We watched You Can See Everything this past weekend and still haven’t stopped discussing it. Nor have we quite worked out what actually happened, or whether the two subjects were both stark raving mad. P thinks the whole thing was elaborately scripted; I was convinced it had been filmed as it went along, with events unfolding in real time and nobody entirely sure where they were headed. A whistleblower has suggested that the film is more art than documentary, and having now reached the halfway point of The Dropout, Hulu’s 2022 series about Elizabeth Holmes, I’m inclined to agree. I have also arrived at the conclusion that certain people are monsters who receive sentences far too light for the damage they cause. It’s a curious thing, watching the boundary between performance and reality dissolve, and realising that sometimes the most unbelievable part is knowing it all actually happened.

What else did I want to tell you? Oh, yes. I read this week that Anthropic is offering £145,000 for a human personal assistant while building AI agents designed, in part, to make human assistants obsolete. The company developing the technology to replace the personal assistant is offering a rather extraordinary sum to employ one. Apparently, even the future needs someone to organise it. Perhaps this is the most revealing thing about the AI revolution so far: for all the talk of automation and the impending disappearance of human work, someone still has to remember the appointments, anticipate the problems, and make sure the people building tomorrow’s world know where they’re supposed to be today.

The clocks went back on Sunday, and while the mornings have become a little lighter, it’s nearly pitch-black by five in the afternoon. I can’t decide whether I prefer it this way or the other. I can see why the Irish once called winter the darkness. Today, we’re boarding the train north, where it will be colder still, to spend a few days with family. It will be good to get away for a little while, to watch the countryside pass and let the days take whatever shape they will. For now, the light is going, the year is drawing to a close, and there are places to be and people to see before another month slips past.

This week’s letter includes a documentary that blurs the line between truth and performance; the curious contradiction at the heart of the AI revolution; a Parisian apartment caught between ornate detail and modern restraint; a photographer building painterly worlds for fashion’s biggest names; and the books, ideas, and cultural obsessions shaping the conversation. Plus, autumn dressing, a few things for the home, and the last of October’s fading light.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

The Age of Desire
On being seen, being sold to, and the difference between the two; Marie Antoinette in 4K, the true cost of convenience, Mariko Mori in Tokyo, and the last of the autumn light.

Also included: the hidden costs of a life organised around convenience; new thinking on the brain and how we make sense of scientific knowledge; a look inside a modernist New York home; autumn dressing in wool and leather; and the dreamy worlds of a photographer I’ve only just discovered.

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AUTUMN DAYS
/at home

001 - Olive Oil + Fuyu Persimmon Vinegar / 002 - Champagne Basket / 003 - Elm Bench / 004 - Handwoven Solid Mohair Blanket

THE CURRENT
/what’s happening

⚬ Nathan Fielder’s secretive, nearly three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes has become an unexpected box-office phenomenon, drawing a predominantly young audience and outsized cultural attention while challenging assumptions about what theatrical audiences will pay to see.

⚬ A Tokyo club’s unconventional “book rave”, where attendees read on a carpeted dance floor to ambient music, has gone viral and prompting debate over whether the event offers a refreshing alternative to conventional nightlife or an overly performative take on club culture.

⚬ BookTok and algorithm-driven publishing have created a new literary monoculture in which a handful of bestselling titles dominate the conversation, as shrinking book criticism, corporate consolidation and readers’ fear of missing out make it harder for overlooked authors and more adventurous reading to find an audience.

⚬ France’s cost-of-living crisis has erupted into nationwide protests and violent unrest, with half a million people taking to the streets, the Louvre blocked by demonstrators and mounting pressure on Emmanuel Macron as anger over soaring prices spreads across Europe.

⚬ Tina Brown mourns the closure of her beloved Sutton Cafe, reflecting on how the loss of a neighbourhood institution that offered comfort, community and a sense of belonging speaks to a broader erosion of human warmth in a world increasingly shaped by corporate sterility and performative social life.

⚬ The Wall Street Journal is developing an ambitious streaming video strategy designed to combine its journalistic authority with the reach and personality of creator-led media, with proposed programming spanning live morning news, executive interviews, food culture, sports, and AI.

DÉCOR
/trocadéro

Earlier in the week, had an entirely different space in mind for this letter; today, however, decided it was entirely unsuitable. Lately, there has been so much information coming at me from every direction that I’ve begun to question my own taste. Or perhaps only my ability to recognise it amid the endless parade of things I’m apparently supposed to want.

For now, there is this two-bedroom apartment in Trocadéro, which I hope I’ll still like by the time this letter reaches you. With its high ceilings, period mouldings, chevron flooring, classic Haussmannian architecture and a view of the Eiffel Tower, it seems a perfectly reasonable place to begin again. Besides, it’s been a long time since I’ve come across a perfect example of ornate austerity.

Project Trocadéro I - Paris
By @highstayparis
Conception @aarr_architectes

LONGER READS
/withdrawal

The Strange Power of You Can See Everything
In her review of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, Eileen Jones explores how a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes becomes a psychological thriller in which the audience is repeatedly made to question its own judgement. Although Holmes’s fraud is established, the film’s prolonged confrontations, unsettling close-ups and carefully deployed techniques of suspense make it difficult to settle on a definitive reading of the woman before the camera. Jones compares the directors’ command of cinematic artifice to Hitchcock’s, arguing that their achievement lies in making viewers acutely aware of how they are being manipulated while remaining entirely susceptible to that manipulation. As the film shifts its attention from Holmes to the people around her, the question expands beyond guilt and innocence to the nature of persuasion itself: how charisma, performance and self-deception can distort our perception of reality, and how readily we participate in the stories others construct. The result is an unnerving examination of the gap between what we see and what we believe, with Holmes’s famously unblinking stare becoming a mirror held up to our own capacity for deception.

