Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage...
Paris, that most presentable of capitals, is being polished before it hosts the Summer Games. Around the Champs-Élysées, where some of the benches date to the 1850s, the seats are getting a new layer of paint before an estimated 15 million visitors arrive to scuff them up again.
When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight.
THERE ARE many ways to measure time – by years and by minutes, by months and by days. Perhaps with each falling second, or the small everyday moments as they unfold, or big once-in-a-lifetime events of grand importance. Perhaps time is marked by a first kiss, or the first time you knew you loved someone; or the anniversary of an important milestone, maybe even with that person.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination.
Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
READ IN BRITISH Vogue yesterday that Londoners are all in their autumn uniforms already⏤wooly jumpers and jackets and I can confirm that we are. That's because it's been raining for weeks on end and has been unseasonably chilly.
MY FAVOURITE earrings are these solid gold threaders that dangle prettily and glint in the light when I move. They were my lucky earrings because I've nearly lost them a million times, but they always turned up again, often in the most inexplicable places.
The call came in to the concierge at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the fabled luxury hotel on the French Riviera. It was spring 2007, and an assistant to Angelina Jolie said that Jolie and her fiancé, Brad Pitt, were seeking a sizable property in the South of France to rent.
Far out on the Arabian Sea one night in February, 2018, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, the fugitive daughter of Dubai’s ruling emir, marvelled at the stars. The voyage had been rough. Since setting out by dinghy and Jet Ski a few days before, she had been swamped by powerful waves, soaking the belongings she’d stowed in her backpack; after clambering aboard the yacht she’d secured for her escape, she’d spent days racked with nausea as it pitched on the swell. But tonight the sea was calmer, and she felt the stirring of an unfamiliar sensation. She was free.
It is a humbling experience to try to learn any new skill as an adult. But there is a particular humiliation in learning to ride a bike. Not only because biking is something everyone already assumes you know how to do and the quintessential skill you never forget. But also because you have to do it in public, wobbling and teetering under the curious gaze of other adults who seem to be fully in control of their balance, pace, and place in the world.
For residents of southeast Paris, the construction vehicles rumbling back and forth behind the Austerlitz train station are a loud annoyance that has gone on for too many months. But for city officials—and countless Parisians, they hope—history is unfolding behind the cordoned-off area. After years of thwarted ambitions and vague promises, the French capital, officials say, is set to accomplish a rare feat for a major metropolis: making its once heavily polluted waterway fit for swimming again.
… And so on, until the 36th person types “Good morning,” and the work day can begin. It’s nine in the morning, and Alexia D., a graphic designer, types the final “Good morning.” No one dares skip the greeting. Not Alexia, not anyone. If she does, the team leader will log her as absent, even if 10 minutes later she is on the screen with her work completed and a smile on her face, ready to review project updates.
No artist wants to be on the end of harsh public criticism but are artists becoming too fragile and defensive in the face of critics? This week I came across an interesting video of the music critic Anthony Fantano doing a review of the hip hop artist Logic, doing a review of Fantano’s review of Chance the rapper album, The Big Day.
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
