Life

Thursday

Kara Newman

Go Long: Why “long” martinis are the sessionable way to drink right now

Martinis remain one of the most popular cocktails of the moment – pristine and dry or filthy-dirty-hazy, vodka or gin, olive or twist, there’s one on every menu. But the iconic drink sure does pack a punch. In a moment where many – particularly younger consumers – are drinking less, even the classic martini is seeing some changes. Enter the “long” martini, which lengthens the basic martini build with soda water, tonic, etc., and serves it over ice. The end result: a less-strong, less austere version of the drink. “I don’t think the martini is going anywhere,” says Kevin Denton Rex, director of The Spirits Authority, a research organization that gathers data from bartenders. But the “long” martini drives “sessionability, that low-alcohol moment.

Joanne Glasbey

A murder-free cruise down the Nile on the 1920s steam ship that inspired an Agatha Christie classic

The actor David Suchet, who starred as Hercule Poirot in TV films and on the big screen, has recounted trying to perfect the Belgian detective’s fussy walk, as described by his creator Agatha Christie. In the end, Suchet placed a penny between his butt cheeks and shuffled like a penguin to keep it in place, thus recreating Poirot’s distinctive gait – a testament to his resourcefulness and acting chops. Author Agatha Christie, literary body count, prolific [Alamy/Associated Press] Well, fire up your little gray cells and oil your mustaches: here’s the opportunity to enjoy the inspiration for one of Christie’s best-loved books. With a legacy of more than 70 crime novels, 150 short stories and 25 plays, this year marks the 50th anniversary of her death.

Kitty Tucker

Richard Mille watches cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So why do athletes try so hard to break them?

Ester Ledecká, Tomoka Takeuchi, and Arthur de Villaucourt were all part of the Richard Mille “family” at Milano Cortina 2026, and while the first two competed in the Women’s Parallel Giant Slalom for snowboard, the latter attacked the Men’s Moguls and Men’s Dual Moguls. For athletes to have associations with watch brands might not be unusual, however there is one crucial difference here – where Richard Mille is concerned, those it invites to become part of its network are required to wear their watches while competing. Ledecká went into this Olympics chasing a fourth gold medal, having remarkably won the top gong at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in both the Parallel Giant Slalom (snowboarding) and the Super-G (alpine skiing).

Jackson Ford

For under-the-radar, innovative watches that retail for under $1,000, turn to Time+Tide

As the saying goes, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Perhaps this is why Australian Andrew McUtchen is in such a hurry to spread the word about what he calls watch “microbrands.” These are the product of young watchmakers who have developed small runs of interesting and innovative watches and are challenging the hegemony of the traditional Swiss horology titans. Typical is Studio Underd0g, a British outfit founded in 2020 with the aim of making quirky, colorful timepieces. Its Watermel0n chronograph is a striking creation, with a dial that replicates the look of the fruit.

Eric Walker

A 147-year-old British shoemaker from Northampton has designs on your loafers

Founded in 1879 in Northampton, Crockett & Jones sits at the center of British footwear. While other venerable shoemaking names have chased trainers and other youthful styles, marketing and e-commerce director James Fox says the family company (Fox is the son-in-law of managing director Jonathan Jones, fourth generation of the co-founding Joneses) preferred to “double down.” “We’ve stuck to our guns. There’s a lot to be said for being the shepherd and not the sheep,” says Fox. Trainers, he suggests, are not the inevitable end point of modern footwear. To illustrate this, he cites the company’s selection of Travel Loafers. “There’s not much between this and my gym trainers,” he says of a style called the Harvard 2.

Ivo Dawnay

Sending out an SOS

Even in my own hilly, albeit domesticated National Park of Exmoor in south-west England, you can easily get lost. And when the light fades and the clouds descend, the marshy bogland can be not just unpleasant, but lethal. Garmin’s inReach Mini 3 Plus is now not so much a luxury as a necessity for any outdoorsman, whether they be long-distance trekker, mountaineer, off-piste skier, scuba diver, or otherwise solo traveler. This tiny, satellite-connected tracking device has been around for some years, but its latest, just-released version, the Mini 3 Plus, pretty much completes any shortcomings of earlier editions.

Lucinda Bredin

Explore the intellectual side of the Renaissance’s softest boi at The Met

There can be resistance to Raphael. A bit unfair, really. Just as Renoir is considered the soft-edged Impressionist, Raphael (1483-1520), indisputably one of the three great artists of the Renaissance, is often eclipsed by his near contemporaries, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Is it because his works are just too beautiful, too ethereal, too perfect? This view is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 19th century, Raphael had pole position because his paintings were so otherworldly. His romance with La Fornarina (the baker’s daughter, sitter for one of Raphael’s greatest portraits) only boosted his reputation further. However, it turns out the 21st century is more inured to love’s dream. We prefer artists to be tortured souls.

Kitty Tucker

Defending the romantic tangibility of writing with elegant accouterments mightier than the sword

In 1924, it is said, the company that became Montblanc – the Simplo Filler Pen Company – developed special pens for customers who wanted something more refined for use on a Sunday. Dubbed Meisterstück designs (literally “masterpiece”) these took a number of forms before settling on the 149 model, the iconic cigar-shaped style we know today, which appeared in 1952. So classically elegant in its looks, it has an almost childlike simplicity and is identified by a snow-capped lid – a white “star” motif referencing the frozen peak of the mountain that gives the brand its name.

Peter Howarth

This luxury Italian menswear house has a new not-so-fancy man

The decision by Italian clothing brand Corneliani to use American psychedelic folk musician and artist Devendra Banhart as its “face” for this season is a telling one. This firm from Mantua, which has been making sartorial Italian menswear for nearly a century now, made its name creating traditional style for professionals. But times change, and style with it. So, wisely, Corneliani has been developing modern menswear that uses its traditional tailoring and fabric knowledge but applies it to more casual designs. Style director Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte says, “Today’s Corneliani man is no less interested in quality, but the life he lives is less constrained by formal conventions. He still wants elegance, but not in an uptight way.

Joanne Glasbey

Delight in the discord of Cora Sheibani’s ‘unpredictable and contrarian’ (and very wearable) designs

Jewelry designer Cora Sheibani’s eye for detail and form was refined from a young age, having been brought up immersed in what sounds like an exciting epicenter of the art and design world during the 1980s and ’90s. Her father, the Swiss-based international art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, and her mother Christina, both collectors, invited guests – often well-known artists and designers – into a home full of intriguing art, furniture, and objects, be it a kitchen chair or walls hung with works by Warhol and Basquiat. Early on, Sheibani had an interest in collecting Roman bronze rings, attracted by their deceptively simple mechanics, and the way they aged through wear would later inform her interest in engineering as design.

Peter Howarth

These Italian-American jackets’ signature hardware will have you hooked

Firefighters are universally loved, right? Of course they are – heroic lifesavers rushing into danger in those big red engines… what’s not to like? Back in the 1980s Andrea Della Valle, a young Italian, was certainly fascinated when he encountered a bunch of ex firefighters who were wearing the garments of their former trade. “I met these guys when I was living in New York and they were all in these amazing jackets,” remembers Della Valle. “They looked so cool, I thought this could really work back in Italy.” At the time, the Italian casual wardrobe was still pretty formal, he says. What if he could introduce something that was really different. A jacket with hook-and-eye fastenings, for example?

Bridget Arsenault

A playwright who went from stage to screen, then set aside scripts to pen a novel. Its themes? Escape and reinvention

Lila Raicek likes a big swing. Just last year the New York-based playwright and screenwriter debuted My Master Builder in London’s West End – only a matter of months after the first draft landed on director Michael Grandage’s desk. Most writers wait a lifetime to catch even a whiff of a Broadway or central London staging (especially one starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki). But for Raicek, this warp-speed ascension is something of a pattern. “I wrote a play at Columbia,” says Raicek of her college days. “It was my senior graduate school thesis. And that play was seen by a couple of people in Hollywood.” Bang, that script gets optioned for the screen and lands Raicek in a Los Angeles writers’ room.

