Town & Country February 2023

“She is still considered, even by the severest critics, to be an artist of muscle and discipline: fervent, candid, exhilarating, and arguably the greatest living actress/musician in North America,” T&C wrote of Lena Horne in 1995. Throughout a career spanning 70 years, the legendary performer made enormous strides on screen and stage, starring in classics such as Stormy Weather and The Wiz and recording iconic hits from “I Got Rhythm” to “At Long Last Love”—all while breaking barriers as a Black woman in a predominantly white industry. Last fall Broadway paid homage to Horne (who died in 2010) by naming a theater after her—the first venue in Broadway history to honor a Black woman. It was a joyous celebration attended by New York governor Kathy Hochul, NYC mayor Eric Adams,…

Let’s start here, with the issue of T&C you’re holding in your hands, the first in what will be our 177th year. We were founded in 1846 by two enterprising young editors who wanted to make a magazine that would, as they stated in their editors’ letter, “instruct, refine, and amuse.” Our mission remains the same. We hope there are always lessons, refinements, and yes, fun, for you in these pages. (We take the amuse part very seriously.) We enter 2023 with tales of legacy college admissions, investigations into the search for lost artifacts and the value of family jewels, an assembling of your winter wardrobe, a quick trip down to a new Florida clubhouse, and a tribute to the fierce lifelong love between mothers and sons. Allison Williams is…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? Even 60 years after the debut of Where the Wild Things Are, few children’s books capture the imagination like Maurice Sendak’s classic. The tale, of a boy who discovers a magical world of monsters, turned him into a legend, but Sendak had long been a prolific artist. In the first retrospective since his death in 2012, more than 150 works are at the Columbus Museum in Ohio. THROUGH MARCH 5, COLUMBUSMUSEUM.ORG WHAT ARE WE WEARING? In the spirit of timeless icons, Harry Winston’s Avenue collection pays homage to New York’s Art Deco history, its geometric silhouettes and renegade spirit recreated in pink sapphires and diamonds. Heirlooms to inspire a bit of childlike wonder—and perhaps open the door to a different kind of magical universe? Consider this,…

If you listened carefully during the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried and the implosion of his cryptocurrency empire—the exchange FTX and the hedge fund Alameda Research—you might have heard the squeak of a spigot closing. A year ago Bankman-Fried founded the FTX Future Fund, a grant and investment–making organization to “improve humanity’s long-term prospects.” The group said it would distribute “at least $100 million,” maybe up to $1 billion in 2022, aimed at causes like pandemic prevention, nuclear disarmament, and the “safe” development of artificial intelligence. These existential preoccupations align with the ethos of “effective altruism,” a philanthropic movement that has swept through the Bay Area, picking up acolytes like the Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoff-man; Palo Alto’s favorite prophet gerontologist, Aubrey de…

Ask Emma Rice to explain the extraordinary shelf life of the Brontë sisters—Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, those 19th-century Brits who wrote some of literature’s most celebrated works—and her answer is simple. “These were not Victorian damsels,” Rice says. “They were hard as nails.” Rice is the adapter and director behind the Wise Children theater company’s production of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which the Guardian called “bold and ingenious” during a UK run and is now touring the U.S. And while Rice knows why revisiting Brontë’s story appealed to her (“the Brontës’ world is about emotional chaos,” she says, “and we’re also fighting for hope at the moment”), she isn’t alone in finding the sisters fascinating. In late 2021 a British charity raised close to $20 million to purchase a trove of…

Bozoma Saint John made her name in the C suite, working as a top executive at such companies as Netflix, Uber, and Endeavor. But when it came time to write her memoir, Saint John didn’t go in for the boardroom bromides and self-hagiography that tend to plague books by titans of industry. Instead The Urgent Life ($29, Viking) tells a more personal, and far more compelling, tale of love and loss, delving into tender topics like the suicide of her college boyfriend, the death of a child born prematurely, and her late husband’s harrowing battle with cancer. Saint John’s story is often not a happy one (“death hovered always,” she writes), but it’s told from the perspective of a survivor who has learned to appreciate the people and time she…