For the first time in many years, a teacher was correcting my handwriting. “Go more slowly,” Laura Edralin, a calligraphy teacher in London, told me, as she walked around a table of beginners on a recent Wednesday night, explaining how to achieve even, flowing strokes. As a breaking news reporter for The New York Times,…
A dozen years ago, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., sent voters an email posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff. He later masqueraded online as a Russian tech worker with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential information in violation of…
For years I had been hearing about the island of Pantelleria, the craggy, hard-to-get-to Eden with middle-of-nowhere tranquillity that sits 89 miles southwest of the island of Sicily and about 50 miles east of Tunisia. Luca Guadagnino’s 2015 film “A Bigger Splash” painted a seductive idyll of mud baths, romantic ruins and secluded swimming coves….
By the time Rena Barrow-Wells gave birth to her fourth baby in 2020, she was well-versed in caring for a child with cystic fibrosis. She was also experienced in fighting for a diagnosis of the disease, which runs in families and can severely damage the lungs and digestive system. Nineteen years earlier, her first son,…
Think for a minute about the little bumps on your tongue. You probably saw a diagram of those taste bud arrangements once in a biology textbook — sweet sensors at the tip, salty on either side, sour behind them, bitter in the back. But the idea that specific tastes are confined to certain areas of…
Three Black men have accused American Airlines of “blatant race discrimination” over its temporary removal of them and five other men from a Jan. 5 flight from Phoenix to New York, in a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday. The men said they were seated on a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport when an…
Q: I’ve heard that drinking coffee first thing in the morning can interfere with my ability to feel awake and can lead to an afternoon energy crash. Is that true? It’s an idea that has been popularized by online influencers: Avoid consuming caffeine for 90 to 120 minutes after waking up, they say, and you…
The summer after my freshman year of college, I bused tables at a restaurant by the water in St. Augustine, Fla. Parched and sticky with sweat, I watched one particular salad — huge, geometric chunks of watermelon and feta, stacked on a plate with basil — go to nearly every table. I cleared those plates,…
When Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, announced last year that his company would release an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had reservations. Mr. Emanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time A.I. enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” A.I. models, including OpenAI’s, meaning the systems’ underlying code could not be accessed or modified. When Mr. Zuckerberg…
Many weeks before tomato seedlings can be safely transplanted outside — or almost any freshly seed-sown vegetables dare break the surface of the slowly warming soil — harvest is underway in John Forti’s Maine garden. When you grow a range of perennial edibles, you have what Mr. Forti calls “the shoulder seasons” covered, and then…
