For decades, Prague was the stag party capital of Europe. The Czech capital, with its fairy-tale old town and its famously cheap, famously excellent beer, drew planeloads of rowdy bachelor and bachelorette groups, mostly British, who came for one thing: to drink the historic center dry at a price that seemed almost too good to …
American mashed potatoes are a fine thing, comforting and familiar, but next to their French cousin they can start to look a little sad. Because the French make mashed potatoes so silky, so rich, so impossibly smooth that the great chef Joel Robuchon won Michelin stars with his, and the secret to the difference comes …
Here is a disappointment that befalls a surprising number of people every year. They see a photograph of a famous European town blanketed in Christmas snow, Hallstatt mirrored in its lake, Colmar’s canals dusted white, Rothenburg’s walls under a soft fall, and they book a December trip expecting exactly that. And they arrive to grey …
Denmark keeps winning “happiest country” and Americans keep thinking it’s about the free healthcare or the bikes or the pastries. I spent three weeks with a Danish family and discovered the secret: They just don’t do the things that make us miserable. That’s it. That’s the formula. Stop doing stupid things that make you unhappy. …
Among the many things people do in the hope of protecting their aging minds, one of the more surprising candidates has emerged not from a supplement aisle or a brain-training app, but from the operating theater of the eye surgeon. In recent years, a striking body of research has linked one of the most common …
There is a small Greek island in the Aegean where men routinely live into their nineties and beyond, where heart disease and dementia are strikingly rare, and where a surprising number of people simply seem to forget to die. The island is Ikaria, and it is one of the world’s handful of Blue Zones, the …
On her very first day in France, in November 1948, a thirty-six-year-old American who did not yet know how to cook sat down to lunch in Rouen and ate a dish that changed the entire course of her life. The American was Julia Child, the restaurant was La Couronne, and the dish was sole meuniere, …
The fantasy starts with the price. A woman buys a house in Sardinia for €1. Americans immediately do the same mental trick they do with cheap flights and clearance furniture. They anchor on the first number and build the whole dream around it. Suddenly the story becomes “own a home in Italy for less than …
Beef bourguignon is one of those dishes that almost everyone has eaten and almost no one makes quite right, and the reason usually comes down to a single step near the beginning, the browning of the meat. Americans are taught to brown beef a certain way, and that way, applied to a bourguignon, quietly sabotages …
Most “best places to retire” lists are vibes with a price tag. If you are a non-EU American, a country “wanting” you is not a compliment, it’s a legal category with a checklist, a fee, and a renewal calendar. Here’s the blunt part: in Europe, retirees are welcomed when they can prove stable non-work income, …
Why Bother Trying This? If you had told me a month ago that cooking pasta “the Italian way” could be a life-altering experience, I would have laughed in your face probably while shoveling spoonfuls of leftover mac and cheese from a box. Yet here I am, 30 days later, feeling like I’ve undergone a mini …
An American woman lands in Europe, and within a day she has noticed the hands. Not consciously, perhaps, but the impression registers: the women around her have lovely nails, and yet something about them is different from home. Short. Natural-shaped. Bare or in the quietest polish. And always, unfailingly, neat. What is missing is just …