A barge trip on the Thames provokes reflections on identity, history and England in the wake of Brexit. Sunday “Who was more influential, Churchill or the Duchess of Windsor?” says Stephanie, and roars with laughter. We are at The Stafford in London, the starting point of a six-day barge cruise along the Thames. From here, the small group of eight guests will be driven to the Magna Carta, a…

Rina Grob is back with another sharp and side-splitting Masterclass review. This time she learns about style from Tan France. Much like the first time I did a Masterclass I am going into this completely biased. I love Tan France. Love him. I watch anything he is on. I have read his book. I follow him on Instagram. Some times when I can’t sleep I rewatch his Architectural Digest…

Lessons from David Sedaris’s Masterclass on storytelling and humor, and the essay it produced. I love David Sedaris. He’s so catty, self-deprecating and honest that I could listen to him all day. In fact, I do listen to everything he produces on Audible, where he reads his own work. Theft by Finding, the 40-years of diaries he published in 2017, provide one of the…

What’s the point of comedy? I’ve been holding off publishing this one for a while now, since there seem to be many more important things going in the world that need space. While we are talking about Black Lives Matter, racial, environmental and social justice, it seems frivolous to think about what makes good comedy…

The three-star Michelin chef says it’s about emotion, imagination, and connecting to your palate. Since we’re all in quarantine, what better time to experiment in the kitchen? Massimo Bottura has some amazing recipes such as homemade tortellini in parmigiano cream, pasitelli with a broth that requires the slow overnight oven cooking of vegetable scraps, and an amazing complex layered “spin-painted” beet inspired by the…

Everything in life is a negotiation. Life is a negotiation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a terrorist or a businesswoman. Chris Voss is a former FBI negotiator who worked on over 150 hostage cases including the Jill Caroll case in Iraq, the Steve Centanni case in the Gaza Strip, and…

Should you do Natalie Portman’s Masterclass on acting, or watch Zoolander instead? Rina Grob considers. As you know, I’m struggling a bit with my ambitious plan to do one Masterclass a week, so I outsourced one to my brilliant and funny friend Rina Grob. Rina was the perfect choice to do Natalie Portman’s Masterclass on Acting because she’s studied drama and worked in the theatre…

You don’t need to know a lot about games to design them. You just need to know how to play. I’ve fallen a bit behind in my Masterclass program because I was writing a mega article about sex tech. It turns out that it’s pretty hard to learn one new thing a week while trying to do other things at the same time — who’d have thought??? In any case…

I photograph people. It allows me to have a point of view, and have a voice — Annie Leibovitz Annie Leibovitz decided that she did not want to be a photojournalist because she wanted to have more of a say; to be conceptual rather than objective in her work. …