Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /032
what i've been consuming, contemplating, and completely absorbed by
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This letter comes to you from the window seat of a train bound for Scotland – though really, does it come from there, or from Manchester, where it began, or from that small coffee shop in the bohemian town (what was its name?), or from all the rooms, all the windows, all the moments of looking out and seeing, what? Change, perhaps. The thing itself.
We’ve been living in hotel rooms for a week. London first, then Stamford with its stone and quiet, then Manchester with its rain, and more, always more, each room a small planet orbiting our larger journey. Seven days. Though time moves differently when you’re unmoored, doesn’t it? It stretches and pools. A week becomes a month becomes a lifetime becomes an afternoon. The trains carry us forward but we seem to hover, suspended between what was (already growing dim) and what will be (still shapeless, still forming).
Multiple train rides. The rhythm of them. Other hotel rooms with their bedside lamps, their crisp linens. The window seat in a cosy pub where the light fell just so. And now here, now this moment, watching the landscape stream past like thought itself, like memory, like the way we tell ourselves our own stories as we live them.
This edition of Recent Intelligence includes a startling rise in colon cancer among young people (and the likely culprit), Jane Goodall’s quiet influence on a generation of girls, and why liminal spaces may be your brain’s secret superpower. Plus: pink onyx sinks, the fall of the corporate job, AI-powered marriage meltdowns, and a very chic perfume discovered by accident in Manchester.
RECENTLY AT TIG /autumn in shades of blue and navy
The sky in September begins to fall inward. Light pools at odd angles. The world ripens, then slowly lets go. And somewhere in that hush (before the fire-coloured trees, before the air slips colder) blue begins to feel right again.
RECENTLY AT HYPERREALITY /elsa peretti’s iconic homes
For years, I’ve been collecting images of Elsa Peretti’s homes – ever since first glimpsing that unforgettable fireplace in her house on the Porto Ercole coastline. They lived in a folder on my desktop, scattered and unsorted: a room from one place, a view from another, fragments without context.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve finally pieced them together – tracing provenance, cross-referencing sources, and arranging them geographically for the very first time. Alongside the images (some which you may have never seen), I’ve written about what makes each house extraordinary.
What emerges is something far more than a collection of interiors: it’s a portrait of how the designer chose to live, how she carried herself through different landscapes and seasons of life. The work was painstaking, but the result is rare, intimate, and unlike anything you’ll find elsewhere.
Below, for paid subscribers: written from the window seat of a train somewhere between what was and what comes next, this week’s letter hovers in the in-between – between cities, between lives. Inside, the strange comfort of liminal spaces, and why colon cancer is quietly surging among young people. There’s cultural analysis, sharp media picks, and the kind of beauty you don’t expect – in a single sentence, a perfume sample, a pink onyx sink. For those craving stillness in motion – come in.