A person, typically a woman, is talking gently into a microphone. She’s paying close attention to you. Perhaps she’s asking you about your day, or role-playing the part of an aesthetician or doctor or your best friend at a slumber party. Maybe she’s about to give you a facial. Or examine your eyes with a…
Dear readers, For the past few months I’ve been on a scavenger hunt. Where are the fully realized babies in fiction? I wasn’t after infants who are incidental to the plot; I wanted babies whose babyhood was essential to the story. I shouldn’t be surprised by this itch. It has been the year of the…
I’ve always been a daughter on Mother’s Day. Even after my sister and I had our own kids, Mother’s Day meant visiting Mom at our childhood home with its untouched 1980s kitchen, bearing flowers and platters of bagels and lox. I would pick up the Russ & Daughters order, my sister would arrange the peonies…
For more than half a century, Thailand’s state-owned tobacco monopoly mass-produced cigarettes at a sprawling industrial estate in Bangkok. A steady stream of heavy trucks brought raw tobacco into the heart of the city and hauled millions of cigarettes away. But now, that cancer-inducing complex has given way to something completely different: green space that…
Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a medical ethicist who pioneered using mediation at hospital bedsides to navigate the complex dynamics among headstrong doctors, anguished family members and patients in their last days, died on April 14 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 82. The cause was heart and lung disease, her…
An ethereal-looking image of Molly Baz, the cookbook author, with her pregnant belly exposed and her breasts covered with not much more than a rhinestone bikini top and two oatmeal cookies, floated high above Times Square. It was a digital billboard, measuring 45 feet tall, for Baz’s lactation cookies — a recipe to stimulate milk…
The Biden administration said on Friday that it would compensate dairy farmers for cooperating with its efforts to limit the spread of the bird flu virus, part of a series of expansive measures aimed at containing an outbreak. The payment system amounted to one of the most forceful actions taken so far by agriculture officials…
Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made…
For most of this year, the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus accounted for an overwhelming majority of Covid cases. But now, an offshoot variant called KP.2 is taking off. The variant, which made up just one percent of cases in the United States in mid-March, now makes up over a quarter. KP.2 belongs to a…
In 1978, a few months after Marc Malnati got out of college, his father, Lou, died of cancer at just 47 years old. Marc, then in his 20s, took on a more active role in the family business, picking up where his father left off. Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria had just three outposts at the time….