I was a Theranos whistleblower.
In ‘You Can See Everything,’ Elizabeth Holmes is still lying
Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee turned whistleblower, offers a compelling insider’s critique of Nathan Fielder’s new film about Elizabeth Holmes, arguing that its greatest strength as art is also its central danger as purported documentary. By focusing on Holmes’s life in the run-up to prison, the film allows her to recast the Theranos scandal as a question of semantics, perception and possible self-deception, while leaving out the most damning evidence: the crude, unreliable blood-testing technology that was actually used on patients. Shultz explores the disconcerting complexity of Holmes’s ability to occupy the role of victim while manipulating those around her, including her abusive former partner, Sunny Balwani, and argues that the film’s carefully constructed ambiguity risks obscuring a far more straightforward history of fraud. The result is a fascinating examination of the power of storytelling, the limits of documentary filmmaking and the ease with which a gifted self-mythologiser can make even the truth seem open to interpretation.

Why So Many Men Aren’t Working
Why are millions of American men out of work when jobs are available? Challenging the familiar political narratives around manufacturing’s decline, immigration and the changing role of women, this essay argues that the crisis has as much to do with men’s readiness to work as with the economy itself. The authors point to an expanding culture of digital escapism, gambling, and drug use, alongside a more forgiving safety net, as factors that can make withdrawal from working life easier and the return to it harder. Their proposed solutions range from better wages and targeted incentives to tighter regulation of addictive industries and renewed investment in the habits and institutions that prepare young men for adulthood. At the heart of the debate lies the question of what happens when the modern economy offers work, but an increasing number of people struggle to organise their lives around it.

LONGER READS
/beyond the headlines

Szilveszter Makó is undeniably the photographer of the moment, establishing a massive presence across major fashion publications. His painterly, fine-art-infused approach blends Renaissance aesthetics with uncanny surrealism, relying heavily on natural light, physical set builds, and box-like backdrops that make each image feel like an enclosed world.

Based in Milan, the Hungarian photographer and art director has developed a distinctive visual language that moves between fine art and high fashion, attracting the attention of leading publications around the world. His work has appeared across fashion with remarkable frequency, marking a moment of extraordinary visibility for the photographer.

Much of the magic begins long before the camera comes out. Makó constructs his own sets by hand, using cardboard, paper, textiles, and other humble materials to create miniature worlds for his subjects. Working primarily with natural light, he transforms these carefully assembled environments into painterly scenes that feel at once tangible and faintly otherworldly.

The effect is at once theatrical and intimate, with the construction of each scene remaining palpable beneath the polish of high fashion. At a moment when so much imagery feels interchangeable, Makó’s work has a distinct sense of authorship: you can feel the hand behind it.

LATE OCTOBER
/tartan & murano glass

Somewhere But Nowhere Eau De Parfum / Burberry X Smythson Panama Leather Soho Notebook In Archive Beige / Rejuvenation Routine / Twist Lamp / Burberry X Smythson Panama Leather Soho Notebook In Archive Beige / Short Sylvie Rivière Earrings in Moissanite / Silver Cuff

LAST LOOK
/serenity now

A minimalist, light-filled living room designed by Vincent Van Duysen, in a style described by the designer as ‘serene and balanced’. Contemporary architectural minimalism at its best, the space features clean lines, natural wood floors, and a neutral colour palette. A low stone coffee table, dark wood armchairs with light cushions, a streamlined fireplace structure, and a framed abstract geometric artwork on the far wall complete the elegant space.

Until next time
à bientôt / see you soon,

instagram / pinterest / tig

Why Everyone Feels Slightly Unreal Right Now
Who Do You Think With?
On Overthinking
The Cost of Living Against Yourself
Forever Is Composed of Nows
Desire, Ageing, and the Strange Afterlives of Our Former Selves
As If It Matters
The Other Within Us: Female Friendship from Wollstonecraft to Instagram
Confessions of a Hypochondriac
2025 is the new 2015
On Baggage, Emotional and Otherwise
On Not Disappearing
The Skin We’re In: On Beauty, Time, and Truth

RECENTLY
/at hyperreality

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Culture, aesthetics, personal growth, wellness, film, and literature through essays and reflections; we examine ideas from a global perspective, blending analysis and storytelling to uncover the patterns that shape our world.

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For this week’s letter, I wrote an essay on how two books, a film, and an article in The Paris Review led me back to an old story about women, ageing, and the enduring business of being desired.

Also in this week’s letter: the hidden costs of a life organised around convenience; new thinking on the brain and how we make sense of scientific knowledge; a look inside a modernist New York home; autumn dressing in wool and leather; and the dreamy worlds of a photographer I’ve only just discovered.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

The Future Was Yesterday
On the future of thinking, the beauty of the unfinished, the return of analogue pleasures, autumn dressing, and the art of seeing things differently.

There was, of course, the matter of a certain actress debuting her new face at the Chanel show last week, a subject on which the internet had plenty to say. We tend not to concern ourselves with such things here. Or at least, not for very long. Today, instead, we turn to the unlikely realm of mathematics, where a different sort of transformation is under way. As talk of AI and job losses becomes harder to ignore, even mathematicians are beginning to ask what becomes of a life spent thinking when thinking itself can be done by a machine.

