All posts tagged: enduring

‘The most quietly romantic town we have ever visited’ – the enduring charm of Chiavenna, Italy | Italy holidays

‘The most quietly romantic town we have ever visited’ – the enduring charm of Chiavenna, Italy | Italy holidays

Published by Sam Flores

The ancient settlement of Chiavenna, in Lombardy, near Italy’s border with Switzerland, was once well known among travellers. “Lovely Chiavenna … mountain peaks, huge boulders, with rippling miniature torrents and lovely young flowers … and grassy heights with rich Spanish chestnuts,” wrote George Eliot in 1860. Eliot wasn’t the only writer to rhapsodise about this charming town. Edith Wharton described it as “fantastically picturesque … an exuberance of rococo”. For Mary Shelley it was “paradise … glowing in rich and sunny vegetation”, while Goethe described it as “like a dream”. For those pioneering travellers, gentle, sunlit Chiavenna marked their arrival in Italy, having crossed the Splügen Pass, one of the earliest transalpine routes connecting northern Europe to the south. Today, few tourists bother with Chiavenna, heading instead to the better-known Como that lies 60 miles (100km) to the south. They are missing a treat. Intrigued by the praise once heaped upon this mysterious town, with a picture-perfect location at the foot of the snow-flecked Alps, I decided to spend a week here with my husband. Surrounded by thick …

An Enduring Assumption About Love

An Enduring Assumption About Love

Published by José Betancourt

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. For as long as people have been looking for love, many have been convinced that they know exactly what it looks like. We might talk about having a “type”: someone with certain traits, habits, beliefs, or quirks that we assume will add up to a successful match. But that certainty is often an illusion, Olga Khazan writes. Studies suggest that what people say they want in a partner rarely predicts whom they actually fall for—or whom they build a relationship with. Chemistry, timing, shared experiences, and the slow work of falling in love with someone tend to matter far more than the traits that some people screen for on a dating-app profile. This Valentine’s Day, explore stories that challenge the idea that love is about finding the “right kind” of person. On Love and Choice Most People Don’t …

8 Enduring Menswear Essentials Actually Worth the Splurge

8 Enduring Menswear Essentials Actually Worth the Splurge

Published by Jenni Sidey

We talk a lot here about menswear essentials—go-tos, basics, whatever you want to call them. But these terms are too often reduced to T-shirts, hoodies, and underwear. When the truth is, true essentials are more than that. They’re the foundations of a wardrobe: reliable stalwarts you can mix together, layer up, and build on, even as your style evolves, the seasons change, and repairs are required. Pulling that foundation together takes time, intention, knowledge, and yes, some cash-money. But the difference between investing in a passing trend and one of these kinds of pieces is that, with a proven men’s style classic, you don’t look in the mirror four months later and wonder what you were thinking. Instead, the longer you wear it, the more you realize why it’s so damn great. With that in mind, we felt it was high time we served a few up for you. And on a recent visit to Mr Porter, we realized that a good chunk of our hero items were sitting right there, in an abundant range …

The Enduring Popularity and Industry Appeal of FanFiction

The Enduring Popularity and Industry Appeal of FanFiction

Published by José Betancourt

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. A Deep Dive Into the Rise of FanFiction in Publishing Writing for Defector, Eli Cugini explores the vast landscape of FanFiction, focusing on where it stands in publishing today and how it has come to dominate culture with its mass appeal and established fan bases. In so doing, Cugini touches on some of the problematic pieces of FanFic’s current popularity that have generated much online discourse and present complicated questions. For instance, does the ick and real harm of J.K. Rowling’s TERF activism and anti-trans rhetoric stick to Harry Potter FanFic, or do some of these works achieve the claim that writing HP FanFic is an act of resistance to Rowling’s repugnant views? Also, does some erotic FanFic work to normalize taboos that are actually problematic and should be rejected? While the story of FanFic’s success and appeal …

Vice signaling explains Trump’s enduring appeal

Vice signaling explains Trump’s enduring appeal

Published by Sam Flores

Last Friday, the day before Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Colorado Public Radio reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Eagle County, Colorado, had left ace of spades cards inside the cars of nine Latino immigrants they had detained. Family members found the cards, which read “Denver Field Office” and listed the address and contact information of a detention facility in the city of Aurora.  The ace of spades has a violent and racist history attached to it. During the Vietnam War, American soldiers often left the cards on the bodies of dead Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese soldiers. They were a symbol, death’s calling card.  In a statement, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agencies tasked with carrying out Donald Trump’s wide scale immigration raids, condemned the behavior as unauthorized and promised an investigation. “Under President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem, ICE is held to the highest professional standard.”  The action in Colorado is symbolic for the life-and-death morality play that is …

The Secret to Hollywood’s Most Enduring Friendship

The Secret to Hollywood’s Most Enduring Friendship

Published by Sam Flores

Here’s a good rule of thumb for making a movie: Don’t allow the press tour to be the most exciting component. The Rip, from the director Joe Carnahan, is a cop drama where macho guys (and gals) tote carbine rifles and grunt law-enforcement lingo—the kind of crime-genre pablum that commonly gets thrown onto Netflix in mid-January. But this one comes with a ridiculously stacked cast, including, most important, its two leads: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The longtime Hollywood pals have dutifully hit the promotional circuit to talk up their latest collaboration, as well as argue over who’s the bigger New England Patriots fan, reminisce on their former shared bank account, and generally remind everyone about the wholesome endurance of their creative bond. But none of that cheerfulness or easy friend chemistry can be found in the film they’re plugging. Damon and Affleck have acted together on-screen numerous times, but this is their first time sharing the top billing since Dogma, their 1999 dark comedy about a pair of fallen angels. The hiatus makes The …

The enduring power of journalism in a world of more media and less freedom

The enduring power of journalism in a world of more media and less freedom

Published by Sam Flores

A vast amount of information has not necessarily meant more reliable information, writes James Rodgers, a former BBC correspondent who held postings in Gaza, Moscow and Brussels On December 10, the year 2025 reached a murderous milestone. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had recorded 126 journalists and media workers killed, the highest number since the CPJ first began keeping records in 1992. In 2025, the figure was matched with three weeks of the year still to go. One nationality, Palestinian, has paid by far the highest price. “Israel has killed almost 250 journalists since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023,” the CPJ reported. What does this mean for audiences’ understanding of a world where international affairs are dominated by war, the climate crisis and unpredictable politics? As far back as the early years of the US, and through the European revolutions of the 19th centuries, information and freedom have been linked. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or …

The Enduring Relevance of The Brothers Karamazov

The Enduring Relevance of The Brothers Karamazov

Published by Jenni Sidey

A great book manages to speak insightfully both to the culture it was written in and to the present context. The Brothers Karamazov by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is such a book. The last novel ever written by Dostoevsky, it tells the story of three brothers, Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha, each with radically different approaches to life. Dmitri is passionate and worldly. Ivan is cynical and coldly rational. And Alyosha, a monk in training, is reverent, innocent, and loving. Ultimately, though, the book is about the problem of evil and how we can treat life as a gift in the midst of suffering. That’s one of the main reasons we keep going back to it. In one of the most famous chapters ever written, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a disillusioned cardinal complains to Christ how his incarnation has failed since evil and suffering have remained so rampant. How does Christ respond? By kissing the inquisitor in silence. The celebrated Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard recently wrote a new meditation in The New Yorker on Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, …