Hello again, Five Weeknight Dishes readers. I hope you’re not feeling pressured to cook dinner tonight. Most of us are already spending more time than usual thinking about food, and how to get and keep it. Between the elder and younger generations of my family, I’m currently food shopping for eight people, in four different…
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Ellen Floren was not looking for love. The criminals who lured her into an online scam last summer approached her not on a dating site, where she might have been wary, but through the neighborhood hub called Nextdoor. A man who said his name was James Gibson said he’d noticed her profile on the site.…
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In Shanghai, day-to-day life for many luxury retailers has started — slowly — returning to normal. After almost two months of stringent lockdowns enforced by Chinese authorities hoping to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, retailers and restaurants are cautiously reopening for business, alongside the first sunny rays of spring. In Europe, however, where…
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“I love you,” I said to my wife. Then, quietly: “Goodbye.” It was 6 a.m. and I was getting up for work. If I had said more, she would have had trouble falling back to sleep. She already had been woken numerous times in the night by our two boys, aged 4 and 13 months.…
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My husband is the family bread baker, turning out burnished, crackling sourdough loaves from our Dutch oven on a weekly basis. But biscuits are my domain. And they’re great to make right now, transforming a few pantry staples into buttery, flaky treats. They are also pretty easy, as long as you don’t overhandle the dough.…
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After Governor Tom Wolf ordered all “non-life-sustaining” businesses in several counties in Pennsylvania to shutter last week — as one of a growing number of governors to issue “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus — only the most Dickensian remained in operation. It was not…
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There is good evidence that a daily baby aspirin reduces the risk for heart disease and stroke, and some have thought its inflammation-lowering effect might also help in delaying cognitive decline. But taking a daily low-dose aspirin did not appear to be effective in lowering the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia,…
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At the beginning of March, I experienced a new joy: I published my first book, a collection of essays investigating how Americans make meaning of their lives and what they do when their systems of meaning-making begin to break down. This book was roughly seven years in the making. In writing it, I did quite…
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If you are one of the millions of Americans breathing polluted air, you may be at a greater risk of catching the coronavirus and of having a more severe infection. The reasons are twofold. First, air pollution can cause or aggravate respiratory illnesses like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And those illnesses can make…
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Arian Agrawal and Arjun Naskar had dozens of mutual friends at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., many of them Indian-American like themselves, during the three years they overlapped as students there. Yet somehow Ms. Agrawal and Mr. Naskar managed to avoid meeting each other entirely. “M.I.T. is a very small school, which makes it even harder…
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