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…
Something was in the air — though Tomi Adeyemi couldn’t quite say what. It wasn’t the sweltering heat of a New York City summer, nor the perfume of the sweat that had gathered atop our skin. “What’s your sign?” Adeyemi immediately asked me, before we even began to talk about her new book. Aquarius, I…
TikTok is many things: a place for slime videos, a free therapy session, the leading source of information in America right now, and, for some, the ultimate restaurant resource. With a properly tuned algorithm, TikTok can become a never-ending scroll of rhythmic recommendations from critics of varying reliability, many of whom have been paid by…
I don’t need help scheduling more things to do; I need to do less. Often these services suggest that users throw money at that problem (which is not very helpful if one of your problems is that you do not have enough money). The apps transform parents from workers into consumers, translating our to-do lists…
I found it while walking through the home-goods section of T.J. Maxx, the American retail equivalent of the Garden of Earthly Delights, at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in 2015. It was two days after Easter, and in this Hieronymus Bosch land of shopping anarchy, the shelves were stocked with pastel-colored objects of uncertain usefulness:…
It began as ideas, good and bad, often do: in a bar. My soccer club — a group of mostly middle-aged dads in suburban New Jersey — was enjoying its weekly post-match pint when we began talking about how fun it would be to play against a similar team in Mexico City, where several of…
