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If you've been feeling like something is off, weird, or downright out of whack recently, good ol' mercury in retrograde may be to blame. For those of you who aren't astrology buffs, here's the deal with MIR: Three to four times a year, Mercury appears to switch directions (hence, retrograde). Although this is technically an optical illusion, astrologers believe the phenomenon can cause a whole slew of wackiness, from transportation to communication issues. “This phenomenon is one of the few that affects everyone in a fairly uniform way, and its effects are always obvious,” says Susan Miller, founder of AstrologyZone.com. "When Mercury retrogrades, think of it as an instant signal that the wind is changing direction.” And while not everyone is keen to pointing fingers at planetary disturbances for day-to-day problems, if you're an astrology fan, you may be treading especially cautiously during this time. Miller notes “Mercury rules anything that begins with ‘re’...

On a Sunday morning in July—specifically the middle Sunday of Wimbledon, when the players rest and the trampled lawns recover— Serena Williams awoke from one of those vivid dreams that are a common feature in the hormonal rush of pregnancy. In it she was competing, except that she wasn’t at Wimbledon or even on a tennis court. Instead this was the Williams Invitational, the mock-seriously titled (but very real) dance tournament that Serena and Venus Williams have mounted each spring for the better part of a decade and that, Serena explains , has gone from fun to serious to Broadway to Vegas in short order. In the dream, Serena was suspended from the ceiling, twirling inside a hoop attached to a long ribbon. (True story: Williams has an aerial-dancing coach in Florida and another in California.) Sequins and wigs may also have been involved, though the details are fuzzy. “What do you think it means?” Williams asks as her fiancé, Alexis Ohanian, 34, works on coffee and soft-scrambled eg...