I was looking for my grandmother. That meant spending a warm fall day in a reading room among reference books, microfilm reels and acid-free folders. I had stolen the day from a meeting in Charleston, S.C., to stop over in Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital and home to its archives. I felt anxious. It wasn’t the…
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Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. A hospital is an invaluable vantage point from which to understand an epidemic. It provides a glimpse of the severity of an illness in a geographic area, a sense of whether cases are going up…
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If you need something to get excited about these days, Madewell is hosting its first-ever Secret Stock sale, where you can save up to 70 percent off select clothing, shoes, and accessories. While Madewell regularly has sales on its effortlessly cool wares, I’ve never seen a sale this big. (And, trust me, I spend a…
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After Rabbi Jennifer Anne Gubitz reactivated her lapsed dating app memberships and joined new ones in August 2017, she was intrigued by a three-month-old message on JDate from Matan BenYishay who had the screen name TzedekNerd (tzedek means justice in Hebrew). “Oh no,’” Rabbi Gubitz, who goes by Jen, recalled thinking, and quickly messaged him.…
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Kristen Meehan’s home office is often a brown Adirondack chair on her front lawn, with hedges that make a halfway decent Zoom backdrop. “Every time I’m on a video call, people are like, ‘Are you in a forest?’” said Ms. Meehan, 31, who lives not in the woods, but in a four-bedroom house in Montclair,…
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Next month, Elena Gaudino will fly from New York to Las Vegas, rent an S.U.V. and drive to the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree National Park and other desert destinations. The 10-day road trip stands in for her favorite annual tradition — Burning Man, the Nevada arts festival that was canceled this year because of the…
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Courtesy of Tracee Ellis Ross Over the past few months, I have cultivated a style perhaps best described as The Big Lebowski meets Auntie Mame. After stay-at-home orders removed any semblance of a routine, I turned to piling on odd, clashing garments, as if I were starring in a one-woman, millennial version of Grey Gardens.…
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Dr. Chloe Ciccariello remembers looking forward to a quiet nap one day in August 2006 at her Columbia dormitory, which was then assigned mostly to freshman engineering students. Suddenly the deafening sounds of electric guitar music outside her door roused her from bed in search of the source. She opened the door and found Dr.…
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By the time Alex Song said his first hello to Kelly Jean Qu in September 2017, she was saying goodbye to New York, where she had lived for nearly three years, and on the verge of moving back to her native Los Angeles. “I had already packed up most of my furniture and I was…
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Shana Caro, a 31-year-old scientist at Columbia University who grew up in White Plains, N.Y., has lived in Borneo, Costa Rica, Uganda, Kenya, Oxford, and a tiny town in the Netherlands called Wageningen. Georgina Emerson (left), 34, the founder and director of Teach About Women, a nonprofit organization based in her native New York that…
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