Dear friends,

As the year winds down and we approach the shortest windows of daylight, I make it a custom to look back and select the handful of cultural experiences that shone most brightly in my mind — the ones that moved me, tickled me, or that I kept thinking about. As usual, some were performances or books, some were art exhibits, many were meals. Some were hard to categorize. I felt grateful to have so many to choose from.

(In the past, I’ve catalogued these on Twitter.)

Before we get into the good stuff, I wanted to share some writing that published since my last update.

• For Men’s Health, I spoke to guys whose lives were transformed by GLP-1 drugs.

• And for Cultured, I profiled the Brooklyn artist Dominique Fung, who has woven her work through New York. It’s in this month’s print issue.

I’ve also been very busy regenerating my Achilles tendon, which I ruptured over the summer playing tennis. (Editors reading this: I want to write about my foot! I have SO many thoughts about my foot. Commission me to write about my foot.)

Ok, without further ado—

A short list of cultural ~items~ that blew my mind in 2025, in no particular order:

1. Robert Caro’s notebooks at the New York Historical Society

   

2. Fake books by Molly Young and Teddy Blanks in “Bonjour Tristesse,” dir. Durga Chew-Bose

3. Safe return of the astronauts who were stuck in space

   

4. Man who was swallowed, then spit out, by a whale

5. Meg Stalter on Colbert yelling “get me outta here!”

6. Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery

   

7. Tim Robinson’s “The Chair Company”

8. The hook from “How Bad Do You Want Me,” Lady Gaga

9. Watercolors from Lisa Yuskavage (The Morgan Library, L) and Hilma af Klint (MoMA, R)

   

10. Dinner at Gunshow, Atlanta, Ga.

11. Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You?

12. Flannery O’Connor’s paintings and carvings, Milledgeville, Ga.

    

    

13. The Alter G, an anti-gravity treadmill

14. Burger and alfredo at Wild Cherry

    

15. Iiu Susiraja, “Touchdown by Venus,” Gratin Gallery

    

16. Scialatielli at Il Posto Accanto

    

17. Book sale, NYC Municipal Archives and Library

Happy new year, everyone, and here’s to more awe in 2026—

Lindsay

Dear friends,

I’m writing to share with you a story I’ve been working on for a long time, and that is close to my heart. It’s online today in The New York Times, in the Well section, which covers health.

It’s about a lifestyle program marketed to people with Alzheimer’s disease and their loved ones. The program leans on concepts from alternative medicine, like the keto diet, intermittent fasting, dozens of supplements, and various other treatments. It touts some testimonials from people who said following its strict guidelines helped them reverse their Alzheimer’s symptoms, and is based on a few small studies (without control groups) that showed promise.

But the consensus in mainstream neurology is that there is no proven way to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. And so for more than a year, I dug into this program, its founder, the business around it, and similar offerings from competitors. And I followed many patients and their caretakers, who spoke to me as they followed its strict, complex — and unconventional — rules.

Jamie Kelter Davis for NYT

Here’s the thing about this protocol: not only is 1. it aimed at a vulnerable population and 2. based on questionable science — it’s 3. really expensive. This trifecta is an ethical minefield, and is often what compels me to do a story.

The family in my story paid $25,000 over eight months in the hope of reversing the patient’s Alzheimer’s. Their desire to try anything that might help is wholly understandable.

All the more reason to look carefully at this business, its network of 2,000 practitioners, and what they advertise to people in a desperate position.

I’m grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Good Science Project Fellowship, the sources who devoted their time and energy to sharing their experiences with me, and my Times editors — especially Maxwell Strachan, who was a persistent champion of the story.

You can read my story in The Times here, and keep an eye out for it in print in the coming days.

xo,

Lindsay

Dear friends,

Interviewing the writer and director Durga Chew-Bose for The New York Times was never going to be an experience that flowed in one direction. I knew, from having read her collection of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood, and her vibey meditations on artists like Rihanna, that it would be unlikely that she’d turn off her rapt attention to the world even as she went inward to answer some questions from me.

Maria Wurtz for NYT

And answer them she did: Durga was generous and game, letting me tag along to a panel following a screening for her new film, “Bonjour Tristesse,” and a dinner with cast and crew where I ate delicious steak frites and asked her friends for stories about her. And then she sat with me for nearly two hours the next morning over breakfast, telling me about her art, her goals, her childhood, and her way of being in the world.

She told me, for instance, that she returns often to the lines from the Louise Glück poem “Nostos”:

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

I told Durga I didn’t think that quite applied to her, though. Wasn’t she always looking at the world?

Even right now?

So much so that when I ordered my scrambled eggs well-done at the diner, a habit I copied from my mother, Durga was so delighted with the specificity of that choice that, the next day, she tried it herself. “I got a Wendy special before leaving New York,” she texted me, referring to my mother. “Life changing.”

