Lauren Collins

News of the Jordyn Wieber drama did not reach me in London until this morning. The BBC’s coverage yesterday was all about the women’s road race, a soaked eighty-seven mile affair that ended in a mad sprint up the Mall, with the Yorkshirewoman Lizzie Armitstead winning silver. Besides that, I watched some judo. Have you seen judo? It is terrifying. Fortunately, the sight of profoundly conditioned men and women poking at each other, like bears with sticks, was offset by some great vocabulary words…

On Thursday, as the diplomatic brawl between Britain and Ecuador intensified, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, remained holed up inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. The Embassy, at 3 Hans Crescent, is a small apartment in a red-brick building behind Harrod’s. Assange has been there since June, seeking refuge from Britain’s attempts to extradite him to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning regarding sexual-abuse allegations. The Ecuadoran President, Rafael Correa (whom I intervi…

“Do you have a Prosecco?” Gardner asked the waiter. He had stopped for lunch at the Belgian Arms, a wisteria-covered pub outside London overlooking a small pond. Gardner, whose wife is Italian, has lived abroad since 1979. He was in town to visit his mother. He speaks English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and some Spanish. (“Just add Portuguese to Italian and divide by two,” he said, of the latter.) At the Court of Auditors—“itself a bad translation”—his job is to translate docume…

Allow me a thought or two on the triple selfie that became this week’s leading event of real-fake-news? The photograph, and the photograph of the photograph, and the commentary surrounding it, improbably united two subjects I’m interested in: Michelle Obama and Danish television. As I wrote in January of last year, the progressivism of Denmark—where seventy per cent of women work and ninety-seven per cent of children between the ages of three and five attend day care—makes surprisingly good fodd…

On July 14th, Gracie left for a vacation. She flew to London from Beijing—where, for two hundred days a year, she lived alone, in a rental apartment—and caught a train to the Scottish coast. She planned to unplug from the news cycle and spend time with her children, Rachel, twenty, and Daniel, nineteen. They went to the beach, walked their dog, ate fish-and-chips. On the eighteenth, they celebrated Daniel’s birthday. The next day, a friend of Gracie’s asked her whether she had seen that the BBC—…

Macron had vowed to “stay the course without ceding to demagogy.” But the gilets jaunes have provoked a surprise crisis that will likely define his Presidency. As they persist, he is increasingly desperate to appease them, even at a loss of revenues and face. On Tuesday, Édouard Philippe, the Prime Minister, announced a raft of conciliatory measures, including a six-month suspension of gas taxes, a promise to make sure that electricity prices don’t go up over the winter, and a “national debate”…

“A Star Is Born” came up. The film’s lone advocate was quickly crushed with an analysis of its gender politics and time-line issues. The discussion turned to Brexit. We were in Castlebar, County Mayo, at the home of Rooney’s mother, Marie Farrell. Everyone was worried about what would happen to the Irish border if the United Kingdom left the European Union without an agreement in place. And what of the Labour Party? Rooney said that although she didn’t exactly love the Labour leader, Jeremy Corb…

Many people my age have a similar memory. If you grew up in America during the years in which edamame became a snack food for toddlers, my story probably sounds a little dubious. You might be thinking, Did she really not try sushi until she was eighteen (and did she just call a California roll “sushi”)? Maybe she grew up in a weird family? That’s always been my feeling toward the initiation narratives of previous generations. The decades seem off, the foods impossible. The dish my mother didn’t…

The coronavirus may have accelerated his decline, or it may not have. Leukemia was the disease at fault. Still, the demands on medical personnel, amid the general chaos, made recovering at home dangerous and dying at home unworkable. On the afternoon of April 3rd, my father entered a hospice center. He had not been a churchgoer in recent years, and hadn’t attended a Catholic church since adolescence. Still, we knew that last rites were something he wanted, so we tried hard to make it happen. In…

How the star of “Lupin” pulled off his greatest confidence trick.

The French actress, known for “Call My Agent!,” “Killing Eve,” and “Connasse,” co-habits with “fucking Matt Damon” in the Trump-inflected Cannes hit “Stillwater.”

In 1898, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, staged a coup and murdered dozens of Black residents. More than a century later, a team of volunteers tries to track down every living relative of the victims.

A food-world star’s method and mess.

The female image is ubiquitous on social media, yet when it comes to pictures of parents with their children many moms feel disappeared.

Can three weeks of hydrotherapy and enforced leisure fix what ails us?

A hundred and ten years after Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing, passed through Queens on his way home to Hawaii, the break off the Rockaways is the only legal spot in New York City to surf.

A salute to the French cartoonist and longtime cover contributor to the magazine, who died on August 11th.

“Flatten yourself against the wall if a car comes,” Invader told me. He wriggled past a phantasmagorical fern. “You always get some crazy plants, with all the carbon dioxide from the cars,” he said. Our destination was a forty-foot-high concrete pillar that supported a smaller road passing over the A4. Traffic raced by at eighty miles an hour. Invader rummaged in the underbrush, trying to find a pair of polypropylene supermarket totes, filled with supplies, that Mr. Blue had tossed out of the va…

Yet, just as sabermetrics transformed baseball, data is coming for fashion, supplementing the hemline index—the theory that skirt lengths rise and fall with the stock market—with data lakes, traffic-share analyses, and lots of graphs. The other day, Alexandra Van Houtte, the Bill James of the catwalk, was sitting in a conference room in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris. Her company, Tagwalk, is known as “Google for fashion.” But, instead of typing “weird rash” or “post office hours” into its fr…

The restaurant is called Les Grands Buffets. A week or so later, I went to its Web site, and entered my e-mail address to receive a secure link to make a reservation online. It was late July. The next available table was for a Wednesday in December, at 8:45 p.m. “We remind you that this reservation is non-modifiable, you cannot change the number of guests, the date of the meal, the hour of the meal, or the name of the beneficiary,” the confirmation e-mail read. If I wanted to bring children unde…