The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. The Guilty Pleasure A confession about museum gift shops, and the twenty best ones in the world Let us be honest about this. The museum gift shop is not supposed to beContinue reading “Exit Through the Gift Shop”
Category Archives: Monthly Picks
Who Are You at the Dinner Table? The Invite — Review
Director: Olivia WildeScreenplay: Rashida Jones and Will McCormackStarring: Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Edward NortonYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Comedy-drama / chamber comedyRunning time: 107 minutesBased on: Cesc Gay’s Sentimental (2020), released internationally as The People UpstairsRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Joe and Angela are a long-married San Francisco couple whose relationship has calcified intoContinue reading “Who Are You at the Dinner Table? The Invite — Review”
The Beginning of the End of the Story: Departure(s) — Review
Author: Julian BarnesTitle: Departure(s)Year: 2026Genre: Literary fictionForm: A late novel / elegiac fictionRating: ★★★★★ What It Is Departure(s) is Julian Barnes’s declared final book: a brief, formally elusive work that moves between fiction, memoir, literary essay and autobiography while refusing to settle comfortably into any one of them. Barnes’s own website describes it as fictionContinue reading “The Beginning of the End of the Story: Departure(s) — Review”
Riding in Cars with Boys
We drove back to Los Angeles the next day. It was one of those sunny days suspended in time. We both knew something in our story had ended, and neither of us understood that something else had already begun. When I said goodbye to him at his hotel, I pretended it was nothing. We didn’tContinue reading “Riding in Cars with Boys”
Fashion Mood Board
The Culture Now: Palestine
Across Gaza, the West Bank and a scattered diaspora, the past five years have produced an unusually intense body of work — made, in large part, out of catastrophe A note on scope before anything else: “Palestinian culture” today is made across more places than any single capital could hold — Gaza, the West BankContinue reading “The Culture Now: Palestine”
The Culture Now: Lebanon
A country that keeps rebuilding its culture before it finishes rebuilding anything else There is a version of Beirut that exists mostly in retrospect — golden light, café terraces, a cosmopolitan capital briefly nicknamed the Switzerland of the Middle East. That version keeps reappearing in the culture discussed below, not as nostalgia exactly, but asContinue reading “The Culture Now: Lebanon”
The Culture Now: Iran
In a country reshaped by war, censorship and exile, art has become the nearest thing to a free press There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from trying to describe a culture at the exact moment it is happening. The historian has the comfort of distance; the critic reviewing a single film orContinue reading “The Culture Now: Iran”
Villa San Michele
Above Florence Villa San Michele, A Belmond Hotel, has just reopened above Fiesole after eighteen months of renovation — and the view from the terrace is, as it has always been, the finest available in Tuscany There is a concept the Romans called otium — a form of leisure quite distinct from idleness, devoted toContinue reading “Villa San Michele”
The Examined Life: Wim Wenders and the Radical Ordinariness of Perfect Days
On toilets, cassette tapes, and the philosophical weight of a life lived well Forget about the Oscars, Perfect Days (2023) is all you need this week. There is a scene near the midpoint of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days in which Hirayama, a cleaner of public lavatories in Tokyo, lies on his futon in the amberContinue reading “The Examined Life: Wim Wenders and the Radical Ordinariness of Perfect Days”
My World of Interiors 