One of the most fundamental rules in improv comedy is that a player must never negate the ideas of another player. The response to another’s suggestions, no matter how crazy, inane, or mundane, must always be: “Yes, and…”. It seems simple, but it’s a rather profound notion: To accept another’s ideas and incorporate them into one’s own as a matter of principle requires a great deal of letting go of fear and control.

Noted author and local dad A.J. Jacobs is planning the world’s largest family reunion—and we’re all invited.

What happens when a well-meaning city family encounters a difficult pet adoption, or two. My husband and I like domesticated animals. We also like New York. For years, it seemed to us that these penchants were incompatible—small apartment, pet hair, close neighbors—and so we lived in the city pet-free for over a decade.

Andrew Solomon and his husband, John Habich, are part of a charmingly unconventional modern family: “four children, five parents, across three states,” as Solomon is fond of saying. He and Habich are fathers to 4-year-old George here in New York; Habich has two biological children who live with their mothers (a lesbian couple) in Minnesota; and Solomon’s daughter, whom he and a close friend from college chose to conceive together, lives with her mother in Texas.

In her moving book about parenting a child with Down’s syndrome, Columbia professor Rachel Adams examines the broader issues faced by families raising children with disabilities. There is a boy on the Upper West Side named Henry. He is five years old, a lover of “Sesame Street,” a budding puppeteer.

My husband likes to tell people that when we had our first child while living on the Upper West Side, we could still consider ourselves relatively hip Manhattanites; with the birth of our second, we conceded the borough and moved to Brooklyn; when our third baby came along, we emigrated to Canada. Like many before us, we had moved to NYC when we were carefree and kid-free.

I don’t think I was ever really good at breastfeeding my son. In the beginning, it was full of unexpected trauma. I remember being shocked at how painful those first weeks were, as he and I would wrestle into nursing position, a clumsy maneuvering of clothing and bodies which would leave me shaking and in a deep sweat.

Dana Points claims to be one of those people who needs eight hours of sleep a night. Frankly, it’s difficult to see how she can possibly manage it. Maybe she manages it all because she foregoes Facebook as a general rule. But more likely, it’s because of the singular focus she brings to each aspect of her day.

The Ear Inn is a three-story Federal-style building tucked away on a quiet, tree-lined block in SoHo amid tall, sleek glass buildings. Originally built in 1812 for James Brown, the African American who helped George Washington make his famous escape across the Delaware in the early days of the Revolutionary War, the squat building’s ground floor has served as a local tavern for nearly 200 years.

When I meet Cat Greenleaf at her iconic brownstone on a recent Tuesday morning, she has a sleeping baby strapped to her chest. She puts her finger to her lips, “shhhhh,” and tiptoes quietly up to the nursery to lay him down in his crib. Moments later, a cry wafts down the stairs, and Cat reemerges with her son in her arms: baby victorious, nap defeated.

The experience of listening to “Rabbit Days and Dumplings,” the new album by Elena Moon Park of Dan Zanes and Friends, is delightfully strange: the music is foreign and deeply familiar in the same instant; wildly contemporary and ancient at once; light-hearted and heart-rending in a single melody.

And, too, that I had better get my own kid started with chess, STAT. Okay, that’s three things. But it’s true: the film makes a strong case for chess not only as an important educational tool, but as training for a life well-lived. Chess is a life-kind-of-game, and we see its promises at work in the way the students at I.S. 318 approach their wins and losses, both on and off the chessboard.