One of the absolute best ways to learn about wine is to “dive in” and wine festivals, especially when they have a focus on educational seminars, are a terrific way to dive in. But even if you’re just a wine lover who likes to taste and sample and enjoy, then wine festivals equally rise to the occasion. There are thousands of wine-focused festivals - both big and small - each year and in every corner of the world. This month, we take look at some incredible summer wine festiva

At a local high school basketball game, the game came down to the wire. Player A, the star of the team, is standing on the perimeter, surveying the defense, ball in his hands. Player A could easily take the shot, but instead, passes to Player B who’s wide open in the corner. Player B take a shot, but misses. It would be easy for Player A to say, “Why didn’t he make that shot? He is terrible!” which may be an accurate assessment of skills, but instead, he chooses to ask hims

THE CHILD AS A LIVING PROPHECY “When we protect the youngest members of the human family, we build a better world.” - António Guterres There are moments in history when the future does not arrive as a machine, a market, or a manifesto. It arrives as a child. Not merely as a biological beginning, but as a living threshold - a soft, watchful, radiant presence through which a civilization quietly reveals what it believes about life itself. Whether it chooses tenderness or force.

Perfect powder. Luxury accommodations. Lively restaurants. An experience designed with a jet-set, snow-fiend in mind. We could be talking about Aspen, Vail, Megève, Cortina d’Ampezzo or Whistler; but we’re talking about Hakuba Valley in – you might have guessed it – Japan. From December to May each year, skiers-who-know flock to the mountainous village in the Nagano Prefecture that hosted part of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Since it’s on the same island as Tokyo, it’s a simple

Anne Hathaway is talking about work-life balance, a concept that actresses were asked about for decades and their male counterparts never were. It may have reached its apex (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in 2013, when Sheryl Sandberg told every woman to lean in, that they could “have it all”, which mostly meant having a family and a full-throttle career and no time to feel adequate at any of it. For a while, everyone seemed to agree that this was a good thing. In

There is a vine in the Amazon that climbs like a prayer. It does not hurry. It does not conquer. It spirals - patiently - around the rainforest’s ancient pillars of wisdom, as if it remembers what modern life forgets: that healing is not an event. Healing is a relationship with reality. To the Indigenous lineages who have safeguarded this medicine through centuries of conquest, displacement, and spiritual criminalization, Mother Ayahuasca is not a “psychedelic.” She is a livi

Kaley started using YouTube at the age of 6, downloading the app on her iPod Touch to watch videos about lip gloss collections and the online kids game Animal Jam. She posted her first video when she was 8 — in it, she played Animal Jam as an otter character, singing in a put-on British accent. A year later, she downloaded and began posting on Instagram, circumventing a guardrail her mom had tried to set up to block her from the app. She says she became addicted. She started

There is a discernible and different vibe happening in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Story by William Smith/Polo Lifestyles Wine Contributor While the headwinds impacting the wine industry are nearly universal – declining and shifting consumer patterns of consumption, tariffs, climate change, risings costs, and consolidation – in many places they take on an ominous tone that points to a state of somewhat inevitable decline. In Oregon, those same challenges seem differently assi

If you are headed to the Willamette Valley, you have many choices on where to stay - from luxury hotel resorts to small boutique properties to vineyard stays. After a recent visit to Oregon wine country, we've compiled a list of quintessential Pacific Northwest properties for your consideration, and all within proximity of the region's incredible winery offerings.  Story by William Smith/Polo Lifestyles Wine Contributor Atticus Hotel atticushotel.com The beautifully appointe

Many people’s brains deteriorate as they age, becoming riddled with malfunctioning proteins that result in cell death and the loss of memory and cognition. But other people’s brains remain almost perfectly intact, their thinking as sharp at 80 as it was in their 50s. A paper published in the journal Nature provides a new potential explanation for this discrepancy, and it taps into one of the hottest debates in neuroscience: whether human brains can grow new neurons in adultho