For many, sparkling water is the perfect beverage — versatile and utterly refreshing, able to cleanse the palate and it contains zero calories. And it sure seems to be having a moment. Sales of packaged sparkling water have skyrocketed since the pandemic confined so many seltzer fans to their homes, with MarketWatch reporting a dramatic…
Details
Here are some puzzles, mostly priced between $10 and $200, for the novice or the aficionado. Jigsaw for Beginners Happily, most ordinary jigsaw puzzles announce their difficulty numerically. A 100-, 200- or 500-piece puzzle should satisfy the first-time solver, as should clear images with bright colors, cut into a regular grid pattern. “What is most…
Details
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has plunged the world into a crisis of grief. It has caused the deaths of more than 290,000 people in the United States, many of them grandparents and parents. In New York State alone, 4,200 children lost a parent or caregiver to Covid-19 between March and July,…
Details
Slightly uneven little spheres dusted in cocoa to simulate the soil on a freshly dug fungus — the black Tuber melanosporum — defines a chocolate truffle at its most basic. Inside is a firm yet velvety center, a confection called ganache. Truffles are never cheap, but before you take out the credit card consider the…
Details
And because “there’s no substitute for in-person coat drives,” Ms. Amodio said, her charity has come up with creative ways to stage them. Last month, a school in Atlanta held a coat drive during morning drop off. Masked volunteers collected more than 400 coats through rolled-down windows. There is more demand to feed the hungry.…
Details
This has been a long and winding year, but it’s almost at an end. To solve this puzzle, cut out the pieces of the maze and fit them together to make a rectangle, then find your way through the labyrinth to 2020’s finale. Upon your journey, you will encounter a series of images. Use these…
Details
An independent committee of experts advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday afternoon voted to recommend the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older. That endorsement, which now awaits only final approval by Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., is a key signal to hospitals and doctors that they…
Details
At Novant Health in Winston-Salem, N.C., the new ultracold freezers are ready — enough to eventually house more than 500,000 doses of the first coronavirus vaccine approved in the United States. In Los Angeles, the Cedars-Sinai medical center has installed extra security cameras to protect the secret location of its soon-to-arrive supply of the vaccine.…
Details
Now the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, a federally funded research group, is prospectively collecting data during the pandemic from more than 800,000 women and nearly 100 mammography centers across the country. Millions of women missed their regular mammograms in the first wave of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, about 100,000 women had screening mammograms each…
Details
(Almost Heaven was acquired in 2018 by the Finnish company Harvia, a maker of sauna stoves, among other related items. Mr. Mouw said affably that he was hazed by his new colleagues in Lapland, 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle.) Can’t afford a sauna of your own? Rental is an option. Henning Grentz, 47,…
Details