We know, we know: We live in the era of “eat the rich.” Conspicuous consumption is supposed to turn our collectively enlightened stomachs.
But who does the Financial Times think it is fooling by rebranding How to Spend It? That’s the tasty glossy magazine that comes tucked inside the weekend edition of the pink-paged British broadsheet. It is the most trusted Baedeker of bankers, oligarchs, and what Evelyn Waugh called “the sound old snobbery of pound sterling and strawberry leaves.” After Muammar Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound was stormed by Libyan rebels, one journalist reported finding a “well-thumbed” copy of How to Spend It on the dictator’s coffee table. Last weekend’s issue featured an actual statue of Bacchus once owned by Hubert de Givenchy and currently priced at over €1 million. In terms of opulence, How to Spend It makes the New York Times’ T Magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ. — and even Luxx, which is put out by the Times of London — seem if not populist then at least relatively approachable. How to Spend It once claimed that one in five of its readers has, or would consider using, a private jet. Maybe consider is the key word here. Part of the fun of the magazine is to imagine yourself having to weigh the pros and cons of private jettery. (And I know exactly where in my apartment I would put that Bacchus.)
While visiting a friend of a friend in Key West many winters ago, I was smitten by the bookshelves in his living room. The built-in shelves wrapped around a window and ran to the ceiling, obviously the work of an expert craftsman. But from across the room it was the books themselves that dazzled my eye—their spines, meticulously arranged by size and color, made the wall look like a gigantic pointillist painting. When I complimented my host on his bookshelves and asked what he liked to read, he looked at me as if I was one very dim bulb. “I bought those books by the yard,” he said. “Then I arranged them in a way that’s pleasing to my eye. I haven’t actually read them.”
In 1920, 12 women held pilot’s licenses in the United States. Ten years later, that number had risen to more than 300. As female aviators took to the skies, performing daredevil stunts and smashing speed records, journalist Harry Goldberg heralded the start of a “feminine invasion” in aviation. “A new world of endeavor beckons to womankind,” he wrote in an article syndicated in various newspapers on August 21, 1927. But when Edith Eva Keating answered its call, she wasn’t piloting a plane; she was steering a camera.
From the start, it is clear this is not only a novel of natural disaster, destruction, and dystopia, but also one that shows desire does not end just because the world does.
Set in a too plausible future in which American control of Canada is even more explicit and far reaching than it is today and a patriarchal counter revolution reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is rapidly gaining ground, Autonomy is an implausible love story. The romance links Slaton, a Canadian student counsellor who works for the deliciously named Department of Brand Management at the fictional D’Aillaire University, with Julian, a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence who has been developed to conduct interrogations for the government.
David Gergen worked for four American presidents — Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — and he witnessed their struggles with leadership up close. In his remarkable new book, “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made,” he rejects universal models for leadership. His heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and include John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.