Helen Lewis and I are doing a live event in London on August 3. Tickets here! When the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care Version 8 was released in September 2022, a very strange thing happened: WPATH removed references to minimum age requirements for various medical interventions, describing the change as a “correction” in a notice that now reads, weirdly: “This correction notice has been removed as it referred to a previous version of the article, which was published in error.

Someone in my town asked me for an easy care plant suggestion that tolerated shade and was deer resistant. I immediately answered Variegated Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’). This elegant perennial grows 18 to 24 inches tall, has green and white striped foliage that turns a golden yellow in autumn. Its arching stems emerge from the ground in early spring and, in late spring, small, white bell-like flowers dangle beneath the leaves.

About certain subjects, I have a compulsion to show off my knowledge. At a dinner party, I’ll often dig my nails into my palm rather than correct a misstatement. Sometimes, though, I can’t help myself. It’s a flaw in my manners. But it’s also one of the reasons I write.  Thorsten Veblen’s 1899 book, Theory of the Leisure Class, held that the upper class felt compelled to display their wealth through conspicuous consumption, measured not only by material luxury goods, but by avoiding work and spending their time in non-productive leisure.

When Billy Joel, the American singer-songwriter, was visiting his estranged father in Vienna, Austria, they were sitting on the sidewalk at a coffee house when Joel suddenly noticed an older woman sweeping the streets. Joel told his father how awful for this older woman to be doing this type of work. To which, his father replied, "No, it is not. She is being useful and doing a service that benefits everyone.

If you stick to Ulaanbaatar’s center, as most visitors do, it wouldn’t strike you as that much different than any other post-Soviet city. It’s got the monumental plazas juxtaposed against newer glass towers. It’s got the Brezhnev-era apartment complexes, with their colossal tile motif-ed rectangular buildings. It’s got the wide boulevards, walled in by four-story apartment complexes, dotted with kiosks, and jammed with cars, trolleybuses, and pedestrians dressed against the cold.