By Rita Mehta For the habit makers who make new resolutions every year—some of our favorite products to help them actually keep their promises. Cookbooks — because sometimes all it takes to start cooking again is a new recipe! Metal and bamboo bento boxes to pack a lunch. Reusable, easy-to-wash coffee cups for the daily  ...

By Karleen Gardner “Empathy is a squishy word,” writes Michael Ventura in the book Applied Empathy. “Sometimes it’s confused with sympathy or misinterpreted as ‘being nice.’ That isn’t empathy. Empathy is about understanding. Empathy lets us see the world from other points of view and helps us form insights that can lead us to new  ...

When Jesse Treviño was 25, he was relearning how to paint using his left hand—the only hand he still had. He started by painting a bedroom wall black. Then, over the course of two years, he turned that wall into a mural of beer, cigarettes, and pain pills — the balms of life after war. He called  ...

Of all the images in “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975,” a gritty show of anti-war art organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, some of the most appealing are by a woman named Corita Kent. One of her prints features a yellow submarine, sprouting flowers  ...

When Mia launched the Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts, in 2017, Elif Gokcigdem was among the project’s advisors. Born in Turkey, she became a historian of Islamic art and a scholar of museums themselves before focusing on building empathy. In her 2016 book, Fostering Empathy Through Museums, she introduced the notion that museums  ...

The Vietnam War defined a generation of Americans in the 1960s and ’70s, from campus protests to disillusionment to, of course, death. More than 58,000 Americans died in the conflict. But for Southeast Asians, in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the war was always different. It was longer, for one thing, having begun in Vietnam in  ...

When I was 23 years old, fresh out of journalism school, I went to work at The Associated Press bureau in Minneapolis. This was in 1995, just before the internet and email became widely accessible, and the AP still distributed the news — all the news that was fit to print — by printer. In  ...

By Esther Callahan The Vietnam War, which ended 44 years ago, may seem long ago and far away. But the damage remains acute: more than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, and a shattered faith in the United States government. In the end, after decades of trying to  ...

On the morning of January 28, 1976, Kim Jones stepped into his combat boots, pulled a nylon stocking over his face, and slathered himself in mud. He strapped an unruly lattice of sticks — held together by twine and electrical tape — to his back, as though he’d been lying on a forest floor for  ...

By Casey Riley and Tim Gihring Meadow Muska was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1952, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Roseville. She earned a degree in photography from Ohio University and eventually got a job as a staff photojournalist with a small-town newspaper in Oregon. It didn’t last long. She was  ...