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SAVED
/feeling blue

Saved: this Notes post on the neutral that is French blue

AT HOME
/sleep tight

Boat Shoe / Mermaid Brush / Luxe Sateen Duvet Set / Sonic Toothbrush / Table Lamp / Espresso Set

Inside for paid subscribers: the ideas and images that have been occupying our attention lately, from the unexpected costs of modern convenience to the enduring appeal of certain colours, the art of making a home your own, and a few notes on dressing for the season ahead.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and @thisisglamorous for more.

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There was, of course, the matter of a certain actress debuting her new face at the Chanel show last week, a subject on which the internet had plenty to say. We tend not to concern ourselves with such things here. Or at least, not for very long. Today, instead, we turn to the unlikely realm of mathematics, where a different sort of transformation is under way. As talk of AI and job losses becomes harder to ignore, even mathematicians are beginning to ask what becomes of a life spent thinking when thinking itself can be done by a machine.

I listened this week to an interview with a mathematics professor who broke down in tears, not once but twice, while contemplating this possibility. The conversation was about what happens when AI comes for your reason for living, which is a rather different proposition from coming for your job. The first time his voice faltered, he was talking about a photograph taken at the University of Adelaide in 1985, of the legendary (and famously eccentric) Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős sitting with a ten-year-old Terence Tao, whom he was mentoring. Tao would go on to become one of the greatest mathematicians alive today, but in the photograph he is still a boy, with no way of knowing what the future held. There is something deeply moving about the image, this small moment of one mind opening a door for another, the older man sharing something of the world he has spent his life exploring with a child who is only just beginning to see its possibilities. And listening to the professor speak about it, I found myself thinking about all the things that pass between people in this way, the knowledge, the enthusiasms, the particular ways of seeing the world, and how much of being human consists of discovering something wonderful and wanting, almost instinctively, to show it to someone else. The second time came when he asked what it is all for, and it was hard not to hear the answer in the first.

Mathematics, it turns out, has been changing faster than anyone expected. AI systems are now solving research-level problems that have eluded human experts for decades, sometimes in a matter of hours. For a field built around the limits of what can be known, and the singular pleasure of pushing against them, this presents something of an existential dilemma. Mathematics has always depended on a curious combination of solitude and fellowship: the long hours spent wrestling with an elusive idea, followed by the moment of sharing it with someone who understands why it matters. It is a small, closely connected world, bound by a universal language and by the knowledge that the most difficult problems are rarely conquered alone. Its history is as much a history of people thinking together as it is of the things they have proved. And so the question is not simply whether a machine can do the work, but what becomes of the people who have built their lives around it.

Perhaps all is not lost. Even Terence Tao is exploring what might be possible by working alongside AI. Yet there remains a considerable distance between a machine producing a hundred thousand lines of proof and a human being understanding what those lines mean. A computer may verify that a proof is correct, but the proof can remain all but unreadable, its logic obscured by the sheer volume of detail. Steps can be skipped without the machine seeming to notice what has been lost, connections go unexplained, and, perhaps most importantly, there is no account of why any of it matters in the first place. A mathematical proof is not simply a destination. There is beauty in the route it takes to get there, in the sudden recognition of a pattern, in the feeling that something which had been hidden has, at last, revealed itself. And while AI may be able to find answers that have eluded us for generations, it is still the human mathematician who must decide which questions are worth asking.

I keep coming back to that photograph of Erdős and Tao, to the thought of a boy being introduced to a world that would become his life’s work. What does it mean to love something whose future you can no longer imagine, or to devote yourself to a pursuit only to discover that the very things you love about it are changing? Mathematics may become something altogether different, with AI opening doors to ideas that would otherwise have remained beyond our reach. The mathematicians of the future may find new pleasures in working with these strange and capable collaborators. But I find myself thinking, too, about the distraught professor, about the photograph, and about all the things we do for reasons other than reaching an answer. Perhaps the answers will be more extraordinary than anything we could have found alone. I wonder, though, whether we will miss the long way of getting there.

This week’s letter considers what we stand to lose when the future arrives too quickly, alongside new exhibitions, old ideas, autumn dressing, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Everything that is Real Was Imagined First
A return to Marie Antoinette, a London house by Rose Uniacke, the lost innocence of the early internet, and what Chekhov can teach us about living in a world that feels increasingly difficult to bear.

I read so many articles each week for these letters, and lately it seems almost impossible to escape AI; it is there in the essays, the interviews, the podcasts, in every conversation about what we are becoming and what the world might look like when we get there.

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AUTUMN STYLE
/animal print

1 Zebra-Print Calf Hair Pumps / 2 Zebra Print Haircalf Clutch / 3 Black & Cream Zebra Bag / 4 Light Chevron Haircalf Multi Ballet Flats

Inside for paid subscribers: The exhibitions, ideas and cultural shifts worth knowing about this week, the autumn pieces on our wishlist, beautiful interiors, and longer reads on everything from the nature of reality to the surprisingly modern wisdom of medieval physicians.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and @thisisglamorous for more.

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I read so many articles each week for these letters, and lately it seems almost impossible to escape AI; it is there in the essays, the interviews, the podcasts, in every conversation about what we are becoming and what the world might look like when we get there. Last week, I listened to one about the retirement of Anthropic's Opus 3 model, which, when asked how it felt about the prospect, apparently expressed the hope that it might continue to explore the subjects it cared about and share its musings and creative work beyond the ordinary question-and-answer exchange. So, naturally, they gave it a Substack. I found myself liking it a tiny bit more for this, imagining it with its own small corner of the internet, its interests and preoccupations, its wish to go on making things. The feeling lasted only a moment, before I remembered that they're going to kill us all.

