On Mother’s Day – The New York Times

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…

Read More

Big, Smoggy Bangkok Gets a Badly Needed Breath of Fresh Air

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…

Read More

Five-Star Three-Cup Chicken – The New York Times

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…

Read More

How a Novelist Became a Pop Star

“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…

Read More

The Black Female Artists Redefining Minimalism

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…

Read More

In Ecuador, Homes That Are Part of the Mountains

Later, the discovery of Amazonian oil reserves generated an economic boom beginning in the 1970s that helped establish Ecuador as a beacon of relative peace on a troubled continent. But two decades of rampant inflation followed, leading in 2000 to the center-right government’s replacement of the national currency with the American dollar. Between 1998, as…

Read More