Jordan Fletcher

As a reporter who covers sex and intimacy, I spend a lot of time listening to experts extol the virtues of open, honest communication. To have good sex — and to keep having good sex over time — couples must be willing to talk about it, they say.But some people would rather leave their relationships than have those conversations, said Jeffrey Chernin, a marriage and family therapist and the author of “Achieving Intimacy: How to Have a Loving Relationship That Lasts” — especially if things in the bedroom aren’t going particularly well.“One of the things I often say to couples…

Sixty years ago, baseball commissioner Ford Frick received a telegram from a Wisconsin congressman. Rep. Henry Reuss was worried the Milwaukee Braves would defect to Atlanta for the promise of a richer television contract, and proposed a fix: if all the Major League Baseball teams would share their television money, then the Braves might stay.According to the Associated Press, Frick replied in that summer of 1964 that “… a plan to pool all television receipts would not be feasible or acceptable at this time,” but would be “worthy of future consideration.”Now, in 2024, that conversation has arrived. Commissioner Rob Manfred…

The U.S. military anchored a temporary pier on Gaza’s coast on Thursday, creating a point of entry for humanitarian aid for the enclave, where the flow of supplies through land borders has largely come to a halt since Israel began its incursion into Rafah last week.The aid will be loaded onto trucks that will begin moving ashore “in the coming days,” the U.S. Central Command said in a statement Thursday morning. U.S. officials had said last week that the floating pier and causeway had been completed, but that weather conditions had delayed their installation.Israel has long opposed a seaport for…

The Biden administration, under acute pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the heart of theories that Covid leaked from a lab.The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, came on the heels of a scorching congressional hearing this month at which lawmakers barraged the group’s president with suggestions that he had misrepresented work with virologists in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. Republicans went further, demanding that Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit, EcoHealth…

Who’s pitching tonight?For 100 years, that wasn’t just a casual question. It was the question that defined baseball.The answer always had a chance to give you goosebumps. Maybe it was Tom Seaver versus Steve Carlton. Maybe it was Sandy Koufax versus Bob Gibson. Maybe it was Pedro Martinez versus Randy Johnson.They weren’t just a reason to watch. They were the reason to watch. They threw the first pitch of the game. They often stuck around to throw the last pitch of the game. When the stars hold the ball in their hands 100 times a game, from the first minute…

Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled the literary world and earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night in Port Hope, Ontario, east of Toronto. She was 92.A spokesman for her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, confirmed the death, at a nursing home. Ms. Munro’s health had declined since at least 2009, when she said she’d had heart bypass surgery and had been…

The four adult children were in agreement.Their father, William Curry, a retired electrical engineer and business executive, was sinking deeper into dementia. They had found a memory care facility about a mile from their parents’ house in Chelmsford, Mass., where they thought Mr. Curry would do better.But their mother, Melissa, who was 83 when her family began urging her to make this change in 2016, remained determined to continue caring for her 81-year-old husband at home, despite the increasing toll on her own health. When her children raised the issue of a move, “she wouldn’t discuss it,” said her daughter,…

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the story behind the stories from the last week on court. This week, the coveted Masters 1000 in Rome ran its first week and the stories on court were matched by the drama off it. Novak Djokovic exited, struck by a water bottle, Rafael Nadal took the next step in his comeback, and the on-court spectacle was overtaken by some strange umpiring.And is everybody injured now?If you’d like to follow our fantastic tennis coverage, please click here.Are all these injuries signal or noise?Friday lunchtime in Rome and the Foro Italico briefly…

Spain’s governing Socialist party emerged on Sunday as the winner of regional elections in Catalonia that had been widely seen as a litmus test for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s polarizing amnesty measure for separatists.The Socialists are celebrating what they claim is a momentous victory, though they did not clinch enough seats to govern on their own. They most likely face weeks of bargaining, and possibly a repeat election if no agreement is reached. But for the first time in over a decade, they may be able to form a regional government led by an anti-independence party.Addressing supporters late Sunday night…

Richard “Rick” Slayman, who made history at age 62 as the first person to receive a kidney from a genetically modified pig, has died about two months after the procedure.Massachusetts General Hospital, where Mr. Slayman had the operation, said in a statement on Saturday that its transplant team was “deeply saddened” at his death. The hospital said it had “no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant.”Mr. Slayman, who was Black, had end-stage kidney disease, a condition that affects more than 800,000 people in the United States, according to the federal government, with disproportionately higher rates among…