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When Violet Jessop set out to be a maritime stewardess, she wasn’t driven by some starry-eyed desire to see the world. She was moved by necessity.

My grandma’s favorite question is one we now discourage her from uttering. “Can you come in?”  The impulse to swing open her door and her arms, honed over nine decades and stitched into her Irish-Catholic DNA, is not easily thwarted. Yet we have attempted to do so this year.

The color-coded books first caught my eye. 

Tonight I wrote two events on my calendar: a birthday party and a baptism. They will be sanitized, scaled-down gatherings – and they will be fun – but still, it pained me to sully those blank boxes with black ink. 

The snow has begun. It is expected to last 18 hours, piling nine inches high and crippling weekend plans. The streets are emptying, the collective dash to the grocery store completed.

I was a sophomore in college when I received the little blue book, a gift from a friend who also wanted to be a writer. At the time I was editing the student newspaper, poring over buried leads and dangling modifiers.

More than 19 million people tuned in to watch the final episode of “Game of Thrones” May 19, making it the most viewed show to ever air on HBO.

“Wife Returned After Having Fine Funeral.” The headline of a 483-word story in the March 15, 1904, edition of The New York Times bore a sly nod to Tom Sawyer. A man named Ignacio Valente was charging the city with a funeral bill he had been wrongfully issued, according to the Times.

All afternoon I had been hunkered over my MacBook, perched above a frozen lake and watching the sun cast pink into the clouds. I was thinking about what lie dormant and all the possibility below, waiting to thaw.

I’ve always appreciated the notion of self-care in an Oprah Winfrey, hot-baths-and-expensive-chocolates kind of way. We work so hard, the thinking goes, that we deserve a break here and there. So splurge on that full-price gift-to-yourself. Book the massage. Binge on the new season.

It all started with a lost birth certificate. The Holy Spirit was at work that day and hasn’t slowed down since.

Roxanne Loper was almost home. Her journey had begun 15 months ago when she spotted a picture of a baby girl on the World Partners website and sensed something special.

Haley Stewart stared at the publish button and froze.

I’ve been emailing my friend Becky, a newspaper editor in South Dakota, about our growing desire to unplug. We used to compare notes on “Dancing with the Stars,” but lately we’re both watching less TV.

Janet Easter is experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions as she arranges a bouquet in her backyard, and she is unfazed.

The big news from the Social Security Administration is the ousting of a champion: Liam has dethroned Noah as the nation’s most popular boy name. This was the headline of its newly released baby-name report, an annual synthesis of Social Security card applications from the past year that offers a fascinating cultural statement and doubles as a tip sheet for expectant parents.

When Oprah Winfrey was first asked the question, the talk-show queen was left tongue-tied.

Erica Tighe was 26 when she made the leap: She would set out on her own to be a calligrapher. Full time. In order to pay her $800 rent and cellphone bill and $1,000 college loan payment and also hopefully afford some food.

Little did he know what a noble purpose awaited him when Don Ritchie settled into a house on Old South Head Road back in 1964. The former Navy seaman and retired salesman was eager to soak in the stunning view with his wife: an ocean cliff at Watsons Bay in Eastern Sydney known as The Gap.

When it came time to interview prospective sailors for his expedition across Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton had clear-cut criteria.