Explore Things to Do: Shopping

Chelsea Morning is a store for girlfriends. That’s not a gender-orientation-related remark. I mean just what I say: if you have girlfriends of any kind, and they like girly things, take them to this store. Buy them gifts at this store. You really can’t go wrong. If you like hearts and flowers, little tea cups, lace and puppies, angels and English toilette water, scented soaps and romantic clothes, lacy undies, snuggly sweaters, and hilarious greeting cards that make you laugh with woman-oriented humor, this is the place.

Talking to Terry Schurmeier, co-owner of Cowboys & Indians Antiques, Inc., is like talking to an old friend. The conversation never lags, whether talking business strategies or design sensibility. This icon of the Western and Native American antiques business gets even more excited when I ask her about using the wares that her store sells in all kinds of environments.

Nob Hill’s Wearit! Boutique, with 27 years in business, was one of the pioneers of Nob Hill. Born even before The Flying Star café, Janet Moses’ boutique has been through many incarnations, and she jokes that her building has had more facelifts than Joan Rivers. All her life she had a sense of style and an eye for retail. Moses notes that as a girl she used to go shopping with her mother and within three minutes inside a store she could tell if they were going to find what they were looking for or not. “How do you do it?” her mother would exclaim.

Few new businesses in Santa Fe are as aptly named as One=of=One, a small treasure-shop where almost everything for sale is handmade, and most of the items are one of a kind.

Those small blankets neatly packed in boxes lining the antique bookcase against the west wall? They didn’t come from some assembly line. Every one of them was made by Melissa Moore, co-owner of the shop, from found objects like a Martha Stewart designer tea towel and the yardages Moore scouts around the world. She lovingly backs them with flannel, too.

And if you don’t see what you like in stock, Moore will help you design your own blanket or throw or duvet cover, from the yardages she stocks or ot...

A Los Alamos scientist gave the Soviets the secret to the hydrogen bomb five decades ago, allowing our arms race enemies to catch up during the tense early years of the Cold War, a pair of nuclear weapons veterans charge in a book being published next month.

The allegation, if confirmed by other historians , could answer one of the great mysteries of Cold War history: how the Soviets mastered the clever trick used by U.S. scientists to perfect the hydrogen bomb. In their book, “The Nuclear Express,” Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman say they believe they know who the spy was, and describe him in some detail.

But they decline to name the since-deceased scientist. “...