soltera con tiempo libre: volver a descargar mis aplicaciones de citas. En…
Deep inside the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, I stood in a corridor observing a melee. The soap opera where I worked was going off the air, and the wardrobe department had filled an empty suite of offices with piles of designer purses and handbags. With a limit of four per person, everything was…
The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, which erupted in early October, has halted international tourism to Israel and severely blunted travel to neighboring countries in a ripple effect spreading across the entire Middle East. While the slowdown in international visitors is only one of the war’s economic repercussions in the region, it poses a…
Stuck at home in 2021, and unsure if he would perform again, he began to write in a more personal way about the place he was from. He turned Strafford into his version of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley. He name-checked Alger Brook Road, his childhood address, and sang, “I’m mean because I grew up in New…