Pandemic life is tough on everyone. But for a single person, the prospect of dating and sex — while social distancing to avoid a potentially life-threatening respiratory illness — feels impossible. How do you date without touching or kissing? How do you have sex without breathing on your partner and putting each other at risk?…
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There was a time in the not so far-off past when hotels lived or died by being an out-of-towner’s fantasy: the Plaza, the Four Seasons, the St. Regis. Then, as new money poured into real estate in the mid-1990s, and as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cracked down on dance clubs like the Sound Factory and Tunnel,…
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Why do people love games? As the Game Maker for The New York Times, I grapple with this question every day. The reductively easy answer is simple: They’re fun! But why are they fun? Do they have to be fun? As we dig deeper and deeper, we find more questions. What even is a game?…
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“Pick the member of the group who likes you the least and tell him how it is his problem.” It sounds like a directive from a reality-show producer, but in fact, it is a challenge from the greatest board game of all time: Group Therapy. In the three years since I stumbled upon Group Therapy…
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My neurologist father maintained that hand-washing was our family’s single greatest obligation to one another and to the world. “As you know, it’s the No. 1 way to prevent disease transmission,” Dr. Beauregard Lee Bercaw would say to my brother and me every single night before sitting down to dinner. “Your hands are clean, right?”…
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I love games, but my wife, Mandy, hates the clutter. The other day, I spent a half-hour rearranging the shelves to find room for a recent addition to my board game collection. Over the years, I have accumulated almost 150 games, several of which are still shamefully unopened. The only downside to my collection is…
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Quarantining in your home is sort of like being marooned on a desert island. You’re stuck in a confined space, cut off — Zoom calls aside — from the rest of society. You’re alone or with your pod of people, looking for ways to pass the time. And once the novelty wears off, you’re left…
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Nothing strikes fear in my parental heart more than hearing one of my daughters say, “Mama, can we play Candy Land?” Even when I was a child myself, I never enjoyed board games, because I have two personality traits that make them excruciating: I’m easily bored and incredibly competitive. I recall sabotaging games of Monopoly…
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As New York City crawls toward reopening, even as momentous protests fill the streets, the formal events industry, predicated on people assembling en masse for merrymaking or shared purpose, remains in the dark. These splashy affairs of yore — high-stakes fund-raisers, slick product introductions, galas, conferences, rollicking celebrations — organized by teams of party professionals…
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Paris Fashion Week closed in March with a spectacle held by Louis Vuitton in a shadowy courtyard of the closed Louvre museum. Though no one knew it at the time, the event may have been the last traditional catwalk show of 2020. Shortly afterward, the spread of the coronavirus put an end to physical gatherings,…
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