Over the past weekend, the winter storm that hit the East Coast had a big effect on air travel in that area. As with some previous storms this winter, airline passengers were stranded on planes for hours without leaving the ground, sometimes overnight. To help those poor souls stuck in similar situations in the future, [...]

As Thanksgiving draws ever closer, I’d like to offer another list excerpted from Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. You know the old saying about too many cooks in the kitchen. As long as you have just one willing assistant and my book, you’ve got all the help you need to prepare a complete Thanksgiving meal, [...]

You’ve carefully planned a full Thanksgiving menu, bought your ingredients, and arranged a lovely feast—and then, inevitably, someone asks, “What can I bring?” You have everything under control, but you also don’t want to turn away help or hurt anyone’s feelings. What do you say? Here are a few suggestions, excerpted from my book Take [...]

Of course most of us store our music digitally on a computer or iPod these days, but some people still think having physical CDs (or even—gasp—vinyl) is a pretty neat idea. If I learned anything from reading/watching High Fidelity (book | DVD), it’s that there’s more than one way to organize one’s albums, and an [...]

To the best of my recollection, I’ve never been lost in the woods (or elsewhere away from civilization)—or at least not sufficiently lost that I didn’t have a general sense of which direction I needed to go. But if I were, I’d have many options for getting my bearings. I recall learning, as a kid, [...]

When we first toured our current apartment, one of the delightful things we discovered is that it had a lemon tree in the backyard. Once we moved in, we tried to think of all the things we could make with lemons, and we found quite a few, including sugary lemon bars, freshly-squeezed lemon juice, lemon [...]

In the last few decades there has been a sharp increase in the number of people who are allergic to peanuts. According to an article in the June 24, 2006 issue of New Scientist, “Allergenic foods are often things a population eats a lot of,” and “Today, the average American eats 3 kilograms of peanut [...]

For some reason, the seemingly simple task of hard-boiling an egg appears to be very confusing, and numerous techniques have sprung up to demystify it. Of course, you’re looking for a yolk that’s firm but not dry (or green!), a shell that remains intact during boiling, and, preferably, an egg that’s easy to peel. What [...]

Ah, the martini. This simple and elegant pairing of gin and dry vermouth is always classy, but impossible to get right, because everyone has a different idea of the proper way to make one. There’s the whole shaken-or-stirred issue, of course, and the question of whether a martini made with vodka instead of gin is [...]

The SPCA and most responsible veterinarians will tell you that you should never, ever declaw a cat. This is comparable to cutting off your finger at the first knuckle; it’s inhumane and can have seriously negative long-term effects. But there are other ways to keep your cat from scratching up the furniture. For example:

Trim the [...]