If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke. Rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot.
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october
What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby.
When you and I look at the same object we assume that we’ll both see the same color. Whatever our identities or ideologies, we believe our realities meet at the most basic level of perception. But in 2015, a viral internet phenomenon tore this assumption asunder. The incident was known simply as “The Dress.”
SOMEHOW THE clocks went back on Saturday night here and we had no idea until 11:30 on Sunday morning, when we noticed that our watches were an hour ahead of our laptops, tablets and phones. It's a very strange thing not knowing ahead of time that the clocks are changing, as it's something that I'm normally always prepared for, sometimes weeks in advance. It's was nice though, to luxuriate in a slow, extra long morning ...
IT'S BEEN WILDLY blustery for days now, leaves blowing everywhere and here, cosy with candles and a fire all weekend long. We watched an old Italian giallo film from the sixties. It wasn't nearly as good as Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) but it was entertaining and interesting, as I'd never watched anything in that genre before.
WAS READING an article about 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books and realised that I'd started most of them, but actually did finish one them⏤Thomas Piketty's 2013 masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century⏤all 600 pages of it, and enjoyed it so much that I'd considered picking up his follow-up while at Waterstones recently. Last week we introduced new candles at The Shop and we had no idea that they would be so wildly popular so soon after launch. Today, two new scents have arrived, just in time for upcoming festivities: Cranberry and Chestnut ...
AT THIS MOMENT, the room smells like cool and smoky autumn air after a cosy bonfire. We're burning Embers & Ash, one of the new fragranced candles that arrived today and it's strange trying out a different scent from Gardénia, our longtime favourite and the only candle we've ever burned for years. But it's a nice change and it's definitely cosy ...
WE RECENTLY discovered London-based interior design firm Salvesen Graham on Instagram, and immediately fell for their quintessentially British style. Founded by Mary Graham and Nicole Salvesen in 2013, the duo focuses on creating Future Heritage interiors with a sensitivity to historical and traditional interior schemes.
THE TROUBLE with having so much storage on my phone is that it has inadvertently become a digital hoard of images that have been all but forgotten, the favourites already printed and framed, or made into polaroids. The rest are meant to be sorted at some point, but there are so many of them that it's become a tedious task to be avoided ...
CAME ACROSS this quote by Dr. Seuss yesterday morning: “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.” And it struck a chord because it feels like lately, that we're always waiting/hoping to move past current situations and times and on to better ones ...
YES, WE KNOW, it's only been officially autumn for a month, but with the nights drawing in so quickly now, the bright yellow leaves falling off the trees, the wet gloomy skies, and British Summer Time ending at the end of the month, we're already dreaming of sunnier times and warmer days. If the dark days of autumn and the dreary days of winter must be tolerated, then we'll do it with cosy evenings fireside, and also through plenty of daydreaming. These images, that came floating through our feed this week, of places around Mallorca are a perfect place to start ...
WE ARE BACK with the second instalment of our new series, Talking Points, and in this edition, we’ll be looking at the relationship between the body and mind; the notion of Mass Fame, and the concept of temporal neutrality.
CONTINUING WITH our series that we began last week about the things we like lately and this week, we're looking at the Isabel Marant Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear runway show; a new hotel opening in Paris this month; Virginie Viard's Chanel Spring 2022 presentation; a bright and spacious Haussmanian apartment by Festen; beautiful minimalist knits, and the elegant work of Studio Ko. Of course, the Caucasus mountains in Russia (above) in full bloom by Daniel Kordan is on the list as well ...
AT THIS MOMENT, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are all down and have been for a few hours now. It's such a big deal that it made the six o'clock news. I deleted WhatsApp a long time ago, when Facebook changed the privacy rules, but we do use Facebook for TIG and Instagram as well, although to a much lesser extent the past few weeks. It feels strangely peaceful without them and it's made me wonder what life would be like if all three of them just vanished forever ...
We first wrote about Christo and Jeanne-Claude in January, when Sotheby's announced the sale of some of the artists' work. Bulgarian Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Morrocan Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon met in Paris in 1958. In 1961, three years after they met in Paris, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began imagining and creating temporary works of art in public spaces. They would marry in 1962 and become one of the world's most famous artistic collaborations ...
