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Their Parents Met Online. Then They Matched in Real Life.

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Their Parents Met Online. Then They Matched in Real Life.

The first time Dr. Sunpreet Singh Tandon and Dr. Shalini Moningi spoke, they already had their families’ approval.

Their parents first connected in 2022 on Shaadi.com, an Indian matchmaking website where relatives can create accounts on behalf of single family members. After speaking on the phone a year later, Dr. Moningi’s and Dr. Tandon’s parents felt confident in their matchmaking skills and exchanged their children’s phone numbers. Then, it was up to the children what to do next.

“I’d been set up before and gone on these first dates, and I was just tired and irritated that evening, so I saw a text as an item on my to-do list,” said Dr. Moningi, who, nevertheless, reached out first with a short greeting.

After Dr. Tandon responded, they began texting regularly, then moved to phone calls, and a connection soon developed. But there was one not-so-minor challenge: They lived a two-hour flight apart, with Dr. Moningi in Boston and Dr. Tandon in Cleveland.

Dr. Moningi, 36, is an assistant professor at the department of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School — specifically, in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She was born in Cuttack, India, and raised in Al Bukayriyah, Saudi Arabia, then Philadelphia, and, finally, Charleston, W.Va. She has a bachelor’s in chemistry and philosophy from West Virginia University and a medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In April, Dr. Moningi will start a new role as an assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology at the Cleveland Clinic.

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Dr. Tandon, 37, was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and spent his childhood in Grand Falls-Windsor, Canada, before moving with his family to Mankato, Minn., then to Andalusia, Ala., and then to Kent, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in integrated life sciences from Kent State University and a medical degree from Northeast Ohio Medical University. He is a staff radiologist at Fairview Hospital in the Cleveland Clinic system.

In January 2024, Dr. Tandon flew to Boston from Cleveland for his first date with Dr. Moningi.

“I was hopeful but I didn’t want to get crushed,” Dr. Tandon said.

They had brunch at Buttermilk & Bourbon, where Dr. Moningi discovered that Dr. Tandon doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol.

“My grandma would have loved him,” she said. “What a good boy.”

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They walked to the Massachusetts State House afterward — one of Dr. Tandon’s goals is to visit every state capitol in the United States — and visited the Museum of Fine Arts.

At the end of the 24-hour trip, Dr. Tandon invited Dr. Moningi to visit him in Cleveland. She thought he was being polite until he called her as soon as his plane landed. From that point on, the two spoke on the phone daily.

“We connected on our Midwest values, our love for our friends and family and home and our community,” Dr. Moningi said.

“My cellphone usage has skyrocketed,” Dr. Tandon said.

In September, Dr. Tandon proposed during a hike at the Rocky River Reservation in Cleveland.

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[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]

“She didn’t say yes initially,” Dr. Tandon said. “I was holding her hand, I gave my spiel, and she just looked at me. She was waiting until I got on the ground.”

After, they met both of their families in Richfield, Ohio, to visit the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Foundation, a Sikh place of worship, and then the Sree Venkateswara Temple, a Hindu temple, to receive blessings for their union. Dr. Tandon’s family practices the Sikh religion and Dr. Moningi’s family is Hindu.

Dr. Moningi and Dr. Tandon were married on Feb. 22 at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., in a Hindu ceremony led by Srinathan Kadambi, the head priest of the Hindu Society of North East Florida, in front of 230 guests.

On the morning of their wedding, the couple also participated in a Sikh marriage ceremony at the Jacksonville Gurdwara, led by the gyani, or congregation leader, Amandeep Singh.

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“In a gurdwara, it’s all about equality, so whether you’re a king or pauper, everyone sits on the floor,” Dr. Tandon said.

Dr. Moningi and Dr. Tandon chose the wedding location because it is close to Dr. Moningi’s parents’ home in Jacksonville, Fla., and because the city holds a deeper meaning for the family. Dr. Moningi’s younger brother, Sanat Moningi, died in San Francisco in 2018 at 24. After several years of mourning, Dr. Moningi’s parents moved to Jacksonville from Charleston, where Sanat grew up.

The new city, Dr. Moningi said, “represents a lot of the strength of our family and moving forward and being strong and surviving something we never could have imagined happening. It’s about having Sanat with us but moving forward.”

They honored Sanat at the reception with a memorial during which Dr. Moningi’s and Sanat’s friends talked about his life and accomplishments.

“There were so many people who supported me and my family through a really bad time that were there with us,” Dr. Moningi said. “Every person from different stages of my life was in the same place, which was very cool and meant a lot.”

