IT IS THE HEIGHT of summer and we can’t seem to resist bright, luscious colours lately―rich floral wallcoverings and dusky lilac bamboo chairs; a pink satin robe for late Sunday mornings …

THIS PAST SUNDAY we booked in for lunch at our favourite pub for the first time in many months. There is a rose garden with socially distanced tables set up and a very efficient system in place that made us feel comfortable and safe venturing out into the world again after so many weeks of lockdown.

It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

James Blake has released a new track called “Are You Even Real?” Blake told Apple Music the track came out of initial sessions with the accomplished US writer and Mad Decent-affiliated artist Starrah. The cut, which was also written with help from Ali Tamposi, was completed at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Pulse Studios and Conway in the Los Angeles area and Blake’s home studio in LA.

On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site’s cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white layout. In the place of its usual catalogue of several million words of fiction, book reviews, essays, and miscellanea, as well as at least as voluminous an archive of reader commentary, was a single post of atypical brevity.

THERE IS A THEORY that people are more productive in beautiful office spaces. If this theory were true, then Office E, in Berlin, Germany must have the highest levels of productivity ever.