Society

A lovely posh woman once told me that should things ever become too much in my life, there was a simple solution: “Just book yourself into a five-star hotel and forget about it. Works every time.” When Prince Harry arrived back in Britain last week to take on the British press in court, rumor has it that he did just that. Instead of spending the night at his previous home, Frogmore Cottage, or one of the many rooms at Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, he stayed at Soho House, the private members' club and hotel. It would not be surprising. Harry is accustomed to a luxurious life and some of these castles are getting far too shabby nowadays. There’s also the fact Meghan and Harry’s first ever date was at the Soho House on 76 Dean Street, London.

“Coming into British Vogue, I remember thinking, I wanted to create a magazine for all women. I said to myself, ‘I’m probably going to get fired for making it inclusive,’ but at the same time I thought that would be great. Because at least I would have been true to myself.” Edward Enninful said this less than a year ago in an interview. The outgoing editor-in-chief of British Vogue seems to have manifested his own firing. Last week, Condé Nast announced that Enninful was being bumped upstairs. For relinquishing the reins of British Vogue, he has been handed a non-job as “editorial advisor of British Vogue and global creative and cultural advisor of Vogue.” The press release called it a “promotion.” No one is buying it.

America! The land of the free. A place for second chances. But if you're a foreigner who wants to keep basking in the aforementioned freedom, the one thing you probably shouldn't do is write about your excessive drug use in a memoir when you're on a visa.  That's the mistake made by Prince Harry, who now faces legal action that could end with his deportation back to Britain.  You’d think a royal armed with the best schooling (and lawyers) money can buy would know that. But as is clear from Prince Harry’s latest debacle, hundreds of thousands of the finest British pounds in tuition will only get you so far. In his memoir Spare he wrote that he had consumed cocaine on several occasions. “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time.

“A person should not just be able to buy special police services,” Prince Harry was told last week after losing a legal challenge over the UK Home Office’s decision to not allow the government to pay for his security when visiting Britain. The man that begged for the world to see him as "Just Harry, drop the prince," had to be reminded that the Metropolitan Police was not for hire, and that privately-funded protection would undermine public confidence in London’s police force. This is just one of the ongoing court battles that Harry has on his plate at the moment. It seems that tending to his chickens, being hired on as "Chief Impact Officer" at a hippy-dippy wellness company BetterUp and taking part in his worldwide privacy tour is less time consuming than one might think.

Murdoch gets what Murdoch wants — and this time, it’s to erase any evidence that Tucker Carlson ever existed. The media mogul is so insistent that the “T”-word remain unspoken that he has purportedly banned any mention of the ex-host across the Fox networks.  This is bad news for Chadwick Moore, author and contributing editor at The Spectator after he announced his new book, Tucker, that comes out next month. Moore tweeted that he’d been blacklisted from the network after announcing the book, saying: “I’m not allowed on Fox anymore, because I wrote a book about @TuckerCarlson. I’ve been banned from the network.

The New Yorker has come to the profound revelation that crazy, evil people who carry out heinous crimes hold crazy, evil beliefs to justify their crimes. Such people, the New Yorker has apparently now realized, can be of different races. But no matter what, the most common motivating cause is white supremacy, regardless of the perp's race — and it’s all America’s fault. In his piece on “the rise of Latino white supremacy,” New Yorker columnist Geraldo Cadava writes about how Mauricio Garcia, the mass shooter who killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, before being killed by an off-duty police officer, expressed white-supremacist views in a diary and online — and because of this, “many were shocked that he was Latino.

The clamor of voices, the snapping of shutters, the dazing glare of bulb after bulb. A celebrity is whisked into a waiting car by a no-nonsense staffer, holding back the throng so they can make their escape. But just how easy is it to cause this scene? This week, I put on my most refined accent and dialed the number of a photo agency to find out.  “Hi, I’m a publicist and I have a new client looking to move from London to LA.” “What kind of client?” “She’s done a lot of reality TV and she’s a fashion influencer, mainly on TikTok. I’d prefer not to name her at this point.” “Ok. What are you looking for?” “I was — we were — hoping to create some buzz around the move, something that’ll get her into the papers.

Lonnie VanHook was preparing to board the train to Oregon when his body gave out. The Navy veteran is accustomed to these sorts of betrayals. He is quadriplegic and legless to boot; a rare form of cancer is eating away at his skeletal-muscle tissues and bladder. He awoke in a facility surrounded by medical professionals wearing the plastic countenances of concern and sympathy they picked up during the med school lessons on bedside manners. During the interaction, Lonnie told them about the reason for his upcoming trip. You can picture the Oakland native rolling his eyes as he has prepared for the rebuttal. The doctors, no doubt, exchanged astonished glances. Lonnie, what were you thinking?!? You don’t need to take the train. We can do that right here!

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg may just be the smartest man in DC, likely even a card-carrying Mensa member, according to a fawning WIRED interview published Thursday.  Virginia Heffernan, a contributor to the magazine, came to this dazzling conclusion when she sat down to speak with Mayor Pete “in his undernourished corner office one afternoon in early spring.”  “I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” she recalled. Cockburn, however, thinks the people of East Palestine would like it to take up slightly more mental headspace.  Heffernan is right, however. Buttigieg does hold much of his mind’s “functionality in reserves.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were followed by paparazzi in a "near catastrophic" car chase Tuesday night in New York City, according to a statement from the couple's spokesperson. "Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland [Markle's mother] were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi," the spokesperson said. "The relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers." https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1658844017918869510 The incident supposedly occurred as Harry and Meghan were leaving the Ms. Foundation for Women gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown.

One year into his tenure as the CEO of CNN, Chris Licht is taking a battering. Ratings are dwindling, viewers are outraged and an internal rift is widening. The mountain of problems facing the embattled CEO erupted into public view last week in the wake of the network’s town hall with Donald Trump, an event that sparked outrage inside and outside the CNN newsroom. “It feels very bleak,” one CNN journalist told me. “Staffers are nervous about the future.

As President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy begin to square off on a compromise debt ceiling bill, the subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for the purchase of electric cars will prove a major, if not the major, sticking point. McCarthy clearly knows that Goldman Sachs, Brookings and other respected observers have predicted that these EV credits could cost taxpayers $390 billion over the coming decade — or at least twenty-seven times the original estimate. Yet the president is also acutely aware that preserving the IRA’s role in facilitating a rapid transition away from gas-powered vehicles is the reddest of lines for his progressive base.

Elon Musk has decided it's too much work for him to be the chief executive of Twitter, a fraying social network, in addition to running Tesla and SpaceX and a potpourri of other startups. He recently named Linda Yaccarino, an NBC ad executive, as the new CEO so that she could focus on business operations and he could focus on product design and new technologies. As an employee of Musk's, Yaccarino has an impossible mission — to stem the bleeding, appease the advertisers, and, of course, keep her new boss happy. Good luck to her, I say, for Twitter's current fortunes are going in only one direction — south. When Musk acquired Twitter, he paid $44 billion for a company that no one else wanted nearly as much. Since then, its value has fallen to almost $20 billion.

It is out of sight and usually out of mind, but recent events are forcing Americans to focus on the security of a vast network of undersea cables that the nation depends upon. In early February 2022, cables connecting Taiwan to its Matsu Islands off the coast of China were cut in what appears to be an act of sabotage that Taipei later ascribed to Chinese vessels. It took nearly two months for the internet to be up and running again, highlighting the importance of a largely ignored element of a country’s critical infrastructure.  According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data.