Tracey Minkin

2 weeks ago | veranda.com | Tracey Minkin

It feels like artist Pierre Mottier is channeling all of Switzerland into his slender blade. The jagged ridgelines of its Alps, the broad slopes of its chalets, the bristled branches of its forests—he slices these intricate shapes into the paper spread before us. I watch as he takes a breath, steadies his cutting hand, and traces the minute curve of a leafing tree, plucking out the tiny shards of paper with the knife’s tip and blowing them out of the way.

2 weeks ago | veranda.com | Tracey Minkin

I am not prepared for the wildness. I had envisioned the Mekong River, Southeast Asia’s great waterway that carves a path from the plateaus of Tibet to the deltas of Vietnam, as a gentle passage. A jade-hued bearer of small boats through jungles. But this was before I join Heritage Line in the border town of Huay Xai for a weeklong cruise on the Upper Mekong through the limestone mountains and tribal villages of Laos.

2 weeks ago | veranda.com | Tracey Minkin

There is no sunrise more mystical than one on India’s Ganges river. It begins with the morning mist, which hangs so low and often so dense it diffuses the rising sun into an otherworldly scrim of mauves, oranges, and yellows. It muffles sounds: As the small villages of West Bengal come to life along its banks and people begin their day’s work—buzzing around on motorbikes, hammering brass, coaxing a reluctant cow—the human sounds disperse around the river like the murmurings of gods.

2 weeks ago | veranda.com | Tracey Minkin

I meet, at long last, Cleopatra. I had begun to wonder if she really existed—her brief but storied reign in the first century BCE was to me a watercolor plate in a history book, a verse from Shakespeare, a celluloid shimmer of a movie star. But now, here I stand at her feet, her regal silhouette rising above me in stone carved in sunken relief by an anonymous artist some 2,000 years ago.

2 weeks ago | aarp.org | Tracey Minkin

In the auspicious beginning of Hacks, Season 4 (premiering April 10 on Max), the superb dark comedy starring Jean Smart, 73, as Las Vegas comic Deborah Vance, Deborah and her protege Ava’s agent Jimmy snaps at Ava, “Blackmail on day one — not good!” Indeed, Ava (Hannah Einbinder, daughter of SNL’s Laraine Newman, 73) has forced Deborah to hire her as head writer for Deborah’s new late-night talk show.