“Singer grew up in and around Chez Panisse, Berkeley’s pioneering slow-food restaurant, opened by her mother, Alice Waters, in 1971. By her own account, she remains most comfortable in the boisterous, epicurean company of cooks, writers, and artists. Permanent Collection, launched in 2016 with Mariah Nielson, produces heirloom-worthy housewares in collaboration with designers and artisans, and is in large part a way to celebrate this heritage.”

-Departures

“Despite the challenges, these intrepid designers also say that recent changes enabled them to think small and work on more focused collections, meaning they had fewer pieces in production. Some were able to work in a different way — more as artists, rather than simply at the mercy of this exacting industry's timelines.”

-Departures

"There's utilitarian moisturizing and then there's nourishing, aromatic, anoint-me moisturizing. Attar Floral Repair Concentrate from buzzy San Francisco-based Monastery, a small-batch beauty brand (and skin-care studio), is the latter."

-Departures

“I spent entire days sitting upright in my bed, surrounded by a wide arc of dirtied dishes. Tupperware containers of varying sizes were sprinkled with salt and pretzel sediment. A spoon rested in a milky eighth-inch of melted ice cream. The bitten-off ends of snow peas clustered in a bowl like tiny beaks. Sometimes I wrote in a shabby vintage housedress and cotton leggings. The dress, faded and floral, looked like something a peasant might wear in an old Italian movie, and it somehow matched the aspect of mild, righteous suffering to which I was by then deeply committed.”

-Forge Magazine

“I find myself longingly looking back at baby pictures and videos of my kids from six or seven years ago, many made just before bedtime when we were coziest, silliest, lying together one-two-three in my big bed, laughing, practically sharing the same breath. I find myself moony with love as I read stories to my best friend’s toddler over FaceTime. She leans in to kiss the screen and I think I’ll die.”

-Romper

“Rather than argue for sitting on your couch trying not to check the Likes on your latest Instagram post, Odell pushes an informed politics of refusal, a blueprint for a more intentional life that rejects the capitalist definition of productivity. It’s activism masquerading as self-help. ‘I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter,’ Odell writes, ‘than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together?’”

-California Magazine