omething strange happened the first time I encountered an article online that I wrote for a print magazine. The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish.
IT STARTED INNOCENTLY enough, as a search for decent pastrami, an item not easily found in Western Europe. We were emerging from lockdown, and while my American passport had allowed me to travel back to the United States a few times...
THERE ARE literally over four thousand photos on my phone at the moment, many of which I'd meant to sort through and file away into digital memory boxes but forgot about when new photos took their place. I may be feeling crushed by their spatial weight as an unfinished task in my mind, so I've decided to share a few a them here in a series of Life Lately photo diaries...
I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
I was probably in college when I first learned that movies could commandeer my desires in a manner hostile to my flourishing as a woman. My favorite film at the time was “Sin City,” a 2005 neo-noir adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic-novel series of the same name.
An amber-colored glass paperweight sits in my nightstand drawer. It used to belong to my dad, who recently died, and to his grandmother before him. It’s shaped like a cube, with delicate flowers painted on each side, and it’s heavy in my palm. But I rarely pick it up, because I have no papers that need weighing down. The object occupies valuable space that might otherwise be used for a book, tissues, or anything else that I actually use. Still, I keep it, along with a few other pieces of what you might call “sentimental clutter”—personally meaningful yet impractical objects: a box of old birthday cards, a chipped seashell, a loyalty card for a café that no longer exists.
Gen Zers are still in the early stages of their careers and personal finance journeys, but their financial habits are already proving to be radically different from those of their predecessors. With heightened levels of anxiety about the future grounded in very real socioeconomic and environmental issues, Gen Zers are reconfiguring their approach to money.
ON FRIDAY evening we had that pub thing in Vauxhall that had been telling you about. It turned out to be less of a business meeting, and more of a quick dinner and some drinks, all over in an hour and a half. Afterward, we wandered around, ended up in the quirkiest little Spanish bar with a juke a box playing Strawberry Fields and a hilarious clientele in various stages of drunkenness.
A few months ago, the writer Alice Sebold began to experience a kind of vertigo. She looked at a cup on the table, and it no longer appeared solid. Her vision fractured. Objects multiplied. Her awareness of depth shifted suddenly. Sometimes she glanced down and for a split second felt that there was no floor.
Last week, at Google’s annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard chatbot, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, will soon be able to describe images.
This wasn’t Supposed to happen. In 2020, in a house surrounded by fields in the Irish countryside, Liam, 19, sat at his laptop, an energy drink fizzing at his elbow. He leaned in for a better look at the profile photo and, sure enough, saw the face of an old rugby friend looking back at him.
Product placement is over. It’s so lame. Why smuggle an item of merchandise into a movie, like contraband, and have people snicker at the subterfuge, when you can declare your product openly and lay it on the table? Why not make a film about the merch? That was the case with “Steve Jobs” (2015), which unfolded the creation myth of Apple; with “The Founder” (2016), which did the same for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which is not, alas, about the harvesting of soft fruits; and with “Joy” (2015), which gave us our first chance—pray God it not be our last—to watch Jennifer Lawrence trying her hardest to sell mops.
Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.
It was when I was researching a story on that I realized there truly was no escape from the influencer industry. If business bros with corporate jobs in tech and finance — stable, high-paying careers with cushy benefits! — felt the need to supplement their status (and possibly their income) by becoming influencers, what hope was there for the rest of us?
