On a rainy spring morning, an old cherry tree was beginning to blossom in a little park along Cherry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Several protesters surrounded the tree to protect it from the New York City workers who were about to cut it down. Police officers moved in, arrested the activists,…
Details
Selling amyl nitrate has been illegal in the United States since 1968, but chemicals called alkyl nitrites are still available for purchase. These chemicals produce a similar effect to amyl nitrate when their vapors are inhaled. The sale of poppers for non-prescribed human consumption is illegal, but many retailers get around this by selling the…
Details
Beautiful clothes are not like beautiful people. A beautiful person has something you don’t, even if you’re beautiful, too: Their beauty can’t be transferred, borrowed or replicated. We can envy or resent or imitate it, but we are always outside it. A beautiful dress, on the other hand, acts like an invitation, beckoning you to…
Details
When hotel or motel guests check into their rooms, they expect at the very least to be greeted with a clean space, a made-up bed and in the bathroom, soap. But what happens when you leave that soap behind? They typically end up in the trash, said Shawn Seipler, the founder of Clean the World,…
Details
LOS ANGELES — Their dogs play together among the canvases, drop cloths and spray cans. They crowd into cars on road trips to each other’s far-flung exhibitions. They sometimes share paint supplies. In an art world that is often competitive, the painters who have come to share a studio in the Boyle Heights neighborhood represent…
Details
If you’d prefer to stay off the reservation sites, you can try calling: Restaurants of a certain era, like Yakitori Totto near Carnegie Hall, sometimes take last-minute reservations over the phone. Or you should join every restaurant obsessive I know in dining out at 6 p.m. Sure, it’ll be on the quiet side when you…
Details
Lil Nas X caused a stir, as he is wont to do, when he arrived on the red carpet at MTV’s Video Music Awards last fall wearing a lavender hybrid outfit — half pantsuit and half off-the-shoulder gown — by Atelier Versace. The aim, explained the rapper, was to telegraph “a mix of masculine and…
Details
Looking Ahead Lord’s Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard, the owners of the seafood-focused Dame in Greenwich Village, are planning a new restaurant, scheduled to open in early fall, and, as Ms. Howard said in an email, inspired by London establishments like St John, Rochelle Canteen and Quo Vadis. “That style of simple, elegant, seasonal British…
Details
San Francisco comes to Hudson Square at Pine & Polk, a newly opened food shop from Lindsay Weiss and Alyssa Golub, New Yorkers who met while working in San Francisco and named their store for two of that city’s streets. They’ve filled the shelves with a quirky assortment of food products they like, from producers…
Details
In kitchen mythology, no archetype is more potent than the grandmother, and most powerful of all is the nonna. Even if you’re not Italian, you probably have an idea how the archetypal Italian grandmother looks and, more to the point, how she cooks. Pick a major cooking website and you can look up recipes for…
Details