Forget the diaper toss game and mimosa station. The hottest trend for expecting parents in 2025 is the nesting party — a low-key, practical spin on the traditional baby shower. It’s all about getting things done with your sleeves rolled up, not just sipping punch and unwrapping onesies.

According to Pinterest Predicts — an annual report ...Read more

On a cold spring day years ago, young neighbor children found a small, dead bunny in their yard. They ran inside to tell their mother about the discovery. She went outside with the children to view the pitiful sight.

When the woman’s husband came home that evening, unbeknown to the children, he disposed of the bunny. The next day, the ...Read more

Krista Beggan’s debut novel "A Life Saving Bullet" starts off fast and never lets up. Six months after a young CIA officer dies during a clandestine operation, his best friend and sister, both CIA officers themselves, get assigned the mission of finding his killer. Hunting a ruthless criminal puts everything at stake, especially since the best...Read more

Through alternating perspectives in "Kalayla: Unraveling Tangles," Jeannie Nicholas brings to life an engaging story that explores themes of family, love, loss, marital abuse, healing, and second chances.

Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between the summer of 1999 and the spring of 2002, the novel follows the lives of three women from vastly ...Read more

Once their three children became adults, Michael and Jill Loughran moved from Stowe, Vermont, to a rural town about an hour away – more specifically, to a 300-acre spread that used to be a wholesale Christmas tree farm.

Before semi-retiring, Michael had been the operations manager at his family's industrial engineering company in Philadelphia...Read more

There are two kinds of people in this world: Do it Yourself People and Hire Someone to Do It For You People. Wisdom is knowing which category you fall into.

We are Do it Yourself People. Unless it involves plumbing. Then we are Hire Someone to Do It For You People.

Experience has taught us that nearly every home plumbing project can and will ...Read more

Cultural Psychosis. You might not have heard the term before, but you’re sure to have seen its effects. The term is used to describe a unique set of psychological and behavioral responses — such as feelings of hopelessness and alienation, anxiety, depression, anger, and maladaptive behaviors — within a marginalized group to systemic ...Read more

The son of a Virginia plantation owner and an enslaved woman flees west after he is accused of killing his father… but that is only the beginning of his misadventures in Dan Schafer’s western homage, "Sun Walker."

In 1821, Joshua Beck is one of a hundred volunteers for a large trapping party ascending the Missouri River on keelboats to its ...Read more

Creators of an innovative pacifier believe it will transform neonatal care.

According to team lead and associate professor Hong Yeo in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, this is the first device in the world that can continuously measure a baby’s electrolyte concentrations.

“We started to develop this technology...Read more

I was one of the first to complete the family NCAA bracket this year. There’s not a chance I’ll win and I’m good with that.

Our son-in-law started the family bracket challenge, which includes his side of the family and our side, 15 years ago.

His side of the family loves sports. His dad even refereed for years.

When you love sports, you...Read more

Part of what makes novels so appealing is how they allow us to step into the lives of others. This allows us to not only escape the real world — like in science fiction and fantasy — but also to see the real world through a new lens. To see — to feel and experience — what it’s like to live a completely different life, even if only for ...Read more

"The Librarians of Lisbon" is accurately described on the cover as “A WWII story of love and espionage,” and novelist Suzanne Nelson certainly delivers, as promised, a fine work of historical fiction for adult readers.

This former children’s book editor and award-winning author has previously written dozens of middle grade and young adult...Read more

Looking out the window of his home in Troy, New York, on a Friday night, Kyle Wessels made note of his first chore the next day: shoveling snow.

On Saturday morning, he saw that only a few inches of snow had fallen, but it was the wet, heavy kind.

Having grown up in Troy, then-47-year-old Wessels knew the drill. He grabbed his snow blower and ...Read more

I can’t call heads or tails on whether we should stop minting the penny. There are two sides to every coin, right?

Zinc and copper used to make a penny are worth almost four times the value of the coin. Bottom line: The penny is not cost-efficient. I empathize. Some days I’m not terribly cost-efficient either.

It’s hard to imagine life ...Read more

Is there such a thing as too old or too late to find new love?

I admit that before I turned 40 almost a decade ago, I didn’t give much thought to this question. Though I was writing romance and love stories, my protagonists were my age or younger, because that was what I knew. The protagonists I read about or watched on film and television ...Read more

With her mother in labor, then-17-year-old Jamie Dawson sneaked past nurses and headed for the delivery room.

The door was cracked open just enough for her to hear baby brother Max cry for the first time. Dawson felt a surge of love like she'd never experienced. When she became the first person to hold Max other than his parents, the feeling ...Read more

The fate of America sits in the crosshairs as Russia unleashes its most ambitious plan yet to deceive, distract, and sow chaos. But no Russian machinations have yet survived a run-in with Dan Reilly, international hotel executive and part-time CIA spy, as Ed Fuller and Gary Grossman reveal in the fourth installment of their popular Red Hotel ...Read more

I attend a spirituality group for an hour every week that holds loving kindness as its anchor.

During the hour, we read the poetry of such luminaries as Mary Oliver and John O'Donohue. We meditate, and we talk about the ways we find to extend loving kindness to ourselves and others.

The dozen or so gentle-spirited members of this group also ...Read more

We have just done a school pick-up; 14-year-old twins and their 12-year-old sister are in the car with us. In a unanimous decision, we head directly to Chick-fil-A because some days the main thing you get at school is hungry. Very, very hungry.

We ordered and are seated with waffle fries and ice cream, checking off vegetables and dairy for the ...Read more

Harold Phifer’s "My Bully, My Aunt, and Her Final Gift" is a refreshingly honest, darkly humorous, and unexpectedly heartfelt memoir that masterfully balances comedy and introspection. With sharp wit and a candid narrative style, Phifer takes readers on a journey through his complicated past, shaped by the formidable presence of his Aunt Kathy...Read more