Holiday Gift Guide No. 01 – The Luxe List

It’s common to meet the idea of intuition with an eye roll. We tend to value reason over everything else, using expressions like “think before you act,” “think twice,” and “look before you leap.” We don’t trust intuition. In fact, we believe it’s flawed and magical thinking, either vaguely crazy or downright stupid. After all, good decisions should always be reasoned.

Supermodel, businesswoman and activist, Bella Hadid, appears on the April 2024 cover of Vogue Italia, radiating an authentic and present sense of self. In her interview with Sofia Viganò, Bella remarks, “For the first time since I can remember I am clear and present. I have the feeling that, by showing my most authentic self, things and people have aligned with my destiny.”

I came across a TikTok recently that articulated something about my face I’d been struggling with. It was one of those videos where the speaker sits in the front seat of her car as if she’s been so overcome by an epiphany that she had to pull over and share.

P WROTE LAST week’s Newsletter, and it’s about American Fiction, as well as the author whose work inspired the film, whom he is now reading. (You can find it here.) While still in the middle Little Women, of course I started two new books—the latest being In the Swarm: Digital Prospects by philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han.

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets.