The Week We Talked About Summer, Honestly

The private room at the back of the house. The velvet banquette. The second bottle—a 2015 Krug Grande Cuvée, because we're celebrating something.

You know those conversations—late enough that the posture softens, honest enough that someone finally says the thing everyone's been thinking? The dinner party's over and only the interesting people are left. The room is warm. Someone pours another glass. Someone says something true.

That's what this is. Smart women, good wine, sharp talk—still elevated, still us, but looser. A little unfiltered. A little bit mischievous. Every Saturday evening in your inbox.

Tonight's pour: A French 75, which is gin, lemon, sugar, and champagne poured into a flute that has not been on a flute trend in eighty years. It is the drink for women who do not need a reason to celebrate on a Thursday and do not need permission to drink it on a Tuesday either, and it brings the exact register of bright, sharp, faintly aggressive cheer that we are operating in tonight.

Updates, darling. Keep up.

We did not publish a new piece this week, and we are not apologizing for it. Last week's pieces are still traveling, the Boss piece in particular, which the group chats are dissecting like a Sotheby's catalogue, and there is something to be said for letting a strong week sit on the page for an extra seven days while we read what comes back from readers.

What is happening instead is the unglamorous version of editorial work that nobody writes about, which involves closing the spring data, redesigning the site navigation so the good pieces stop getting buried under last quarter's content, and finalizing what is coming next, none of which we are previewing here, although we will say it is sharper than what you have read so far, which is saying something.

This is also the moment in the spring when the year's actual reading begins, because the social calendar has briefly cooled and the books on the nightstand since January are finally getting opened, and the good thing about the third week of May is that nobody is asking anything of you that cannot be answered on Monday.

Your favorite group chat, but with citations.

The hostess gift has gotten out of hand, and we need to discuss it before the summer entertaining season opens for real.

A friend of ours arrived at a small dinner in East Hampton last weekend with a perfectly nice candle and a bottle of Sancerre, and discovered, on the entry table, that another guest had brought a piece of vintage Pucci scarves still in the original Bonwit Teller box, while a third had brought a small painting, and a fourth, who clearly understood the assignment, had brought a case of the host's favorite wine sourced from her cellar guy in Burgundy with a note that read only, I owe you for January. Our friend left her candle in the car and is, by her own admission, still recovering.

What used to be a gesture has become a competition, and the competition is being conducted, like all the most important competitions in adult life, with absolutely no announcement and absolutely no scoring system, which means you are losing it without knowing the rules. In 2014, the candle was a thoughtful gift. By 2026, it is what you bring when you have not thought about the gift at all, and it has been priced into the bottom tier of the giving economy along with the bouquet from the corner florist, the chocolates that are not Pierre Hermé, and any bottle of wine your host could have bought herself on the way home from school pickup.

The middle tier, where most of us are operating without realizing we have been quietly demoted, includes the nice scented candle from the small French brand that came in the linen pouch, the bottle of something the host would not have known to buy on her own, and the cookbook by the chef the host has mentioned more than once. This is acceptable, recoverable, and entirely forgettable, which is exactly the problem with it. The top tier, which is where the woman with the vintage Pucci was operating, requires a gift that is one of three things: personal in a way that demonstrates the giver has been paying attention all year, sourced in a way that demonstrates the giver has access the host does not, or so specifically aligned with the host's actual life that she laughs out loud when she opens it. The case of wine from the cellar guy did all three at once.

The women who are good at this maintain a small list in a note on their phone, which contains the host's favorite olive oil producer, her preferred florist with the florist's phone number (because the corner shop is the candle of bouquets), the cookbook author she has mentioned twice, the niche perfumer whose scarves she collects, and the name of the chef who would do a single dinner for her, off the books, as a favor to the giver. Three years of attention went into building it, and nobody but the giver ever sees it, which is exactly the point.

If you do not have the list, start one. If you have the list, do not, under any circumstance, let anyone catch you looking at it.

Off the record.

The white linen dress is back, and not the slip-dress version of the 2010s, which was Instagram and was for honeymoons. We mean the actual one, with structure and a collar and sleeves, the kind worn by the woman at the lunch at the country house in Connecticut who is not trying. The Row, Khaite, and Toteme have all sold out of their respective versions, with Toteme gone since March, and the dress to have between now and Labor Day is the one the woman next to you bought in February.

BETWEEN US: The white linen dress is the most class-coded garment in American summer, and the hostess at the lunch will register what you are wearing without comment.

