Earlier this week I left a medical appointment, walked onto the elevator, waited for it to whoosh me to the lobby 18 floors below and started thinking about trust.

How often I rely on trust in a day. How much it shapes my worldview. How crippling it would be to lose it as a guiding force.

I trusted that the elevator would work. I trusted that ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Late at night in 2016, Michael Ramos sat hunched over his dining room table in his suburban Harwood Heights condominium, assembling valves and motor parts he’d picked up from local electronics shops.

By day, he worked as a building engineer at Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center high school in Chicago. By night, he tried to ...Read more

LYNNWOOD, Wash. — Could a partnership between a school district and developer to build housing for homeless families be a model for removing one of the biggest barriers those students face?

Officials in the Edmonds School District and Housing Hope, an Everett-based affordable housing builder, are hoping a 52-unit development underway near ...Read more

There is supposedly an unwritten rule in the plant breeding world: If the new plant is not orange then it may be called blue. I am forever being told that a plant I am touting is not blue but is purple, lavender or ... well, you get the drift. There will, however, be no argument over one of the most celebrated salvias, Rockin Blue Suede Shoes.

...Read more

LOS ANGELES — A wish is a deeply personal thing, often fleeting and silent. But sometimes, a wish is a collective endeavor, a bold and communal call for action.

Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree" installation is both. The piece — which Ono has staged more than 250 times in 35-plus countries — draws on a Japanese tradition at Buddhist temples that ...Read more

Dear Anna,

A few years ago, I fell into an intense long-distance relationship with someone I met through a fandom community. We went from friends to lovers, writing smutty fan fic together and talking every day. They already had a long-term partner, and although they had always considered themselves open, I was the first person they had ...Read more

CHICAGO -- For four years, Lockport, Illinois, residents Ray and Shelly Romolt have stared out their window at an empty lot, waiting for the day developers would transform it into a home for new neighbors.

They’ve been eager to watch construction commence, and have long pictured the moment a moving truck would deliver fresh faces to join them...Read more

In any relationship, budding or established, there are two competing philosophies: Take people as they come vs. ask for what you want/need, especially when it comes to certain behaviors. I want to share that these two things can co-exist, and neither has to necessarily take precedence over the other.

Yes, we have to take people as they come, ...Read more

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Tyonne Nelson was celebrating his birthday with family at a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea resort last month when tragedy nearly struck in an instant.

Nelson, of Miami Gardens, had spent an hour at the beach near the Plunge Beach Resort with his 5-year-old son, Tyler, on May 24. When the boy got hungry about 4 p.m., they headed ...Read more

Years ago, we had a financial adviser who was so young I often wondered if I should bake cookies before he came to the house — peanut butter or chocolate chip?

He once said something that I found semi-appalling. He asked if we knew the three phases of retirement. We confessed we did not. With a grin, he said, “Well, there’s go-go, slow-go...Read more

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I teach in an urban K-8 school. Several years ago, we got a new administrator who took a lot of control away from the teachers and, in my opinion, has made teachers do many things that I believe have made behaviors worse. One thing she has done is to make sure that kids get warnings in the classroom, and that we have a ...Read more

As a man who can’t stay awake for the 11 o’clock news, which isn’t worth watching anyway, I tire easily. Then I fall asleep. And I snore with enough force to wake up not only the dead, who sleep pretty soundly, but also my wife, who would like to kill me.

So I got a CPAP machine, which was supposed to cure my sleep apnea. Stupidly, which ...Read more

Chicago-based writer Veronica Arreola got a text in late May from a friend. It was a screenshot of her 2023 children’s book, “J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet” and a question: “Is this you?”

Her book was featured in People magazine. (Yay!)

Under the headline “Nonfiction book bans are on the rise, including these 29 banned ...Read more

If you’ve got sun and want a touch of the tropics and baskets full of blooms, then Austin Pretty Limits oleander is for you.

Let’s address your cold hardiness concerns first. Austin Pretty Limits is cold hardy from zones 8 and up. That’s a large swath of the country that can grow the shrub with ease. The rest of the country can grow ...Read more

When my husband announced three years ago that he had started playing pickleball, I asked if he was hoping to boost his popularity in a future retirement village.

He took my teasing in stride and informed me that the sport wasn’t just for old people. I knew pickleball had exploded in popularity during the pandemic when people were desperate ...Read more

If you’ve got sun and want a touch of the tropics and baskets full of blooms, then Austin Pretty Limits oleander is for you.

Let’s address your cold hardiness concerns first. Austin Pretty Limits is cold hardy from zones 8 and up. That’s a large swath of the country that can grow the shrub with ease. The rest of the country can grow ...Read more

Dear Anna,

My boyfriend and I have been together for about eight months, and in almost every way we’re really well-suited for each other. There’s just one problem. Our sex life is lacking, and I don’t know how to fix it. He finishes very quickly during penetrative sex — usually within a minute or two — and while he almost always makes...Read more

“If you don’t know, ask.”

I find myself giving this advice on an almost daily basis.

I got a text recently from a male client who had met a woman at a party the previous weekend. She promptly found him on Instagram and suggested meeting. (Good for her for taking the initiative! How would you feel about that?) He then asked me if he ...Read more

Dear Kid Whisperer,

My wife and I are at our wits’ end with our 16-year-old son. He isn’t a behavior problem and never has been. The problem is that since middle school, he has basically refused to work toward anything but barely passing grades in math, and now that most science classes involve math, he’s almost failing in those classes ...Read more

Enough time had passed since the patient’s previous colonoscopy that she met the criteria to undergo another, said Steven Itzkowitz, a gastroenterologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

She was in “reasonably good health,” and the risks of the procedure — bleeding, reaction to anesthesia, perforation of her ...Read more