On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.
A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media has changed in recent times.
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.
The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found.
IT'S BEEN A WHILE since our last instalment of Things We Loved this Week. This one includes balloon curtains and beautiful haute couture, a review on the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch and more...
The past few days I’ve been enjoying a slower rhythm of life: some time with friends and the empty and rainy streets of Paris. I’ve also been particularly enjoying American author, Fran Lebowitz, in the series Pretend It's a City, biographical documentary created in collaboration with filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The series captivates―not only with her wit and way with words―but with the bond between her and Scorsese, talking and laughing together on the streets of New York. And I’ve also become very fond of her style and endlessly inspired by it, especially by her choice of her blazers.
