LOS ANGELES -- As a woman prepares to pitch her friend to an audience of roughly 200 eager singles, a few of their pals skip around the room, hold up cardboard signs that say "Team Jason" and hype up the crowd. A live band plays early 2000s pop music while the eligible bachelor makes his way to the stage and sits on a velvet blue couch under a ...Read more

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- It doesn’t look like anything remarkable.

On the corner of Duke of Gloucester and Conduit streets in Annapolis sits what seems like a residential home. But what happens here is much more than what it seems: The building houses the headquarters of HM2 Buck for Hope Foundation, a small nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness ...Read more

ARISE

Ding! goes my phone every single morning at 7 am For the past year, that sound has meant only one thing: it’s time for my daily communion with friends.

Most days, either Joe or Nana-Ama, my Wordle-playing buddies, have already finished that day’s puzzle and shared their result by the time I get up. Nama-Ama is the night owl and ...Read more

Ever since I became a grandfather, and have proudly remained the most immature member of the family, I have often been asked if I spoil my grandchildren.

“No,” I always reply. “That’s my wife’s job. My job is to corrupt them.”

This makes me supremely qualified to be a grandparent coach.

I got the idea for this heretofore ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — It doesn't take a hawk eye to recognize that the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is not your normal Caltrans project.

For one thing, there's the color. Most Caltrans structures are the light gray of natural concrete. But to reduce reflectivity and help the crossing blend in more with the ...Read more

I’m writing this with no idea who our next president will be. You may be reading this already knowing.

I’m typing this six days before Election Day. It will appear in the printed version of my hometown newspaper, and several others, five days after Election Day. Such is the reality of newspaper deadlines. It’s a little like writing a ...Read more

SEATTLE — This summer, therapist Michelle Ehle added a new offering to her practice: a weekly group focused on getting through the presidential election.

Clients were bringing up politics during sessions, and she wanted to make a space for people to process emotions before the November election.

In the first sessions, the group focused on ...Read more

The Temple of Bloom is like the tree of life to everyone who gardens for pollinators. It is a more compact form of Seven-Sons Flower known botanically as Heptacodium micronioides. The Temple of Bloom’s native habitat is China where its wild populations are under threat of extinction.

If you live in zones 5a to 9b however, and you are looking ...Read more

Dear Anna,

I’m a 40-year-old newly divorced career gal, and dipping my toes back into the dating pool after a long marriage. I’m not looking for anything super serious just yet, but I also don’t want to waste time on people who aren’t genuinely interested or who have wildly different values or goals than I do. The idea of endless dates ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Peter Schoenmann leaned over a rectangular hunk of plaster with a historic mural painted on it last week in Berwyn, Illinois. He began slowly shaving material off the backside of the hunk with a vibrating tool while his wife, who’s also an art conservator, positioned a vacuum near the blade and sucked up the debris.

The goal is to ...Read more

As anyone who's swiped on Tinder, Hinge or Bumble can attest, some of the photos our eyes come across, well, leave a lot to be desired. In fact, the photos you choose can make or break your profile before someone even reads your bio (which will obviously be well-crafted if you’ve been taking my advice!).

In my 13+ years of helping people with...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Barely four hours after he had arrived in Los Angeles from Georgia to attend his nephew's birthday bash, James Huling was seated at a bar rolling a joint and sipping a cannabis-infused agua fresca on a recent Thursday afternoon.

"I'm trying to find out about that Cali life," said Huling, 71, with a grin as he sparked the freshly...Read more

DENVER -- What keeps you up at night?

Bank account woes? An impending work presentation? Analyzing that embarrassing thing you said in the seventh grade?

Boring!

To give you something fresh to worry about as Halloween approaches, The Denver Post pulled from the scariest thing we can think of — the state of the world — and asked a slew of ...Read more

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I handed my 5-year-old a few books and some trash from his car seat and asked him to take it into the house and put it where it belongs. He put it back on the car seat, said “no” and walked in the house. I am proud of myself that I didn’t react, but now I have no idea what to do about it.

Answer: You already did the ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- For more than two days, a vital shipping passageway in the Port of L.A. was shut down, and the cause was surprising to some. A big rig overturned, sparking a fierce lithium-ion battery blaze that spewed toxic gases, snarled port traffic and resulted in what one official said was massive economic losses from delayed shipments.

The...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- To hear police and locals tell it, Halloween in Hollywood two decades ago was out of control, with revelers routinely spraying and damaging property with a product deemed such a menace it has since been seasonally outlawed: Silly String.

Thin plasticine strands stripped the sheen off sports cars parked on the street. Not even the...Read more

My heart surgeon told me to take a hike, so I bought a pedometer. Then he told me that my surgery was canceled and I didn’t have to take a hike. But I already had the pedometer.

So I took a hike.

It was a walk in the park — or, actually, around the neighborhood — compared to the excessive ambulation I would have to do each day while ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — On a Wednesday night around 7, Morgan Steffy arrived at El Rey in Philadelphia's Center City area, following directions from an app she had downloaded two months ago. The app directed the 30-year-old West Philly software engineer to sit at Table 2, where she joined a Temple University doctor, a nomad who works in health care ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- For the young and upwardly mobile hipsters of Northeast L.A., the Frogtown Flea Crawl was the hot new event of their perfectly Instagrammable dreams.

For many residents of the historically working-class Latino community, it was their breaking point.

This fall, the event became an unexpected flash point in L.A.’s debate over ...Read more