Elise Boulding
A guide to the small things making summer feel better right now: stone fruit, flavored salts, tinned fish, cold drinks, and dinners too simple to call recipes.
Spend a summer Saturday wandering between folk art, hidden galleries, Central Park landmarks, global food counters, and classic pizza joints, all for $30.
How inexpensive rituals, public spaces, and slow summer evenings might save us from the pressure of performative modern leisure.
Long before modern feminism had a name, there was Aspasia: sharp-tongued, politically influential, and impossible to ignore. Dora Russell revives the controversial figure not as a historical footnote, but as a woman whose intellect and independence still feel strikingly modern.
In Dora Russell’s hands, Artemis becomes more than a mythological figure. She emerges as an enduring emblem of female independence, illuminating the lonely and often difficult path of women determined to live outside the boundaries imposed upon them.
Writing in the 19th century, Hyde attempts to map Hawaiian legends onto familiar biblical narratives. Yet the stories resist containment, revealing a mythology shaped not by scripture, but by volcanoes, oceans, ancestry, and the spiritual force of the islands themselves.
This ornate tale of sorcery, romance, and betrayal moves from glittering wonder to near-gothic darkness with surprising ease. Pearls fall from tears, spells distort reality, and redemption arrives only after immense suffering.
A kaleidoscopic glimpse into early American life, this chapter shifts the lens from battlefields and charters to the rhythms of ordinary existence: muddy roads, mismatched bread, amateur diplomacy, and deer crashing through parlor mirrors. In the voices of Franklin, Byrd, and Knight, colonial America emerges not as a mythic Eden or a theater of heroic suffering, but as a sprawling, uneven experiment in self-reliance, satire, and stubborn improvisation.
A meticulous, meandering survey of bats—from medieval mistrust to anatomical marvels, vampire legends, and affectionate insectivores—this 19th-century piece stitches natural history with myth, showing how bats have flitted between folklore and science, often misunderstood, always fascinating.
Madame Jumel, as depicted in Superwomen by Albert Payson Terhune, is a figure of relentless ambition and social cunning, rising from obscurity to become one of the wealthiest women in America. Terhune casts her as a master of reinvention, whose marriages, fortunes, and flirtations with power reveal both the boldness and cost of a life lived on society’s edge.
With the precision of a naturalist and the curiosity of a proto-archaeologist, Jeffries Wyman documents the ancient shell-heaps of coastal New England, revealing layered histories of diet, habitation, and human presence long before European contact. The work is as much an anatomical catalog as it is a quiet challenge to the prevailing myths of a blank American past.
A centuries-old preservation turned centerpiece, labneh takes on the brightness of mint and thyme, anchoring sharp tomato and brined olive in a landscape where salt once stood for survival.
Pork, long the pulse of Chinese cookery, meets the crackle of modern heat; this dish bridges the ancestral and the immediate, with chili oil as both homage and rupture.
A study in precision, negima pairs chicken thigh and scallion on a skewer—each bite a calibrated contrast of fat and fiber, smoke and salt, repetition and restraint.
A small fried strip of fish, yes, but the goujon is also a lesson in elegance, timing, and the French art of elevating the ordinary. Its crispness is fleeting, its pleasures deliberate.
From Sicilian sweets and French stationery to elegant home accents and beauty essentials, these Bergdorf Goodman finds deliver a touch of luxury without crossing the three-figure mark.