The Baggu Crescent Bag Deserves Its Cult Following

This is part of Global Sounds, a collection of stories spotlighting the music trends forging connections in 2024.

As the very last town on the eastern tip of Long Island, connected by only a small stretch of land, Montauk feels worlds away from the bustle of New York City and the doldrums of suburban Long Island.

During the Gilded Age, Cornelius Vanderbilt was America's richest man with an estimated net worth of $100 million, or around $200 billion in today's currency. Having amassed his fortune in the railroad business during a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization, he would be wealthier than Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett if he were alive today.

I recently took a one-day trip to Disney World. To save as much money as possible, I flew from New York to Orlando and back in one day so I wouldn't have to pay for hotels — and I chose to fly Spirit Airlines.

Qatar Airways’ over-the-top business class suite is about to get even more luxurious thanks to a new caviar service.

Disney asked a court to dismiss a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by a widowed husband because he signed up for a free trial of Disney+ and purchased tickets to its theme park, according to court documents.

In 2022, a new startup airline called Norse Atlantic Airways launched cheap flights between Europe and the US, operating Boeing 787 Dreamliners equipped only with economy and premium economy seats.

Houston, we have a problem.

The tonka bean, a wizened-looking South American seed, is beloved for its complex almond-vanilla scent, often appearing as an ingredient in perfumes. Outside the United States, it has also long been utilized by chefs, but studies have indicated that coumarin, a chemical compound in the plant, can cause liver damage in animals, and the Food and Drug Administration banned the bean in commercial foods in 1954. Now, with reports that the minuscule amounts used to impart big flavor are harmless (and the F.D.A. seemingly not particularly interested in enforcing the ban in recent years), tonka is showing up on dessert menus here. Thea Gould, 30, the pastry chef at the daytime luncheonette La Cantine and evening wine bar Sunsets in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was introduced to tonka after the restaurant’s owner received a jar from France, where it’s a widely used ingredient. Gould says the bean is an ideal stand-in for nuts — a common allergen — and infuses it into panna cotta, whipped cream and Pavlova. Ana Castro, 35, the chef and owner of the New Orleans seafood restaurant Acamaya, discovered tonka as a young line cook at Betony, the now-closed Midtown Manhattan restaurant. Entranced by the ingredient’s grassy, stone fruit-like notes, she’s used it to flavor a custardy corn nicuatole, steeped it into roasted candy squash purée and grated it fresh over a lush tres leches cake. And at the Musket Room in New York’s NoLIta, the pastry chef Camari Mick, 30, balances tonka’s richness with acidic citrus like satsuma and bergamot. Over the past year, she’s incorporated it into a silky lemon bavarois and a candy cap mushroom pot de crème and whipped it into ganache for a poached pear belle Hélène. “Some people ask our staff, ‘Isn’t tonka illegal?’” she says. Their answer: Our pastry chef’s got a guy. —

The Paris Summer Olympic Games are coming to an end this weekend, but there are still plenty of disciplines to go, including a new sport at the Games this year: breaking.

Hotels are often agents of change in a neighborhood. That’s certainly true in New York, where buttoned-up Wall Street and the frenetic NoMad district, north of Madison Square Park, are just two of the beneficiaries of the city’s latest hotel boom. More than 40 properties have opened across the five boroughs since 2022, during apost-Covid rebirth that’sbrought freshenergy to long-overlooked pockets of Manhattan as well as to its most well-trodden quarters. Among these new arrivals are the Hotel Chelsea, a long-awaited revival of the venerable art-crowd hangout, and Nine Orchard, an elegant makeover of a 1912 bank building on the Lower East Side. Then there’s the Aman, the hushed retreat that opened two summers ago in the middle of Midtown. At least two more luxury hotels are planning to welcome guests next month: the Surrey, an Upper East Side landmark entirely remade by the Malta-based Corinthia Hotels group, and the Manner, an upscale sibling of the Standard hotels, in SoHo. Here, a closer look at five other attention-worthy newcomers:

Aug 7, 2024 • 7 min read