Lauren Crichton

Some years ago I was given a life-changing nugget of travel advice: if you visit the same café, bar, or restaurant, at the same time of day, for three days in a row, you are (more often than not) magically transmuted from tourist to temporary local.

And, amazingly, the trick works at every scale. In the aftermath of Covid, I took coffee and... See more

This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long time to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people about important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing for the young. But it took me years to understand that the latter was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really figured it out as I... See more

If I was a bird, what bird would I be? Am I a cottage with a wraparound porch or a mansion? What about colour: blue, pink, lemon? Would I be a pearl earring or a hoop? A pine tree or an oak? A lake or the Mediterranean Sea?

In this slog of a late-capitalist world, too much tedious work has cut off people from their passions. What can we be interested in, or curious about, when we are exhausted? Mothers bear a double burden here. How to dream when you don’t get enough sleep? It’s nearly impossible but it’s not impossible. You are still there, under the rubble, maybe,... See more

Because what’s demonstrated here is that tasteis actually a function of all kinds of contextual information, including information wholly extrinsic to the thing itself. (This is why wack people can ruin something you love.) There is no purely inherent value that exists in a vacuum, separate from cultural information. Context is always... See more