The perils of The Walkable City

A wise lady (Carrie Bradshaw) once said: "So I walked. I walked 48 blocks in $400 shoes...". I'm learning the harsh lesson of walking in her shoes.

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Three months in New York and I’ve already lost five pairs of impractical shoes to the streets of Manhattan. (Brooklyn, with its affinity for more casual, hardier footwear, has been kinder to me.) That’s a burn rate of one every two-ish weeks. The shoes are still in my closet, they’re just utterly chewed up, ripped and scuffed. I should have known this would be the punishment for living in a walkable city!! I’m also embarrassed to admit I have more than one Safari tab dedicated to the search query “best cobbler in NYC reddit”. Those tabs will remain open until I stump up the extortionate amount of cash it will take to fix all five pairs. Or should I simply accept they’re beyond repair?

Anywho, welcome to Quality Sheet! I hope you’re enjoying your week so far. This week is all about posh olive oil and the world’s best running race (“best,” because it involves pizza).

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I’ve almost fallen victim to the cult of Graza a few times—willingly—but then I back out when I see the price. Thankfully, that hasn’t stopped the olive oil brand from making tens of millions of dollars worth of sales from its fun squeezy bottles. Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull writes smartly, as always, about how the brand became a hit: “If a company wants to sell you something, it needs to figure out how to induce the decisions it wants in buyers, and inventing a new approach to package a familiar commodity has historically gone a long way toward convincing consumers that your product is the best.” (Free link here.)

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Britain is in the midst of a butterfly emergency. An annual butterfly count in the UK this summer found significantly fewer of the insects fluttering around, likely down to the use of pesticides. “When they are in trouble we know that the wider environment is in trouble too,” one scientist says of the key indicator species.

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Amazon this week announced it’s ending its work-from-home policy in January, with CEO Andy Jassy claiming a return to the office is better for collaboration and connection between employees. Some executives will tell you that’s not the case. Last week, I moderated a panel at Forbes’ Future of Work summit on how to make hybrid work, work. It was a really insightful conversation with executives from Pinterest, Neiman Marcus and Aéto Strategy — you can watch some of it here.

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With the New York marathon weeks away, what better way to prepare than to warm up with the city’s annual pizza run? The concept is flawless: run a one-mile loop and reward yourself with a slice of pie at the end. Repeat a few more times. Time Out’s Morgan Carter ran the race and got the t-shirt to prove it!

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What happens when you look around you, only to realise that your personal style is eerily similar to that of your peers? Is it time to rethink our understanding of personal style in the age of microtrends? Brooke LaMantia writes in The Cut: “In the age of social media, a sense of uniqueness is damn near impossible to find. And maybe it’s overrated. We are all getting our style from somewhere; why not let it be from other queer kids my age?”

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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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