Seyward Darby

White truffles (also known as Piedmont or Alba truffles) are one of the world’s most prized culinary delicacies: When shaved atop a dish, they add a pleasantly earthy layer along with their unexpectedly fresh texture. Often, their presence—thanks to their famously high price tag—is more a status symbol, a signal of the procurer’s appreciation of […]

Catch up with Brody, Heidi, and (most of) the rest — plus, somehow, Mischa Barton?

In a given year, some 3,500 unpaid prisoners make up Florida’s shadow economy. State road crews and “community work squads” incarcerated by the Department of Corrections subsidize local governments from the Panhandle to Miami-Dade: powering waste and public works departments, grooming cemeteries and school grounds, maintaining and constructing buildings, treating sewage and collecting trash.

“Earlier this week, Dressbarn’s parent company announced that it would be closing all 650 locations to focus on more profitable brands, and I’m sad to see my sentimental favorite go. I have bought many dresses since then, but I have a special place in my heart for that particular Dressbarn, in a parking lot between […]

Carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came […]

“To walk through an estate sale and finger the wares—as I’ve been doing regularly since I was a teenager—is to commune with the departed. If you’re paying attention, you can put together a story about who they were.”

“A few hours later, after giving birth in the car’s back seat, there was paperwork to do. In my bed at New York Methodist, my daughter’s buttery newborn skin against my chest, I tabbed through papers in a blue folder embossed with the hospital’s logo: birth certificate and social security forms, lactation support resources, a […]

In the 20th century, anthropologists fell over themselves to study the “cargo cult” phenomenon in the South Pacific. But was it really a new religion—or just a Western fantasy?

Every generation gets its own Keanu Reeves, except every generation’s Keanu Reeves is this Keanu Reeves. Alex Pappademas attempts to separate the man from the myth.

“It’s clear my daughter died because of these drugs coming through our border,” Susan said afterward, to a bank of TV news cameras, and then she returned to North Carolina, where the more complicated truth was that nothing about Toria’s death seemed clear. Susan, a former private investigator, was trained to work a case and […]