Life

Today

Josie Cox

My Memorial Day pilgrimage to a Pennsylvania Walmart

Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

walmart memorial day

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

Why America is still immune to the soccer virus

It’s World Cup time again, and Americans from Bangor to Batavia don’t even bother to stifle their quadrennial yawns, while more fervent patriots are praying to the God who adjudicates sporting events that the US team flames out early, as usual.  ​It’s been 32 years since the World Cup first tainted American soil. The 1994 invasion was a colossal flop, despite the corporate subsidies lavished by Coca-Cola, Mastercard and the usual suspects. The title game – oh, excuse me: match – a thrilling 0-0 tie in regulation between Brazil and Italy, did not win millions of new fans.

World Cup soccer

Thursday

Philip Patrick

The dark side of Japanese convenience stores

Japanese cities can disappoint. Visitors stroll around hoping to be awe-struck by the dreamy spectacle of clip-clopping Geisha in their wooden geita, or barreling sumo wrestlers, or high-stockinged ninja girls (à la Kill Bill), and all against a Blade Runner backdrop, only to be confronted with mostly unremitting blandness. The constants are these: concrete, plastic, more concrete, more plastic, endless construction (one crappy shopping complex or mansion block replacing another), confusion, and noise. It can all seem dizzyingly homogenous. The defining feature of the Japanese city these days is the ubiquitous convenience store or "konbini," the scaled-down supermarkets/post offices/banks/…whatever the customer requires it to be.

7-11

Saturday

Melissa Kite

We’ve lost our only anti-vaxxer friend in the village

“Can I go now?” said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay on to the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favorite neighbor since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realized he was our sort of person anyway.

anti-vaxxer

Friday

Rory Sutherland

My points-based system for choosing our leaders

Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. "The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty." There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: "Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely." And of course there is Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to read PPE at Oxford.

points
William Cook

My annual pilgrimage along the route of the Berlin Wall

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

Berlin Wall
Bill Kauffman

The many versions of ‘Come Saturday Morning’

Wedding season has begun. First out of the gate this year was my young first cousin once removed, who entered marital bliss in a lovely Catholic ceremony in the small western New York city of Lockport, hometown of the logorrheic novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the supermodel cum hemorrhoid-cream spokeswoman Kim Alexis. As I sat nursing a non-alcoholic beer (I should’ve stuck with water) at the reception I awaited the father-daughter dance, and not only for its poignancy. I have paid attention to these ever since reading a newspaper article several years back that said Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” was then the second-most-popular song for this wedding-reception custom. Hmm.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The difficult pursuit of happiness

For six centuries, from the Renaissance forward, the architects and creators of modernity have promised and predicted a new world, one which, in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words, would be dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” The birth of that world in its political aspect is being celebrated this year in the United States, as well as, to some extent or another, throughout the West. This phrase, so vague and rhetorical as to be meaningless, is also the best definition there is of the modern project. Hence the 250th anniversary of the birth of the US is an obvious moment to consider how far America, and with it the world it has so radically influenced, have advanced since 1776.

Ruaridh Nicoll

In Cuba, we’ve all become preppers

We may not be happy campers here in Havana. But increasingly we are campers. Enter any home, from the most privileged (a relative term these days as the blackouts rise to 22 hours a day) to the poorest, and the trappings of off-grid living are everywhere. Some of the kit wouldn’t shame the back of a hedge-fund weekend warrior’s tricked out Jeep as it wended its way into the wilds of Glacier National Park. Do you know what an Ecoflow Delta Ultra 3 is? Well I didn’t, until recently. It’s the latest in “portable power stations.” Basically a big battery, it can keep a freezer running for 12 hours, or power several fans through the night. But at $1,500, it’s 150 times the average Cuban monthly pension.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

I gave up drinking. Don’t call me teetotal

I hate teetotallers. The pitying looks they give you with their cold, unclouded eyes. Those patronising, bored smiles they smile, as though they are indulgently listening to the table-talk of children. Their uncouth early departures from the dinner table and tactless talk of early starts. Teetotallers are as bad as people who insist on whipping out their phones to film fellow guests when they’re dancing. They’re buzz-killing squares who should learn to live a little.   And yet … I have, despite my worse judgment, recently mounted the wagon. In my heart, I remain a devoted drinker. In my mind, I continue to see myself as the Falstaffian life of the party.

Stephen Bayley

Looking back to the future on the 50th anniversary of Concorde’s first high-speed commercial flight

Not since the Spitfire has a machine inspired such complex loyalties. Never before or since had an aircraft so completely embodied national values and excited such admiration and affection. But, like the Spitfire, Concorde was both magnificent and absurd. Thus, essentially English. Concorde was shockingly beautiful and an aeronautical marvel. At its Mach 2 cruise – say 1,300 mph – its nose reached a temperature of 127 Celsius. The fuselage stretched by several inches. Passengers could – with a glass of champagne to hand – see the curvature of the Earth from its tiny windows. The sky was purple and orange. Concorde was an emotional and technical success, but a commercial disaster.

Amy Raphael

Pack everything you need for your weekend getaway in a bag that epitomizes British luxury

For summer getaways, look no further than British brand Ettinger to carry all you need in enduring style. The luxury leather goods brand’s collection of travel bags, available in overnight and weekend sizes, exemplifies Ettinger’s ethos of adopting traditional manufacturing processes, focus on durability, and attention to detail. The company uses various types of leather according to need: fine bridle leather is more delicate than traditional bridle hide and thus more versatile; soft Italian calf is chrome tanned, dyed, and drum rolled to give the leather a silky touch that improves with age; goat leather, one of the finest in the world, is known for its softness, strength, and resilience.

