For the past couple of months, I have been putting together a little weekly newsletter of sorts for my British colleagues, to loop them in on all the zany news and views tearing our fine country apart. Now, we’re going to open this little reading list to you – every Friday. These, then, are the bits and bobs in American culture and news this week that maybe didn’t make it into your feeds, but are worth your time.

Hiya from New York, where we are barely eking through the days with only the odd cat video and super nihilistic burn-out millennial meme to get us through the day. How gloomy are we? Well, we’re recirculating an article about a philosopher who, like Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective, thinks it would be better if we’d never been born, so…

Funny though, I think about that a lot: the two poles of belief in our species as expressed by characters played by Mr Matthew McConaughey. On the one hand, in Interstellar, his astronaut-farmer Cooper goes about fighting for the furtherance of the human race beyond even the horizon of relationships, descendants, and whatnot. And on the other hand, Cohle thinks we ought to “walk hand in hand into extinction”. But, how ‘bout them Yankees? (They lost; though the NBA did tip off this week and I got to see our friend Mr JJ Redick in action against the Knicks – the Pelicans won.)

Mr McConaughy’s space man Cooper could’ve probably explained dimensions to us in a nice and tidy way, but in his stead we’ll have to take Mr Sean Carroll’s word on the matter, in this Wired video. If the tourism to Iceland is anything to go by, we’re all already seeking out new dimensions to travel to next summer, so says writer Mr Kyle Chayka.

Mr Chayka also published a story this week on the man and empire that was/is Condé Nast. It’s quite a story – though, perhaps not quite as gruesome as that of the attempted reboot of Gawker – and begins to anticipate all sorts of questions about what a media company is and does in the 21st century, of what components a publishing company ought to be made. Like, for instance, have the star editors of yesteryear been replaced by the writer-influencer? Or is that role of zeitgeist-defining tastemaker to be taken by fashion designers?

This latter suggestion comes after the designer Mr Nicolas Ghesquière distanced himself from the American president, immediately after his own boss, LVMH CEO Mr Bernard Arnault very publicly aligned himself with the President at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Texas. Interesting that, in a time when brands – both corporate and personal – are made by political outspokenness, one of the most public political people in the US, Mr Mitt Romney, felt the need to create a secret Twitter account to voice his opinions. But what do we know. The really, really, rich, as Mr F Scott Fitzgerald would have it – and as Mr Romney certainly is – are different. “All they have is money,” according to The New York Times. “They’re defined by it.”

All I have are books by Mr John Le Carré, and so I happily gobbled whole his new one, Agent Running In The Field, this week. I also picked up and loved two books from the new Nobel laureate, Ms Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead and Flights. I found, too that I had a few credits for audio books, so I’ve been listening to Blowout by Ms Rachel Maddow, about the oil and gas industry, here and in Russia, as well as Catch And Kill, Mr Ronan Farrow’s book about his incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning story that sparked the #metoo movement.

As far as writers go, there was hardly any stylist more beloved in Downtown than Mr Nick Tosches, who passed away this week at the age of 69 – which I hope might stir a bit of rereading, especially of his biography of Mr Dean Martin.

Good things I watched on Netflix: Living With Yourself, starring our pal Mr Paul Rudd, and_ The Laundromat_, based on the Panama Papers, written by Mr Scott Z Burns and directed by the great Mr Steven Soderbergh.

Happy Friday.

A few things I picked up this week: a Dries Van Noten tie-dye Hawaiian shirt, which I wore under a navy suit for a formal dinner in LA, helping our friends at Mr & Mrs Smith judge their best new hotels of the year; a printed, tapestry-like wool scarf from Drake’s, which is coming in handy in NY; and suede chukkas from our man in Atlanta, Mr Sid Mashburn, which I’m just trying not to wear every single day.