Winter is a slow time for me — there is no weeding or mowing or transplanting to do — so I have time to cross country ski or walk almost every day. I love observing the trees and native shrubs of the forest, and try to know the name of everything I see. Trees without […]

NEW YORK Poor Barbie. She had plastic surgery to become more socially acceptable. But a lot of her critics still don’t like her. Barbie’s manufacturer, Mattel, announced Thursday that the doll has three new body types — curvy, tall and petite. Barbie will also now come in seven skin tones, 22 eye colors and 24 […]

NEW YORK “Dear Pope Francis,” 10- year- old Mohammed begins, “Will the world be again as it was in the past?” Signed “ Respectfully yours,” the boy wrote from a Jesuit- run school for refugee children in Syria and was treated to a long and personal answer from the pope himself. So were 29 other […]

Mexican hot chocolate is a beloved beverage made from chocolate (no surprise there) combined with cinnamon and another spice or two to bring up the heat. The combination of spicy and chocolate just plain works, and I wanted to see how it would translate into another beloved treat, the good old American brownie. Again, it […]

It’s that time of year again. Time to buy seeds, either at your local feed-and grain store, the local garden center, or from a catalog. I like to buy locally, but catalogs do present a wider variety than most stores can offer. Recently I called Ken Greene, founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library in […]

I’ve been truly afraid a few times in my life: when I bungee jumped from a perfectly good platform 110- feet up in the air. When we lived in Florida and I put out mouse traps but caught a coral snake instead. When I got on an airplane for the first time in more than […]

WASHINGTON The current version of the SAT college entrance exam had its final run over the weekend, when hundreds of thousands of students nationwide sitting, squirming or stressing through the nearly four-hour reading, writing and math test. A new revamped version debuts in March. Sixteen-year-old Alex Cohen, a junior at the Miami Country Day School […]

HARTFORD, CONN. Advocates for domestic violence victims and those supporting animal rights are teaming up to support the latest proposal for a public registry in Connecticut that would identify people who abuse animals. The two groups contend those who abuse animals should be singled out because they’re more likely to repeat certain types of abuses, […]

Hosting a horde of fans for the Super Bowl? Or are you crashing somebody’s party and tasked with bringing something delicious? Either way, you could spend a lot of time thinking about what to prepare. Or you could just make this and know beyond any doubt that you had picked a crowd-pleaser. What is it […]

Have you heard about the “new” movement against assigning homework to children? I use the term “new” loosely because kids have been anti-homework since roughly the beginning of mankind, and parents balking at the nightly ritual is nothing new either. In fact, every decade of so, this issue gains momentum again after a new academic […]