Celebrity Life

As a synonym for a break-up note sent by a woman to a man in uniform, the Dear John letter made its debut in a major national newspaper in October 1943. Milton Bracker, a seasoned correspondent stationed in North Africa, wired a story back for publication in the New York Times magazine. “Separation,” Bracker observed,…

I spent the first long months of the pandemic in suburban Maryland alone and away from my family. The world beyond my door became a stream of timelines, a social media cascade of triumphs and accomplishments. Everyone else, it seemed, was leaping to new feats in baking, in writing, in everything. Meanwhile, the blank page…

What does it mean to be a good mother? For most of my life, I’ve received conflicting answers to this question. Growing up, my parents revered mothers like mine, who walked away from a career in medicine to stay at home with me and my four siblings. On our way to school and soccer practice,…

Today, the Middle Ages are a sort of paradox; the myth of the “Dark Ages,” which survives quite ably in popular culture, allows space for it to be whatever the popular imagination wants. When people want to kick a current problem back into the past—whether terrorism, bungled responses to COVID-19, or even the process for…

The end of the year is traditionally a time for reflecting on lessons learned from the past 12 months and looking to the future with optimism. New Year’s resolutions offer us a chance to identify specific ways we can improve our lives and make concrete changes for the better. But for many of us, 2021…

The word “was extremely high in our data every single day in 2021,” said Merriam-Webster's Peter Sokolowski

I signed my first book contract without paying much attention to what it said. I didn’t know at the time that the book would be a best seller or that it would one day inspire a Netflix series. I just needed the money. I was a single mom with a 2-year-old and a 9-year-old, living…

'Never forget, because people are still struggling. People are still dying.'

Those of us who stayed stuck around, through 9/11 or the COVID-19 pandemic, did so expressly to preserve the New York we knew

Every morning as I drink my coffee, I check Timehop, an app that tells me what I posted to social media on this day one, two, ten years ago. I have checked Timehop every morning for the last 1,286 days—more than three years straight—and nearly every one of those 1,286 days, I have found something…

As the U.S. entered WWI, the Ringling show employed about a thousand people—but forces that would reshape the circus industry had begun to emerge

As COVID-19 cases rise, unpaid college players are putting their health at risk, for little economic reward.