WE USED to have a series here featuring a compilation of the things we loved in the past week, but it fell away about two years ago.
WHEN I WAS little, pink was my absolute favourite colour. Although I like to think I’ve grown out of it and now tell people my favourite colour is black (which is true), pink still holds a special place in my heart.
I FINALLY finished Little Women and understand now while it did not end satisfactorily. Louisa May Alcott had written it for money, at the request from her publisher (and a little nudge from her father), and she apparently did not enjoy the process. She also wanted the main character, Jo, to remain unmarried, but at the time (1868–69), this was not possible and the character had to be married off.
AS THE Christmas season is upon us, we find ourselves revisiting the perennial debate over holiday decor: should one choose multicolored or white lights to adorn the tree and home?
AUTUMN, that wistful interlude between the sultry veil of summer and the frozen stillness of winter, arrives in a cascade of rustling leaves, each one a reminder of the season's transitory beauty. The air, once laden with the languor of summer, now wears a crisper edge, a hint of the inevitable chill to come. The scent of oud and embers drifting from candles mingles with the earthy fragrance of fallen leaves, weaving a heady potion filled with melancholy.
One word has been popping up increasingly on earnings calls and in corporate filings of some of the world’s biggest companies. From Wall Street giants like BlackRock Inc. to consumer titans like Coca-Cola Co. and Tesla Inc.
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...
Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
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.
After the nadir of Covid travel restrictions, summer travel season is in full swing. Air travel is projected to exceed pre-pandemic levels, according to the Transportation Security Administration. People are dusting off their passports, or waiting weeks to get them renewed, and applying for the visas they need for their destinations. International vacations take planning, even more so now. While the world has mostly opened back up since lockdowns, most nations have strict limits on how long noncitizens can visit.
Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.
IT FEELS like 2021, which is the last time we wrote about blue shirts being a trend, as well as tennis skirts, which are also trending at the moment, as they did then. Perhaps they never really went away.
THE LAST TIME I did a Life Lately was way back in February, and a lot has happened since then. Here is the latest photo diary⏤a few snippets from the past days and weeks, from the pink peonies and tulips in Fulham (just before we stopped in at the charming Fox & Pheasant pub) to sailboats on the Thames, the Tate, chestnut trees in Bushy Park, and more...
YOU MOST LIKELY have seen photos of this place floating around the interwebs. They are evocative, and they'll make you want to drop everything and travel to the Amalfi Coast, if for no other reason, than to visit Felicia's Home Restaurant, housed in the Tramonti farmhouse where your chef, Felicia, was born.
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.