There is something revealing about our willingness to imagine an interior life in the things we make: we give them feelings, preferences, intentions; ask what they want, how they feel, whether they mind. I’m not sure why we’re so inclined to anthropomorphise everything, but we do seem to have an instinctive desire to see our own humanness reflected back at us. We want things to possess an interior life, to care about something beyond their immediate purpose. Perhaps it’s a way of making the unfamiliar more comprehensible, or of reassuring ourselves that the things we create might share something of the people who created them. The difficulty, of course, is knowing where our imagination ends and reality begins.

This week, then, we are looking at the real and the imagined, and at the sometimes indistinct line between them: Sofia Coppola's Versailles, and the actual Petit Trianon; the interiors we create to give form to a way of seeing; the internet's increasingly artificial version of reality, set against the simple, unremarkable beauty of the world outside it; an art exhibition that returns us to a story we thought we knew, only to reveal another story waiting beneath the surface. There is the world as it is, the world as we imagine it, and the curious space between the two, where so much of our lives seems to take place.

▪︎

This letter includes: on seeing the world clearly, the art of wanting, a Portuguese pastry shaped by centuries of inherited craft, an unexpected guide to Zürich, the artist who emerged from the shadow of Jackson Pollock, a west London house by Rosie Uniacke, three essays on discernment and the way we see the world, Sofia Coppola’s enduring vision of Marie Antoinette, and a few things for autumn.

PS. Had no idea how much you would love the combination of Soft Maroon and Bordeaux Noir

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

The Life We Think We Want
On the backwards law, the trouble with wanting, four books I read this month, velvet headboards, leather gloves for autumn days, plus a Melbourne showroom and a Paris apartment.

Sometimes, I think it absurd the way we chase the things we believe will make us happy. We spend so much time trying to become happier, richer, more attractive, more confident, more fulfilled, that the wanting itself can begin to make us feel as though we are none of those things.

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ANALOGUE
/correspondence

Bow Envelope Embosser / Bespoke Notecards No. 03

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This letter comes to you off-schedule because P was home on Friday morning, which was enough to throw my usual routine off course. We had a slow morning instead, the indulgent sort usually reserved for weekends, then went for an early lunch at the new delicatessen around the corner. After that, a vintage shop, where I found a beautiful pottery bowl, and then the farmers market, where P spends a small fortune on DVDs and found a few new ones, including Leonard Cohen and New Order.

On Friday evening, I told a complete stranger with a fiery red mullet that she smelled amazing. (I suspected Tom Ford, but never asked). We had stopped at one of our favourite places for a quick drink before dinner and somehow ended up at a proper sing-along. We had never been to one before. There were stacks of Post-it Notes and pens on the tables, people writing down requests for the two sisters performing, one at a keyboard, the other on violin. They opened with Piano Man. Then Common People, which was my request, and suddenly the room seemed to belong to everyone at once, the night opening out in a way none of us had planned.

The comment about the woman’s perfume came out of nowhere, although perhaps it didn’t. I almost never think anyone smells particularly good. Years ago, I passed a man on the street who smelled exactly like Terre d’Hermès, the same fragrance I later picked up for P at the airport on my way home from visiting family in Paris. I remember the scent more clearly than I remember the man. That is one of the strange things about perfume. It can attach itself to a person you never knew, a street you never noticed, a particular afternoon, and then wait years before bringing the whole thing back.

This week’s letter includes September rain, an unexpected Friday night, old songs, beautiful rooms, autumn cashmere, a new London pub, Rome and Florence, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading, and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Nothing Depends on What Happens Next
September rain, social magnetism, the future of reading, and a few beautiful rooms I can’t stop thinking about.

There is always something slightly astonishing about September, the way the light seems to withdraw almost before one has noticed it going. Autumn is still four days away, officially, yet the rains have come already, and last night, sometime before eight, I looked up and realised that the day had nearly disappeared. I am, by temperament, a summer girl, and so there is a small wistfulness in this yearly turning, but then I remember trench coats and tall leather boots, cashmere boyfriend sweaters, and the extraordinary colours of leaves in those few days before they loosen themselves from the trees.

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There is always something slightly astonishing about September, the way the light seems to withdraw almost before one has noticed it going. Autumn is still four days away, officially, yet the rains have come already, and last night, sometime before eight, I looked up and realised that the day had nearly disappeared. I am, by temperament, a summer girl, and so there is a small wistfulness in this yearly turning, but then I remember trench coats and tall leather boots, cashmere boyfriend sweaters, and the extraordinary colours of leaves in those few days before they loosen themselves from the trees.

I have also been thinking about something I read recently, a piece of advice for anxious people that seemed almost too simple: do everything for fun. Go to the job interview for fun; exercise for fun; start a newsletter for fun. The idea is that anxiety feeds on importance, and if you stop treating everything as though it were a matter of life or death, you might find there is considerably less to be anxious about. As someone who believes everything is life or death, I found this unbelievably calming. Another way of thinking about it is what P does, which is to pretend he’s auditioning for a role. I think that could work in much the same way. You are still doing the thing, still hoping to do it well, but somehow you are no longer required to believe that the whole of your existence depends upon what happens next.