So much so that when she wrote a screenplay adaptation of the 1954 French novel Bonjour Tristesse, its world was so fully formed, even on the page, that she was really the only choice to direct it, her producers told me.

Lena Dunham told me that when she met Durga back in the late aughts, she knew she wanted to be near her “big gorgeous brain.” Chloë Sevigny, who stars in the film, and whose warmth and charisma is a force all its own, told me that Durga’s way of thinking, writing, and speaking sold her on the project. “I came on board mostly just wanting to be a part of her world, and serve her and the story,” she said.

“There is intimacy in small details,” Durga told me.

And she’s right — you want to be in her field of vision.

You can read my story in The Times here, and keep an eye out for it in print in the Styles section in the coming days.

xo,

Lindsay

Dear friends,

Sometimes it’s my job — and my honor — to bring you niche controversies from random corners of the internet, because they can be juicy, but also because they are interesting and say something deeper about who we are and the way we live.

Today’s kerfuffle comes courtesy of “CleanTok,” the part of TikTok where people typically post housekeeping tips and routines, and maybe push products like a weekly checklist or their favorite Amazon tools.

Kylie Perkins, a 27-year-old woman in North Carolina, has — really in the last few days — blown up on the platform with her “motivational” cleaning videos, which feature her folding laundry, wiping down her kitchen, or opening her blinds.

In most of her posts, she’s yelling.

Kylie Perkins (@sociallykylie) via TikTok

Perkins says that young mothers like her who have fallen behind on cleaning are being “lazy”; that dishes left overnight in the sink are “disgusting”; that a diagnosis of illness is “an answer, not an excuse” for someone who is overwhelmed by daily tasks.

Maybe some tough love can be helpful at times — and it’s definitely resonating with people and getting them to straighten up, for now.

But people online have been pointing out that the idea that self-blame is an effective strategy is misguided; there’s actually solid evidence for self-compassion as the best framework for making behavior changes over the long term. In turn, Perkins has cautioned her 2 million followers to steer clear of dangerous “enablers” who favor a more compassionate approach.

Controversy was swirling even before one influencer made a video speculating that Perkins was a Trump supporter and urging people to unfollow her because of that. In response, more than 1 million people, many of them conservatives, followed Perkins in the last few days.

I told my editor on Monday that I was certain a book or podcast deal would fall into place for Perkins by next month. But it probably won’t take that long. Last night, on TikTok Live, Perkins said she’d signed with a talent agency that has an in-house podcasting service.

It all got me thinking about the politics of self-talk and keeping house.

You can read my story in The Cut here.

xo,

Lindsay

Dear friends,

A lot of book covers have come to look pretty much the same. Through some combination of market forces related to thumbnail display on Amazon’s app and signaling to BookTok’s massive purchasing power, there’s been a march toward homogeneity that can feel dispiriting.

Na Kim’s book covers are different.

They are striking; they take risks. They are good.

I became interested in understanding how Na does this — how she takes in a novel and translates it into an image. Then I learned she was doing a version of this at The Paris Review: finding or commissioning art to go in its pages, and to serve as a cover.

When I saw recently that Na would be exhibiting her own paintings, it felt like the right moment to bring the story to The New York Times. Na, who is a deeply private person, was gracious enough to open her Clinton Hill studio — and contacts — to me.

Dana Scruggs for NYT

We spoke a lot about what it means to do the thing she does so well: alchemize words into images. And I spoke to writers like Sheila Heti, Raven Leilani, and Jeffrey Eugenides about what it was like to go back and forth with Na as she worked this magic on their books.

“I didn’t even know that it was possible to feel that way about a cover,” Sheila told me.

So much of Na’s work is about diminishing herself to make room for this work of translation. But now that she is painting — her work is on view until February 22 at Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea — I wanted to capture what I could of Na’s private self.

I learned that Na is a tinkerer and a maker with an appetite for the whimsical and absurd: she and a friend fashioned miniature shoes out of bread for a now-defunct project they called Panolo Blahnik.

She has a bumper sticker on a utility cart in her studio that says, for some reason, “I’ll die for your fat ass.” She gives the best gifts, her friends told me, both IRL and in Animal Crossing. She takes her dog, Moon, everywhere. She listens to Bad Bunny, Willie Nelson, and the Grateful Dead. She’s obsessed with the artist Ann Craven, who specializes in painting the moon.

And every day, she makes time to complete a painting, returning again and again to the same portrait of an imagined subject. (Don’t even think about suggesting it might be a self-portrait.)

via Na Kim and Nicola Vassell Gallery; Photo by Lance Brewer

To me, these canvases feel like Na’s own covers — translations into imagery not of a book — but instead, of something of herself.

You can read my story in The Times here, and keep an eye out for it in print in the Styles section in the coming days.

xo,

Lindsay