It's Tacky

Hi {{first_name|friend}},

There’s a film making the festival circuit right now called The Siege of Paradise. It shows how tourist season transforms the tranquil Italian paradise Cinque Terre into a crowded nightmare as more than 3.5 million visitors, like a horde of locusts, descend. The interlopers are identifiable by their ever-present iPhones, pulled out to capture the sights, the meals, each other. “Look with your eyes!” remarks one frustrated local. All the public phone usage — the constant picture-taking, the live streaming — is undeniably tacky. But the screen is also a wall between them and the place they’re supposedly exploring.

“I think phones have made the world so accessible, so known: you feel like you know everything about where you are already,” says director Gar O’Rourke. “You’re on Google Maps, you don’t need to ask for directions, you know where everything is, you’re in your own little lane the whole time. If you want, you don’t need to have any engagement with a local person. And I hope, in some small way, this film just reminds you that travel should be about those little conversations that you have with people, putting the phone down just for a minute, maybe, being in a place, being present.”

The push-pull of wanting to pick up our phone and while also not wanting to constantly pick up our phone, the anxiety over not being fully present, of losing our attention spans, of increasing isolation and inwardness, has encroached upon every aspect of our lives. Look at the unquenchable nostalgia for the ‘90s, our last disconnected age; the repeated call to “touch grass” aka get off a screen; this new idea of choosing to live a more friction-filled, intentional life. As Madonna recently remarked, “If I go on Instagram for more than 10 minutes, I get depressed, and I don’t want to go there.” Same!

People are dealing with this anxiety in various ways. Some are buying Bricks and trying to force-adapt willpower, some — like the comedic author Gary Shteyngart — are espousing an return to “savoring the best of life that’s all around us” (the topic of his upcoming book, The Sensualist, and a reaction to the type world he foretold in his 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story). It’s a fool’s errand to try to predict the future, but maybe Joel at The Washington Post is right with this: “We think that in another 25 or 30 years we will look back in horror at this period — our kids, our kids’ kids, will marvel that in the 2020s we had no real culture of ‘attention fitness’ or ‘attentional hygiene.’” That seems like best case.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

The Fourth of July marks the official kick-off of summer sale season, a period of discounting with no hard end date. Sales are continuing post-holiday, the discounts are deepening, and we’ve spent days and days digging through it all for pieces that we’d actually want to buy, on sale or not. Below, we’ve highlighted a cute item from 13 sales we’re shopping, and then linked to the full sale page for additional browsing. Items, and sizes, are going quickly.

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TO WATCH Let the cool, easy breezes of Nantucket, and the charm of Jennifer Garner, wash over you with the debut of the beach read-turned-TV series The Five-Star Weekend. It’s out this Thursday with a stacked cast that includes indie cool girl Chloë Sevigny.

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TO READ The Shampoo Effect is being described as a coming-of-age novel for middle-age. As in The Four Seasons, an outsider (and a baby) disturb the tranquil of a close-knit friend group.

TO BAKE This recipe creates perfect focaccia, even for a novice baker. You need to think ahead (the dough rests in the fridge overnight), but it’s otherwise pretty simple and the end result is delicious: pillowy and not greasy.

“Why are people using A.I. to text their friends?” • Even Harvard-trained OBGYNs are surprised by their own perimenopause. • New study shows that fish oil supplements do not improve memory or cognitive function. • Getting veneers in your 50s. • So much we did not know about skin tags. • C’mon with this!

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