Welcome. On a recent virtual visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I stopped into the Thorne Miniature Rooms, a series of dollhouse-scale dioramas, created by Narcissa Niblack Thorne in the 1930s and ’40s, depicting dozens of “period rooms”: a mid-19th-century New York parlor; the living room of an old Cape Cod cottage; an English…
Details
Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Friday that their Covid vaccine is effective against one of the mutations present in the new contagious variants identified in Britain and South Africa. Independent experts said the findings were good news, but cautioned that each of those coronavirus variants has several other potentially dangerous mutations that have not yet…
Details
Hi, friends, and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. Margaux Laskey filling in for Em today. What a roller coaster of week. How are you doing? I’m trying to focus on the bright spots: My kids. My Christmas tree. (Yup, it’s still up.) What’s for dinner. Looking for something to cook has become a delicious daily…
Details
Growing up in the United States Virgin Islands, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith saw firsthand what can happen in a community with limited access to health care. Her father, Moleto “Bishop” Smith Sr., was only in his 40s when he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partly paralyzed and with slurred speech. The cause was high…
Details
In the early stages of a global push to distribute the coronavirus vaccine to those who need it most — a process that has, so far, managed to be both hectic and slow — some health officials have turned to an unexpected tool: the ticketing website Eventbrite. Before the pandemic, the platform was a place…
Details
By Charanna Alexander For many of us, 2020 hammered home the importance of community. We found that the support of our friends, family and loved ones (near and far) carried us through difficult days and moments of despair. Logan Ury, the author of this week’s Modern Love essay, writes that her circle of support became…
Details
For all the personal technology introduced and popularized in 2020 — upscale fitness bikes, at-home Covid tests, game consoles new and old — the personal computer lands on the list with a bit of a thud. PCs lack the novelty of other gadgets, but they’re practical, essential even, in a year when work, school and…
Details
Humans have relied on plants for their healing properties as long as we’ve been incarnated on this planet. Sumerian clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia contained instructions for the herbal preparation of more than 200 different plants, including poppy and mandrake. A Neanderthal burial site discovered in the 1960s contained branches of a bush known to…
Details
Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. As Congress debated the COVID relief package, a joke ricocheted around Twitter to the effect that our stimulus checks had been bargained down to a pair of Parade underwear. By that point, the ubiquity of the brand, especially on the platform,…
Details
The celebrated film My Neighbor Totoro can serve as a much-needed distraction right now, especially during a week of an otherwise dreadful news cycle. The uplifting storyline follows two young sisters who escape the grim reality of their hospitalized mother by exploring a new home and a lush countryside. Along the way, they meet magical…
Details