A new study has found that watching yourself eat something unhealthy, like a slice of chocolate cake, can make that food seem less tasty. And that, in turn, might make you eat less. Ata Jami, a marketing professor at the University of Central Florida who studies consumer behavior and decision-making, looked at whether mirrors affected […]

Why we’re so ready to believe that it does The beards said it all, really. Long and well groomed, attached to handsome young faces, they were the beards of men who worked the land. The beards of men who built things with their own hands, which, we all surmised, were callused, but clean. Those beards […]

NEW YORK  — A scandal is roiling the world of fancy chocolate: Did two brothers misleadingly sell remelted chocolate and sprout beards to cultivate a hipster appeal? The headlines began after a site called DallasFood.org published a series about Rick and Michael Mast, who have been toasted in food circles for their stylishly wrapped chocolate […]

No matter how high-tech the world becomes, it seems there is always a place for good ol’ Craigslist. Do you need a couch, a boyfriend or a life-size nail-clipper costume? Look no further than the classified advertisements website, which turned 20 years old this year. According to its website, more than 60 million people in […]

When did it start? Was it the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, when you whipped up your pie filling as Nat King Cole sang “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .” Was it the first week of December, when the containers filled with homemade Chex Mix started arriving at your office? Or maybe it […]

A bigger vocabulary is a bigger vocabulary — no matter whether you are quoting Shakespeare or cursing like a sailor. This is the takeaway from a study recently published in the journal Language Sciences, which finds that fluency in “taboo words” is correlated with having a larger vocabulary in general. The finding goes against some […]