In her workshop on Suomenlinna, an island fortress begun in 1748 to protect Helsinki, now the Finnish capital, from Russian invasions, Sini Majuri carries out her craft, the centuries-old art of glassmaking. But behind the arched doors of her studio, which was once an armored chamber, the 40-year-old artist uses glass as a medium to…
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After Mr. Ertegun died in 2006 of injuries suffered in a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Manhattan, his wife continued the couple’s philanthropies. In 2015, her $9 million gift created an atrium for Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2017, her $1.4 million pledge helped restore a substructure under the fourth-century Church of…
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Henry A. Kissinger, the powerful diplomat who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and accused of being a war criminal for his realpolitik approach to foreign affairs, had a kind of second career on the society circuit, especially in the years after he served as secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Even…
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The counter is stacked with blocks of softening butter, there’s three different kinds of sugar in the pantry and every kitchen surface is covered in a dusting of flour. All of which can only mean: Cookie Week is here! If you’re subscribed to our Cookie Week newsletter, you know that the batch of seven new…
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Most older Americans want to live at home as long as they can, but finding and affording the help they need often isn’t easy. There are severe shortages of home health aides in many parts of the country. Hiring them is costly. And most middle-class people will have to pay for home care themselves if…
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It’s a good day when Frank Lee, a retired chef, can slip out to the hardware store, fairly confident that his wife, Robin, is in the hands of reliable help. He spends nearly every hour of every day anxiously overseeing her care at their home on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island near Charleston,…
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“I really want to be friends with a whale,” Mikey Day, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, said this week as he stood inside the American Museum of Natural History and discussed his favorite displays. “They just look so magical.” “Sorry, it’s Thursday,” he continued. “I just came from work, and my brain is fried.”…
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At the end of my recent trip to Japan, I found myself at Haneda Airport in Tokyo with an hour or so to kill. So I went to the onsen. On the 12th floor of the Villa Fontaine Grand, a hotel attached to the departure terminal, I paid 4,800 yen, or about $33, for access…
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Though it was nearly five decades ago, Gay Blackstone can still vividly recall the first time she was sawed in half onstage. Her screams were an intended element of the illusion, but nerves and fear made them genuine that time. For Ms. Blackstone, that gig assisting the master illusionist Harry Blackstone Jr. turned into a…
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Last year Charlene Truong Launer, a social media content creator, bought a real Christmas tree from a seller on a sidewalk in Manhattan. Ms. Launer, 29, and her husband carried the tree 15 minutes to their apartment in TriBeCa and spent hours setting it up. “I was so excited,” she said. The next morning, however,…
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