this week’s style icon:
Cole Escola as Little Edie in the Hamptons issue of NY Mag
what I’m clicking:
Welcome to the millennial midlife crisis lol | Where the Amish go on vacation | America’s obsession with Hampton Inn | Don’t pity a woman dining alone | Getting asked to leave the French Laundry | Kyoto has a tourism problem | The scam of “best of” lists | The travel writer’s dilemma | Inside the media’s traffic apocalypse | Where have the men gone? | Hiring an escort for your 70th birthday | How Little Simz found her way | My brother’s keeper | How bros joined a coup in the Congo | What we mean when we talk about brainwashing | The accidental advocacy of paying off school lunch debt | A firsthand account of the Texas floods
what i’m wanderlusting:
Dreaming up a reason to throw a party in the suspiciously cheap castle (sleeps 20!) in the south of France.
what i’m watching:
Which one of you jerks told me to watch Sirens? Quite possibly the dumbest show I have ever seen. I kept thinking there would be some shocking twist, but the whole thing is just people running around looking for each other, but nothing happens once they find who they’re looking for. If you saw this pop up on Netflix and got intrigued, just watch The In Crowd instead. I also watched Your Friends and Neighbors and it was just fine but it coulda/shoulda been a movie instead.
what i’m eating & drinking:
Last month in Provence, we had one of those idyllic long lunches at Bistro du Paradou and I’m still thinking about the cheese basket they brought us at the end of the meal.
what i’m listening to:
Bar Mediterraneo is my perpetual summer soundtrack.
what i’m recommending:
Instead of making me lose my sense of smell, Covid made me extra sensitive to smells, so much that I couldn’t wear alcohol-based perfume. It took me years to recover. The wrong perfume can still make me instantly carsick, but I have been loving floral-based tropical scents this summer. Costa Brazil’s aroma oil smells like a rainforest, and their lotion smells even better. Vacation sunscreen is summer in a bottle. I really regret not buying the whole line of Fragonard’s fleur d’oranger at the Marseille airport (weirdly hard to find in the US!). Right now, my current go-to is a mini Kai oil (an oldy but a goody).
what i’m coveting:
I really need this vacation purse. (My friends are going to be like “don’t you already own this?”)
what i’m reading:
Jose Saramago
The other day I got accosted by some random guy because I was walking down the street with a stack of books, one of which happened to be the complete stories of Clarice Lispector. If you know me, then you probably know I fucking loathe male strangers, but because he was commenting on my book selection and not like, my fat (phat) ass, I decided to stop and chat. He gave me a really cryptic and intriguing book recommendation for Blindness by saying that “halfway through the book, something is going to happen to you.” What happened to me was that I was like “this is the worst possible writing you can write and still get me to finish a book just because the premise is so interesting.” Anyways, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’m also not going to stop a stranger in the street and tell them not to read it. (And I won’t be reading the sequel, but I did wikipedia the plot summary.)
Helen Fielding
Somehow, I made it to middle age without ever having read or watched Bridget Jones. (I know who she is because it’s one of those things you learn by osmosis.) I bought the entire series from a used book store, read the first one, and donated the rest without reading them because it was so, so bad. Then I made my husband watch all the movies with me instead. They were fine, the most recent one is actually very cute, but the really shocking plot twist is Renee Zelwegger’s new face. People need to start understanding that some plastic surgery doesn’t make you look better, it just makes you look different.
Alua Arthur
Haley bought this book for me because he heard about it on the radio. As a memoir, it’s ok. As a book about death doulaing, it’s also just ok.
Brittany Newell
I bought this because the bookstore had a little placard that was like “for fans of Anora!” but it was mostly just sad and weird and 200 pages too long.
M.L. Longworth
One thing I have learned about myself recently is that I love to read a cozy little murder mystery when I’m on vacation. Comforting AND daunting to know there are 9 more (and counting) of this series set in Provence.