What Happens After Dark at Amsterdam’s Mystery Manor

You’d have to be searching for something peculiar to stumble across the Mayer Manor. Luckily, it seems you and I are always in search of something peculiar. Originally a 15th century monastery, later occupied by a wealthy tobacco merchant of the 19th century, the four-storey mansion is tucked away behind a canal in the red light district. By day it goes by the “Mayer Manor”, by night, it becomes a curious Theatrum Vitae, where Amsterdam’s eccentrics and bohemians play after dark, where absurdist subcultures are celebrated, and if you’re game, where Eyes Wide Shut fantasies can become a reality…

- Messy Nessy Chic

This Is How I Learned To Accept Being 'Too Horny'

I thought my horniness was a post-breakup aftershock. Instead, I’m realising this is my body making her demands know – and I have to listen to her. I don’t know if it was a blessing or a curse that when my office’s work from home policy became a little more, um, loose, so did I.

I was in my late twenties and I suddenly found myself very horny. As you can suspect, working from home was a challenge in this state of mind; especially with my new roommate, the Hitachi Magic Wand. (I won’t get into it lest you have a bottle of wine and a few hours to spare, but let me just say this: that is one powerful vibrator.)

When I wasn’t masturbating, I was thinking about masturbating. The days I did go into the office, I found myself staring blankly at my computer, imagining bedroom adventures with my now growing list of crushes.

- HuffPost

‘Easy’ Is The Most Sex Positive Show On Television

With its second season, Joe Swanberg‘s Easy cements itself as the most sex positive show on television. Structured as a series of vignettes as is Swanberg’s style, Easy tells the stories of several couples living in Chicago. The stakes are never too high, and the show perpetually has a day-in-the-life sort of tone running through it.

In Season 2, the series explores a couple (Michael Chernus and Elizabeth Reaser) who decides to explore an open marriage, and a sex positive writer (Karley Sciortino) who is a sex worker on the side. Almost every story and character in Easy ties back to sex in some way. However, the show never feels as scandalous as that sentence may make it seem. By being upfront with its sexual themes, Easy is able to move past the novelty of being steamy on television and actually dive into the complicated ways sex relates to intimacy, understanding, conflict, and power.

- Decider

Wildlife Intertwine in Finely Rendered Mythological Worlds

Sinuous, intertwined wildlife bridge worlds of the living and the dead in Lauren Marx’s intricate multi-media work. Twisting fox heads, disemboweled deer, and lambs bursting with flowers and birds are rendered with watercolor, ink, pen, and colored pencil. Marx often places her animal compositions on semi-abstract backgrounds, awash with grey tones that give a sense of weightlessness to the dense drawings by evoking fog or clouds.

- Colossal

12 things people decide within seconds of meeting you

Psychologists call it “thin-slicing.” Within moments of meeting you, people decide all sorts of things about you, from status to intelligence to conscientiousness.

Career experts say it takes just three seconds for someone to determine whether they like you and want to do business with you. It also only takes three seconds for someone to decide if they are attracted to you, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania.

Fortunately, you have some control over the way others see you. For example, wearing tailored clothes and looking at your conversation partner in the eye will generally create a more positive impression. But as for how aggressive you seem? That’s largely determined by your facial structure.

- Ladders

The truth about midlife dating and sex

Dating is an adventure at any age — nerve-racking, exhausting, crushing and occasionally wonderful — but maybe even more so in midlife. The stakes are higher, whether you’re looking for a life partner and co-parent, or emerging from a long-term relationship with new clarity about what you want from the rest of your life. In a landmark survey commissioned by Style, more than 1,000 single men and women over the age of 35 talked frankly about their dating experiences: what they’re looking for, how they go about finding it and, crucially, how it feels. The results make clear that, in 2020, the dating landscape for midlifers is even more Wild West than it is for many gen Zers.

