Here’s Elton John on his day off, in a sleek, modern house by the water somewhere in Vancouver, sitting at a kitchen-adjacent table with a book of crossword puzzles, dressed like — well, like Elton John on his day off. Iridescent black Gucci tracksuit, white moon-boot sneakers adorned with crystal-studded belts that gently jingle-jangle as he moves. They turn out to be Gucci FlashTreks that retail for $1,590. The belts are removable, should you wish to entirely defeat the purpose of paying $1,590 for gemstone-accented sneakers.
John, 72, has been living here with his family while playing a run of shows around Canada. Tonight he and husband David Furnish, 56, and their two sons will fly home to Los Angeles. Right now Furnish has taken the kids to Dairy Queen and the house is tranquil. Outside the afternoon sun glints off the rain puddles on the patio and the wings of distant seaplanes descending silently into Departure Bay. Soon a chef named Gaultier will bring around coffees white with foam and sugar-free cookies that look like tiny cakes of birdseed — the finest birdseed, the kind you’d feed an ungainly beautiful bird that might be the last of its kind on the planet.
“I like to move forward,” Elton is saying. “I’m not nostalgic. I don’t dwell. I’m not interested.”
That doesn’t mean dinner parties have become obsolete in 2019: They’ve just evolved. Millennials prioritize friendships, so they still value gathering with their friends and loved ones over food and drinks, but they’ve changed the playbook to adapt to our post-recession economy. That means formal dinners served on china with a roast and martinis have been replaced by having friends over to your apartment for chili night and White Claws. The cornbread might get a little burnt, some people might have to sit on the floor, but the important thing is getting together with friends and enjoying each other’s company — not stressing out about tablescapes and etiquette.
“I think the millennial dinner party now equates to casual but well thought out: good group of like-minded friends; easy-going cooking; BYO approach; on-point music on the record player in the background,” says Alisha Miranda, a 33-year-old writer in Philadelphia. “Most importantly, it’s about low-key chill vibes.”
The tradition evolved from the 1930s Oslo Breakfast, a government program that provided a free meal of bread, cheese, milk, half an apple and half an orange to school children at a time when Norway was a poor country. “It’s become a symbol of frugality and egality, but for those who are not big fans, it’s a terrible thing,” says Viestad. “It has many good things to be said about it, but there’s also this element of something a little bit gray and boring.”
“It can be very plain,” confirms food writer Nevada Berg, an American who has traveled to and lived in Norway for the past 15 years (and married a Norwegian). “For outsiders, it can look kind of sad — in the States we’re kind of used to a sandwich that is full. Here it’s the bread, and one little thing. It’s very simple, nothing extravagant at all.”
Kathy and I were getting serious. We’d talked about everything — we wanted to get married. We wanted children. But we hadn’t yet had “The Talk.” I was nervous, but I knew it was time to come clean.
I had to tell Kathy that I was … a fainter.
I’ve passed out enough times in my life that I don’t have an exact count. A few experiences stand out. When I was 10, my family went to Disney World. At Epcot Center, we saw the movie The Making of Me, which I now know was my parents’ way of teaching my brother and sister and me about the birds and the bees.
There’s much to love about Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, but its most famous section is that about his cat, Jeoffrey. Smart calls him “a mixture of gravity and waggery,” which may be the most apt description of cats ever written.
But that’s hardly all Smart has to say about Jeoffrey: Jubilate Agno’s Jeoffrey section goes on for a total of 77 lines, some quite long (e.g., “For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.”) and each beginning with “For…” Written between 1759 and 1763 when Smart was quarantined in London’s St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, Jubilate Agno—Latin for “rejoice in the lamb”—is marked by religious fervor, often-bewildering word emphasis, and frequent changes in direction. There’s a touch of madness to the overall poem, and Smart’s praise for his cat is no exception. Here are its last few lines: