I just baked 12 dozen Christmas cookies for no one. I do the baking every year; the “no one” part I’m still getting used to. When I ran a magazine, I’d make a batch of these each December week and bring them in on Mondays for the staff. A junior editor who became a senior […]
I give bad gifts. Size 5 shoes to size 11 feet. Yogurt makers to the lactose intolerant. Diaries to the discreet. Sheet music to the relentlessly tone deaf. It’s not that I am thoughtless—I’m thinking, I’m thinking, believe me. It’s just that I have this holiday weakness of idealizing my friends and family, sometimes to […]
Our family of six sisters had a tradition as we dated in high school and college. If you brought a boy home for Christmas Eve dinner, you had to force him to bring along a traditional dish representing his ethnic heritage. This was how we learned to embrace exotically diverse non-Scandinavians, not to mention expand […]
For all its wholesomeness, “Heartland” is not sickly sweet and doesn’t sidestep the realities of life.
The Apple TV+ series “Severance” sends us back to work in prepandemic corporate America.
A young cartographer is helping the church catalog its land holdings so it might address the environment, human migration, and sustainable land stewardship.
Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is a skillfully crafted story about masculinity that is compassionate and supportive.
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ offers an ode to taking chances.
Trees are, as it turns out, social and more than a little like us.
The coming of age film is a nuanced exploration of the way both lesser and better angels exist in all of us.