November 2025
Happy month-before-Xmas! This latest in an occasional series of newsletters has one aim and one aim only: to take you, if only for a few minutes, to a happy place. Come on, let's deny reality, just for a moment.
First, I wanted to celebrate you - my uninterested, forgetful, unenthusiastic subscribers! Are you one of the 50 most stylish people alive? I think chances are high. Except for you. You know who you are.
Second - romance! Here is this month’s obligatory mention of Dolly, talking about love and marriage. And here are some Orcas with some heartfelt PDAs. Get a room!
It’s not easy to write memoir - to be funny and interesting and have a style that gently pulls a reader through a story. But I know such a man. And who can resist a remembrance with the line “Grandma was always generous with everything—whether it technically belonged to her or not.”?
Social media has made us all photographers. There are some incredibly talented amateurs posting photos online. But we amateurs should always look to the pros for ideas. Try here for some 1960s Americana on the boardwalk. If anyone was to ask me how to take good photos (imagine!), I’d say to take hundreds, even thousands of photos. At least a handful will come out great. It’s good to have a professional back me up.
You want weirdness? You want traffic signs? You want things that don’t exist? You want this guaranteed sheep-free tale from Wales.
The internet has found something else to hate. Performative reading. Who hasn’t read Plato’s Republic on the bus to show how clever they are at 14? That’s just a stage we’ve all gone through, right?
Music! Look, we’ve all been wrong about something - something we thought was a terrible idea but turned out to be genius. Take cover versions, for example. I used to believe that certain songs should never be covered. Some songs belonged to an artist and should be left alone by everyone else. This theory fell apart when I heard this version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” It’s hard to imagine anyone coming anywhere near Queen’s version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” And oh my gods, people have tried. But if you have enough people all working in harmony, maybe anything is possible.
As the broad point of this newsletter is “happiness,” I can tell you what the experts say. The Daily Habits of Happiness Experts. And what they’re teaching at Harvard these days about happiness. I bet they need this…but let me stop there.
If all else fails, we still have this…
