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A Waffle-Lover’s Tour of Belgium’s Beach Towns

The country’s signature sweet tastes even better at its charming seaside. Five places to find the fluffiest, crispiest and most decadent Belgian waffles. Plus: Advice on the easiest way to explore the Belgian coast. Read more

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Tennis Style: The Chic Return of Wimbledon White

In the middle of a 2016 Grand Slam season marked by outrageous displays of style—cartoonish Day-Glo colors, risqué cutouts and corny zebra prints—comes the breath of fresh, crisp air that is Wimbledon, an event known for its traditional rules about tennis-court attire. 

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Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Unfiltered

BACK TO THE FUTURE? Kevin Systrom is the founder of image and video-sharing app Instagram. ‘If you look all the way back to the way people communicated initially, there were pictograms, hieroglyphics and cave paintings,’ he says.  Read more

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The Real Meaning of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Flowers

Georgia O’Keeffe knew flowers better than most. In the 1930s, she wrote of her desire to paint the humble flower enlarged and up-close. “I’ll paint it big, and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it,” she wrote. “I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

Busy New Yorkers did take time, but many of them didn’t see what O’Keeffe saw. Since her first gallery show in 1916, critics have hailed her work—especially those close-cropped flora portraits—as an expression of womanhood and, often, the female sex organ. For nearly as long, O’Keeffe, who died in 1986, begged to differ.

“You hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower,” she complained in 1939. “You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.” Read more.

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Lululemon’s Laurent Potdevin Meditates on Workout Wear

The Lululemon CEO on workout trends, yoga pants and why he shuns email. Read more

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The $3 Billion Family Art Feud

For half a century starting in the 1950s, Greek shipping mogul Basil Goulandris and his wife, Elise, lived in a manner worthy of a sun-soaked, Patricia Highsmith novel. They palled around with European aristocracy and flitted among their seven homes in places like Paris, New York’s Southampton and Switzerland’s Gstaad—when they weren’t sailing around the world on their yacht.

The couple never had children. Instead, relatives say they devoted their energies to amassing one of the world’s best private art collections, valued at as much as $3 billion by one estimate. The trove of several hundred pieces included 11 Picassos, six van Goghs, five Cezannes and a rare pair of Monet’s 1894 views of the Rouen Cathedral, one bathed in blue hues and the other one in pink.

The Goulandris collection is now at the center of one of the biggest and most complex legal disputes over art in Europe. The saga involves a collection of treasures that have largely been hidden for the past two decades, a secret seller using an offshore company to put up paintings for auction and a fight that boils down to one nonexistent will and one cryptic one. Read more. 

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Vik Muniz: Famous Artworks’ B-Sides

Artist Vik Muniz collects copies of the backsides of major paintings like other people collect baseball cards. In the past 15 years, he and a team of specialists have traveled extensively to photograph and meticulously re-create the B-sides of masterworks such as van Gogh’s 1889 “Starry Night” and Grant Wood’s 1930 “American Gothic” as sculptural objects. Read more.

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Amsterdam: A Cultural Travel Guide

From Rembrandt’s famous works and favorite haunts to canal-house museums that give you a front-row seat to Dutch history, our guide to culture-rich Amsterdam

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Ballpark Figures: Baseball Cards From the Old Days

Baseball teams have come and gone, but the collector’s cards will always be with us. An exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening on June 10, “The Old Ball Game,” will feature nearly 300 cards (many focused on New York players) from 1887 to 1977. Drawing from the museum’s collection of more than 30,000 cards, the show chronicles their evolution, says curator Allison Rudnick—from larger pieces meant for cabinet displays in the 19th century to trading items. See more photos. 

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‘Barkskins’ Author Annie Proulx Is Restless in Seattle

For years, Annie Proulx was intrigued—and cowed—by the idea of writing a multicentury epic inspired by her Canadian ancestors. A vanishing forest helped her conquer those fears and complete the 713-page novel this year at age 80. Read more

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The Real Maya Rudolph

The comedian on impersonating celebrities, not watching TV and her new show, ‘Maya and Marty’. Read more of the Weekend Confidential interview. 

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Beach Party

For his new book ‘Beaches,’ photographer Gray Malin took to a helicopter. See more photos. 

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The Summer Book Extravaganza

Summer’s Top 10 Fiction Books 

A Summer Nonfiction Preview

Literary Menagerie: Summer Books About Animals

A Moveable Feast of Summer Books

‘Homegoing’ by Yaa Gyasi, Born in Ghana and Raised in the U.S.

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How does ‘Hamilton,’ the non stop, hip-hop Broadway sensation tap rap's master rhymes to blur musical lines? 

Behind the sensational success of "Hamilton" are some of the most densely packed, complex rhyming lyrics in the history of musicals. How exactly do they work? Find out with our algorithm

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Getaways for the Snorkeling Set: Luxury Homes in Bali, Tahiti and Australia

Water lovers around the world are heading to resort areas in the Asia-Pacific for an amphibious lifestyle: buying luxury homes near surfing, snorkeling, deep-sea fishing and other world-class water sports.

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Montenegro Makes a Bid for Luxury-Home Buyers

Ten years after its independence, Montenegro is drawing international buyers with its mix of new luxury developments and historic coastal towns. 

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One of London’s Few Castles—Yours for $4.2 Million

Britain is a land of castles, but almost nobody in London lives in one—except for Dave and Barbara Edgar.

Their home for the past 20 years has been Vanbrugh Castle, a fortresslike folly built around 1720 by Sir John Vanbrugh, a great Georgian-era architect and playwright.