Eileen Gu

Monday

Christopher Caldwell

Cheugy, Gu and you

New executives at Tiffany, the venerable American jeweler, have decided to hawk what used to be called “bling.” Just before Covid hit in late 2019, LVMH bought Tiffany & Co. for $16 billion. LVMH, which started out as the high-end luggage company Louis Vuitton, has taken over all manner of fancy wine, perfume and clothing emporia. The Tiffany buyout was the largest in luxury-sector history. Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, installed one of his sons, Alexandre, as executive vice president. “It’s time,” Alexandre said recently, “to push the boundaries a little bit.” In a bunch of recent press reports, we’ve been given a hint of what that means.

cheugy

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

Home is where the racism is

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

racism

Thursday

Amber Duke

The twisted love affair with Eileen Gu

The Chinese Communist Party has a brilliant new propagandist in Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu, the American-born freestyler skier who is competing for China in this year's Winter Games. Gu is a talented athlete, gifted academically, and, well, gorgeous — she has done modeling campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Gucci and has appeared on the covers of Elle and Vogue China. She's also a traitor. Gu, who is 18, was born and raised in San Francisco by her American father and Chinese mother. She plans to attend college at Stanford University. Yet she announced in 2019 that she would represent China in the 2022 Beijing Olympics.