Lifestyle

Wearable devices are good at detecting if you’ve fallen down, but now it’s possible to figure out if your walking is unsteady, well before you take a tumble. Apple ’s latest iPhone operating system, iOS 15, takes the walking metrics previously rolled out in the Health app—walking asymmetry, double support time, step length and walking speed—and assesses them to rate a person’s overall walking steadiness. After a few days of collecting data as you walk around, preferably carrying or wearing your iPhone at hip level, you’ll receive a notification that your walking steadiness is OK, low or very low.

Todd Stephen Bell, a retired teacher living in San Diego, on his 1959 Cadillac Series 62 Coupe, as told to A.J. Baime. Who knows why a young kid gets interested in anything? As far back as I can remember, the Cadillacs of the 1950s and ’60s captivated me. I particularly liked the 1959. I had read that it had the highest tail fins of any standard production car ever built. It was an icon, kind of like the 1957 Chevy among Chevrolets. It’s that one year that gets more attention than the others.

When Bill Burke retired from practicing corporate law in 2003, he craved an activity that would indulge his passion for travel and challenge him mentally and physically. He had already been hiking in the mountains around his home in Costa Mesa, Calif., and learning the art of alpinism had more appeal than tennis or golf, he says. He attended a high-altitude climbing course, upped his training and within a year was peak bagging mountains around the world. By age 67, he had climbed the highest mountain on every continent, including Mount Everest twice. Today, he is one of the most respected mountaineers in the world and even has a peak near the Nepal-Tibet border named for him.

Piecework quilts have long been embedded, so to speak, in American life. Assembled from dozens, if not hundreds, of individual fabric pieces, their colorful geometries became popular in the decades before the Civil War, taking the place of wool “bed ruggs” and other colonial-era coverings. “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories,” a new exhibition opening Oct. 10 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, explores the enduring hold of quilts on the American imagination, with more than 50 textile works dating from the late 17th century to this year. Exhibition organizer Jennifer Swope, a curator at the MFA, says that the goal of the show is to trace “the evolution of the American quilt and the ongoing American experiment, and how they’ve both changed over time.” The three works that open the...

TO THE DELIGHT OF art lovers around the country, this autumn promises to be much livelier than last, with scores more museums fully open and long-delayed exhibits finally unfurled. But as coronavirus cases tick back up and restrictions tighten in some cities, elbowing your way through a crowded gallery at one of the country’s major art institutions appeals far less than it used to. The solution? Seek out a less popular art venue with its own cachet. Better still, make it a pilgrimage and build a trip around the venture. After so many months deprived of both art and travel, what finer way to celebrate their return? For trip inspiration, we asked five art-world notables to share the collections and house-museums worth traveling for. Fondation Claude Monet | Giverny, France The house and gard...

In the early 1990s, Patti Davis felt “broken and useless,” she says. Her novels were earning tepid reviews, and acting jobs had dried up. “Everything I touched went bad,” she recalls. Divorced and keen to escape an abusive relationship, she sold her Los Angeles home at the bottom of the market and fled to New York, where she knew almost no one. She says she thought seriously about suicide. Then, in 1994, Ms. Davis learned that her father, former president Ronald Reagan, was about to announce in a public letter that he had Alzheimer’s disease. “Something opened up in me,” she writes in “Floating in the Deep End,” her new handbook for Alzheimer’s caregivers, published next week. Helping her father offered a way out of her “dark, little world” by pushing her to grow up. “If he could face the ...

YEE-HAH. Eighty years after the original Willys Jeep set the template, Jeep’s Wrangler compact SUV series is selling like there is no tomorrow, chalking up three straight quarters of record sales in the U.S., including 118,666 units in the first six months of 2021. Unfortunately, prices are soaring like there was no yesterday. Our test vehicle, a 2021 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 4xe, Jeep’s first plug-in hybrid vehicle in the U.S., arrived last week with what I considered a fairly staggering window-sticker price of $65,890. I might have peed a little, there in the driveway.

‘Dear Evan Hansen,” the screen version of the acclaimed Broadway musical, draws its dramatic energy from the anguish of its young hero, a high-school senior who suffers from a severe anxiety disorder. Painfully lonely and terrified of the rejection that he constantly courts, Evan thinks in obsessive loops and speaks in apologetic whispers, though he sings ardently, sometimes beautifully, of his fears and yearnings. He’s played by Ben Platt, who began to develop the role in 2014, then went on to win a Tony for his brilliance on stage. You needn’t have seen the show—I did not—to understand how powerful his performance must have been. But the film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scal...

“IT’S UNFORTUNATE that nature has a bad sense of humor,” said Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Rey to Women’s Wear Daily in 2007. The star of the reality show “Dr. 90210” continued: “Even the thinnest women have love handles.” His then-new brand, Dr. Rey’s Shapewear, was conceived to “help” women achieve the kind of slimming that he practiced surgically. At the time, shapewear—stretchy, often compressive lingerie designed to smooth one’s figure—was a corrective tool meant to be hidden under your regular clothing. Just as you wouldn’t go to work with visible pimple cream on your chin, you wouldn’t venture outside with visible shapewear, or even discuss it. Dr. Rey’s quote underlined the shameful nature of the product in those days. The doctor’s office did not respond to requests for...

Old stories are getting told to new audiences this week. David S. Goyer brings Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels to the screen, Diablo Cody finds comfort in “Baywatch,” and “The Wonder Years” gets a new family. Plus, Billy Bob Thornton says goodbye to the character that is most like himself. Here’s where to stream it: New Release: ‘Goliath’ (Amazon Prime Video)