CHICAGO -- The last time we saw Diamond Gibbs, then a mother of one and a senior deckhand on the Mercury Skyline Queen, she was keeping an eye on the water to make sure her passengers and other boaters on the Chicago River were safe while enjoying themselves. That was in the fall of 2019.

These days, the West Garfield Park native is at the helm...Read more

Q. My co-parent and I have two kids. I recently married a woman with two more children, a few years younger than my own. My wife insists on going to the children’s doctor and dentist appointments, which causes my co-parent to become extremely territorial and recently caused a huge brouhaha at the dentist’s office. The kids were there, and ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA -- How many people can say they’re in a 13-person worldwide collective of people doing their specific job? Or that folks travel from all over to work with them? Most of us certainly can’t, but Mona Maruyama, a tattoo artist at Floating World Tattoos in Philadelphia, can.

Maruyama does Hajichi, a traditional style of permanent ...Read more

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I know I need to have immediate consequences for negative behaviors in my third-grade classroom, but no matter how immediate those consequences are or how big they are, they seem to make things worse. Kids talk while they are supposed to be taking a test, for example. It started with one student; now it’s 15. I tried a ...Read more

The bugle call known as taps is 24 hallowed notes long. My dad was a World War II Army veteran. At the close of his funeral service, a soldier stood on the crest of a small nearby hill and played taps. Each note rang with a piercing sorrow.

When taps is played, military members salute, civilians place their hands over their hearts, and loved ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- I went to my dentist earlier this year for a regular checkup, and he made a series of observations nobody wants to hear.

I had a cavity.

It was under a crown.

And the crown was next to a wisdom tooth that might have to be yanked to make room for him to saw off the crown and fix the cavity.

So I went to see an oral surgeon, who...Read more

In case I am run out of the country, which is probably inevitable but would give me a great reason to have my own travel show, I just renewed my passport.

“Now I can visit my mother,” I told Jenn, a very nice postal employee who helped me and my wife, Sue, with our renewals at a post office branch on Long Island, New York.

“Where does ...Read more

On a recent cloudy afternoon in Seattle's Sodo neighborhood, Baso Fibonacci dipped the slender tip of his brush into a glob of white gouache and painted the shape of a skull on a scrap of fentanyl-stained aluminum foil.

Someone, at some point, used the foil to smoke fentanyl — you can tell from the trail of brown residue left by the pill on ...Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- When was the last time music made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, sent a chill down your spine or gave you goosebumps all over?

Whether it’s a full-body rush from joining in an outdoor choir of 58,000 Swifties at Levi’s Stadium or a shudder from the evocative tension that’s made Samuel Barber’s “Adagio...Read more

History is a complicated subject in a place that embraces reinvention as strongly as Venice Beach, and you can tell by the neighborhood's murals.

There's Jim Morrison of the Doors; the cigar magnate Abbot Kinney, widely thought of as Venice's founder; and Teena Marie, a white soul singer from Oakwood, Venice's historic Black community. But ...Read more

Last year I had the opportunity to trial a new daylily and I can tell you it went out in a blaze of glory. This happened for a couple of reasons. The first and foremost is that its name is Blazing Glory and it is making its debut this year as part of the Proven Winners Rainbow Rhythm collection.

This group now consists of 16 varieties and if ...Read more

When Caitlin Bethune-Daniels met Chris Daniels on the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, one of the ice-breaker facts she provided was that she’d won $500 in a karaoke competition singing Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love.”

“He saw my profile and said, ‘I could marry this woman’ out loud,” recalls Bethune-Daniels, a school teacher in ...Read more

Your kids look so beautiful. They really do.

You post photos of them going to prom and going to graduation and going to end-of-the-year banquets and all of these milestone events that will forever shape their childhoods and punctuate their memories and inform their futures, and I see their joy and affection and pride and really gorgeous hair ...Read more

Burnout. We’ve all experienced it, whether at work, from school, over family obligations, or even due to a too-packed social schedule. We can also apply it to relationships — because it’s actually completely normal. Sometimes it stems from being overwhelmed (so many apps, so little time), and other times you find yourself feeling like you�...Read more

Dear Anna,

I’m a bisexual woman currently in my first significant relationship with another bisexual woman. Throughout my life, I’ve always identified as bi, but my past romantic involvements were primarily with straight men. I've been married twice and have three daughters. Despite my attraction to women, I’ve never dated one until now. ...Read more

Every day, the scene plays out in hospitals across America: Older men and women lie on gurneys in emergency room corridors moaning or suffering silently as harried medical staff attend to crises.

Even when physicians determine these patients need to be admitted to the hospital, they often wait for hours — sometimes more than a day — in the ...Read more

As a 14-year-old interested in skin care, Emily Chan thought dabbing her face with her mom’s fancy anti-aging products would help nourish her skin.

What she didn’t know was that the creams contained ingredients such as retinol and hyaluronic acid. Both can improve the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles by increasing skin cell production,...Read more

Q. My husband did multiple tours in Afghanistan and has had multiple head injuries. When he came home, he seemed disconnected and it was almost like he didn’t know us. My presence seemed to irritate him, he left the church, and we are now in the middle of a divorce. He met someone while we were still married and chooses to live with her. While...Read more

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I have a 13-year-old who is especially forgetful when it comes to remembering to take things to school: lunches, projects, homework, etc. I have been delivering these things to school for her throughout the years. I try to explain the life lesson that there won’t always be someone there to remember things for her, but she ...Read more