F*ck! It's time!

It's...wait, what do you mean it's already November?

LOVEBEANS! (This is a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 13 reference. Click here to join the support group for those of us traumatized by Mauricio’s overuse of the word in last week’s episode.) Welcome to this week’s Quality Sheet. Mariah Carey, legendary singer and Christmas town crier, has already declared: “It’s tiiiiiiiiime!”. With that efficiency and festive spirit in tow, let’s dive right in.

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“Instagram is not art. Social media is not art,” performance art icon Marina Abramović tells David Marchese in the New York Times Magazine. What do you think?

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On the other side of the tableau, if you’re creative but not gifted at making things, should it matter? Professor James C. Kaufman encourages us to move beyond the biases that can stifle our creativity before we give it a chance to flourish. “There are a host of benefits to being creative that are not always obvious,” he writes.

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Vanessa Friedman with the genius take on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s enduring influence. Amid a 90s resurgence, the style and essence of the late Bessette Kennedy, publicist and wife of John F. Kennedy Jr., are torchbearers for the trend that has filtered down into the line sheets of both new and established design houses. “Like Diana…whose royal status, beauty and untimely death made her into a legend, Ms. Bessette Kennedy exists less as a person than an idea. Because she was so notoriously private, because she married into a family that had already colonized part of the public imagination, and because our memories of her are essentially preserved in amber, she will never age, get Botox, post an unthinking comment, get messy — or change her style,” Friedman writes.

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With each passing day, I understand further why Lil Mama crashed Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ MTV VMAs performance. When it comes to NYC, we don’t play. (Yes, another week, another declaration of love for my future hometown.) Even if, between falling cranes and other precipitations, it threatens harm to unsuspecting pedestrians. Just how concerned should one be about being flattened by a falling object in the Big Apple? amNewYork’s Aidan Graham looks into the matter.  

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Mouth of a sailor? Here’s philosophy lecturer Rebecca Roache on the thrill of a bloody* good swear word.

*That’s the best I can do today, damn it.

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Defecting from North Korea is punishable by death. That’s the danger two families faced as they fled one of the world’s most oppressive countries. Heightening the risk was a tight film crew that followed their journeys, documenting their escapes for film director Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia, released in the U.K. last month. Watch the trailer here.

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Maria Popova expertly synthesizes philosopher Alain De Botton’s theory on what makes up a healthy mind. De Botton writes: “Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance.”

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The town of Salem, Massachusetts, which capitalizes on the historic witch trials every Halloween, was not actually the centre of the 17th-century mass hysteria event, Atlas Obscura’s Theresa McKinney writes. Many of the accusations, prosecutions, and executions took place in Salem Village, which neighboured Salem Town and was renamed Danvers shortly after the traumatic hearings.

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On a warming planet, won’t anyone think of the trees? That’s the concern of scientists at Chicago’s Morton Arboretum, who are devising ways to help oaks adapt to rapid climate change, Grist’s Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco writes. Their work could be key to ensuring forests—and in turn animals and ecosystems—survive increasingly extreme conditions. Related: The End Of The World finally has a soundtrack. Three hundred years after Vivaldi composed “The Four Seasons,” Spanish music director Hache Costa modified the masterpiece to account for the “grim reality of global warming,” Reuters reports.

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Old news at this point, but today’s edition would not be complete without the latest addition to my vision board: Dame Maggie Smith for Loewe. If I’m not dripped out like this at 88, I will have done this life wrong.

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Thank you for reading. Share to sweeten someone’s day—and have a lovely rest of your week!

Isabel :)

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