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Finally, I could see the path. I didn’t need Google Maps for that. The smartphone went, physically dismantled. Rest in pieces. Free of this pocket-size millstone, I learned never to leave home without three books—one to read, one to write in and one filled with maps of London, where I live.

Craving dopamine and distraction, I was at my local climbing gym more than ever. Then, when summer came, my brother took me out on the Isle of Skye. We scrambled to the top of Sgùrr nan Gillean, perhaps the most famous of the peaks making up the Black Cuillin. From the top, we saw the whole ridge stretching out ahead of us, 12 summits strung together under a stonewashed sky.

For years I had been diving deeper into the dark hallucination of my digital life, feeling my trust eroded, in the news, the truth, the very evidence before my eyes. It was invigorating, suddenly, to take hold of something real. There is nothing more real than rock. Not when you trust your weight to it, maybe your life.

I’m hardly the first person to flee the shallows of modern life by running for the hills. “I am losing the precious days,” said John Muir, the pioneering American environmentalist and mountaineer, in 1883. “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

The Incredible Lightness of Being Without a Smartphone

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Irony is a medicine, not only to lift and brighten others, but also ourselves, because self-mockery is a powerful instrument in overcoming the temptation toward narcissism. Narcissists are continually looking into the mirror, painting themselves, gazing at themselves, but the best advice in front of a mirror is to laugh at ourselves. It is good for us. It will prove the truth of that old proverb that says that there are only two kinds of perfect people: the dead, and those yet to be born.

Pope Francis

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His writing rests upon a quiet self-confidence. As a young man, he came up from the South to graduate school at Yale and found that all those Northeastern preppies looked down on Southerners. He could have tried to conform to his new milieu, but he became even more his idiosyncratic Southern self. Then he came to New York, and there, too, he could have lost himself in all the glamour, in the if-you-can-make-it-here-you-can-make-it-anywhere ambition. He sipped from the cup of that ambition, but mostly he stationed himself where writers are supposed to station themselves, off to the side, observing, never quite belonging. It’s lonely there, but it allowed him a peek at what was emerging: The new coastal elites had made themselves insufferable to working-class Americans, and sooner or later there would be hell to pay.

The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop

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By staying in Duluth rather than defecting to New York or Seattle (or even Minneapolis), Parker and Sparhawk were able to keep their overhead low. They worked odd jobs when they had to but lived as full-time musicians as much as they could, which meant long stretches on the road to cultivate the following they were gaining in Europe and the U.S.

“The fact that we were married helped,” Sparhawk said. “I think it gave a certain license for creative intimacy and trust, though it also made us each other’s harshest critics and harshest editors.” Nobody knew that better than Zak Sally, who replaced Nichols in 1994 and went on to become Low’s longest-serving bassist. “We hit it very, very, very hard,” Sally said. “This is a band that makes music, this is also a marriage, this is also a matter of faith. This is also family, this is also friends, and it’s also a job, and some of those lines just cross over each other.”

The Heart of Low

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On “Hope,” Koenig returns to the idea of submission. “My enemy’s invincible / I’ve had to let it go,” he sings. You can nearly hear the shrug. Control is a fiction. Justice might be, too. Or, as Koenig puts it, “The signatories broke the pact / The surfer sacked the quarterback / Your bag fell down onto the tracks / I hope you let it go.”

Amanda Petrusich

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Now that I’m an octogenarian, Grant’s observations make even more sense to me. In retrospect, I believe he was warning me that youth and beauty fade, and once the glory days are over, an older, wiser man should strive for elegance and dignity. There are no prizes for appearing sloppy or ill-kempt. 

How we men dress isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it’s not inconsequential either. When meeting friends for dinner, I choose an outfit that I hope will be flattering. I do so as much for my friends as for myself. I know they will be flattered that I have chosen to shine a little brighter just for them. We don’t dress solely for ourselves. We also do it to broadcast, without speaking, “I am here to be with you.” 

Charles Hix

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I believe that the components of style emanate from within: intelligence, character, personality. Clothes do matter, but they cannot give you style.

It is a feeling more than anything else. Your dress should be in sync with you, with how you feel that day. The key to style is finding that equilibrium between the way you are feeling that day and the way you dress. You are constantly expressing yourself.

What I am trying to say is that more important than how many centimeters of shirt cuff you are showing is that you be in sync with the way you dress.

We are almost like characters in a film, we are moving, living characters, we are playing ourselves.

Yukio Akamine

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A Farmer’s Shadow

As a livestock farmer, I am reminded of death fairly regularly. Often my customers will ask me if I get sad taking a load of hogs to the abattoir or processing chickens. The truth is, no, I don’t. I am grateful and appreciative, but not sad. Daily I’m surrounded by magnitudes of life. I see babies born and flowers bloom, and at night the frogs can be so loud they keep me up. I also see death, and not only is it a part of life, it provides life. To be a livestock animal on my farm means you get a lot of great days and one bad one. We should all be so lucky. But when you work with dogs, you get into a rhythm, even with the lying-around types. It’s a beautiful thing. And when you lose a dog, that rhythm changes in a way that is profoundly heartbreaking.

