Is Your Fireplace Ready for Winter?

If you’re lucky enough to have a wood-burning fireplace, cold weather comes with a silver lining: an excuse to build a roaring fire. “Fire becomes this really amazing focal point for a room, whether it’s traditional or modern,” said the New York-based interior designer Thom Filicia. “There’s just something poetic, sexy and inviting about gathering…

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Margaret Atwood Offers Her Vision of Utopia

Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s foremost writers of dystopian literature, having imagined such worst-case horrors as a theocracy that forces fertile women to bear children for the rich (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and a bioengineered virus capable of eradicating humankind (“Oryx and Crake”). But she is also a profound optimist and pragmatist. Despite real-life…

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Hanukkah Sweets and Dips

Yes, there are likely to be latkes, but what else can you offer for a gathering on one of the eight nights that Hanukkah is celebrated? Daniel Soskolne and Loren Abramovitch, Brooklyn-based caterers, have assembled the Friday box, a gift box of Israeli and Palestinian dips, spreads and pickles, ready to serve with a generous…

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