IT’S THE HEIGHT of summer and the weather has been all over the place this year. After a perfectly wonderful sun-drenched week of bicycle rides in the countryside and a day by the seaside, the weather is set to change again—to overcast skies and rain. Here are a few looks we’ve been collecting lately, style inspiration for navigating these mid-summer days: from layering shorts with a light knit and a trench to classic summer whites and more …

More than a year into the pandemic, many of the usual paths to happiness are blocked. We can’t always rely on the externals for their dependable highs: travel, going to pubs, bars and parties, socialising with large groups of friends, seeing live music, theatre and festivals …

P normally cooks at our place because he’s actually really good (for one of our first dates, he made Shrimp Vol-au-Vent to start), but every once in a while, I come across a recipe that I’d like to try. Most of the time, they do not turn out great, but this one―a recipe for pasta with spicy vodka sauce―was so easy and delicious and turned out so well that I’ve made it twice already …

THIS INSTALMENT OF 10 IMAGES features the wonderfully bright and happiness-inducing photos of @alicedetogni. Her use of colour is inspired: from the purple umbrellas of San Fruttuoso, Liguria, Italy to the macarons at Ladurée; to picnics in orange gingham sundresses to fields of wildflowers, it’s impossible to look at this interior and graphic designer’s feed without feeling that the world is a wonderful place …

Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate. Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.

I am not a huge fan of aphorisms, but every once in a while I come across something that makes PERFECT SENSE and lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these words: Your energy is your currency. Spend it wisely. Invest it well …

My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student at a prestigious boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his assignments was to recite Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. By the day of the presentation, he had rehearsed the poem dozens of times and could recall it with ease. But this time, as he stood before his classmates, something strange happened …

THE WEATHER has been beautiful, so on both Friday and Saturday, we took our new folding bicycles out for very long countryside rides through hilly landscapes filled with roaming sheep and giant bales of hay framed by rambling stone walls covered in moss that have been there for hundreds of years. There were castles and viaducts and cosy country pubs along the way where we would stop for a drink and mingle with the locals …

Everyone knows where the happiest people in the world live—the United Nations tells us every single year. For the past several years, Finland has been ranked No. 1, sitting atop the pack of Nordic countries, which are all considered very happy. And since they’ve cracked the happiness code, as my colleague Joe Pinsker wrote recently, many of the rest of us are tempted to mimic Nordic habits. Live like a Finn—take a short walk in the forest, go ice swimming—and all will be well, right?