Author: Happy

Ron DeSantis wears a “Ron DeSantis” shirt. Tim Scott sports a “Tim Scott” hat. Self-branding is all the rage for presidential candidates. To find out why, we asked Vanessa Friedman.Some politicians need no introduction. The rest are running for the Republican nomination for president.Ron DeSantis has the words “Ron DeSantis” plastered across the breast of his fishing-style shirts. On sunny days, Tim Scott wears a white baseball cap that says “Tim Scott.” Vivek Ramaswamy’s polo shirts read “Vivek,” and Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson wear hats and shirts with their names on them.Even Donald J. Trump — so recognizable that…

Goro, on the Adriatic Sea, is famous for its clams — essential for the beloved spaghetti alle vongole. But an infestation of crabs is threatening the town’s cash crop.Before dawn in Goro, on the Adriatic Sea, Massimo Genari drove by the central roundabout, with its sculpture of two concrete clams in a net, and under a billboard of a mollusk donning a crimson royal crown. Wearing waders, he boarded his boat and motored to the lagoon with scores of other fishermen to rake the clam gardens that for decades have transformed this sleepy Italian village off the Po River Delta…

Group running has exploded in New York City. As friendships, marriages and even rivalries emerge, the benefits are proving as social as they are physical.On a Thursday evening in early September, the Upper West Side Run Club met on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It was 6:30 p.m., and temperatures were hovering in the low 90s. But despite the extreme heat, over 25 people, ranging in age from teens to late 60s, showed up to run a four-mile loop around Central Park.They made frequent stops at the water fountains. They also played a game…

The Substack pundit Fredrik deBoer and the political scientist Yascha Mounk feel that liberal ideologues and “woke” pretenders have marred American life.HOW ELITES ATE THE SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT, by Fredrik deBoerTHE IDENTITY TRAP: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, by Yascha MounkThe prophet of our moment, it becomes clearer by the day, was the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who in his classic dissent in Abrams v. United States, written in 1919 during the peak of the first Red Scare, argued that free speech protections should be extended even to anarchists and agitators since…

The watch world’s calendar is packed with meet-ups, fairs, auctions, conferences and awards ceremonies.When the mechanical watchmaking renaissance hit its stride in the early 2000s, the Swiss watch industry had just one main event: the Baselworld watch and jewelry show, a trade fair held every spring in the river port city of Basel, Switzerland.Two decades later, the trade’s event calendar is packed with meet-ups, fairs, auctions, conferences and awards ceremonies. To help make sense of the fall 2023 schedule, we’ve highlighted a handful of goings-on, from a pair of New York City buying fairs to the watch industry’s answer to…

Fans say the devices provide benefits, including help with lubrication, but detractors say overuse can cause damage.Do you need a watch winder? The answer is as varied as the timepieces wound on them.Useful but often misconstrued, watch winders are mechanisms, usually in the form of a box or a container, meant to mimic the actions of a human wrist. By doing so, winders keep the movement of an automatic watch greased and functioning, and maintain the power reserve. The winder can also shelter a watch from dust and prevent other objects from scratching or rubbing against it.But not everyone is…

In conservative South Korea, few L.G.B.T.Q. entertainers have ever come out. The young members of QI.X don’t see the point of staying in.At a bar in Euljiro, one of Seoul’s up-and-coming hip neighborhoods, two voices intertwined in a duet. One was high-pitched, the other an octave lower.But there was only one singer, a 27-year-old named jiGook. The other voice was a recording made years ago, before he began his transition and hormone therapy deepened his voice.“I don’t want to forget about my old self,” he told the 50 or so people at the performance, a fund-raiser for a group that…

Kerry Washington’s true colors came out over a pink cardboard box of croissants.“You have to take them back to your office,” said Washington, 46, as she sat, cross-legged, on a wingback chair at the Spence School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “No, really. You must.”Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.We’d already located her graduation picture on the wall (Class of 1994), marveled at the weather (blistering) and admired the drawing room’s décor (Oval Office meets “Masterpiece Theater”). We laughed when the person who delivered the pastries referred to them as…

Kerry Washington’s true colors came out over a pink cardboard box of croissants.“You have to take them back to your office,” said Washington, 46, as she sat, cross-legged, on a wingback chair at the Spence School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “No, really. You must.”Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.We’d already located her graduation picture on the wall (Class of 1994), marveled at the weather (blistering) and admired the drawing room’s décor (Oval Office meets “Masterpiece Theater”). We laughed when the person who delivered the pastries referred to them as…

Bottega Veneta and Diesel take some winning risks; Versace and Moschino go spelunking in the archives.“Judging is an instinct.” “You’re already giving a score to this look in your mind, just express it.” So droned the Voice of God at the Sunnei show over the weekend as Milan Fashion Week drew to a close. Well, who doesn’t know truth when they hear it?Every member of the audience was handled a group of paddles bearing numbers from one to 10, and instructed to rate each look as it appeared, in the sort of fashion meta-commentary on the modern condition that the…