95 Picadilly

I’ve told this story before, but a decade or so ago, Rendy – a dear, lifelong friend of mine – called to say I was on television. That wouldn’t have been anything unusual in a former chapter of my life, but what she meant was the cast of Southern Charm. “Your kind of people,” she…

I’ve called myself a jack of all trades and master of none, and there’s some truth in that. I tend to be arrogant enough to believe I can learn most things with enough time and effort. Writing, though, doesn’t quite follow those rules. It isn’t something you conquer so much as something you travel with.…

Life can be a grand enigma, full of shifting terrain and unexpected turns. It has a plethora of changes and vicissitudes that send us in all directions at once, often before we’ve had time to understand where we are headed. Last week, for many of us – amid the usual noise of life – tax…

Sibling rivalry, at its best, is a kind of private story, isn’t it? Made up of half competition, half companionship, and the merging of those two worlds is wholly impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. Growing up, we kept score on everything. Not just the obvious things – sets on the tennis…

When news of the Roberta II landfill first broke last May, I admit my first reaction wasn’t outrage like so many. It was something closer to a shrug. After all, I grew up around it. In conversation, if not in practice. I had an uncle who owned a waste management company. Garbage wasn’t some distant…

Over the weekend, I watched “Reality Check,” a documentary series revisiting the now-maligned “America’s Next Top Model.” What struck me wasn’t just the criticism of a show we once loved, but how confidently we act like society was once misguided. I have to roll my eyes at that. We like to think ourselves as evolved,…

About two weeks ago, I did the unthinkable: I downloaded TikTok. After months of friends insisting, cajoling, threatening, and guilt-tripping, I finally caved. I’ve yet to decide whether that was a good thing. I needed another social media account like I need a hole in the head, but here we are, like a moth to…

The television series Love Story, chronicling the lives of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., recently hit on something personal – the helplessness of being public property. Recent episodes have shown Carolyn Kennedy’s struggle to deal with the incessant press intrusion and strangers commenting on her life. While she endured this on a very…

Spencer Matthews is a decade younger than me. His family own Eden Rock on the Caribbean island of St. Barts and he’s well-known for his appearances on “Made in Chelsea,” a reality television show about posh Londoners, living in the historic Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. We both speak a little French and have…

I remember July 16, 1999. No one who experienced that could forget it, or the wall of media coverage that rivaled the death of Diana, Princess of Wales two years before. For two families, it must have been a living nightmare, as helicopters hovered over familiar water and perpetual news footage looped to feed a…