LOS ANGELES — Most swiping for love on a dating app know the drill.

Strategically pen an inviting self-description. Select filters — age, geographic proximity — for potential partners. Perhaps declare intentions: Looking for something serious? Something casual?

The dating app Mirchi presents another possibility: "Auntie made me sign up....Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A bout with flesh-eating bacteria can start out with a day at the beach, a hardly worrisome cut and then, in less than 24 hours, a raging infection fought with heavy antibiotics and gruesome scalpel work.

It would be reassuring to know where and when Florida’s coastal waters are ripe with “one of the fastest growing ...Read more

When I think of the legendary concerts in music history — the Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York City; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other rock giants at Woodstock; me as the guest triangle player for the Stamford Symphony Orchestra — the one I remember as the greatest was my granddaughter Chloe’s third-grade recorder concert, which was ...Read more

Some cooler heads have prevailed in Florida, where Seminole County School Board members unanimously voted down a proposal to cover an entire high school yearbook page in stickers to hide photos of students carrying “love is love” signs.

The photos were taken at a March walkout, which students organized to protest Florida’s Parental Rights...Read more

CHICAGO — The 35th annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt — which is nominally a scavenger hunt but closer to a campus tradition wrapped inside a multigenerational class reunion bundled into an elaborate prank requiring the cooperation of hundreds of students, dozens of faculty, family, friends and government officials — concluded ...Read more

Prince Tut and the dwarf exquisite Queen Tut papyrus grasses have put the proverbial ta-da in ‘The Garden Guy’s containers this year. The story, however, really goes back to October. I have two containers I call smokestacked in their shape. They are about 20 inches tall, ceramic-glazed and about the diameter of a Frisbee. The containers get ...Read more

OK, I promise this is the last one. No. Really. This time, it is. I just can’t stop telling these wedding disaster stories, because you all keep springing them on me. And they’re just too funny.

I mean funny later — not funny when they happened. Well, maybe sometimes when they happened. But it was like when my daughter Curly Girl was ...Read more

Cameron Wright, 16, has always seen himself as a “dude.” As a young child, Cameron didn’t have the words to explain the disconnect between how he saw himself and how the world saw him. But he knew that despite being born in a girl’s body, he was meant to be a boy.

After taking reversible puberty blockers that pause a teenager’s body ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Peggy Stenger casually admits to having a freezer of dead birds.

The Cleveland native, who lives in Chicago's South Loop and works in the Loop, collects the creatures when she sees them on the ground, often dead or injured from midflight collisions with buildings in her neighborhood.

Stenger puts the dead birds in Ziploc bags and ...Read more

A 64-year-old bartender loves pi — and it led him to score a jackpot win in North Carolina.

“I’ve always been an extremely big math person,” Jonathan Ruby told the N.C. Education Lottery. “I picked my numbers based on pi.”

It isn’t the first time Ruby said he was drawn to the ratio — which starts with the decimal places 3.1415...Read more

Online dating seems like the most obvious way to meet a potential partner — after all, how many singles (who are ready to mingle, of course) do you know who don’t have at least one dating app on their phone?

But online dating has become more than just a place to find dates. When someone moves to a new city, it’s a place to chat with ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday announced the launch of a mental health and suicide prevention campaign that encourages students in seventh through 12th grade to take a pledge to stay alive and seek help if they need it.

CPS said staff members, including school counselors, will discuss the “Please Stay” campaign, self-care ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Spanish was rarely spoken at home while Luis Eduardo Sanchez was growing up in the early 2000s. He attended a predominantly white elementary and middle school in suburban Illinois. Despite being a son of a Mexican immigrant father and a Chicana mother, he recalls not feeling comfortable embracing their roots. “I was kind of ashamed ...Read more

There are thousands of ways to keep your relationship interesting, but I’ll only give you a few special ones that will not only make your partner feel loved, but also make you proud of your efforts. The more you put into your relationship, the more you will get out of it.

Do something sweet every day

For my wife this comes naturally; for me ...Read more

I shouldn't have been surprised when my conversation with Eliza Reid, the first lady of Iceland, ran the gamut from her thoughts on government-subsidized child care to the indisputable fact that Ryan Reynolds is indeed Canadian.

Reid artfully weaves incisive, relatable observations into her impressive new book on gender equality, "Secrets of ...Read more

Laurie and Mike Riley like to walk their dogs around their Weston, Florida, neighborhood in the evenings. The squirrels scurrying about the tree-lined paths have been an ordinary sight of the after-dinner tradition — that is, until 4-year-old Myroslav and 5-year-old Volodymyr Nemets and their parents joined them from Ukraine last month.

“...Read more

BALTIMORE -- It has been an agonizingly long time since the members of Baltimore’s two oldest Reform Jewish temples have been able to worship as well and as fully as they’d like.

Membership at Har Sinai Congregation and Temple Oheb Shalom dwindled for years, and with it their prospects for long-term survival. They considered merging five ...Read more

CHICAGO -- For show-and-tell Friday, Genevieve Billingsley handed her granddaughter, Alaina, a green and yellow ukulele. The 5-year-old picked at the strings in front of her iPad as she sat on the sofa in her Chicago apartment.

Already that morning, Alaina had watched a video on the weather, written her name with a large yellow pencil and ...Read more

Q. Mother’s Day was interesting at our house this year. I’ve been married to the kids’ dad for most of their lives. They are now 15 and 17 and were scheduled to be with us but decided to be with their mother for most of the day. This was a little weird because normally they spend more time here with us even though the custody agreement ...Read more