7 New Escapes in the Caribbean

If your idea of a winter vacation means trading snowmen for sand castles, it’s time to make your Caribbean escape. From Anguilla to Turks and Caicos, new hotels have sprung up across the region, including an off-the-grid, eco-chic hideaway, a getaway beside one of the largest reef systems in the world, and a resort steps…

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Have We Reached Peak Christmas Ornaments?

American consumers’ spending on winter holidays including Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa has grown, rising from some $567.6 billion in 2012 to around $889.3 billion in 2021, according to data from the National Retail Federation, a trade group. Among the 93 percent of Americans that celebrate Christmas, according to a 2019 Gallup poll, a growing share…

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American Rituals

Abiquiú, New Mexico Photography by Justin Kaneps At the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a remote abbey beside the Chama River in northern New Mexico, some two dozen Benedictine monks begin their days in darkness. At 3:30 a.m. one Sunday this past winter, a bell summoned the monks to vigils, the night prayer. Under…

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Happy Birthday, Omicron

A single subvariant is not gaining all of the new mutations, however. Ben Murrell, a computational biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues are tracking more than 180 Omicron subvariants that have independently gained mutations causing them to grow faster than BA.5. These subvariants are going through a process that Charles Darwin…

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