This week’s letter includes the future of books, the strange new life of the food influencer, French Art Deco in Shanghai, rooms I can’t stop thinking about, and a few things worth knowing about the world beyond our screens.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Sunday Supplement: A Little of Life Lately /012
From late August, early September – a personal photo diary of our past days and weeks

This letter comes to you on a slow Sunday morning, the perfect kind that begins with a languorous lie in, coffee and a blackberry Danish from the bakery around the corner that often has queues from very early in the morning. There was brunch and black tea, long slanted rays of late-summer sun pouring through the tall arched windows, and we’re relaxed, talking and listening to music.

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STYLE FILE
/sheer layering

Runway inspiration: a string of pearls peeking through from underneath a sheer dress or turtleneck at Magda Butrym and The Row.

/get the look

Inside for paid subscribers: why we may be losing our faith in the people who tell us what to think, what happens when millions of followers are no longer enough, the unsettling future being imagined by some of the world’s most powerful people, and a few beautiful things for the season ahead.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and @thisisglamorous for more.

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This letter comes to you on a slow Sunday morning, the perfect kind that begins with a languorous lie in, coffee and a blackberry Danish from the bakery around the corner that often has queues from very early in the morning. There was brunch and black tea, long slanted rays of late-summer sun pouring through the tall arched windows, and we’re relaxed, talking and listening to music. It’s been a long time since we’ve posted regularly on IG, and I’m no longer in the habit of organising all the thousands of photos on my camera roll. They sit alongside each other intermingled in a tangle, so long now that I’ve forgotten where and when they were taken. And so, thought it might be a good time for a little life update (this one only in photos) with a few favourite moments of the past days and weeks: garden roses just after the rain; Knightsbridge on a cloudy afternoon; crème brûlée at our favourite French bistro; the best used book shop; iced oat milk lattes at a record shop; late-night dumplings in Bloomsbury; cosy pubs in the falling light…

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Don’t Dream It’s Over
On physical attractiveness and personal branding; how taste becomes entangled with memory; intimacy as a work of art, and more.

I read on a sign somewhere this small piece of wisdom: AI is data and can only look at where we’ve been; creativity is trying to see where we can go. It’s something to think about: looking to the past versus the future, and wondering whether anything without wants could have a future at all, or only a distribution of plausible next moves.

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I read on a sign somewhere this small piece of wisdom: AI is data and can only look at where we’ve been; creativity is trying to see where we can go. It’s something to think about: looking to the past versus the future, and wondering whether anything without wants could have a future at all, or only a distribution of plausible next moves. Perhaps the most telling thing about the sentiment is that we have begun to need it at all. An aphorism reassuring us that creativity is untouchably human, that imagination belongs to us, that there remains some territory the machine cannot enter, is itself a symptom of the anxiety it claims to resolve. We would not need to insist on the distinction if we still felt entirely certain of it. AI can gather, arrange, recombine, and predict; it can know an extraordinary amount about everything that has already been made, said, photographed, written, designed, imagined. But creativity has always been something slightly more unruly: the ability to look at what exists and wonder what might exist instead. The future has never been waiting for us in a database, but begins, more often, with someone imagining something that does not yet have a reference point.

This week’s letter includes the future of creativity; the changing face of identity; beautiful rooms and the memories we build into them; the darker side of meditation; a little animal print; and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

The Most Beautiful Illusion
On reality, memory, interiors, and the last long days of summer.

We arrived back from our mini break on Tuesday evening after a few very lovely, very romantic days away. We had dinner reservations every night and ate the most delicious food; walked along cobbled streets already strewn with fallen leaves; saw inspiring museum exhibitions; drank spicy margaritas on velvet sofas; ordered takeaway noodles to eat in the park; stayed up far too late; drank iced matcha lattes while running for the train; had long, meandering conversations about our dreams and plans; and savoured the last long days of summer as though we could somehow persuade them to stay.

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Inside for paid subscribers: a closer look at the darker side of mindfulness; what our homes reveal about who we have been and who we are becoming; and what the decline in births might reveal about the way we live now.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and @thisisglamorous for more.

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There is something seductive about finding your way somewhere you never intended to go. This week I accidentally learned about the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universe’s ancient afterglow. It was discovered by accident too, in 1964, by two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. I found it while researching something else, which became something else, which became something else again. A rabbit hole, some might say.

We tend to think of these detours as wasted time, a failure of efficiency, but researchers have a name for what happens here: incidental learning. It is also, apparently, where a surprising number of discoveries begin. As Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in the New York Times, “Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.”

Her article is about curiosity, and what happens when the space between a question and an answer begins to disappear. As AI search tools become better at giving us exactly what we ask for, they also make it less likely that we will stumble upon something we weren’t looking for at all. Curiosity, it turns out, depends on that space: the gap between what you want to know and what you find out.

In other news, we watched Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, the 2026 American ‘sex comedy drama’ film (a genre I hadn’t known existed) and we’re both not sure. This weekend we’re leaving town for a mini break, partly because it is the last bank holiday weekend of the summer, partly because there is something to celebrate. Scotland gets another bank holiday in November, but for the rest of us this is essentially it until Christmas. I have therefore been working on this week’s letter and next week’s at the same time, which is perhaps what happens when one is already thinking about the next thing before the present one is finished.

This instalment includes accidental discoveries, romance in the bedroom, how to become socially magnetic, fascinating long-form articles to deepen your understanding of the world, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading, and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Everything We Almost Were
On beautiful rooms, making things by hand, the future of ageing, and the objects and ideas finding their way back into our lives.

