Maybe you have to live in the bleak midwinter to get it. Maybe you have to see the countryside in its ash-white purity to understand—the landscape burnt-over by the dead indifferent cold. Maybe you have to wonder, as you wander out under the distant stars, what it would mean to live in a universe…
The story goes that the head writer on The Simpsons television show walked into a meeting one morning, two small band-aids on the same cheek, another on his neck under his chin. “What kind of a country is this?” he exclaimed. “They can kill all the Kennedys, but they can’t make a decent razor…
For some reason yet to be fathomed, the 50 million Americans born between the greatest generation and the baby boomers were never assigned a name—at least not one widely recognizable.
One of the nice things about getting old these days is that you no longer become an old person. You become a senior citizen. Another is that we old people—wait, we seniors—are able to discern the sudden and sweeping changes in manners and morals and politics that seem to a young person to be just…
Neologisms, words newly coined, are as necessary to language as water to land. New inventions, institutions, patterns of behavior require new words to describe them. Nor need all neologisms describe new phenomena. Some are required to cover long-established phenomena that have called out for but…
There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer,” the business writer Peter Drucker once said. One of the great things about capitalism is its concern with pleasing the customer, but in recent years this concern has gotten out of hand. Nowadays almost every…
Does 12 or 13 count as an early age to become disillusioned? Maybe it was once on the young side for lost innocence. On the other hand, maybe I was just a slow learner.
Priscilla M. Jensen on the sisterhood of the spiral-bound cookbook.
I have a new set of socket wrenches. If you knew me well, you might not be completely surprised, but nevertheless, this is a first for me.
My daughter came to visit for the long weekend. Some friends mentioned that they were driving across the state, and so—on a whim, at the last minute—she threw some clothes in a bag, gathered up her schoolbooks, and piled into the car with her friends. And why not? It’s just 350 miles or so from the…
The first time I felt it was in the first grade. I wasn’t in Mrs. Conn’s class, but she reprimanded me for talking back as we stood in line in the lunchroom. The feeling, a cold burn, rose briefly in my chest before sinking down, down, down, into the pit of my stomach. Woooop, went the Big Sink.…
Stories of first deer hunts are a staple of family lore for many Americans. The genre peaks around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas, where the token vegan relatives, already feeling a twinge of guilt for demanding a meatless turkey molded out of tofu, are obliged to hear how cousin…
I seem to recall an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he predicts that the world will be subsumed not by fire or flood, but by an overwhelming mound of common pins. It hasn’t happened so far, but that may be because we have shifted the cultural weight, as it were, to a far more voluminous…
When the future becomes more finite.
On the joys of a cheap amusement park.
A vinyl pressing gone missing—and greatly missed.
Barton Swaim, Luddite 2.0
David Skinner’s shiners.
Priscilla M. Jensen pays a visit to Miss Flannery.
Joseph Epstein on verbal inanity .
Mark Hemingway, stock boy.
David Skinner, taskmaster.
Alice B. Lloyd's reunion.
Joseph Epstein on profanity.
Christine Rosen remembers the '80s.
Andrew Ferguson’s boon companion in Rome.
Eric Felten's long-ago summer reading.
Micah Mattix, exterminator.
Joseph Epstein's neighborhood.
Mark Hemingway, guitar addict.
Victorino Matus chows down.
Priscilla M. Jensen, at the fair.
I have never had, nor felt the need of having, a hobby. When I was a kid, friends of mine collected stamps or miniature cars or made model airplanes. I did none of these things. When I was 11 or 12, a shop moved into our neighborhood called Hobby Models, catering to hobbyists of all sorts. I found…
Christopher Caldwell sneaks into a movie.
I always wanted a nickname, a moniker to set me apart and give voice to the familiar fondness that everyone who knows me feels towards my special character—you know, that way I have, that unmistakable something about me.
If our scribblings here at The Weekly Standard have, for the last two years, had a jittery, anxious quality, it might be because we haven’t had a minute’s calm. And I don’t mean the mad whirlwind that is the Age of Trump. I refer to the daily slam-bang from the construction site next door.
Ever since Michel de Montaigne noted that he couldn’t be sure whether he was playing with his cat or his cat was playing with him, an essayist without a cat has seemed like a Hasid without a hat. Or so I came to conclude a month or so after our charming calico cat Hermione died one sad evening in…
"I don’t agree with him on that one," my stepmother said. “It was wrong, and I don’t think he should have done it.” Usually she took my father’s side in these discussions. Not this time.
