Happy Friday!
The season of holiday partying, shopping, and traveling is upon us, ready or not. I’m relishing the quiet moments between work and social obligations, whether it’s to reflect on the year that was (and still is), or just to watch one more episode of The Gilmore Girls while I do housework.
“Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable,” said the late Leonard Cohen, in an interview he gave The New Yorker toward the end of his life. “It’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels.”
Cohen was referring to preparation for a much greater transition, but I find some quiet solitude during a time of transition—whether to a new season, a new administration, or a new city—to be of great benefit. Even better if it takes place in a home lit with a few Christmas lights.
Quartz deputy editor Sarah Todd surveyed her co-workers (us) about our life-changing tweaks of 2016, and many emphasize just that sort of indulgence in moments of daily transition. Quartz reporter Oliver Staley, who reads the news on his commute into work every day, reserved his ride home for fiction: “Reading fiction was a great way to balance the immediacy of the news business with the distance and perspective provided by literature.” He read Moby Dick, Middlemarch, The Corrections, and 14 other books. (This also seems like a great way to have something to discuss besides politics at holiday parties.)
Fidel Castro had a hand in some books we might bring on the train. Following Castro’s death, Quartz’s Latin America correspondent Ana Campoy wrote that the spirit of El Comandante loomed large at the International Book Fair underway in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Cuban revolution, Ana wrote, helped galvanize the sense of pride in a distinctly Latin American identity that allowed literary greats including Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar to flourish in the movement known as el Boom.
Castro even edited some of Garcia Márquez’s manuscripts. (The weapons in an early draft of Chronicle of a Death Foretold were apparently not accurate.) One of my favorites from el Boom was Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. It’s a pulpy, Lima-based romance between a young law student who rewrites news stories into radio scripts (kind of like a pre-internet blogger) and his sexy aunt Julia, a recent divorcée. Ana, meanwhile, is partial to the short stories of Garcia Márquez’s Strange Pilgrims.
Glossier girls. I have long been fascinated by the way the New York-based beauty brand, Glossier, infiltrates my Instagram feed. I like Glossier’s products—when my eyebrows aren’t hiding behind my bangs, I swipe them to full attention with Boy Brow—but I’m even more impressed with the company’s media presence. So I wasn’t surprised when Glossier’s founder and CEO, Emily Weiss, told me for Quartz that she thinks of cosmetics as content.
Weiss (pictured at left, above) explained how Glossier uses Slack, Instagram, and events to involve fans in the company’s growth, whether by announcing the most recent round of funding ($24 million, on Wednesday) on Glossier’s editorial site, Into the Gloss, or surveying readers’ wishes for the newest product (Priming Moisturizer Rich, coming in January). She also told me about a program they’re now testing to pay the most engaged devotees to spread the word, like a millennial Mary Kay.
Casual Glossier girls, take note: Later this month, the brand’s first permanent store will open in its Soho penthouse. For those abroad, some of that $24 million is meant to take Glossier global.
Before Into the Gloss launched Glossier’s beauty products, it had amassed a dossier (Get it?) of research chronicling the grooming habits of the world’s most artfully tousled models, artists, editors, and entrepreneurs, via an interview series known as The Top Shelf. Be warned: They are addictive.
For The New Yorker this week, Naomi Fry wrote a parody of this form, imagining the posthumous beautification habits of a long-dead Jim Morrison. Enjoy.
Speaking of cosmetics, Hillary Clinton has understandably eased up on hers since ending her presidential campaign, and people have feelings about it. The Cut’s Stella Bugbee (whose Top Shelf interview is one of my faves) hypothesized that your reaction to Clinton’s mellower makeup and hair is a bit like a Rorschach Test: “Where her supporters see liberation and resolve, her critics see depression and defeat.”
For Quartz, Lux Alptraum saw both, though mostly liberation, and I tend to agree. Lux wrote that Clinton’s late embrace of makeup (after her husband’s 1982 gubernatorial race) shows her use of cosmetics to make constituents feel comfortable was both a sacrifice and a compromise. However disappointing the election’s outcome may have been, it’s nice to think Clinton might be enjoying some relief from the aesthetic demands of a hypercritical electorate. In any case, she looked radiant in rouge at Tuesday night’s UNICEF Snowflake Ball in New York.
May your personal beautification routines be enjoyable and effective. Have a great weekend!
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The Hamilton Mixtape is out today, with tracks featuring Nas, Chance the Rapper, Jill Scott, Wiz Khalifa, Alicia Keys, Common, and more. I’m only at the very beginning, but The Roots’ version of “My Shot” with Busta Rhymes is already making me want to rise up and hit the track for a run.