Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /035
Brains that change with the cycle, soft cardio, late-night design discoveries, and the art of noticing.
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This message comes to you from bed, where I’ve been convalescing since Christmas Day (a day that was, in fact, wonderful) before promptly succumbing to the flu that seems to be circulating everywhere at once. It started, as these things often do, with a faint scratch at the back of my throat, and for three nights now I’ve kept P awake with my coughing. The letter arrives late for that reason, and the next likely will too, given that it’s New Year’s Day and time has taken on its seasonal looseness. We’re in the in-between now, that narrow corridor between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when the calendar falters and the world appears briefly undecided, hovering between what has already happened and whatever is about to.
This edition of Recent Intelligence includes reflections from the in-between days of the year, when time slackens and attention drifts; early signals for 2026 across culture, technology, wellness and travel; and a personal reckoning with the public figures we lost this year, tracing influence, legacy and contradiction. You’ll also find discoveries across design, media, art, and culture, each selected for the way they bring warmth, texture and moments of insight to these last, suspended nights of December.
WHAT’S NEXT /the year ahead
The coming year will be defined by a shift toward trust and authenticity. As consumers reject overly polished “performances”, they are seeking genuine connection. This demand for precision is also transforming wellness, which is becoming hyper-personalised through bio-data. Finally, our relationship with the past is shifting from simple nostalgia to “remixing”, that is, reimagining classic icons to create something that feels both familiar and entirely new.
What follows are our predictions for the year ahead: shifts in technology, culture, travel, fashion, and the ways we’re reclaiming presence in an always-on world.
PEOPLE /lost in 2025
This is not a comprehensive record, nor a hierarchy of importance, but a personal reckoning with a public year, a list of people whose deaths were reported, noted, or quietly absorbed as the months passed. The image above is a collage of figures whose work has mattered to me, a reminder that influence and loss don’t always overlap neatly. (It is a tragedy, of course, that BB's later politics would so deeply tarnish an illustrious career, forcing us to reconcile the artist with the ideology.) What follows is simply an accounting: names, dates, ages – the visible outline of lives that ended in 2025.
A few of those who were lost this past year: Giorgio Armani (11 Jul 1934 – 4 Sep 2025), age 91 / Jane Goodall (3 Apr 1934 – 1 Oct 2025), age 91 / Robert Redford (18 Aug 1936 – 16 Sep 2025), age 89 / Diane Keaton (5 Jan 1946 – 11 Oct 2025), age 79 / Frank Gehry (28 Feb 1929 – 5 Dec 2025), age 96 / Chris Rea (4 Mar 1951 – 22 Dec 2025), age 74 / Val Kilmer (31 Dec 1959 – 1 Apr 2025), age 65 / Brigitte Bardot (28 Sep 1934 – 28 Dec 2025), age 91 / Michelle Trachtenberg (11 Oct 1985 – 26 Feb 2025), age 39 / Gene Hackman (30 Jan 1930 – 17 Feb 2025), age 95 / Richard Chamberlain (31 Mar 1934 – 29 Mar 2025), age 91 / Marianne Faithfull (29 Dec 1946 – 30 Jan 2025), age 78
(a more complete list here)
Below, for paid subscribers: A deeper dive into the worlds that unfolded this week, including an exploration of how companionship is being redefined by technology, by groups, and by the limits of what we ask from one another. A look at the unseen psychological architectures that shape collective behaviour, from intimate social experiments to the systems we move through every day, often without language for what’s happening to us. We turn, too, to the body: new research that complicates long-held assumptions about stability, neutrality and “normal” states of mind, and what it means when science begins to catch up with lived experience. There’s a close reading of an artist whose rapid rise tells a larger story about taste, credibility and the porous boundary between commercial polish and emotional risk, alongside reflections on ambition, routine and the discipline of starting again. Threaded throughout are signals from culture at large (what’s beginning to fray, what’s softening, what’s being rejected in favour of something slower and more humane) as well as practical, grounding notes on movement, place, and small pleasures worth holding onto in winter.
These are the stories, discoveries, and textures reserved for the inner circle – the richer, quieter layer beneath the main letter.