Curated Letter N°16

September & October Edition

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Refined Hearsay, picked to boost Casual Confidence

My Dear Friends,

While the world’s been back to bullet points and back-to-school energy for over a month, you’re getting something else entirely: a Curated Letter focused on sophistication, refined hearsay, and just enough chit chat to boost casual confidence. Welcome to your autumn edit.

The more you know, the less you need to prove–this is what casual confidence is about. More in four weeks!

– Yours, Harper

Bookology

Books that don’t just pass the time—they expand your thinking, compromise your comfort zone, and deepen the kind of casual confidence that carries well beyond the Curated Letter´s final sentence.

Cover of Banksy: A Graphic Novel, depicting a masked figure walking from a London streetscape—featured in the Curated Letter for its take on the politics of street art and the market’s talent for appropriation without consent.
Banksy (A graphic novel)

Author: Francesco Matteuzzi & Marco Maraggi
Published: Prestel, 11.October 2022

“Readers will learn not only of Banksy’s politically charged art and the causes he championed, but also of its worldwide dissemination, museum exhibitions, and record-breaking auctions,” says the publisher in a statement. The publication tackles thorny topics such as “who does street art belong to”, highlighting works by Banksy sold at auction that have been removed from their original sites without the artist’s permission, including pieces consigned to sale in Miami in 2014.

Breathless

Author: David Quammen
Published: Simon&Schuster, 4th October 2022

The story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world. Breathless takes you inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 as if we were peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase.

Cover of Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe—featured in the Curated Letter to boost casual confidence with true tales more gripping than fiction.
Rogues

Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Published: Doubleday, June 2022

“Rogues” is a collection of Keefe’s New Yorker articles about criminals, con artists, and more. It’s highly entertaining, of course, but what shines through most brightly is Keefe’s fascination with what makes us human even when we’re at our most imperfect.”  

The Song of the Cell

Author: Siddartha Mukherjee
Published: Scribner, 25th October 2022

Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down at their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Hooke christened them “cells”.
The discovery of cells and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. 

New Nobel

Not quite news– but absolutely belongs to every investor’s knowledge arsenal. Consider yourself equipped with casual confidence.

Ben Bernanke, Nobel Prize winner, featured in this Curated Letter—because being casually confident means knowing who’s shaping the global economy.
Ben Bernanke

The guy who followed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve( 2006-2014) was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. They received the price for their research into “Banks and Financial Crisis”- or more simple, a study about what banks are for.
Some, haile him for having prevented the second “great depression” by introducing innovative tools at the early stages of the banking crisis(2007-2008). Others heavily criticise him for measures like “quantitative easing”etc. . His critics say he “bailed out Wallstreet”, overinflated the FED’s balance sheet by trillions, and “created” too much money.
Photo: Reuters via BBC News/business

Spilled Beans

An ever-shifting selection of chatter, because curiosity is always in season and boosts casual confidence with out any effort.

A glimpse into a room at Hôtel Lambert—featured in this Curated Letter as a reminder that casual confidence includes knowing who’s buying, selling, and stirring up Parisian controversy

For Sale

Hotel de Lambert´s princely interior is up for sale. In 2007, the brother of the Emir of Qatar bought the residence for approximately €80 million. Its extensive restoration did cause some controversy. In February 2022 the property (without content) was sold to a French Billionaire for $ 227 Mio. The prince a great aficionado of the 17th and 18th-century decorative arts put up the “content” for sale at Sotheby. Proceeds of the sale will go to “The Al Thani Collection Foundation“.
Photo: Sotheby

this way To The Controversy
Kim Kardashian at Milan Fashion Week 2022, barely able to walk in a skin-tight gown—featured in the Curated Letter as fashion’s cautionary tale, where style over function wobbles into satire. A glimpse of influence gone impractical, all in the name of casual confidence.

LOL

Location: Milan Fashion Week, featuring Kim Kardashian as the protagonist.
Take a look and decide whether to giggle or to cry……..

About The Famous Wobble

Groucho Club

Hauser & Wirth, the swiss mega gallery, bought one of London’s most famous private clubs. Located in London´s Soho district it owns a collection of 150 pieces of contemporary art. Ewan Venters of Artfarm- Hauser and Wirth´s hospitality arm- said: “We will respect the history and traditions of the club, and we look forward to engaging with its membership to create a long-term future for the Groucho that builds on its eclectic appeal and maverick ethos.”
Photo @richard Lewissohn; photographer architecture&interiors

More About Tradition and History
Bella Hadid with bleached eyebrows at peak 2022 trend—proof that not every celebrity style cue deserves imitation. Featured in the Curated Letter to boost casual confidence while keeping one´s eyebrows

Latest Trend

This is no error but the latest trend: turning people’s looks into something absurdly alien. Note this! Bleached eyebrows are the desire of the season. It’s a look that’s getting feeds, proving rather not to be a fad but a celebrity-endorsed bandwagon.
It definitely raises my “darker than my hair” eyebrows.
Photo@Instagram.com /bellahadid

Want to raise some eyebrows?

Autumn Wisdom

“If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.” 

Edmund Burke, 1729-1797, Philsopher & Writer