Locals are sick of tourists and influencers crowding their favorite restaurants—and are turning to ingenious means to lead them astray

By Flora Gill

Spontaneity in London is dead. Especially if you want to eat well.

Reservations a month out and curling lines so dense they make even an Englishman gasp have become the standard. This is largely thanks to the Internet, whose recommendations—by newspapers, blogs, TikTokers, you name it—have gotten so ubiquitous that no gem can stay hidden for long.

So how do you secure a spot at that up-and-coming restaurant you’ve been dying to try but can never get a booking for? You could pretend to be Jacob Elordi’s assistant, but most places will see right through that. You could try to READ ON

The fashion designer—and great-granddaughter of Sigmund—analyzes Kate Moss, Zadie Smith, and Kristin Scott Thomas on her new podcast

By Mark Smith

It feels like a collective fashion world hallucination ­— or some kind of haute data leak. Over mellow, undulating piano riffs and the sound of a ticking clock (or is it a metronome?) the west London therapist buzzes in her next client through the intercom and she lies face up and on a pristine white couch, unmistakable in a black Saint Laurent dress and Westwood heels.

Within five minutes the most famously tight-lipped woman in fashion — Kate Moss, whose mantra is supposedly “never complain, never explain” — is unburdening herself, talking earnestly about the discomfort that accompanied her breakthrough appearance on the cover of READ ON

The charter-school entrepreneur went from being one of the most acclaimed operators in the education sphere to losing everything. Will he be able to make a comeback?

By William D. Cohan

When I spoke with the entrepreneur Chris Whittle for the first time, this September, he was calling from his modest but tasteful saltbox home in Sharon, Connecticut, constructed in 1740. “It always amazes me that it was built before the revolution,” he tells me. “I really love it here.”

Whittle, now 77 years old, is often described as one of the great salesmen of his generation, so I’m not particularly surprised by his ability to make the best of a bad situation. He retreated to the $1.2 million house in 2023 to lick his wounds during the pandemic after losing nearly everything he had built for himself during the previous 40-plus years. READ ON

From raw milk to Luigi Mangione’s eyebrow specialist, this year’s most overhyped and underhyped things

By Jeanne Malle

Overhyped

Personal truths

Gay men

Raw milk

The Menendez brothers

Disposable vapes

Wearing pimple patches in public

Tasting menus

Oura Rings

Any job that starts with “creative”

Creatives

The West Village

New members’ clubs

Running clubs

Anxiety

The Bear

Long nails

Martinis

Michael Barbaro

Trad wives

Ethical non-monogamy

Baccarat Rouge 540

California sober

Barry Keoghan

Australian shepherds

Tall-person energy

Underhyped

Good manners

Gay women

The business lunch

NyQuil

Luigi Mangione’s eyebrow specialist

Juuls

Grammar

Monogamy

Walk-in-only restaurants

Full-time jobs

Vaccines

The Upper East Side

Korean bathhouses

Sabrina Tavernise

How the left suddenly thinks it’s acceptable to use the r-word again

Feminism

The bus

AirTags

Letterboxd

Olivia Nuzzi and R.F.K. Jr.’s sexts

Vito, the first pug to win the National Dog Show

Short-person energy

Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at Air Mail

In the U.S., overpraising is endemic, while in the U.K., compliments are viewed as insincere

By Chiara Brown

No one knows quite how to dole out gushing, unbridled praise like an American. I grew up in the epicenter of this way of life, California, and from a young age was taught that a compliment (warranted or not) was the best way to make your way in the world, whether that was at work, school or in relationships. No polite greeting should be considered complete without an added “I love your shoes!” or a handy “Now, that is a great top!”

Frantically complimenting people and ourselves is sort of a national pastime, second only to baseball. Researchers have READ ON

Italy’s little-known, highly suspicious history with the same steroids Jannik Sinner tested positive for bodes poorly for the tennis world champion and his massage-table alibi

By Jack Sullivan

For all his leaps and lunges, Jannik Sinner was hardly sweating. It was a relatively cool afternoon in Queens, but the tennis phenom’s bone-dry shirt had more to do with the ease with which he’d just dismantled his opponent, Taylor Fritz, in a three-set U.S. Open final on September 8.

It was over quickly, the sort of match that allows fans to saunter back to Manhattan well ahead of their dinner reservations. And it went perfectly for Sinner, the 23-year-old who’d just won the second Grand Slam of his career, upheld his World No. 1 title (the first Italian READ ON

A radical plan to reduce traffic in Paris is underway. Will it reduce the capital’s deadly road-rage incidents?

By Charles Bremner

Motor vehicles that do not fall under a list of exemptions will be banned from parts of central Paris from this week in the latest move by the Socialist-led council to squeeze traffic out of the French capital.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor, has signed a long-promised measure imposing a limited traffic zone in the traffic-clogged Right Bank. The 5 sq km area, covering the first four arrondissements, is home to 100,000 people and includes the Louvre, Tuileries gardens, Rue de Rivoli and most of the Avenue de l’Opéra.

The scheme, which follows the long-standing examples of Rome, Madrid and other European cities, bans motor vehicles except taxis and buses READ ON

The Krotona apartments, in L.A.’s Hollywood Hills, once attracted artists, actors, and eccentrics. Now their state of disrepair has pitted neighbor against neighbor

By Hadley Meares

Nestled beneath Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, in the hills of idyllic Beachwood Canyon, are the Krotona apartments, a Spanish Colonial Revival complex with vines creeping up the sides. The main apartments surround a beautiful courtyard, and next to them rises the Temple of the Rosy Cross, a former religious meeting place now divided into studio apartments. Once the site of a groundbreaking commune, Krotona has been a residential apartment complex for nearly a century.

“Krotona holds that incredible power,” says Courtney Sell, a local documentary filmmaker and historian of Los Angeles’s spiritual communities who has led tours of the property. “You can feel this vibration—it’s a magical vibration. It’s a really special place.” READ ON

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Buzz Bissinger is apoplectic at the political ads bombarding his Pennsylvania home

By Buzz Bissinger

Welcome to the great state of Pennsylvania! The Liberty Bell! Gettysburg! The Rocky statue! Your mind turning into mush every four years!

As anyone with a brain cell must know, Pennsylvania is a swing state in the presidential election that takes place Tuesday—the swing state among seven swing states. (Am I the only one who keeps thinking of the seven dwarfs?) And because the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has been so close for months, there has been a campaign ad every six seconds on television.

The ads have been like a plague of rats, multiplying READ ON

Locals are up in arms over a cruise-ship monopoly that’s quickly turning a quaint coastal town into the Venice of Maine

By Clara Molot

At dawn in the idyllic town of Bar Harbor, Maine, the ocean glows in shades of charred orange. The sun slips out from behind nearby islands, and seagulls call to one another over the lull of waves breaking against the rocky shore. It’s the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, and the town is still asleep.

By daylight a thick, wet fog descends onto the whole of Mount Desert Island, home to both Bar Harbor and the picturesque Acadia National Park. Distant peaks disappear behind a veil of clouds, and a low, steady horn is the only sign of the arrival of the READ ON

What’s behind the growing popularity of Ivy League student Republican clubs?

By M. J. Koch

The words “Harvard” and “Republican” don’t typically go hand in hand. Only 12 percent of the senior class last year identified as “conservative” or “very conservative,” while 65 percent identified as “progressive” or “very progressive,” according to The Harvard Crimson.

This year, however, the Harvard Republican Club is booming. Roughly 150 freshmen have signed up this semester, and 850 students are on the e-mail list, the club’s president, Michael Oved, tells me. Club events regularly attract more than 100 students, Oved says, with some bringing in twice that. Recent guest speakers include former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy; the C.E.O. of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon; businessman Peter Thiel; the founder of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice; and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. READ ON

How the birth-control pill went from women’s-lib sensation to TikTok albatross, drawing backlash from young people on both the left and right

By Flora Gill

At one point in history, the pill was heralded as a medical marvel, a way to unshackle women from an unwanted future. For female equality and independence, no invention of the 20th century has been more life-changing; as Gloria Steinem said, “Not everyone with vocal chords is an opera singer. And not everyone with a womb needs to be a mother. When the Pill came along we were able to give birth—to ourselves.”

But if you’re a young woman scrolling through TikTok today, chances are you’ll soon come across a video on the pill—if you haven’t already—suggesting its reputation has gone the way of READ ON

The straw vote at Harry’s Bar, in Paris, has predicted the results of the American presidential election as accurately—if more drunkenly—than many more scientific polls

By John von Sothen

In the run-up to the 1924 presidential election, which pitted Republican incumbent Calvin Coolidge against Democrat John W. Davis, the Parisian watering hole Harry’s Bar offered its American patrons something new on the menu: a chance to vote.

Absentee ballots were not yet available to Americans living abroad, and Harry MacElhone, the bar’s namesake and founder, sympathized with expat regulars such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway, who felt excluded.

“His idea was to hold a fake election followed by a real party,” said Franz-Arthur MacElhone, Harry’s great-grandson, the bar’s fourth-generation owner, who holds court at the Second Arrondissement institution near the Place Vendôme. READ ON

Jamie Reuben, of the English property-and-investment firm Reuben Brothers, is spending billions on hotels and private clubs in New York. But will the Upper East Side love him back?

By Vassi Chamberlain

New York’s hospitality industry can be downright forbidding to outsiders. In the best of times, it’s a blood sport, and now there’s a new player: the Reuben Brothers, an English property-and-investment empire that aims, according to principal Jamie Reuben, to become the “LVMH of real estate” and “re-invigorate the Upper East Side.” A) Does the Upper East Side need re-invigorating? And B) Is there room for more hospitality, especially from British outsiders?

The young executive driving the charge is Reuben, a 37-year-old member of the firm that was co-founded by his father, David, and his uncle, Simon, in 2002. READ ON

Al Pacino and Mick Jagger are notches on the bedpost of the glamorous, 30-year-old film producer Noor Alfallah

By Ashley Baker

Older men juggling younger women: so cliché! Noor Alfallah is the exemplar of a more modern mash-up. Raven-haired, poreless, and often accessorized by her very beautiful baby, Alfallah has become one of the most discussed women in Hollywood. And it’s not because she was an executive producer on the film The Apprentice. (Which she was. Trump called it a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job.” It’s that good.)

Film credits aside, it’s Alfallah’s love life that fascinates. In 2017, when Alfallah was 22, she took up with Jagger, then 74. At the time, he was on a break from READ ON

Julia Fox’s life has been filled with sex, drugs, and Kanye West. Unbowed and unashamed, she’s now taking on motherhood with the same riotous spirit

By Julia Llewellyn Smith

When Julia Fox was 16, missing person posters bearing her face were plastered all over New York. She’d run away from home where her parents fought endlessly, often beat her and usually neglected her.

Fox’s childhood had been spent bouncing between her father’s native New York and her mother’s homeland of Italy. There’d been spells of homelessness, she shoplifted, took every drug going and had sex with often much, much older men. When she moved in with her abusive drug-dealer boyfriend, it took her parents (who thought she was in Italy) several weeks to clock her absence and inform the police. READ ON

When a flashy, young private-equity mogul sought to build a lavish compound on the shores of Lake Michigan, he didn’t count on pushback from the area’s old money

By Ben Ryder Howe

Winnetka, Illinois, has long been considered Chicago’s marquee suburb with hotel-size homes at the end of heated driveways and faux-French country houses overlooking Lake Michigan. Popular with big-brand CEOs and lawyers, and familiar to non-Winnetkans as the setting of Home Alone, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and nearly every John Hughes movie ever made, it is a place where titanic wealth meets Midwestern folksiness.

Four years ago, at the height of the pandemic, a mystery buyer began acquiring mansions along Winnetka’s waterfront and knocking them down. One of the mansions was less than a decade old and featured an READ ON

With their mix of sleek Scandinavian design and Nordic ruggedness, J Craft’s Torpedo boats offer elegance, power—and a seal of approval from the King of Sweden

By Gemma Billington

Scandinavia has a reputation for sophisticated world-class design. But there is a historical rugged toughness too, which goes back to those seafaring explorers, first the Vikings and then the Hanseatic League. It is a peculiar mix and when these seemingly opposing sides of the Scandi character collide, you end up with the sort of muscular elegance that you find in Arne Jacobsen’s furniture, a Bang & Olufsen speaker or Volvo’s 1961 P1800.

The Swedish luxury boatmaker J Craft is another example of the school of good looks meets uncompromising performance. Its signature model, the 42ft Torpedo, unveiled in 2009, READ ON

In Kazakhstan, the Nomad Games provide sporting cover for political maneuvering

By Miles Ellingham

Sweat, blood, the warm smell of horse excrement. Those are the three fundamental elements that register as I watch the United States getting roundly battered by Kazakhstan at the sport of kok boru. The game is an archaic form of polo in which riders fight for possession of an 80-pound goat carcass. Horses ram into one another, players are knocked to the ground and almost trampled, a scrum of frothing equine heads, gnashing teeth, and shouting ensues until one rider breaks free, holding the carcass under his leg, and gallops toward a large rubber ring into which he flings it. Score: 1–0 for Kazakhstan. READ ON

A California billionaire wants to build a hideous hybrid manor house in a picturesque English village—the locals are revolting

By Lara Wildenberg

The boss of Soho House has been accused of attempting to build a Disneyland-style mansion in a small village in the Cotswolds, with the plans being described by residents as “grotesque”.

Ron Burkle, 71, a Californian businessman who is executive chairman of the private members’ club chain, has made an application to build a country house in Little Tew, a village between Chipping Norton and Banbury.

The parish of Little Tew, which no longer has a pub or any shops, consists of about 150 houses and a church.

Three volumes of plans describe how Serpentine Lodge will modernize classic architecture in Oxfordshire, drawing influence from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in addition to the “distinct significance of baroque in Oxford”. READ ON

From hot rodent boyfriends to having a strawberry-girl summer, “vibe trends” are multiplying exponentially—and consumers are eating them up

By Cazzie David

Blueberry-milk nails. Hot rodent boyfriend. Tomato-girl summer. What do these things have in common? Absolutely nothing. They are all utterly meaningless. That and, within the last year, each one has become a micro-trend, a niche and short-lived yet pervasive fad that sweeps the Internet.

At this point, they are better described as “vibe trends,” ephemeral word clouds seemingly chosen at random that briefly dictate thousands of people’s identities until the next one comes along.

What it all boils down to is marketing. Sometimes it’s obvious that a marketing scheme is responsible for a vibe trend. See: Brat, the Charli XCX READ ON

For decades, brides have fought to get their weddings covered in the magazine. Considering how quickly many of those marriages fail, it might be a curse, not a blessing

By Paulina Prosnitz and Carolina de Armas

At Grace Morton and Matt Budman’s weekend-long, multi-million-dollar Jamaica wedding, in 2023, guests including Catherine Zeta-Jones and Shay Mitchell were welcomed with rum cocktails served in coconuts emblazoned with images of the couple’s two miniature dachshunds, Marvin and Otis. Bill Murray gave an impromptu, a cappella rendition of “Brandy,” by Looking Glass, at the rehearsal dinner, which was followed by a reggae set by Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani. For the big day, Morton, the daughter of Hard Rock hotelier Peter Morton, wore a custom Chanel dress inspired by a vintage Karl Lagerfeld design, originally worn by Claudia Schiffer—Morton’s godmother—in 1992. READ ON

Could this be the world’s most charming home on wheels?

By Josie Rose

In 2019 I was living at home with my mum when I decided that I wanted my own space. I couldn’t afford a house, so instead I bought a 24-seater minibus [says Josie Rose, 30].

I needed to get rid of the seats and turn it into a livable space, but I’d never even used a drill before, so I took a weeklong course in carpentry. Five years later — including a year off during the pandemic — the transformation was complete.

My minibus and I, along with my Labradoodle, Winnie, were ready to set off across the UK on our adventure: living and traveling as a solo female van-lifer. READ ON

With lower costs and fewer delays, Long Island’s Republic Airport is drawing Manhattan’s private-plane set away from Teterboro. The caveat: it’s farther from Fifth Avenue

By Andrew Zucker

In the past year, former C.E.O. of Google Eric Schmidt, television judge Judith “Judge Judy” Sheindlin, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates have purportedly stepped foot in East Farmingdale, a sleepy Long Island hamlet. But only for a few minutes.

For well-heeled jet-setters, East Farmingdale’s Republic Airport—37 miles and an 80-minute drive (depending on traffic) from Midtown Manhattan—is an increasingly attractive option. Although Republic doesn’t have the scene-y status of private airports such as Teterboro, in New Jersey, or White Plains, in Westchester County, it’s less expensive.

Garry Madolid, who runs one of Republic’s terminals, says renting hangar space at READ ON