One of Amanda Gregory’s warmest childhood memories is a game that she played with her two brothers. They called it “cockroach hunt.” It involved racing into the kitchen at night, flicking on the lights and trying to smash cockroaches with their bare feet before the bugs could scatter. Neither her mother nor her father bothered…
Dear Tripped Up, I am a single American mother living in Jordan and working for the United Nations. In September 2019, I adopted my then 5-year-old son from China, and promised him we would return to visit his country every year. But the pandemic broke out. When China finally reopened to tourists in 2023, we…
What’s it like to be 30 and queer and an artist? To try to put something meaningful into the world while simultaneously figuring out who you are? For many, it’s a pivotal year — a time when you start to know yourself with greater clarity and to understand what you want and how you want…
Boeing says it has achieved significant quality improvements in the production of the 737 Max since one of the planes lost a panel in a harrowing flight in January. The incident, on an Alaska Airlines flight, resulted in no major injuries, but it raised fresh concerns about the quality of Boeing’s planes more than five…
How do you know if you are fit? Or, at least, fit enough? And how can you tell if your fitness is improving? You have to test yourself. And while most people haven’t participated in a fitness evaluation since their high school Presidential Physical Fitness Test, it’s good to occasionally check in on your progress….
When the stand-up comic Keith Robinson was 10 years old growing up in Philadelphia, his father was stabbed to death in a bar. Sitting in the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar in New York on a recent weekday afternoon, Robinson explained what happened dispassionately, adding that the killer died soon after. “He got shot accidentally…
Hello! Mia again, filling in for Melissa Clark today. She’ll be back with us next week. When I moved into my first New York City apartment (on 112th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), there was enough space in my teensy galley kitchen for exactly one kitchen appliance. Would it be a microwave? A food…
For much of my childhood in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts, I didn’t give a hoot about the Housatonic River. In contrast to the many lakes where my brother and I would swim or skate, attend Scout camps or sprawl out for family picnics, the hushed and shaded Housatonic seemed unfamiliar and at times…
Be careful: The garden wants to have its own way, to blur the lines and refocus those pictures you planned so carefully and then planted. Anyone who has ever tried to create a garden — especially a naturalistic one — learns a few things very quickly. Most emphatically, that change is the only constant. But…
The assignment was clear: Test how well artificial intelligence could plan a trip to Norway, a place I’d never been. So I did none of my usual obsessive online research and instead asked three A.I. planners to create a four-day itinerary. None of them, alas, mentioned the saunas or the salmon. Two assistants were, however,…