The Venice Architecture Biennale opened last weekend, and the people who actually care, as opposed to the people who post about caring, are quietly saying the national pavilions are doing more interesting work than the curated main exhibition this cycle. Switzerland's, Spain's, and the Nordic countries' are operating together as something close to a single conceptual project, the U.S. pavilion is skippable, the parties are skippable, and the move is to stay an extra day for the city itself, which when the Biennale crowds clear is the closest thing to time travel still legally available.

BETWEEN US: The person who flies to Venice for the Biennale and posts only the gondola did not understand what they came to see.

The summer share is being renegotiated across the relevant geographies, and the classic three-couple Hamptons share, conducted across four weekends with rotating grocery duty and the polite fiction that everyone is friends, is being quietly replaced by the one-couple full-summer rental, with selected friends invited for specific weekends and no group chat about the cleaning. The cost is higher and the relief, by every account from women who have made the switch, is enormous, the way leaving a board you did not want to be on is enormous.

BETWEEN US: The friend who still asks if you want to do a share is the friend who has not yet figured out that adulthood includes paying for your own beach house.

One thing worth getting smart about.

The summer reading list industry is a scam, and you should make your own list instead. Every May, every publication and newsletter and podcast in America produces a summer reading list, and they are, with vanishingly few exceptions, identical to each other, containing the same eight books written by the same six writers and blurbed by the same four people, none of which are the books anyone is going to read at the beach. They are the books people are going to be photographed holding at the beach, and there is a meaningful difference between the two categories.

The whisper: The reading-list industrial complex exists because the publishing houses need to move inventory before the fall and the reading-list editors need to fill column inches, so the lists are produced four months in advance by people who are not, themselves, going to the beach. What actually gets read in August, by every reader we trust, is some combination of the long novel that has been saved for the trip, the genre book the reader does not want anyone to know she reads, the memoir of someone she went to college with, and the trashy thriller her mother handed her at the lake.

The bigger whisper: The most accurate reading list of the summer is the one assembled in the back of a notebook by the reader herself, in conversation with two friends she trusts, sometime between right now and the first weekend in June. The good list has between four and seven books on it, including one reread, one book that has been on the shelf for over a year, one novel over five hundred pages, one slim volume of poetry or essays, and one book she will not finish and will not feel guilty about not finishing.

TL;DR: Make your own list, on paper, with two friends, by the first of June, and read what you actually want to read. The published lists are theater, and you are too old to perform for strangers.

Something worth smiling about.

Eurovision is tonight, and we will not apologize for caring about it. Yes, the songs are mostly bad, the staging requires an explanation, and there will be fire at some point along with an oversized inflatable object of unclear symbolic meaning, a ballad sung by a woman from a country you cannot find on a map who will be, briefly, the most famous person in Europe, and at least one moment of unscripted geopolitical awkwardness that the BBC presenters will have to talk around for forty seconds. All of this is the point. Eurovision is the most fun television produced anywhere in the world on any night of the year, and the women who watch it watch it with the seriousness of women who understand that joy is not optional. The finals start at three in the afternoon Eastern time, the live stream is findable, and we recommend something cold in a tall glass and the group chat on standby.

Five things worth the second glass.

The Boss Everyone Hates and Nobody Will Replace The female executives whose teams cry in the bathroom and whose results cannot be argued with, and who stopped trying to be liked at forty-one. Still the most-shared piece of the month.

Naked Under the Dior The strategic underdressing of women who know exactly what they are doing in a six-thousand-dollar dress, and what the room thinks it is about versus what it is actually about.

The Lunch Hour Has Changed The midday two hours, reported through the hotel revenue managers, the rideshare data, and the doormen who have seen what they have seen.

The Wedding Night That Is Not the First Time What the night now actually is, and where the actual private event of the contemporary wedding has migrated to without anyone bothering to tell the bride.

The Concierge Who Sources Anything Inside the procurement category that operates above the hotel and outside the platforms, with twelve clients per firm, six-figure retainers, and contracts that run thirty pages.

Because the glass is not empty yet.

Listening: Jamila Woods, Water Made Us. The 2023 record from the Chicago poet-musician who is a poet first and a musician second, which is exactly why the songs land the way they do, intimate and literary and unhurried. Start with "Tiny Garden," on a Sunday morning over the second cup of coffee, before the day has asked anything of you.

Leave us with this: "She did it on a Tuesday in her forty-first year, and she has not looked back." The closing line of the Boss piece, which is still landing in the group chats and is, by every account, the line readers are texting each other.

Intrusive thought: Whether the book on your nightstand is the book you want to be reading or the book you want to be seen reading, and what the gap between the two is telling you about the rest of the summer.

If this landed somewhere true, forward it to one person who would read it without skimming and not say anything until they got to the end.

Read everything at modernmonclaire.com.

Until next Saturday.

Adrienne