The Whitney Museum of American Art is reopening on Thursday, with new safety guidelines that will require visitors to purchase timed tickets in advance. By the time the museum announced its closure in March, our critics had reviewed two remarkable shows: the first New York museum exhibition of the still-mysterious painter Agnes Pelton; and a…
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The comment from Preston G. of San Francisco seemed dismissive and definitive. Over the last month, as this column has been exploring zinfandels that were a step back from the popular over-the-top blockbuster style, he wrote: “Restrained is not authentic to the variety.” Here at Wine School, expressions of historical certainty about wine generally arouse…
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This month we’re going to try something a little different. Ordinarily, I suggest three bottles of the same type of wine. Instead, I want to compare three wines that are closely related but come from different appellations within a larger region, the Northern Rhône Valley of France. Each is made with the syrah grape. But…
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The students who graduated this summer have never faced a more uncertain future. As they navigated the new quarantine normal, we invited college photography graduates from around the country to showcase their skills in the form of fashion images. The models were their nearest and dearest—parents, roommates, siblings, significant others—who were excited to don high…
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Tracy Wait Dowd was in her second-floor apartment in Kingston, N.Y., one night in July when she heard a noise in her kitchen: A bat was fluttering near the overhead light. She did what seemed like the most sensible thing at the time: She went to her bedroom, closed the door and hoped it would…
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I’ve never been an outdoorswoman. Though I’m from Texas, spent pivotal teenage years in Kentucky and grew up around hunters and farmers, there’s a difference between spending time outside and living, cooking and sleeping with nature. Giselle Burgess, a mother of five and a Girl Scout troop leader whom I met while researching a book…
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On a surf outing a few years ago, as I paddled out to the sandbar, I felt something rough and solid brush against my leg. A shadow larger than my shortboard passed in the turquoise water below. I was surfing in the breaks off New Smyrna Beach, Fla., a city known to many as the…
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My husband, our tween son and I moved into a new house at the beginning of the year. We didn’t meet our neighbors before the pandemic hit; we still haven’t. After the horrible police shooting of Jacob Blake last week, our son made a beautiful Black Lives Matter poster and asked if he could display…
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In planning documents sent last week to public health agencies around the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described preparations for two coronavirus vaccines they refer to simply as Vaccine A and Vaccine B. The technical details of the vaccines, including the time between doses and their storage temperatures, match well with the…
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SAN FRANCISCO — It is the beachfront version of a double black diamond ski slope, smack in the middle of this major American city, framed by the San Francisco skyline and fog-wreathed Golden Gate Bridge. Playing out against this backdrop most weekdays in summer is a scene so hair-raising as to seem unreal: dozens of…
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