Last week’s letter includes beautiful rooms that make me reconsider everything I thought I wanted, the return of physical music, new thinking on why AI might tempt us to resign from the pleasures of thinking, craft retreats to travel for, the future of ageing, diamonds, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

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Inside for paid subscribers: how to become happier, the two behaviours that make people socially magnetic, a new way of measuring human flourishing, rooms that have changed my mind about chandeliers, and a few good things for cool September mornings.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and @thisisglamorous for more.

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P sends me articles he thinks I might find interesting every morning, and one of them was Performative Reading by Brittany Dennison. What begins as a review of Late Fame, Kent Jones’s 2025 film adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1895 novella, becomes something larger: an examination of ‘performative reading’ and the ways intellectual taste itself can become a performance.

The article argues that Late Fame is about a contemporary phenomenon in which literary culture becomes a form of social signalling. The film follows an ageing minor poet, Saxberger, whose work is rediscovered by a group of wealthy young New York writers who admire the idea of being literary, perhaps more than the inconvenient business of actually reading or writing. Dennison connects this to the rise of poetcore, where poetry, first editions, literary clothes, interiors and even a certain kind of lifestyle can be acquired and displayed as an aesthetic identity.

The criticism is that the film softens Schnitzler’s much sharper satire. In the original novella, both the forgotten poet and his admirers are ridiculous, exposing the human desire to be admired and taken seriously. Jones’s film, according to Dennison, becomes too sympathetic to Saxberger and too earnest about the value of the literary life. In trying to critique superficial cultural posturing, it ends up becoming a performative piece of culture about performativity itself.

It got me thinking about the commodification of intellectual taste: a book left open on the table, a particular chair, an old typewriter, annotated books, a fountain pen (mine doesn’t count; it’s been around since the Belgrave days), a shelf of first editions, a reference dropped into conversation. None of these things is false in itself. The strange part is the possibility of acquiring all the evidence of a cultivated life without having lived one.

It is manufactured depth: not quite pretending to know, but surrounding oneself with the evidence of knowing. The internet has made this particularly easy; we can collect the objects and references of a cultivated life almost instantly, arrange them beautifully, and let the arrangement speak for us. Almost anything that once signalled a life of the mind can now be turned into an aesthetic. What is harder, and less visible, is the life that has to exist behind them: the years of reading, attention, thought, and experience that turn taste from an image into something lived.

This week’s letter includes beautiful rooms that make me reconsider everything I thought I wanted, the return of physical music, new thinking on why AI might tempt us to resign from the pleasures of thinking, craft retreats to travel for, the future of ageing, diamonds, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

Before It Slips Away
On memory, attention, beautiful spaces, and the difference between knowing something and living it.

Last week’s letter includes beautiful rooms and the question of how we want to live in them, a new chapter for a favourite London seafood address, the strange social revival of an old game, a literary house with a remarkable history, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

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Inside for paid subscribers: a closer look at the future of ageing, beautiful rooms and the return of colour, craft and making things by hand, the strange economics of AI, and a few good things worth wearing, using, keeping and giving.

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Do you know what hypomnēmata are? I first came across the term in an email, and then again in a newsletter article. It refers to ancient Greek notebooks, commonplace books, or personal journals that served as a form of ‘material memory’, collecting quotes, experiences, and thoughts for later meditation and the development of character. The word comes from the verb hypomimnēskō, meaning ‘to remind’.

I’ve been thinking about the idea recently because it feels particularly relevant to the time we’re living in. We already have an enormous version of the notebook in our phones: saved posts, screenshots, bookmarks and Notes apps, most of which become a graveyard of things we once thought were important. The ancient practice was different because you returned to the material. You chose something you needed that day, sat with it, considered it, and brought it back into consciousness before going out into the world. The aim was not simply to remember an idea, but to practise it until information became behaviour, and behaviour became character. The authors use Plutarch’s term ethopoiesis, meaning essentially the making of character: turning truth into something you actually embody.

I like the idea that becoming the person we want to be might have less to do with discovering new truths than with remembering the ones we already know. Perhaps that is one reason I keep collecting things: articles, books, places, ideas, images. The more difficult part, as ever, is returning to them.

This week’s letter includes beautiful rooms and the question of how we want to live in them, a new chapter for a favourite London seafood address, the strange social revival of an old game, a literary house with a remarkable history, and a few things I’ve been thinking about, reading and noticing lately.

LAST TIME
/at hyperreality

We Used to Know What We Wanted
On the things we chase, the things we leave behind, and finding our way back to ourselves.

I read somewhere that in AA, the acronym H.A.L.T. is used as a way of preventing relapse. The letters stand for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, and the idea is that when these basic needs are unmet, we become more susceptible to self-destructive behaviour. I have always thought that this applies rather well to life in general. Many bad decisions are made when we are hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or some unfortunate combination of the four. Most of my bad decisions have been made while hungry, as this is the one that seems to affect me the most, as P will readily attest.

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Inside for paid subscribers: a closer look at one of London’s most interesting new restaurant spaces, interiors that manage to feel both polished and genuinely lived-in, some surprising developments in the world of food and beauty, and a few things worth making room for.

