The Sunday Digest 170

"The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own."

Feb 15, 2026

Welcome to The Sunday Digest — a free Sunday newsletter featuring long (and some short) reads, original columns, things I’ve saved over the last week, relaxing playlists, episodes releases, exclusive product drops, and more. Yes, you can reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

Sunday Read: Champagne, Concierges and Emergency Sand: How the Ultra-Rich Travel

by Sarah Lyall for The New York Times

Despite the dysfunction and occasional murder, I think we’d all like to trade places with people staying at various White Lotus resorts around the world (the HBO world, at least). The massages, the Michelin star meals just a golf cart ride away, and perhaps even a day on another guest’s yacht — what’s not to love?

While I think the above is a large reason why so many of us love the show, I also think we enjoy watching the rich burn. It’s why I loved watching The Menu and and Triangle of Sadness. Sometimes, it just feels good to watch those more successful than you struggle. Hey, we’re all human.

This week’s Sunday Read, however, is the opposite of that feeling. If anything, I’m more jealous than I could ever be. Here’s an excerpt:

Once, to placate a client panicking because a monsoon had washed away the beach around the $40,000-a-night villa he had booked in the Seychelles, Mr. Ezon arranged to have an emergency shipment of sand brought in. Another time, he said, he arranged to have wall-to-wall carpeting installed in a 225-foot yacht his clients had chartered for $750,000 a week because the wife “didn’t want to take her stilettos off,” he said — and the yacht owners did not want anything damaging the wooden decks.
“There are no boundaries,” he said. “Think of the craziest thing you can think of. We’ll do it.”

Read in full here.

Also read this week —

For paid subscribers, I wrote about three passages from books I read in 2025 on Substack this week.
While this isn’t a “read” necessarily, I’ve been making a lot of updates to the Sunday Scaries website. Because everything has moved from websites to social media lately, it fell by the wayside for a bit. This year, I’ve committed to updating it more often with content that won’t live on Substack — I’m really excited about it. You can see the progress here.

The Sunday Haiku: “No.”

No no no no no,

no no no no no no no,

no no no no no.

New Episode › Retail Therapy 143: Olympic Fencer Nick Itkin

This week, we're joined by Olympic fencer Nick Itkin who has two Olympic medals from both the Tokyo and Paris games. We talk what it's like to be on the Olympic stage, what the Olympic Village is actually like, his experience as a Nike athlete, walking the runway for Peter Do at NYFW, his new Retail Therapy-dubbed nickname "The Hitman," and more.

Listen to Retail Therapy on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and anywhere else podcasts are found. You can also follow Retail Therapy on Substack.