Rebecca Mead

From the daily newsletter: A few recommendations for media about the monarchy. Plus: J. D. Vance got what he wanted; defending trans lives in a deep-red state; and the A.I. slop problem.

A new biography of the late British monarch is also a book about the dream life of her subjects.

Success came early for the late British actor, who throughout her career continued to captivate audiences with her edgy, glinting gifts.

At the Copenhagen restaurant, diners are served raw jellyfish—and freeze-dried lamb brain served in a fake cranium—while videos about climate change swirl on the ceiling. Is it “gastronomic opera,” or sensory overload?

She became famous playing buttoned-up Agent Scully. But in midlife her characters often have a strong erotic charge—and now she’s edited “Want,” a book of sexual fantasies.

It was a Tuesday evening in April, and I’d landed in Rome just a few hours earlier. Originally, Ducrot and I had arranged to meet for lunch the next day, but when she learned of my schedule she invited me to come over sooner, for a drink and a light dinner, noting in an e-mail that she “would be enchanted” to see me immediately. She opened the door to the apartment—where she lived with Vittorio (Vicky) Ducrot, her husband of fifty-eight years, until his death, in 2022—and I entered a spacious ha…

Testard, a French citizen who had moved with his family to the U.K. in childhood, hadn’t been eligible to vote in the referendum. But, like many people in his social circle, he’d assumed that Britain would choose to remain part of Europe. Testard was shocked by the result, and horrified by its effective legitimization of hostile attitudes toward European-born residents of the U.K. Testard didn’t feel personally vulnerable: he is effortlessly bilingual, and speaks English with the accent of Londo…

At the same time, however, a new cat was beginning to emerge. This was a round-faced, wide-eyed, sleek-­bodied creature that was pampered, primped, and lavished with affection—like Oliver, a plump, stately, black domestic cat who was a member of a suburban household in the late nineteenth century and who, preserved in taxidermied condition with a yellow ribbon tied in a bow around his neck, is now in the collection of the Museum of London. Consider, too, the proliferating creatures drawn by Loui…

This wasn’t always the case. In 1950, at the age of thirty, Andrew Cavendish precipitously inherited a centuries-old title—the dukedom of Devonshire—becoming the eleventh holder of vast swaths of agricultural land, acres of grouse moor, a valuable collection of art and antiquities, and the then private Chatsworth House, the family seat in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands. He also inherited a problem: despite the best efforts of his father to minimize his heir’s forthcoming tax burden, the new yo…

It was a good moment for a man of means to build such a collection. Many Italian nobles were seeing their fortunes dwindle, and could be persuaded to part with inherited objects for the right price. In Naples, Townley bought from the Principe di Laurenzano a Roman bust of a young woman with downcast eyes, identified as the nymph Clytie. (Later, Townley humorously referred to Clytie as his wife, though he was not the marrying kind.) Excavations were then under way at Hadrian’s Villa, the retreat…