I cast my ballot early, down by the riverside in Hudson, on a radiant October day. As usual, I discovered that voting immediately elevated my health, my mood, my intelligence, my looks and my charisma.

All wedding stories should include this much drama, political intrigue and straight-faced absurdity. Great work in the New York Times from Jesse McKinley and Julia Dias Carneiro. nytimes.com/2026/10/10/style…

Hello, October. This is my favorite month, and not just because it's when I was both born and married. It is also when the flames of color start to lap at the trees and the air becomes clear and gentle, with a taste of briskness to come. Also: the pagan delights of Halloween!

Really, for pure chicness, so many of the birds in our back yard outdo anyone who ever walked the stairs at the Met Gala. This the Northern Flicker, a new arrival today.

I dreamed this, right? nytimes.com/interactive/2026…

Farewell to Bob Mackie, the fashion and costume designer who translated old Hollywood glamour into fantasy clothes that were equal parts flash and flesh. Celebrate his life by wearing a few sequins today, or a curtain rod across your shoulders a la Carol Burnett's Starlett.

"The Ben I'll never be,/Who remembers him?" Hearing that line from Sondheim's "Follies" made me think of my favorite picture from my 20's, taken with my favorite model, the wonderful Karen Bjornson. It was on a fashion shoot for WWD; the photographer was Dustin Pittman.

The summer the hydrangeas ate our house.

Happy birthday, Caryl Churchill, the greatest living dramatist in the English language. Her shape-shifting dramas mirror a disorienting, mutating world, and no playwright has so accurately prophesied the way boundaries -of time, gender, language, nature- would come to bleed.

Deer, seen through screen door, on the last day of August.

Oh, wow. Criticism at its most impassioned: Dwight Garner brings out the coronation robes for Marlon James. A very excited and exciting review of James's "The Disappearers," which I am ordering at this very moment. nytimes.com/2026/08/30/books…

"Truth is not and cannot be defamation." It turns out that there are still people with spines in this country. nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/po…

The color of summer, sunflower yellow. A popular crop this year, and a bright alternative to the elephant's-eye-high cornfields.

This is such a compete and satisfying package. Jason Zinoman traces the evolution of the jittery camera in horror, starting with the paradigm of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead." Fab use of, uh, visual aids. nytimes.com/interactive/2026…

A book that flows like a river after a spring thaw -- naturally, unstoppably, irresistibly. Few writers can match Stuart in mapping the idiosyncracies of loneliness, or the feints and evasions of being gay in a claustrophobic, hostile community.

An accidental convergence of advertising and editorial on my laptop screen.

"The future has vanished. The only future we talk about are different dystopian scenarios involving climate, demography, artificial intelligence." Ivan Krastev to John Guida in the New York Times.

It's the birthday of Robert Mitchum, whose curled lip and perpetually raised eyebrow exuded an irresistible skepticism about the wicked, weary world (and about being a movie star) that perfectly suited the fatalism of film noir.

Our apples bring all the deers to our yard. And woodchucks and rabbits and one stumbling bear, who looks so alone and dispossessed it breaks my heart. The fauna of a crazy August.

He was the 20th century's ultimate embodiment of the fashion designer as both suffering poet and creative genius, who changed the way women dressed forever. Celebrate what would have been Yves Saint Laurent's 90th birthday by throwing on something this simple yet fantastical.