Brandon Chonko

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Q. Since you retired from being The New Yorker cartoon editor, do you feel the selection standards have been lowered?

A. What I’ll say is that the standards have definitely changed. When I was the cartoon editor, my only criteria was the quality of the cartoon.  That is now qualified by the desire for diversity. Diversity is a great goal, but from the perspective of someone who had two thousand cartoons rejected by The New Yorker, you don’t do any cartoonist a favor by prematurely publishing them before they have learned their craft.

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Q. Has cancel culture changed your sense of what is funny and what is acceptable?

A. It hasn’t changed what I think is funny, but it has changed what is acceptable from the standpoint of getting your cartoon selected for publication in any major media outlet that features cartoons.  For most of these magazines, digital and otherwise, their audience overwhelmingly leans left. The cartoons need to support that stance or, at least, not contradict it. Good cartoons can be done within these guardrails. Better cartoons would be done without them.

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Pierre Cardin Wanted to Dress the Whole World

Why did you think of launching men’s fashion at that time?

I was 25 years old and I wanted to be very elegant. People told me how I had my own way of dressing and that I was elegant. That’s the sort of fashion I wanted to create, and it worked very well.

How has fashion design changed since then?

Before, those of us who worked in fashion received education. We worked for old houses, apprenticed. Now, anyone who can draw or can’t draw is backed by money, is given a name. It’s so superficial.

Is it important to be always well-dressed?

I can define someone by the way he is dressed—if he is an intellectual, an artist, ordinary, refined. If he has good or bad taste. If he likes to provoke with colors. If he is discreet. We can define everything with clothing. That’s what amazing.

GQ

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SOS Children's Village In Djibouti

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In it, he explained why he bought the paper. “Simply put,” he wrote, “the horrible thought of this venerable institution folding up and vanishing after 166 years of continuous operation was simply more than I could bear.”

The newspaper, he wrote, was “something we need in order to know ourselves.”

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Meet the Unlikely Hero Saving California’s Oldest Weekly Paper

Newspapers across America, especially in rural areas like here in Sierra County, have been dying at an alarming rate, and Downieville was about to become the latest “news desert.” The obituaries for the paper had already been written. Don Russell, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking editor with a blunt writing style who had owned and run the paper for nearly three decades, was retiring, and he seemed happy enough for the paper to die with his retirement.

And then one night Mr. Butz was watching “Citizen Kane” on cable and thought, I can do that. He made the deal quickly, paying a price in the “four figures,” he said, plus the assumption of some debts, without even looking at the books.

Still, Mr. Russell, an old friend of Mr. Butz’s, was a reluctant seller. “His position was, it’s a losing proposition and someone who’d want it would be crazy,” Mr. Butz said. “He called me a romantic idealist and a nut case. And that’s not a paraphrase, but a direct quote.”

The New York Times

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Can drinks, community events and the occasional wedding subsidize small-town journalism?

Since Ms. Crow and Mr. Kabat took over, they have expanded the newspaper’s digital platform, which has seen a 7 percent increase in traffic, Mr. Kabat said, and broadened its photographic coverage. At the newspaper’s sister publication, The International, which the couple also owns and which serves the largely Spanish-speaking neighboring border town of Presidio, every article is now translated into Spanish. They added a crossword puzzle and Sudoku to both papers, too.

The newspapers still sell ads, which account for the majority of revenue. But with additional income from private events and day-to-day drink sales, the publishers have been able to keep yearly subscription costs steady: $50 for area residents and $60 for anyone outside.

“If people come in and buy a coffee and buy something from our shop, rent the space, buy a cocktail, whatever it is, their dollar isn’t just going to that,” Ms. Crow said. “Their dollar is going to support something larger.”

The New York Times

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RALPH LAUREN’S AMERICAN DREAMS

When talking about his ideal woman, for example, Lauren turns to his long-time wife, the slim, flaxen-haired Ricky, who, in the words of the couple’s daughter, Dylan, is somehow simultaneously “a sort of tomboy jock and elegant woman.” Explaining the aesthetic that Ralph Lauren prefers for her and her mother, Dylan, a grown woman of forty-five, says, with a slight laugh, “My dad doesn’t like any makeup on me or on her.” A highly orchestrated artlessness is a key part of the Polo brand. “I love long hair,” Lauren explains in an old clip. “Hair blowing in the wind, a convertible. That’s what my vision is.” The Ralph Lauren woman is meant to suggest, by dint of her locks alone, the pleasures of a classic sports car. (As I was watching, I imagined that with my own longish but frizzy brown hair, I was likelier to convey, at best, a minivan.)

The New Yorker