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…
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…
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….
Good morning. It’s Mother’s Day weekend for all those who celebrate, which is many of us, even if she’s been gone a few years now and didn’t like the holiday anyway. Mom’s getting younger, in memory, and we’re getting older to meet her at the pass. The relationship’s deepening. It’s easier to understand some of…
“I hope you fall in love, I hope it breaks your heart” is the refrain (in English translation) of “Pasoori,” Ali Sethi’s 2022 global hit. Is this a curse or a blessing? The song, performed as a duet with the Pakistani singer Shae Gill, defies such simple classifications — it’s a pop banger sung in…
JENNIE C. JONES was a 20-year-old art student when she first saw the work of the minimalist painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. These were some of Kelly’s signature panels: bold, monochromatic shapes of saturated color in oil on canvas. They were flat like paintings but sculptural…
