Shopping: More Coats, Jackets & Trenches for Autumn Days

Before social networks became the de-facto place for logging mundane moments from our lives, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch incorporated a feature that let users send footage they’d filmed directly to YouTube. The uploads were all assigned the same generic file names—IMG_0000, IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc. The straight-to-YouTube button existed for only a few years, beginning in 2009, but that stretch of time coincided with the popularization of both iPhones and user-generated multimedia online, prompting an explosion of self-documentation.

WE SENT our Holiday Wishes to subscribers before Christmas and shared a quick update of life lately on Christmas Eve. While this note was meant for Christmas Day itself, we think the warmth of the season still lingers enough for a day-late greeting.

Explore our December discoveries, from museum wanderings to French château histories, perfume reviews to holiday mood boards—a curated collection of winter musings and festive inspirations.

The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality
A few weeks ago, I wrote about happiness and music but didn’t mention perhaps the most famously joyful work ever written: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1824, which ends with the famous anthem “Ode to Joy,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.”

He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago.

LUIGI MANGIONE, CURRENTLY the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected.

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world. Soon after, a software developer asked it to provide instructions for removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, and to write these instructions in the style of the King James Bible. ChatGPT complied: “And the Lord said, ‘Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in thy VCR, for it is not a suitable place for such things.’”

The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out. Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year-low in America, smoking has, unfortunately, become cool again.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY left his home in Beauvais, just outside of Paris, at the age of 17 for the opportunities offered in the City of Light. There, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and began his career as an apprentice. In 1952, he established his couture house, la Maison Givenchy, and two years later in 1954, became the first couturier to present a luxury ready-to-wear line. He would meet his iconic muse, Audrey Hepburn, in 1953, and the two would remain […]