This Japanese Museum Actually Keeps Time

There are a lot of reasons to visit Matsumoto, a city at the foot of the Japanese Alps in the central prefecture of Nagano. Most visitors head there to see the 16th-century castle, one of the oldest in the country, or to bathe in the natural hot springs. But few, even within Japan’s large community…

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Watches and Wonders Geneva Opens in a Time of Uncertainty

TAG Heuer Monaco Split-Seconds Chronograph TAG Heuer’s early 21st-century flirtations with haute horlogerie produced some memorable watches that were not always mechanically infallible. The madcap belt-driven Monaco V4 and the Carrera Mikrogirder, with its exposed linear coupling beam, spring to mind. But the watchmaker best known for its consumer-favorite Carrera and Monaco chronographs insists that…

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It’s Always a Good Time for an Oyster Roast

The near lifelong friends Alexa Brazilian, Aaron Dickson Millhiser and Courtney Broadwater met in the late 1980s as children on Nantucket in Massachusetts, where their families would spend time each summer. They’d ride their bikes together and pass the days at Siasconset Beach, at the far eastern end of the island. In the years since,…

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It’s Time for Honey Baked Ham

Good morning. What I smelled during a 10-minute bicycle ride today: wood smoke, diesel exhaust, grass, frying bacon, rotting wood, bleach, balloon rubber, dollar pizza, a tendril of burning weed, the sharpness of electrical ozone, cart coffee and, last, the strong, sweet scent of lilies — Easter in the air. Good Friday! There’ll be ham…

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Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time

Central Sardinia is not generally considered a hotbed of innovation: Arid and rural, some of its road signs riddled with bullet holes made by target-practicing locals, the setting recalls a Clint Eastwood western. Yet in Ottana, on the brownfield site of a former petrochemical plant, a new technology is taking shape that might help the…

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Quick Tips to Save Time on the Telephone

With everything a smartphone can do these days, it’s often easy to overlook one of the device’s most basic functions: voice calls. Communicating by telephone has become more complicated in a world of robocalls and automated voice trees, but your phone may already have the tools to make talking to people (or not) easier. Here…

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