There is always something slightly astonishing about September, the way the light seems to withdraw almost before one has noticed it going. Autumn is still four days away, officially, yet the rains have come already, and last night, sometime before eight, I looked up and realised that the day had nearly disappeared. I am, by temperament, a summer girl, and so there is a small wistfulness in this yearly turning, but then I remember trench coats and tall leather boots, cashmere boyfriend sweaters, and the extraordinary colours of leaves in those few days before they loosen themselves from the trees.here is always something slightly astonishing about September, the way the light seems to withdraw almost before one has noticed it going. Autumn is still four days away, officially, yet the rains have come already, and last night, sometime before eight, I looked up and realised that the day had nearly disappeared. I am, by temperament, a summer girl, and so there is a small wistfulness in this yearly turning, but then I remember trench coats and tall leather boots, cashmere boyfriend sweaters, and the extraordinary colours of leaves in those few days before they loosen themselves from the trees.
Though we’ve moved away from our Weekend Links format, we still like to write about what we’ve been up to lately and these thoughts have found their way into Hyperreality, our weekly newsletter. For those who’ve come to expect these glimpses of our thinking-in-progress, they’re still there – just in a different form. Below, we’ve gathered a few recent letters that have made their way to subscribers over recent weeks. You can view the full list here.
1
Nothing Depends on What Happens Next
There is always something slightly astonishing about September, the way the light seems to withdraw almost before one has noticed it going. Autumn is still four days away, officially, yet the rains have come already, and last night, sometime before eight, I looked up and realised that the day had nearly disappeared. I am, by temperament, a summer girl, and so there is a small wistfulness in this yearly turning, but then I remember trench coats and tall leather boots, cashmere boyfriend sweaters, and the extraordinary colours of leaves in those few days before they loosen themselves from the trees.
2
Sunday Supplement: A Little of Life Lately /012
This letter comes to you on a slow Sunday morning, the perfect kind that begins with a languorous lie in, coffee and a blackberry Danish from the bakery around the corner that often has queues from very early in the morning. There was brunch and black tea, long slanted rays of late-summer sun pouring through the tall arched windows, and we’re relaxed, talking and listening to music. It’s been a long time since we’ve posted regularly on IG, and I’m no longer in the habit of organising all the thousands of photos on my camera roll. They sit alongside each other intermingled in a tangle, so long now that I’ve forgotten where and when they were taken. And so, thought it might be a good time for a little life update (this one only in photos) with a few favourite moments of the past days and weeks: garden roses just after the rain; Knightsbridge on a cloudy afternoon; crème brûlée at our favourite French bistro; the best used book shop; iced oat milk lattes at a record shop; late-night dumplings in Bloomsbury; cosy pubs in the falling light…
3
Don’t Dream It’s Over
I read on a sign somewhere this small piece of wisdom: AI is data and can only look at where we’ve been; creativity is trying to see where we can go. It’s something to think about: looking to the past versus the future, and wondering whether anything without wants could have a future at all, or only a distribution of plausible next moves. Perhaps the most telling thing about the sentiment is that we have begun to need it at all. An aphorism reassuring us that creativity is untouchably human, that imagination belongs to us, that there remains some territory the machine cannot enter, is itself a symptom of the anxiety it claims to resolve…
4
Everything We Almost Were
P sends me articles he thinks I might find interesting every morning, and one of them was Performative Reading by Brittany Dennison. What begins as a review of Late Fame, Kent Jones’s 2025 film adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1895 novella, becomes something larger: an examination of ‘performative reading’ and the ways intellectual taste itself can become a performance.
5
Everything We Almost Were
We arrived back from our mini break on Tuesday evening after a few very lovely, very romantic days away. We had dinner reservations every night and ate the most delicious food; walked along cobbled streets already strewn with fallen leaves; saw inspiring museum exhibitions; drank spicy margaritas on velvet sofas; ordered takeaway noodles to eat in the park; stayed up far too late; drank iced matcha lattes while running for the train; had long, meandering conversations about our dreams and plans; and savoured the last long days of summer as though we could somehow persuade them to stay.
6
The Afterglow of Summer
There is something seductive about finding your way somewhere you never intended to go. This week I accidentally learned about the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universe’s ancient afterglow. It was discovered by accident too, in 1964, by two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. I found it while researching something else, which became something else, which became something else again. A rabbit hole, some might say.