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Bill Maher is getting the Mark Twain Prize after all

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Bill Maher is getting the Mark Twain Prize after all

Satirist Bill Maher is this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Maher will receive the award at the Kennedy Center on June 28th. The show will stream on Netflix at a later date.

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Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Bill Maher will be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor after all.

There’s been some confusion about whether the comedian and longtime host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher would, indeed, be getting the top humor award. After The Atlantic cited anonymous sources saying he was, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “fake news.” But today the Kennedy Center made it official.

“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” said Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations in a statement. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse – one politically incorrect joke at a time.”

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Is President Trump, chair of the Kennedy Center’s board, in on the joke?

Maher once visited Trump at the White House and he tends to be more conservative than many of his comedian peers but after their dinner Trump soured on Maher, calling him a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” on social media.

Maher’s acerbic wit has targeted both political parties and he’s been particularly hard on Trump recently, criticizing his decisions to wage a war with Iran and his personnel choices.

“Trump said, ‘when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.’ Um, who’s ‘we?,’” Maher said in a recent monologue.

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Past recipients of the Mark Twain Prize include Conan O’Brien, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy and Carol Burnett.

In a statement released through the Kennedy Center, Maher said, “It is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”

Maher will receive the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center on June 28. The show will stream on Netflix at a later date.

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What European Luxury Can Learn From American Fashion

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What European Luxury Can Learn From American Fashion
This week on The Debrief, BoF’s Diana Pearl explains why brands like Coach, Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch are outperforming many European luxury houses — and what their turnarounds reveal about pricing, product, retail and long-term brand building.
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Suit asks court to force Trump administration to use ‘The Kennedy Center’ name

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Suit asks court to force Trump administration to use ‘The Kennedy Center’ name

Workers react to the media after updating signage outside the Kennedy Center on Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

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Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force President Trump and the board and staff of the Kennedy Center to revert to calling the arts complex The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The motion, which Beatty filed on Wednesday, asks a federal circuit court judge to reverse the Trump administration and the center’s current board and staff’s decision to call the complex “The Trump-Kennedy Center.”

In the filing, Beatty’s attorneys wrote: “Can the Board of the Kennedy Center — in direct contradiction of the governing statutes — rename this sacred memorial to John F. Kennedy after President Donald J. Trump? The answer is, unequivocally, ‘no.’ By renaming the Center — in violation of the law — Defendants have breached the terms of the trust and their most basic fiduciary obligations as trustees. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the Kennedy Center as the ‘sole national memorial to the late’ President in the nation’s capital.”

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In a statement emailed to NPR Thursday, Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, wrote: “We’re confident the court will uphold the board’s decision on the name change and the desperately needed renovations which will continue as scheduled.” NPR also reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive a reply.

In December, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the complex would heretofore be called “The Trump-Kennedy Center.” Although the new moniker was never approved by Congress, the Center’s website and publicity materials were immediately updated to reflect the administration’s chosen name, and the same day as Leavitt’s announcement, Trump’s name went up on the signage of the complex’s exterior, over that of the slain President Kennedy.

Later that month, Rep. Beatty who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, sued Trump, members of the Kennedy Center board appointed by Trump, and some ex-officio members, arguing that the complex’s name had been legislated by Congress in 1964. Wednesday’s motion is part of that lawsuit.

In a press release sent to NPR on Wednesday, Rep. Beatty said: “Donald Trump’s attempt to rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not just an act of ego. It is an attempt to subvert our Constitution and the rule of law. Congress established the Kennedy Center by law, and only Congress can change its name.”

For many patrons, artists and benefactors of the Kennedy Center, the name change was the last straw in politicizing the performing arts hub. Following the White House announcement of the new name, many prominent artists withdrew planned performances there, including the composer Philip Glass (a Kennedy Center Honors award recipient, who received his prize during the first Trump administration), the famed Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz and the 18-time Grammy-winning banjo master Béla Fleck.

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The Washington National Opera (WNO), which had been in residence at the Kennedy Center since 1971, also severed its ties in January after ticket sales dropped precipitously. Earlier this month, WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello told NPR, “We did try as best as we could to encourage [the patrons] that we are a bipartisan organization, but people really voted with their feet and with their pocketbooks. And so we realized that there was really no choice for us.”

On Monday, a coalition of eight architecture and cultural groups also sued Trump and the Kennedy Center board in federal court over the complex’s scheduled closing in July for unspecified renovations. Their suit seeks to have the White House and board members comply with existing historic preservation laws, and to secure Congressional approval before moving ahead with the renovation plans.

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