In seafood shacks, at gourmet tables, and especially during a stomach-defying live-fish auction, Reggie Nadelson discovers the true—and a new—Hawaii. It's 5 a.m. at Honolulu's fish auction, and I'm eyeballing a quivering Hawaiian opah, a pink and silver moonfish, round and flat as a plate. …[Read more]
Redesigning your mother's engagement ring is serious business. Reggie Nadelson travels to Gstaad and master jeweler Andrew Grima to get it done right. "Shall I surprise you?" Surprise me! Andrew Grima, a big man with a generous smile, sits behind his desk in his shop in Gstaad and scribbles a design for a diamond ring …[Read more]
One grim winter morning, Kurt Wallander—the cop hero of Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers—gets the news that an elderly couple has been murdered outside the Swedish port town of Ystad. You can feel the damp and cold of the city, the area's melancholy, as Wallander drives across the raw, flat land to their farmstead. Like all the Wallander …[Read more]
In Delta Junction, one winter pastime is tossing your coffee into the air, then watching it freeze in pale-brown crystalline sheets on the way down. Temperatures in the interior of the state, here at the last stop on the Alaska Highway, often sink to 50 below. Weather isn't small talk 2,350 miles north of Denver; it's life and death. You plug your car …[Read more]