TODAY, the third Monday of January, has come to be known in the UK as "Blue Monday", the most depressing day of the year. The idea originated in 2005 via a press release issued by a travel company. Using a formula accounting for factors like weather, debt, post-holiday gloom, failed resolutions, low motivation, and the need for change, they calculated this date to be the saddest day of the year.
HELLO again and Happy New Year! After unintentionally taking off more time than had planned (and missing two Weekend Links in the process), it’s good to be back. Did stop in briefly on New Year’s Day to share my resolutions for 2024, but other than that, for the most part of the past four or so weeks, we’ve been on holiday, which is extremely rare.
Most of us don’t worry about getting vitamin D when the weather’s warm and the sun is shining. But as winter approaches, accompanied by overcast days and long nights, you may be wondering if it could be useful to take a vitamin D supplement – and what benefit it might have.
LAST WEEK I read an article about a couple who had such trouble staying offline when they wanted to be, that they did the most drastic thing they could think of: they disconnected their internet. They had a landline installed to make calls, and used the Yellow Pages to look up telephone numbers.
Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter.
BETELGEUSE, the red supergiant star in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, will disappear from the sky briefly tonight, at 8:17 p.m. EST in what scientists are calling a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. An asteroid called 319 Leona will pass in front of Betelgeuse and block its light for a few seconds as a shadow falls across Earth’s surface.
OUR FIRST Christmas film this year wasn't actually one of our usual old favourites (Christmas Vacation for P, The Holiday for me⏤although we've seen them both so much now that we mainly put them on as background ambience), but The Holdovers...
IT WAS THE champagne coupes tied in lengths of black ribbon (below) that first caught our eye while searching Pinterest for table setting inspiration for the holidays. For interest, we thought we'd provide a brief history of the ribbon bow to go along with these beautiful images of tabletop inspiration for your upcoming holiday soirées or any dinner party really.
I DON'T KNOW what it is about Kings Cross that makes us want to join long queues for food, but this weekend, we did it again. This time, it was for dim sum and you don't even want to know how long we waited. We were tempted to leave a few times, but the promise of the best dim sum in London was too much, so we stayed.
THIS WEEKEND we saw Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall), Justine Triet's French courtroom drama that actually won the Palme d’Or in Cannes this year. It was though-provoking, gripping at times, and made us talk about it quite a bit, even long after it was over.
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
THERE IS a Welsh word, hiraeth, that is used to describe a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past. I've been studying words in other languages recently, marvelling at how different languages have so many descriptive ways to denote very specific feelings or situations.
THE WEATHER has suddenly turned cold after last week's unseasonably warm days. Unfortunately, because of our location, we were unable to view this weekend's spectacular celestial event: the ring of fire annular solar eclipse. Did you see it? It was apparently visible from parts of the US, Mexico and in South and Central America...