Mera Caulfield was watching television a couple of months ago when the screen suddenly erupted with characters doing their best evil laughs. Ms. Caulfield turned to her two roommates, Alixandra Matos and Megan Mandrachio. “I was like, ‘That’s literally us,’ ” Ms. Caulfield said. Their apartment in Queens was soon filled with a cacophony of…
A 7-year-old girl hawks cat-themed souvenirs in Flemish outside her parents’ shop. Two women in matching cat print dresses wander down a crowded street looking for a place to buy stuffed plush kitties. In every store and restaurant window, a cat figurine or statue signals allegiance to the feline persuasion. This is Kattenstoet, Belgium’s cat-themed…
Fathers don’t fare well in my fiction. They are white supremacist killers and domestic abusers. They trick their wives into becoming pregnant. They have affairs. They abandon their families. My biological father, Albert Coleman Bryan Jr., was 22 when I was born. He was a dashing air force pilot who flew off into the wide…
“You’d be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements,” Reese Witherspoon said. “I know it happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.” Nor does she want to read an academic treatise, or a 700-page novel about a tree. Sitting in her office in Nashville, occasionally dipping…
The photographer Susan Kaufman fell in love with the Hamptons at the age of 8. She was seated in the back of her parent’s car, on her way from her childhood home in New Rochelle, N.Y., to visit her aunt and uncle’s East Hampton house for the very first time. It was 1966. Out the…
On a recent trip to Sephora, 11-year-old Lincoln Rivera asked his mom for a $125 atomizer of Yves Saint Laurent eau de parfum. He also covets scents from Jean Paul Gaultier, which he learned about from the animated movie “Megamind,” and Paco Rabanne (some of its cologne bottles are shaped like robots). “I feel fine…
Good morning. The weekends have been filled with frustration lately, all kinds of broken things that need to be fixed before anything fun can happen: the frost-killed hose bib out front; the 30-amp fuse in the hydraulics on the skiff; the shorted-out taillight on the trailer beneath it. That’s often the way of the world:…
When Christie’s executives decided on the evening of the auction house’s contemporary art sales to withdraw its most expensive offering of the week, a squiggly-wiggly painting by the artist Brice Marden estimated to sell for $30 million to $50 million, it was evidence of apprehension in the market. “The choice to withdraw the Marden was…
A century ago, the timber-and-iron tower had supported a tram carrying precious salt across the Inyo Mountains that had been mined from a remote valley in the California desert. More recently, it stood as an artifact in the Saline Valley, and it marked the edge of a hiking trail through the sun-baked wilderness. But a…
Is there any dessert more easy to assemble — and fun to say — than a clafoutis? You simply combine your batter ingredients, tumble fruit into a buttered dish, pour in the batter and bake. The result: an eggy, puddinglike cake studded and stained with pockets of sweet-sour fruit. This new raspberry-almond clafoutis from David…