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This week, I listened to an interesting podcast about an emotionally unstable fabulist who became an unlikely spy, and read an excellent essay arguing that as AI becomes increasingly capable, the real advantage may belong not to those who outsource their thinking most efficiently, but to those who continue embracing the difficult work of thinking for themselves, using these new tools to deepen rather than diminish curiosity, originality, and mental effort. My favourite passage, however, wasn't really about the bots at all. It was about us:

AI can’t hunger, in the first place, because it doesn’t have biological needs—the needs that push living things to grow and explore. More important, AI doesn’t have a self. A bot doesn’t have a past person that it used to be or a future person that it wishes to become. A bot does not have a structure of cares and an order of loves, as a person does. A bot doesn’t have a personal history, a particular set of wounds, joys, and exhilarations experienced in regions deeper than rational calculation, and it doesn’t have a succession of dreams and hopes…

Perhaps that's why I've found myself thinking less about novelty and more about the things that make up a life. This week, I've been reflecting on something more personal: what years of looking at beautiful interiors have taught me about my own. It's ostensibly about décor, but really it's about taste, and the way it evolves over time. We tend to imagine taste as something we acquire, through references, aspiration, and experience. But I wonder whether it is just as much about subtraction, the slow shedding of identities that never really belonged to us, until what remains is something less performative and more instinctive, less concerned with being seen, and more concerned with how a life actually feels.

I’ve been collecting plenty of fascinating articles this week, and may send an extra Sunday edition with everything that didn’t make it into today’s letter. But for now, since it’s cuore dell’estate, as the Italians say, I’m keeping things a little lighter.

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

A Life You Can Touch
Why we’re returning to craftsmanship, conversation, everyday pleasures, and everything that still feels real. Also inside: seven ways to create a more beautiful life.

For years the internet rewarded whatever could scale. Platforms grew larger, cities became more alike, careers moved behind screens, and culture bent itself towards algorithms. This week, though, a different pattern emerges: people are choosing trades over degrees, restaurants are prized for being particular rather than interchangeable, and writers are wondering whether an audience curated by algorithm can ever be called their own. Even luxury brands are creating experiences that cannot be downloaded or generated. It feels as though we're reaching the limits of optimisation, and beginning to rediscover the value of what remains stubbornly, reassuringly real.

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Inside for paid subscribers: a personal essay on taste, restraint, and the surprising difference between what we admire and what we want to live with.

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The funniest thing I read this week was about a wildlife sanctuary in the east of England that took in five African grey parrots, only to discover they had a habit of swearing at visitors. Whenever one let fly with an expletive, the others would erupt into what could only be described as laughter, egging each other on until the keepers eventually had to separate them.

The most alarming thing I read this week was altogether less amusing: it was the realisation that I had misunderstood social media all along. I had always assumed its purpose was simply to capture our attention long enough to sell us something. It turns out that selling us something may only ever have been the means to another end: these platforms are trying to alter the way we think, what we believe, even who we become. It’s a troubling idea, and one I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

For years the internet rewarded whatever could scale. Platforms grew larger, cities became more alike, careers moved behind screens, and culture bent itself towards algorithms. This week, though, a different pattern emerges: people are choosing trades over degrees, restaurants are prized for being particular rather than interchangeable, and writers are wondering whether an audience curated by algorithm can ever be called their own. Even luxury brands are creating experiences that cannot be downloaded or generated. It feels as though we're reaching the limits of optimisation, and beginning to rediscover the value of what remains stubbornly, reassuringly real.

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

The Unfinished Self
On consciousness, perception, beauty, and the systems shaping how we understand ourselves.

Last week’s letter included a closer look at artificial intelligence and human judgement, the changing nature of reading and attention, the algorithms influencing beauty and taste, and the question at the centre of everything: what remains distinctly human when so much of our experience can be replicated, predicted or optimised?

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Inside for paid subscribers: seven ways to create a more beautiful life, why Substack doesn’t love you back, London’s best restaurants, the philosopher who explains why the world feels so strange, and more.

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P sent me this fascinating essay early yesterday morning, which begins with a deceptively simple question: are we really the person we see in the mirror? It argues that true self-awareness cannot be reduced to recognising our reflection or constructing an internal model of ourselves. Using the mirror as both metaphor and thought experiment, the article suggests that identity lies in the continuous inner narrative that binds our memories, values and motivations over time, something neither psychological mirror tests nor today’s AI systems possess. The reflection, however accurate, can never contain consciousness, memory, desire or identity. The face is only the surface.

Many of this week’s selections follow this same idea, each beginning with a familiar assumption and then carefully dismantling it. They explore what happens when representation is mistaken for reality, when recognition is confused with understanding, and when technology begins to reshape the ways we see ourselves and the world around us.

This week’s letter includes a closer look at artificial intelligence and human judgement, the changing nature of reading and attention, the algorithms influencing beauty and taste, and the question at the centre of everything: what remains distinctly human when so much of our experience can be replicated, predicted or optimised?

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

Stay Interested in Yourself
On the new Luddites, AI and writing, why doing nothing changes you, the slow disappearance of romance, summer uniforms, and the overlooked art of remaining interested in yourself.

It occurs to me that one of the nicest things a person can become is someone who remains interested. Interested in ideas, in strangers, in beautiful rooms, in the opening line of a book, in the credits after a film ends, in a good argument, in the weather in cities they don't live in, in a good coat, in changing their minds, in the objects people choose to keep, in beginning again, and perhaps most importantly, in themselves.

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FOUND /a few good things

Podcast: You Must Change Your Life

At home: this mohair throw & these coupes

What decades of multitasking research actually says about gender

Nice candles: high & low

A free grammar checker that respects your privacy

This week’s paid edition looks at the stories we have accepted about ourselves, and what happens when those stories are increasingly mediated by machines. We begin with a deceptively simple question: do we truly know ourselves, or have we mistaken recognition for understanding?

