Cook Amanda Bernier is not your average kitchen supervisor. For starters, she has more than 100 volunteers who help her put out meals, not a paid staff of pros. It’s not unusual for her “customers” to have mental or physical disabilities, or to not speak English. She doesn’t know day to day what food she […]

It’s mid-January, and I’m shopping for a dress my daughter won’t need until June, even though she’ll probably grow three inches and gain 10 pounds before then. This, I’m told, is not a dumb idea. “Everyone” does it for eighth-grade graduation.I have no idea if this is true, but Sophie, my eldest child, says it […]

You send an innocuous text — something as simple as, “hey, how was your day?” or “my plane just landed.” One hour passes, then two, three, four. Funny, you think, they usually don’t take this long to respond. At first you assume the explanation is innocent: Maybe their phone died. Maybe they went to bed […]

The key to a nonstick cast-iron skillet is a little bit of oil Q: I finally bought a cast-iron skillet, and I know it will take a while to build up a real patina to where it is nonstick, even though it came preseasoned. Are there tricks that will specifically help that along at a […]

Especially for men The idea of a “marriage advantage” to health and happiness has existed for well over 150 years. In 1858, epidemiologist William Farr found that people who were coupled up lived the longest, while the unmarried died in much higher proportions from the diseases like cholera that were raging at the time. The […]

Kids have it hard these days. It doesn’t seem like it when they’re playing on their $500 tech gadgets, but they do. Twenty-first century living is taking its toll, and many kids are finding it hard to cope. The number of children dealing with anxiety has been increasing steadily for decades, with up to 25 […]

Ride is raising fundsfor five charities Will Hodson, a primary-school teacher in London, was reading a superhero book to his students one day when a thought struck him. “We were talking about how we can all do something heroic every day — open a door for someone, say something nice to someone,” he recalled. “I […]

It’s been three years now since 10-year-old Christian Bucks thought his family was moving to Germany for his dad’s job and his mom showed him brochures about his potential new schools. He would be the new kid there. The one without anyone to play with in the schoolyard. He was just in first grade then, […]