How a Death Doula Throws a Dinner Party

As a child, Rebecca Illing would spend vacations with her parents and brother, Alex, at Paço da Glória, a gothic mansion turned guesthouse in Portugal’s lush Minho region. A 40-minute drive north of Porto, then the family’s hometown, the property is surrounded by dense cork oak woodland, and Illing loved getting lost on its grounds…

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Sarah Sze Has Been Making Work About Life and Death Since Childhood

Sarah Sze’s studio is an encyclopedic celebration of the human experience. Nineteenth century chronophotography of galloping horses, pre-Columbian cave paintings, and a reproduction of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) line the white walls of her split-level New York studio, a former carriage house used by the city’s Gilded Age barons. For Sze, whose cerebral environmental works…

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Are We Loving Our Pets to Death?

Pets are more popular than ever. Roughly two-thirds of American homes have at least one pet, up from 56 percent in 1988, according to the American Pet Products Association, and Americans spent $136.8 billion on their pets in 2022, up from $123.6 billion in 2021. An estimated 91 million households in Europe own at least…

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