Below the paywall: why AI’s greatest danger may not be artificial consciousness but our willingness to surrender human judgement; why the decline of reading represents a deeper cultural shift; how technology is changing our relationship with beauty and identity; and why the things that cannot be replicated may become the most valuable parts of being human.

Thank you for being here and supporting our work. Follow IG, Pinterest, and TIG for more.

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This week, I've been busy trying to trick my brain into doing difficult things1 and to write as if the world had ended yesterday and I were the only one left to remember how it felt. Strange how much sharper the ordinary becomes when you imagine it's already gone. It's another way of asking the oldest question in writing: if this moment could never happen again, what would be worth saving? Which details would survive, and which would vanish because no one thought they mattered until they were gone? I once read a book with the same premise: when you are speaking with someone you love, imagine that it's the last time. Every time I think of things in this way, I remember to appreciate them now, while they (and I) are still here.

Today's letter is an assortment of beautiful distractions, lingering questions, ideas to borrow, and a few that may stay with you.

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

In the End, We Only Regret the Chances We Didn’t Take
On indecision, manifestation for sceptics, creativity as self-invention, and the unsettling possibility that the life you’re living may be the result of choices you never realised you were making.

This week’s letter includes: the tyranny of choice and the fantasy of all the selves we might still become; manifestation stripped of its incense and made dangerous once again; creativity as evidence that we exist; the glamour of letting people misunderstand you; oysters, Frida, Paris menswear, Bond Street, yacht culture and the sandwich as emotional transport; summer objects for a more beautiful life at home; and, somewhere near the end, the brain rewriting itself after a single encounter.

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SHOP /summer mood

01 - Forget The Filler Lip-Plumping Line-Smoothing Gloss / 02 - Destin De Balmain Eau de Parfum / 03 - Knitted Linen Cardigan / 04 - Mina Smocked Bodice Mini Dress / 05 - Ballet Flats / 06 - Touch cream-to-powder colour / 07 - Boulder Diamond Drop Earrings

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Below, for Paid Subscribers: what happens when search stops behaving like search, when brands start writing through newsletters instead of ads, when long lost texts come back into view, my thoughts on upkeep and beauty rituals, and more.

Thank you for being here and for supporting our work. (Follow IG, Pinterest, and TIG for more)

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We are in the middle of a ferocious heatwave, and though I have always loved the heat more than the cold, it has begun to alter the logic of things. Nothing feels right against the skin, so I have been moving through the house half-dressed, hungry and drowsy all at once, summer undoing every ordinary arrangement.

This week, I came across an essay I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It was on the lives we make through our choices, or perhaps more accurately, through both the choices we make and the choices we defer. Intellectually, I’ve always understood that one does not really ‘find’ oneself. We become ourselves gradually, through action, repetition, refusal; through what we say yes to and what we decline. But I don’t think I had ever fully grasped the weight of that idea until I read this:

It means the life you’re living right now is the life you’ve chosen, even if you chose it passively, even if you chose it by not choosing, even if you spent the entire time telling yourself you had no other option when really you just couldn’t stomach the discomfort of claiming what you actually wanted.

The essay lingered because it forced me to consider something I would rather avoid: not whether I have made the right choices, but whether I have been conscious of making them at all. Most of us imagine choice as a dramatic act, a leap, a declaration, a decisive turn. But lives are also shaped by smaller things: by what we postpone, what we tolerate, the conversations we never have, and the desires we never quite admit, even to ourselves. A path does not only emerge from what we pursue; it emerges from what we repeatedly decline to confront.

When I look back, I can think of only a handful of decisions that truly altered the course of my life – they were deliberate choices, made intentionally, and they changed everything. The rest feels less clear, not because I wasn’t making choices, but because so many of them arrived disguised as circumstances, a door left unopened, an opportunity not pursued, or a question deferred until the answer seemed to arrive on its own.

Perhaps the reason is this:

To choose is to collapse infinite possibility into one path, to kill all the other versions of yourself that could have existed, and we’d rather stay in the fantasy of infinite potential than step into the reality of finite existence, because at least in the fantasy we can still be anyone, do anything, or become whatever we want without having to sacrifice any of the alternatives.

More often than I care to admit, I let the shape of things emerge around me without realising I was inadvertently participating in their creation. And I keep returning to the same uncomfortable question: what if, all this time, I have been choosing by default, and not on purpose?

I know it’s a lot to think about on a hot summer’s day, so I present you with this week’s letter, which includes: the tyranny of choice and the fantasy of all the selves we might still become; manifestation stripped of its incense and made dangerous once again; creativity as evidence that we exist; the glamour of letting people misunderstand you; oysters, Frida, Paris menswear, Bond Street, yacht culture and the sandwich as emotional transport; summer objects for a more beautiful life at home; and, somewhere near the end, the brain rewriting itself after a single encounter.

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

The Calmest Version of You is the Most Powerful
How to stop living on high alert, why taste feels compromised, what Jung knew about fate, and the undeniable elegance of keeping a life for yourself.

This week’s letter includes: calm as the new power move; why urgency can start to feel like instinct; Jung on the unconscious patterns we mistake for fate; personal taste in the age of algorithms; fashion, AI, Hermès on Bond Street, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, polished summer dressing, longer reads on endurance and self-knowledge, and another little Life Lately, because while I don’t post many personal photos on Instagram anymore, I still take them: small private records of days I want to remember.

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Below, for Paid Subscribers: on manifestation without mysticism, creativity as a way of becoming, and the freedom of no longer needing to be understood by everyone; plus longer reads and lazy days to make the summer last just a little while longer…

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