Eric Walker

A cup of gas station coffee that’s worth traveling for

In the early days of the motor car, if you wanted to cross the high-altitude Upper Engadin in Switzerland, your vehicle had to be pulled by horses. Because up to 1925, the townsfolk of St. Moritz had a ban on driving. When it was lifted, Shell opened a petrol station. It also funded the paving of the straight road between this and a sister Shell stop at Samedan. The head of the company, Henri Deterding lived at Suvretta, just outside St. Moritz, and staged speed trials along this three-to-four-kilometer stretch. There is still a Shell petrol station on the St. Moritz site. It functioned for years before slipping into disrepair.

Friday

Bill Kauffman

Reflections on the Moon

We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up. This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science – “corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program – is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman.

Josie Cox

Adieu, Dinosaur the pigeon

On one of the first warm Saturdays of this year, hundreds of New Yorkers flocked to the popular High Line, the railway-turned-public park that extends over 22 blocks of Manhattan, to bid farewell to a T-Rex-sized pigeon. The pigeon, cast out of aluminum and named “Dinosaur,” had been a resident of its elevated perch since 2024. As so many New Yorkers will tell you, though, part of what’s magical about living in this city is that the experience is often transient. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, you should “leave before it makes you hard.” There’s nothing worse than a hard pigeon and so it was that on that glorious day last month, I joined throngs of people eager to get one last look at the monstrous, departing bird.

Peter Watson

How the movies improve your mental health

If you subscribe to The Spectator, there’s a fair chance you are a committed reader. Of books, I mean. Books are your friends, they don’t frighten you. Even long books. But here’s a behavioral oddity that I’ve noticed in others, and in myself. We tend not to read many books twice, but we do often watch movies twice, even more than twice. Of course, length may have a lot to do with it; movies are rarely more than two hours long; books can often take days to finish. But is there something more to it, something deeper? Down here on the beaches in Florida we now recognize something the psychologists are calling “cinematherapy.

oil
Melissa Kite

How far would I go for oil?

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realized that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his truck and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? I had two French cyclists who ran the shower in the en-suite for so long I thought they had fallen asleep Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the truck fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

Aidan Hartley

The cattle rustlers have returned

Kenya When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licensed guard named Joseph. The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My truckload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The banality of Meghan the Martyr

The great Dolly Parton once quipped “get down off your cross, honey, someone needs the wood.” This remark, aimed at attention-seeking self-described martyrs, could almost have been dreamt up for the Duchess of Sussex. Meghan, along with her ever-subservient husband Prince Harry, is currently bringing the gospel according to Meghan to Australia. During her quasi-royal tour to promote a wellness weekend that she is the keynote speaker at, Meghan has invented a new catchphrase – “Call me Meg” – and has been photographed smiling and looking appropriately radiant. The Netflix cash might be drying up, but enough has been banked for her to look a million dollars in the various Instagram-friendly outfits she has been sporting.

Meghan

Tuesday

Philip Patrick

The great soccer World Cup swindle

Tickets for this summer’s soccer World Cup are the most expensive in the tournament’s history. Or the history of any sporting event for that matter, with the possible exception of one-off extravaganzas like the Mayweather-Pacquiao showdown in 2015. The face value of tickets at this American tournament are a staggering five times higher that of the previous World Cup in Qatar. The most expensive seats for the final match have reached wallet-busting levels, affordable only to plutocrats and corporate boondogglers. And that’s just face value. What about the quaintly named secondary market? I occasionally peruse Fifa’s resale site, where the custodians of the game double dip from the buyer and seller to act as an official tout.

The soccer World Cup trophy sits in front of President Donald Trump