When it comes to revolutionaries, the well-dressed employees who work in the Bank of Canada’s granite office building at 234 Wellington Street in Ottawa probably aren’t near the top of anybody’s list. And no wonder: for as long as central banks have existed, their job has been to maintain the stability of our economic system. That means controlling inflation, which can raise the price of everything from food to housing and, if allowed to run rampant, badly damage an economy. For the better part of the last thirty years, they did that masterfully—so masterfully, in fact, that people more or less stopped worrying about inflation at all.

I READ SOMETHING recently that stated that the sales of colour cosmetics dropped 33% in 2020, and that sales of cosmetics overall dropped by 15%. While I did buy a few new eyeshadow palettes during that time despite not having anywhere to go (perhaps it was for the odd Instagram selfie), I did actually reduce spending on these items …

I will easily accept that I am one of those girls who takes fashion inspiration from the southwest of France and the surfer haven of Biarritz, where the style scene is all about a sportswear chic style and effortlessness in every single detail. But what has the most influence everywhere else in the world is without a doubt the Riviera style.

In his 1950 science-fiction collection, “I, Robot,” Isaac Asimov outlined his three laws of robotics. They were intended to provide a basis for moral clarity in an artificial world. “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” is the first law, which robots have already broken …

From my desk in a high-rise office building at the southern end of Manhattan, I click and scroll and scroll and click. Sometimes idly, with one eye on the clock; sometimes desperately, in lieu of the work I know I ought to be doing. I skim the sweaty Getty images on the celebrity fashion blog Go Fug Yourself and peruse the latest tidy musings from Felix Salmon, an arch Reuters blogger who covers high and low finance alike. I read everything published on The Awl (tagline: “Be less stupid”) and most things published on Consumerist. (Emboldened by that site’s recurring pieces of advice, I decide to push back one day, out there in the real world, against one of those little “$10 card minimum” signs at a grocer in SoHo. It does not go well and I will never attempt it again.) It’s the year 2011, and I can’t get enough of the internet.

It’s 9:00 o’clock on a Saturday night and I’m listening to P’s grandmother on the phone telling me about a program she’s about to watch on channel 5 called Meghan: The Climb to Power (or something like that). We’ve just had the most wonderful dinner of cod filets with a parmesan parsley crust and Moules-frites. There’s a bottle of cava chilling in the refrigerator …