On a February afternoon at the University of North Carolina, a group of seven students on the diving team sat barefoot on the floor of the college’s muggy natatorium. They were staring expectantly at a petite blond woman in a black sweater perched on a concrete block. Vickie Segar was …
Under blue skies, where low-rolling hills rise south of the Canadian border in the tiny town of Adams, N.D., a couple braves the stench of old honey, wax, smoke and bee muck. Nancy and Keith Budke, married 43 years, are migratory beekeepers. They produce honey with the taste of canola …
At a backyard barbecue in San Pedro, Argentina, last May, Rafael Flaiman spotted a friend wearing a light blue blazer that looked a little too snazzy for the occasion. He needled the guy a bit. What’s with the jacket? Mr. Flaiman asked. “La China pays,” the friend replied, with a …
Dr. Bryant Lin stood before his class at Stanford in September, likely one of the last he would ever teach. Just 50 years old and a nonsmoker, he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer four months earlier. The illness is terminal, and Dr. Lin estimated that he had …
Soon, Irene Mekel will need to pick the day she dies. She’s not in any hurry: She quite likes her life, in a trim, airy house in Castricum, a Dutch village by the sea. She has flowers growing in her back garden, and there is a street market nearby where …
Will a different city emerge from the Los Angeles fires? Time and again fires have fast-tracked urban change. London after the Great Fire of 1666 rewrote its safety laws, widened streets and erected new public buildings, like the domed St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, which …
The teacher needed teenagers for her summer acting class in Kyiv, which would end with the performance of an original play. “This is a course for happy children, free in their thoughts and dreams,” the instructor, Olesia Korzhenevska, wrote on Facebook last spring. It was hard to find happy teenagers …
There are, the hit man said, many ways to kill. A string tied between two sticks strangles with a tug of the wrists. A butcher’s blade, long and thin, slices into the heart. Edgar Matobato said he fed a man to a crocodile, but only once. Mostly, he said, he …