Tucked inside two early Georgian townhouses in the Greenwich area of London, the Fan Museum opened in 1991 “to promote awareness and appreciation of the diverse history, culture and artistry of fans and fan making,” according to its website. And on a recent sunny Saturday in the museum’s trompe l’oeil-painted Orangery, its founder, Hélène Alexander,…
Tucked inside two early Georgian townhouses in the Greenwich area of London, the Fan Museum opened in 1991 “to promote awareness and appreciation of the diverse history, culture and artistry of fans and fan making,” according to its website. And on a recent sunny Saturday in the museum’s trompe l’oeil-painted Orangery, its founder, Hélène Alexander,…
In her workshop on Suomenlinna, an island fortress begun in 1748 to protect Helsinki, now the Finnish capital, from Russian invasions, Sini Majuri carries out her craft, the centuries-old art of glassmaking. But behind the arched doors of her studio, which was once an armored chamber, the 40-year-old artist uses glass as a medium to…
After Mr. Ertegun died in 2006 of injuries suffered in a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Manhattan, his wife continued the couple’s philanthropies. In 2015, her $9 million gift created an atrium for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2017, her $1.4 million pledge helped restore a substructure under the fourth-century Church of…
Henry A. Kissinger, the powerful diplomat who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and accused of being a war criminal for his realpolitik approach to foreign affairs, had a kind of second career on the society circuit, especially in the years after he served as secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Even…
“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.”…
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…