If Romeo were around today, he would be heavily scarred on his back or chest. Juliet would wax poetic about these signs of his strength and bravery. Daredevil. Batman. Tarzan. “Outlander’s” Jamie. “Fifty Shades of Grey’s” Christian Grey. The romantic hero of our day is a man with physical scars. His scars don’t detract from […]

The internet’s obsessed with new emoji: pitching them, petitioning for them, arguing about their exact designs and details. But regular users have rarely had a way to be part of the notoriously complicated emoji-proposal process – at least until now.Tuesday, the app maker EmojiXpress launched a website called EmojiRequest, which’ll serve as a sort of […]

Or … a screened in amusement park for your cat What, cynics may ask, distinguishes a “catio” from a “screened-in porch”?They clearly haven’t seen the catwalks that wind around Dan Reeder’s Seattle house and yard like a super-sized Habitrail with, as he wrote on his blog, “everything a cat could want in that place, including a […]

Let us count the ways House numbers are an often-neglected detail of a house. They are the first impression people get of your home. They are crucial for first-time dinner guests, emergency vehicles or Uber drivers to be able to identify the right address. So go out to the street and look critically at your […]

Off-the-grid joy draws visitors to western Maine. Mountains rose on his canvas, while crickets chorused instead of car horns. From the cabin on the ridge, Tim D’Agostino turned his easels to face the mountains: Baldpate, Old Speck, Whitecap. He’d paint all day, sometimes break for a hike, and at night he read Moby Dick by […]

Mario Oikonomides credits a massive heart attack when he was 38 with sparking his love of exercise, which he says helped keep him out of the hospital for decades after. While recovering, he did something that only a small percentage of patients do: He signed up for a medically supervised cardiac rehabilitation program, where he […]

Watching your kid sweat over college applications? Wondering which college is the best fit for your child and how to help them make that happen? We asked dozens of admissions officers to reveal the truth about admissions today. Here is what some of them they told us:  (Responses are edited for length): Martha Blevins Allman, […]

The meadow garden has long captured the imagination of gardeners resisting the cultural hegemony of the lawn. The meadow stands as an appealing hybrid between the gaiety of the cottage garden and the primal power of the prairie. In an age of ecological gardening, its allure grows even stronger, and echoes of the meadow are […]