Began assembling this edition in the days before Christmas, but life intervened – as it does – with travel and gatherings, with champagne bubbles rising in crystal and candles burning low into the night. Now it’s Boxing Day, and the introduction I’d written has slipped out of time, no longer quite fitting the moment we’re in.

We’ve entered that peculiar in-between now, that suspended breath after the crescendo of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day have passed. It’s a strange, liminal time, this drift toward New Year’s Eve, when the world seems to pause, caught between celebration and reflection, between the year that was and the year about to begin.

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.

1

This week’s letter is the seventh instalment of Notes Between Us – a space where we share what’s been capturing our attention: cultural moments and ideas, fleeting observations, things worth pausing for. Our personal marginalia, the notes we’d scribble in the margins of our shared life. This edition will be a little different. In it, we’ll both discuss what we believe will be next for the new year – gleaned from our travels around the internet, instinct, experience – including shifts in how we build trust, seek wellness, and remix the past into something newly resonant.

2

This edition of Recent Intelligence includes reflections on performative reading and our strange relationship with intellectual authenticity, thoughts on hitting the first “aging cliff” at 44, the troubling resurgence of climate disinformation, a farewell to Martin Parr’s brilliant eye, my slightly disappointed feelings about Wuthering Heights, why P.S. I Love You doesn’t quite work as a holiday film, oversized bows as the season’s quiet power move, and a gentle reminder that food banks need more than baked beans this time of year.

3

Certain times of the year always pull me into the question of time. Perhaps it’s the seasons shifting, or the strange urgency of the year’s end. Time has a way of catching me in its undertow – hovering between the past, who I used to be, and the future, who I’m trying to become. Not quite here, not quite there.

4

This edition of Recent Intelligence includes a meditation on loosening our grip when life insists on unfolding in its own time; the quiet beauty of early-season rituals; and an exploration of how memory, ageing, and former versions of ourselves drift back into view when we least expect them. Plus: a mood board that reimagines Christmas in velvet black – elegant, romantic, and lit by candlelight rather than colour; what I’m reading; a gift guide shaped by mood and intention; and a slow, cinematic look at craft, whether in floristry, film, food, or the literature that lingers. You’ll find discoveries across design, media, books, and culture, each chosen for the way they add warmth, texture, or a flicker of insight to these lengthening November nights.

5

These essays aren’t about nostalgia so much as weather, internal and external – the storms we inherit, the ones we endure, and the subtler shifts that reveal we’ve changed without noticing. If there’s a theme, it’s this: we are always becoming, even in the moments that feel still.

6

This week’s letter is the sixth instalment of Notes Between Us – a space where we share what’s been capturing our attention lately: cultural moments and ideas, fleeting observations, reflections, and things worth pausing for. Our personal marginalia – the notes we’d scribble in the margins of our shared life.

This edition includes a dive into the strange new logics of AI and meaning-making online; the rise of “village-scale living” and why small towns are quietly outpacing big cities; a Speyside hotel steeped in whisky lore and Highland quiet, and a set of blistering cultural essays – from digital feudalism to the beauty-industrial complex’s spiritual trap.

7

This edition of Recent Intelligence includes: a meditation on what it means to be seen – and unseen – in public and in life; a new season of slow discovery in a bohemian corner of the city, and ideas that challenge how we think, create, and connect. From the glow of a Marylebone pub to the chicness of Baroness Pauline de Rothschild’s Paris rooms, this part of the letter lingers on texture: wool and stone, smoke and silk. There’s the myth of Chloris rewritten for the runway, food as illusion, and the kind of beauty that reveals itself only when you’re fully present. There’s thought, warmth, and the low hum of meaning beneath it all – the kind that lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

MORE IN THIS SERIES

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /006

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /005

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /004

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /004

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /003

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /002

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /001

Lately at our Newsletter, Hyperreality /000

Welcome