- The Times

Advanced Love: The Secrets of a Lasting (and Stylish) Relationship

Welcome to the world of Advanced Love, courtesy of photographer, author, and fellow bleeding heart, Ari Seth Cohen. Following the success of his Advanced Style universe, celebrating the sartorial flair of the senior set (in book and film format), comes yet another round of mature fashion mavericks living life to the fullest – only, this time, in a vibrant bouquet of unique and well-aged love stories. We asked Cohen to pull some of his favourites from the book (and picked a few of our own), to talk about what it really means to wear your heart on your sleeve.

- Messy Nessy Chic

Derrière la porte : la fidélité à géométrie variable

Thomas* est avec sa blonde depuis 20 ans. Il l’aime à la folie. C’est réciproque. Tellement qu’ils se donnent la liberté de vivre des aventures ailleurs, dans le virtuel ou le réel, et ce, sans craindre pour la survie de leur couple. Parce qu’avant d’être un couple, justement, ce sont des individus. Et ils s’assument ainsi. Récit.

- La Presse

Frédéric Beigbeder en rogne contre la toute-puissance de l’humour

Revoici Octave Parango. Il était cynique et défoncé à souhait dans le livre 99 francs, roman-comète qui a propulsé l’écrivain Frédéric Beigbeder au panthéon du star-système littéraire français au tournant des années 2000. Il était très en verve et tout aussi débauché dans Au secours pardon en 2007.

En 2020, Octave Parango réapparaît dans L’homme qui pleure de rire, toujours aussi sardonique et presque toujours aussi habile à manier la phrase qui tue. Il a 54 ans, il s’est un peu assagi, mais il inhale sans broncher quelques rails de kétamine en pestant contre le règne tout-puissant des humoristes à la radio à heure de grande écoute.

- Le Devoir

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias

As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.

THE EAST WIND COMMUNITY is hidden deep in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, less than 10 miles from the Arkansas border, surrounded by jagged hills and tawny fields. Getting there requires traversing country roads that rise, dip and twist through chicken-wire-fenced farmsteads and grazing pastures cluttered with rusty agricultural equipment until you reach 1,145 acres of largely undeveloped highland forest, where cedar, oak, pine and mulberry create a dense canopy. Beneath that are 27 buildings and structures, including four large dormitories, nine personal shelters, a kitchen and dining facility, an automobile shop, a nut butter manufacturing plant and a cold-storage warehouse, all built over the years by the community since its founding in 1974. Outside, farm animals — six piglets, 50 chickens, several dozen brown-and-white cows — crunch through the carpet of winter leaves.

- NY Times

Des milliers de rêves américains évaporés

La mer de Salton était pratiquement aux portes du Johnson’s Landing Cafe & Bar et du terrain de camping qui le jouxte. Mais, aujourd’hui, l’étendue d’eau salée, dont la taille est comparable au lac Saint-Jean, est à peine visible du casse-croûte. Une odeur fétide s’en échappe.

Le vaste stationnement de l’établissement, reconnaissable à sa toiture de tôle ondulée rouge et blanche, est pratiquement désert. Une affiche couvre l’entièreté de la porte vitrée. Elle annonce la tenue d’un karaoké. Les nostalgiques d’un temps perdu peuvent y reprendre les refrains de Frank Sinatra et des Beach Boys, pour qui le lac Salton Sea n’avait pas de secrets.

- Le Devoir

Farewell Fleabag: the most electrifying, devastating TV in years

Phoebe Waller-Bridge raised the bar so utterly with her hit show’s second, and final, series that you have to shake your head in astonishment … then go back to the start.

That’s it. The End. Or at least, according to Sian Clifford, who plays Fleabag’s sister Claire in the show that has become a breakout hit in the UK and US: “It is complete.”

Series two, which has just wrapped up, marks the end of the sitcom about a Londoner grappling with the death of her best friend, a troublesome family, running her own business and navigating a tangle of unfulfilling and masochistic relationships. In truth, Fleabag waving goodbye to the camera should have been all we needed to know that this was the last we’d see of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character – whose actual name we never learned. But who thought one of the final shots would be of a CGI fox?

- The Guardian