Shopping: More Coats, Jackets & Trenches for Autumn Days

On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.

WHILE routine often carries a negative connotation, the film Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) invites viewers to find beauty in the mundane. It follows Hirayama, a Tokyo-based toilet cleaner who finds contentment in life’s simple pleasures and the daily rituals that lend his days structure and tranquility.

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four.

Electricity supply is becoming the latest chokepoint to threaten the growth of artificial intelligence, according to leading tech industry chiefs, as power-hungry data centers add to the strain on grids around the world.

It’s common to meet the idea of intuition with an eye roll. We tend to value reason over everything else, using expressions like “think before you act,” “think twice,” and “look before you leap.” We don’t trust intuition. In fact, we believe it’s flawed and magical thinking, either vaguely crazy or downright stupid. After all, good decisions should always be reasoned.

Supermodel, businesswoman and activist, Bella Hadid, appears on the April 2024 cover of Vogue Italia, radiating an authentic and present sense of self. In her interview with Sofia Viganò, Bella remarks, “For the first time since I can remember I am clear and present. I have the feeling that, by showing my most authentic self, things and people have aligned with my destiny.”

I came across a TikTok recently that articulated something about my face I’d been struggling with. It was one of those videos where the speaker sits in the front seat of her car as if she’s been so overcome by an epiphany that she had to pull over and share.

P WROTE LAST week’s Newsletter, and it’s about American Fiction, as well as the author whose work inspired the film, whom he is now reading. (You can find it here.) While still in the middle Little Women, of course I started two new books—the latest being In the Swarm: Digital Prospects by philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han.

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.