I take my seat. She smiles and waves. No adult in full self-control smiles and waves at a stranger on a plane, but OK. Her breath has settled over our row."Hiiiii." She's got something shiny - a flask. The bag at her feet holds a couple of empty plastic Champagne single servings. She starts with trivial chitchat as we approach the runway. We lift off, and she acts frightened, gripping the armrests. "I don't like flying.""Champagne'll cut the tension."She takes a swig. "This ain't for the plane, baby.

When Julia Marino clips in to her board at the top of the big air jump in Pyeongchang, South Korea, later this month at the Winter Olympics, she'll be staring down the barrel of a 49-meter, 40-degree-angle launch ramp - the largest in the world.This is snowboarding's big air discipline, and it appears on the Winter Olympics program for the first time in the history of the games. Competitors race down a steep slope before vaulting off an upward-curling ramp and performing complex tricks.

On March 5, 1982, I did something I had never done before: I sobbed in public.The occasion? A newspaper headline that said that actor and comedian John Belushi had died in Hollywood.Stuff like this sneaks up on you. I was 6 years old when Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, 15 when Elvis died and 18 when John Lennon was murdered. None of those tragedies, be it age or disinterest, brought me to tears.

In the very first act of the UniverSoul Circus, these stilt walkers from Trinidad and Tobago began to dance. They rocked out, doing backbends and other seemingly impossible things, on the highest stilts I've ever seen. I was entranced.Until that moment, I hadn't thought at all about stilt walking. It seemed pedestrian compared to the other circus apparatuses, like silks, rope and straps. The stilt walkers I'd seen seemed to just stand around. No one had said that dancing was possible.

We asked: Which trusted home remedies do you reach for when you have a stuffy nose or a headache? You answered - and with some pretty interesting concoctions (no judging on how many contain booze). From the "sushi cure" to the Coke soda fountain trick, and from whiskey-infused cordials to weed salves, here are some home remedies you won't find at the drugstore.

Julia Marino, who made her mark as one of the first riders to bring the cab 900 double underflip to women's slopestyle, traveled to Boston in February 2016 to test out the metal big air jump at the Big Air Fenway competition. Listed as an alternate, she had come to Fenway with one simple goal: to get some experience on a metal jump in northeastern weather en route to the World Cup in Quebec, where she planned to compete.

Who knew the lead-up to a handshake could be so riveting? The Oslo Diaries, directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, tells the secret history of the 1993 peace talks between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government. The directors rely on the personal diaries of a chief negotiator and interviews with both Israelis and Palestinians involved in the meetings. Their previous film at Sundance was 2015's Censored Voices,which focused on the Six-Day War.

Olga Karmansky and Anna Venizelos are a performance contortionist duo, and while the work they’re doing today seems, literally, backbreaking, it wasn’t always that way. Venizelos spent three years touring with Cirque du Soleil as an acrobat soloist, followed by years working as a solo contortionist. Karmansky? Her early years were spent as a competitive gymnast, making her mark in rhythmic gymnastics — an experience she describes as tough on her childhood.

Tucked into a corner not far from the hustle of Union Square in New York City sits a compact flower shop run by one man: Paulino Gaspar. For 12 hours a day, seven days a week, Paulino clips, snips and composes the perfume-filled petals that color the shop that he named Angelina’s Petals. “They take care of me,” Paulino says about the flowers. “They’re always happy … they never say anything. They don’t complain.

Each game day, Philadelphia Eagles guard Brandon Brooks used to wake up and then throw up - twice - every hour on the hour. It got so bad that he missed two games in 2016 (against the Green Bay Packers and the Washington Redskins). Doctors performed endoscopies, diagnosed Brooks with ulcers and prescribed medications, but nothing helped. "I never knew what it was. I thought it was something physical," Brooks tells OZY. Each time he met with a doctor, though, he was given a clean bill of health.