For all the personal technology introduced and popularized in 2020 — upscale fitness bikes, at-home Covid tests, game consoles new and old — the personal computer lands on the list with a bit of a thud. PCs lack the novelty of other gadgets, but they’re practical, essential even, in a year when work, school and…
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Humans have relied on plants for their healing properties as long as we’ve been incarnated on this planet. Sumerian clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia contained instructions for the herbal preparation of more than 200 different plants, including poppy and mandrake. A Neanderthal burial site discovered in the 1960s contained branches of a bush known to…
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Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. As Congress debated the COVID relief package, a joke ricocheted around Twitter to the effect that our stimulus checks had been bargained down to a pair of Parade underwear. By that point, the ubiquity of the brand, especially on the platform,…
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The celebrated film My Neighbor Totoro can serve as a much-needed distraction right now, especially during a week of an otherwise dreadful news cycle. The uplifting storyline follows two young sisters who escape the grim reality of their hospitalized mother by exploring a new home and a lush countryside. Along the way, they meet magical…
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When there’s ground meat in the fridge and beans in the pantry, dinner almost cooks itself into a big pot of chili, the ingredients simmering together as if they had wills of their own. I make chili so often that not making it when everything is on hand feels like a betrayal of the muscle…
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“Organizations are encouraged to consider prescribing either tocilizumab or sarilumab in the treatment of patients admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 pneumonia,” the new guidance from British health authorities said. Dr. Gordon noted that this is the strongest official advice issued to date on the pair of immune drugs. Some experts outside of Britain are…
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“Hal is one of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve ever met,” Ms. Root said, “and I really knew how much he loved her, and that he never stopped, despite what he had done to her.” A year later, Mr. Karp wanted to propose. Given the podcast’s role in reuniting them, Mr. Karp felt it…
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This week, the Central Intelligence Agency unveiled a new design for its website, CIA.gov, which wouldn’t have been news if the site had stuck to the formal signifiers of government authority: dense bureaucratic text, link directories, declarative headers, nothing too fancy. Instead, CIA.gov is set against a stark black background, offset by dots and lines…
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There have always been infertile straight couples in need of donor sperm, but with the legalization of gay marriage and the rise of elective single motherhood, the market has expanded over the last decade. About 20 percent of sperm bank clients are heterosexual couples, 60 percent are gay women, and 20 percent are single moms…
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Dear Tripped Up, I live in Massachusetts and had hoped to ski at Okemo Mountain Resort as much as possible this year. However, in November, Vermont announced a new set of cross-state travel guidelines, which include a mandatory quarantine that makes it all-but-impossible to visit regularly throughout the winter. Despite a blitz of preseason assurances…
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