The day after the Great Blizzard of 2020 dropped a foot of snow on her farm in Bedford, New York, in December, Martha Stewart arose around 4 a.m., like she always does, jumped into her snowplow and got to work. The 79-year-old, who became America’s first self-made female billionaire when her company went public in 1999 …

Talking about favourite fashion designers with a friend the other day, and we remembered the famous story about Karl Lagerfeld when he decided to lose weight (and he did—almost 41kg) because he wanted to be able to wear Hedi Slimane’s designs—those razor-thin suits of the early 2000s.

WE FEATURED THE WORK of interior photographer and stylist Carley Page Summers twice before (here & here), but she has since added more images of her North Carolina home to her Instagram page and it’s all marble and crystal chandeliers, gilded mirrors and dappled sunlight, a cat on a dining room table, and a dog curled up on a pink velvet armchair by the fire …

Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed.

THERE SEEMS TO be a strange matchstick shortage in England, almost as if everyone here has succumbed to a winter of lockdown by lighting fires all day long in our stone cottages, keeping cosy and making the best of it. That is definitely what we are doing, and I couldn’t find any boxes of matches anywhere and had to order mine from Lithuania …

The problem with the dispute between the Australian government and the two social media giants Google and Facebook is that it’s a squalid argument between ethically challenged contestants about a really important question – the survival of liberal democracy. The Australian parliament is in the process of passing a law – called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code – which would force Facebook and Google to pay publishers if they host their content.