Bridget Arsenault

Margot Hauer-King, of word-of-mouth hot spot People’s, takes her cues from unexpected sources

British-born and New York-based, Margot Hauer-King is the middle child of American theater producer Debra Hauer and London’s best-dressed restaurateur, Jeremy King. Hauer-King was raised in restaurants – her father having shaped London’s dining scene with his business partner Chris Corbin, from The Wolseley to Le Caprice to J. Sheekey, still reframing with his solo openings, The Park and Simpson’s. And now, after a chance introduction to journalist and film producer Emmet McDermott – of the headline-making documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch – Hauer-King and McDermott are reshaping Big City nightlife. Opened just over a year ago in Greenwich Village, People’s is best described by what it is not.

Georgie Young

Corneliani’s globe-trotting “travel jacket” touches down in Madrid

Ever since the luxury Italian menswear house Corneliani was founded by Alfredo Corneliani in the 1930s, it has created high-quality suits and coats, initially for a professional clientele, but more recently for what it describes as the “modern metropolitan nomad” – men who travel, and who have reasonable need for a versatile jacket to take with them. Corneliani calls this a travel jacket. But Corneliani doesn’t just make travel jackets. It has also inaugurated an art project of the same name, commissioning photographers around the world to shoot a Corneliani jacket on themselves or a friend in their natural environment. The idea is a series of travel photographs that interpret the brand through different lenses in different places and now covers 25 projects over five continents.

Peter Howarth

Berluti’s shoes have been worn by icons from Cardin to Warhol. Now, it’s created a sneaker for the 21st century

The story goes that, in 1962, Andy Warhol went into the Berluti store in Paris asking for some shoes to be made for him. The place, a family-run business founded in 1895, was well-known for its elegant footwear, and the young Olga Berluti was given the task of dealing with this new customer. Warhol’s sketch of what he was looking for was a guide, and Olga made a pair of leather loafers. But when the artist came to collect them, she confessed that one had a scar on it where the hide had been marked, possibly by the cow catching on some barbed wire. According to the brand legend, Olga apparently said that the blemish was the result of a “subversive cow,” and Warhol stated: “From now on, I only want shoes made from the hides of subversive cows.

Antonino Biondo

The oldest luxury brand in Britain has made its ‘Hollywood comeback’

Founded more than 250 years ago as royal whipmaker to King George III, luxury goods manufacturer Swaine has long since moved beyond its equestrian origins, expanding into leather goods, hats, and umbrellas – all rigorously handmade in Britain. In many ways, the business has operated as a luxury conglomerate before that was a thing, undergoing several transformations since its establishment in 1750. Today, leather accessories remain at its heart, complemented by the later acquisitions in the mid-20th century of Herbert Johnson headwear and Brigg umbrellas. Despite a stellar client roster – from Queen Victoria to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia – and a history of outfitting some of cinema’s most enduring characters, the brand remains defined by discreet understatement.

Georgie Young

A book made with gilded leather scales, shimmering organza, and not a single word

Kate Holland has what her father called a “butterfly brain”. The Somerset-based bookbinder and Homo Faber master artisan has spent three decades creating beautiful books that deftly straddle the line between novel and art piece; each is a handcrafted, artistic response to the text it houses, whether that’s a leather-and-gold-tooling interpretation of the Booker Prize nominees, or a first-edition Breakfast at Tiffany’s set with 1,000 white diamonds. “I’m often told I have too many ideas for a book,” says Kate. “I’ve always been told to pare it back.” So, she has found it creatively freeing to allow her imagination to flourish in her latest work, ‘The Butterfly Mind,’ created as part of the Homo Faber fellowship and shown at Milan Design Week in April.

Simon de Burton

Patek Philippe celebrates a half-century of the Nautilus with a platinum watch that will fly out of the vitrines

Of the thousands of watch designs created during the past century, Patek Philippe’s Nautilus is among the few that can fairly be described as horological landmarks. Penned by the late, great Gérald Genta (famed for creating the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak), the Nautilus was launched in 1976 as Patek Philippe’s first integrated bracelet sports watch, complete with a hefty $3,000 price tag, despite the first models being made from steel. The original Reference 3700/1A broke all the rules with its large-but-slim 42mm case with unique “horns” at the three and nine o’clock positions, a flat, porthole-shaped bezel, and horizontal lines stamped onto its blue-gray dial.

Peter Howarth

For its latest Masters of Art series, Montblanc channels the vibrant and expressive works of Henri Matisse

Think of Henri Matisse and what comes to mind? “The Snail”, a square of geometric brightly colored shapes made from cut-out paper. Or “Dance (I)”, a circle of pink figures on a blue and green background moving freely. Or how about “Interior with a Goldfish Bowl”, with its cool, dreamlike atmosphere. All speak of a love of form and vibrant color, and it is his use of color that is most noticeable in Montblanc’s new homage to Matisse. With its Masters of Art range, the maker of luxury writing instruments produces dedicated series of limited-edition pens that channel the spirit of great artists, interpreting their works through intricate and skillful craftsmanship. Now is the turn of Henri Matisse, giving us a collection based on five of his masterpieces.

Jeremy Collins-White

Ever since the Wright brothers, the earthbound have dreamed of gaining personal access to the sky

A vehicle that lifts from your driveway, bypasses the gridlock below, and deposits you, serenely, wherever you choose? For most of the 20th century, it remained science fiction. Now, somewhat amazingly, the race to put a personal flying machine in private hands could be nearing completion. The history of this quest is longer and stranger than most realize. In the 1930s came Autogiro Company of America’s AC-35, an autogyro that could drive 25 mph and fly 75 mph. The ’40s saw the Fulton FA-2 Airphibian with detachable wings and tail. It was even approved by the Civil Aviation Authority, but production was halted due to financial issues.