WE ALL KNOW the iconic opening scene of the 1963 film Charade: Audrey Hepburn looking devastatingly chic in a chocolate brown Givenchy coat and oversized sunglasses, sipping coffee on a sunny terrace in the French ski resort of Megève.
THERE ARE many ways to measure time – by years and by minutes, by months and by days. Perhaps with each falling second, or the small everyday moments as they unfold, or big once-in-a-lifetime events of grand importance. Perhaps time is marked by a first kiss, or the first time you knew you loved someone; or the anniversary of an important milestone, maybe even with that person.
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.
Most of us don’t worry about getting vitamin D when the weather’s warm and the sun is shining. But as winter approaches, accompanied by overcast days and long nights, you may be wondering if it could be useful to take a vitamin D supplement – and what benefit it might have.
Neural networks have become shockingly good at generating natural-sounding text, on almost any subject. If I were a student, I’d be thrilled—let a chatbot write that five-page paper on Hamlet’s indecision!—but if I were a teacher I’d have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the quality of student essays is about to go through the roof. On the other, what’s the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore?
TIME AGAIN for another Life Lately, and these past few days and weeks have felt rather busy, especially following the enforced hibernation of the lockdown years, which are beginning to feel like a million lifetimes ago now. There was an early morning train ride to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month and another to Glasgow the following day; and then all the way to the south, nearly as far as Wales just last week...
In 2012, when Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum released “Magic Mike,” a moist, underlit caper about male entertainers at a Tampa strip club, they thought they were making an indie. Instead, the film grossed a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars, spawning an international franchise.
Long before Pauline Clance developed the idea of the impostor phenomenon—now, to her frustration, more commonly referred to as impostor syndrome—she was known by the nickname Tiny. Born in 1938 and raised in Baptist Valley, in Appalachian Virginia, she was the youngest of six children, the daughter of a sawmill operator who struggled to keep food on the table and gas in the tank of his timber truck.
One of the most-asked questions is about my beauty and makeup routine. My skincare regimen changes with the seasons, with less makeup and rich moisturisers in the summertime, and the opposite in the winter. It's especially important to care for your skin in the wintertime because the cold, dry air can strip your skin of its natural oils, leaving it dry, itchy, and more susceptible to cracking and irritation.
IT IS ONLY the second week in January, and yet it feels like a lot more time has passed since the holidays. The decorations are still up and we're still turning on the white Christmas lights in the evenings, glittery in their delicate glass globes and strung along the archway of the built-in bookcase in the corner, instantly making things feel festive. For the past two weeks, it's been busy, busy, which is the reason why it feels like so much time has passed.
Somewhere near the center of Nevada, on the western slope of the Toiyabe Range, there’s a little meadow beside a creek running down from the mountains. In 2019, long before I had ever been there, a man named James Fredette drove his mobile home down the gravel road from the highway and went fishing. It was a lucky day: He caught three big rainbow trout. Then, as the light turned golden and began to fade from the canyon while Fredette packed up his gear, he thought, why not, and walked back down to the creek to try his luck panning for gold. He turned up a few nuggets, right there. Yes, it was a very lucky day.
HELLO AGAIN and Happy New Year! How were the holidays? Hope you had a wonderful time! As you know, we took some time off and it was amazing. So relaxing and nice to actually not work for a bit. (Novel idea, I know.) We even took a break from the newsletter, which we plan on resuming at this end of this week, since there were so many new subscribers while we were away.
April is the cruellest month because we are stuck. We’ve stopped dead and we’re going rotten. We are living in the demesne of the crippled king, the Fisher King, where everything sickens and nothing adds up, where the imagination is in shreds, where dark fantasies enthrall us, where men and women are estranged from themselves and one another, and where the cyclical itch of springtime—the spasm in the earth; the sizzling bud; even the gentle, germinal rain—only reminds us how very, very far we are from being reborn.
P SENDS me texts such as How much bay leaf (I was making refrigerator pickles) or Do you want a mini quiche when he's out picking up bits and pieces at the shops. I love these texts, with their lack of punctuation and misspellings, because they very much showcase how he prefers to get things done, and get them done quickly, rather than worry about the small details when he knows I'll know what he means.
THE NEW OVEN was delivered last week, and it's been sitting in the middle of the kitchen for days, as P thought he might get electrocuted if he installed it himself after watching one too many Youtube videos advising the hiring of a qualified electrician if you don't know what you're doing. I had a feeling it wasn't as complicated as he was making it out to be, but we tried to ask around anyway to see if anyone knew any electricians who could do it on short notice ...
