"I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out... When you host, quite often it feels like you’re just a spectator to your friends’ evening,” says Simon, 37, from Glasgow. In the past, he’s found that, as host, he spends so much time making sure his guests are catered for that it can be difficult to connect with them on anything other than a superficial level...“One reason is that our social networks may have become more scattered as cities have got larger,” he says. “If we live in smaller villages and towns, it is easy to visit for casual get-togethers. There is a thing called the 30-minute rule: if someone lives more than 30 minutes away, we pretty much stop seeing them regularly. The time/effort required becomes too great.”..In May this year, the Spectator claimed the dinner party was also being killed off “by the modern curse of the ‘dietary requirement’”; both food intolerances and voluntary restrictions appear to have increased over the past 20 years, and so cooking for others might certainly feel like more of a challenge...I’d venture that the rise of tablescaping has a lot to answer for... Whereas hosts might once have simply given surfaces a quick wipe and emptied the bins, there are now tips for curating the perfect playlist, and rules for creating an aesthetically pleasing “theme”...Caz has two children under the age of 10 and says her house is therefore always “a complete nightmare zone”. Of course, her friends don’t actually care about the mess. “I know this deep in my heart,” she admits, “but it doesn’t stop me from feeling shame every time anyone comes over.”..“Until the 1960s, things like homework from school was limited, and children kind of looked after themselves – playing in the street together and turning up only when they needed to get fed. Now the little darlings are under your feet until they go away to university.” In addition, he notes that there is now an “endless stream” of extracurricular clubs and activities that children are encouraged to take part in, which means “families have to be free to do a lot of ferrying”.Thompson also touches on the idea that it’s now “too much fun to be home alone”. Whereas we might once have invited friends over to stave off boredom – and faced social pressure to attend such events, even if we did not much care for the hosts – today we are “cocooned within personalised entertainment fortresses”.
Americans have been spending less and less time with their friends over the past two decades, a trend that started well before the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, and has continued long after restrictions were lifted. But looking across the week, Caren found that, starting in the mid-2010s, the biggest loss of friend time happened on Friday nights. (Saturday hangs have also declined a bit, but are still “nearly double the weekday level,” he wrote.)...But it seems that the vibe of Friday night is evolving... people of all ages have been reporting a strong preference for staying home on evenings and weekends. In a 2020 Gallup poll, Americans’ favorite way to spend an evening was “staying home with family.” The runner-up was “watching television or a movie at home.” Only 3 percent of people named “entertaining/visiting friends” as their favorite evening activity. In a 2026 Harris poll on Gen Z, 73 percent said that staying home was their default weekend plan...Friday nights in particular might be suffering because of their association with hitting the bars; drinking has fallen out of favor in the U.S... Or people might simply be too exhausted at the end of the workweek... For whatever reason, “the cost of going out on Friday nights—people aren’t finding this worthwhile anymore.”
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”...Like pretty much everyone else, I am well aware that my information is strip-mined wherever I go, in more ways than I can count and in many that I will never know... Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”...Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers."...Curious to see what insights on me OpenTable might share with that hypothetical restaurant, I sent the company a request for my personal data....
US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.
Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.
"I took this in 2025 in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, in the Oltepesi area. Three young giraffes were standing side by side on the savanna and looked back at me with great curiosity. Right behind the middle one stood a single umbrella acacia, perfectly lined up with its head and neck. The giraffe seemed to be wearing the tree, like a green hairdo or a fancy hat. Nothing was staged or arranged; it was a matter of being in the right spot at the right moment’"Photograph: Dirk Koster/Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026
"Langdon finished dressing, finally feeling warm in his heavy chinos, turtleneck, and thick Dale sweater."
"They met at Faukman's favorite table in Manhattan - the back booth at Trattoria Dell'Arte - where authentic Italian cuisine was served in a room decorated like an artist's studio...""Langdon would have much preferred his usual Vesper martini with Nolet's Reserve gin."
