Time may be divided into past, present and future, but for the independent Swiss watchmaker Ludovic Ballouard, the only time that counts is the present. It’s a philosophy he developed the hard way, through personal suffering and loss. Watching his wife, Eveline, endure cancer for 10 years took a toll. “I realized you have to…
The commissioning of architects to design watches has been a thing at least since the 1950s. In more recent times, some brands have asked winners of architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, to design a timepiece. Thus far 10 of the 53 recipients of the award, given annually since 1979, have taken a horological detour…
One of the weirder, more unnerving things about today’s leading artificial intelligence systems is that nobody — not even the people who build them — really knows how the systems work. That’s because large language models, the type of A.I. systems that power ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, are not programmed line by line by…
When I started writing this newsletter six years ago, I pitched it as “recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat.” I wanted to solve the dinner problem, that daily 5 p.m. quandary of what to cook when you’re hungry and tired out from the day. Every week since, I’ve picked five…
At the award ceremony for the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève last November, one winner provoked a few double takes. The victor among six finalists in the annual design competition’s Challenge category which, last year, focused on watches priced at 2,000 Swiss francs, ($2,203) or less, was the Millesime Automatic Small Seconds, a 39.5-millimeter vintage-inspired…
At Mar-a-Lago on a Wednesday evening last month, Donald J. Trump mingled with partygoers, greeting his supporters and making small talk. The country star Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and the former president’s oldest son, Donald Jr., gave a speech. The elder Mr. Trump was presiding over a cocktail reception for about 150…
In spring 2020, Jazzminn Hein received an automated phone call from The Ottawa Hospital in Canada, asking if she or anyone in her household had experienced wheezing, shortness of breath or other breathing problems in recent months. The question caught her attention: Just a week earlier, Ms. Hein, then 24, had gone on a stroll…
Oyvind Von Doren Asbjornsen wasn’t content with slapping a rook or a bishop on a watch and calling it a chess-themed timepiece. A watchmaker who also is an avid player, he wanted a sophisticated design, yet one that resonated with aficionados of the game. So in 2019, his brand, Von Doren, based in Oslo, released…
David Dorward was a young boy when he first visited the Floral Clock, a combination of horology and horticulture initially installed in 1903 on a south-facing slope of the West Princes Street Garden in Edinburgh’s New Town area. “I remember when I was a child,” he said, “my mum and dad would bring me down…
Specialists have begun the restoration of the Edinburgh Time Ball, one of the Scottish capital’s best known horological attractions, which hasn’t been operating since 2020. A time ball is a signaling device, a sphere that drops down a pole at a predetermined time — the best known now may be the New Year’s Eve ball…