Tomorrow some people from Catholic Charities are coming to tow away the beautiful BMW 740iL that my father bought in Germany at the turn of the century. Like the vast majority of American males he was until then a car enthusiast who had never owned a nice car. He didn’t suffer from that—fancy…
If you have lived almost any kind of active life, after age 50 someone you know dies every day. Not necessarily someone you knew well. Not necessarily a spouse, a child, a parent—one of those whose death is like a part of yourself, crushed and torn away. But someone you knew, yes: an acquaintance,…
I write of cats as a dog person. For most of my life, an extreme allergy fueled my aversion to cats in general, but the individuals I got to know didn’t help their cause. In college, thanks to a roommate who owned her, I lived with a cat named Sophie. I appreciated Sophie as an aesthetic object:…
Not many people knew he was named Berlin. A roly-poly, soft-spoken man with a scruff of white hair and a big belly, Berrell Long lived quietly in a rundown house in Fries, Virginia. Thin, patchy wallpaper held the place together. There was no insulation, so he had to pile logs in a dirty old…
Shortly before Christmas, I got an email from the Washington Wizards basketball team. “You are in your 45th year with the Wizards!” it said. “We will be taking you and a guest on a trip to see your Wizards in Atlanta on January 27th.”
The Centers for Disease Control alarmed the public in early January when it announced that the topic of its next monthly public health briefing would be preparing for nuclear war. But the agency soon changed the subject to something it deemed more urgent: this season’s flu outbreak.
There are many serious and well-justified complaints against the decrepit Washington Metro system, but sometimes there’s a happy surprise.
Recently I visited a small university town. A friend recommended I visit a certain downtown coffee shop known for its exquisite espressos and Americanos. “It’s pretty hipster,” my friend warned, and it was. Everyone present was between the ages of, I guessed, 17 and 35. The men wore clothes that…
Journalists like anniversaries, or at least this one does, and 2018 is an ideal vantage point from which to survey the past. It’s been a half-century now since the annus horribilis of 1968, for example, and a century-and-a-half since my favorite president (James Buchanan) died. But more to the…
The other day a friend told me that my name came up at the funeral of someone I didn’t remotely know. I told her, this friend, that I assumed that the person who brought it up was doubtless the minister, priest, or rabbi officiating at the funeral. She said it was the minister. I added that I knew…
The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary—he was born December 16, 1917—has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a…
There's a song I’ve started to play on the piano. It’s called “Money,” a fairly straightforward arrangement by Burt Bacharach. The only problem is Liza Minnelli’s eyes. They keep staring back at me from the opposite page.
It was Big Trash Day in my neighborhood. Notices had gone out that the city’s garbage trucks would pick up practically anything you put on the curb. Busted televisions, cracked porcelain toilets, cheap plastic outdoor furniture, and all your abandoned aspirations too—piles of books you never read…
A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone…
Poor David Copperfield, to add to the other humiliations of his boyhood, at school is forced, for reasons too elaborate to go into here, to wear a sign that reads, “Take Care of Him. He Bites.” I have been thinking of that sign in connection with a sign I should like to make for myself that reads:…
I used to despise the relative obscurity of my alma mater, Reed College. The name of the Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school has spurred more than a few quizzical looks in Washington when I’ve mentioned it. “Reed? Where’s that?” This has been a persistent source of chagrin and insecurity about my…
I recently saw a sportswriter on social media paying tribute to a deceased editor he’d had the pleasure of working with. “The best editors are a psychologist, a friend, an idea person, a life vest,” he wrote. “Every story written is a trust fall into an editor’s arms.” I don’t doubt this sentiment…
As I drove across the prairie, I saw the corn fields, tall and ripe. I saw the fabled waves of grain, the endless tides of amber wheat. I saw the plains unfold, down miles and miles of blacktop road. Returning to the landscape of my childhood, I leaned my head out the car window to breathe the…
The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…
The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the…
Samuel Johnson, about to tuck into a pork roast, is supposed to have said that the only thing that would make the food before him better is if he were a Jew. Stendhal, I years ago heard, said that the only thing wrong with ice cream was that it wasn’t illegal. The question both these men raise is…
I was recently in San Francisco on business. I was there on business because, well, I would never go there for pleasure.
I was recently in San Francisco on business. I was there on business because, well, I would never go there for pleasure.
A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…
A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…
When my grandparents—proud, independent, Greatest Generation types—consented to move into a retirement community, they offered to give one of their cars to us grandkids. They didn’t need and couldn’t keep two cars, and they offered this vehicle free of charge. It was a lavish gesture, especially…
Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…
Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…
Last month the Village Voice announced it was ending its print edition, a 62-year run of muckraking reporting, cultural criticism, opinion, advocacy, and opposition—opposition to authority, to anything, sometimes to everything. Founded in 1955, by Norman Mailer among others, the Voice was America’s…
Reading about an exhibition that’s about to open at the Milwaukee Art Museum—“Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair”—took me back to the night long ago in Cincinnati when my teenage daughter and I saw this African-American extravaganza live.
A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…
A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…
There are few people in this life who you are always, every time, happy to see. Mike Cromartie was one of those people. It wasn't just because he was a Christian, though that was a big part of it. If I hadn't known of Mike's faith, I would have quickly concluded he was a Christian anyway. He didn't…
Columbia, South Carolina, is known for its excessive heat, and that’s about it. The place has its benefits, and the weather is splendid for nine months out of the year, but like some other state capitals—Harrisburg, say—it’s not a destination. When I’m in Washington and tell someone I live in…
Disposing of a used couch in an urban neighborhood turns out to be a complicated affair.
Enough, already! It is time for the commentariat to stop attributing every vulgarity erupting from this administration to the fact that the president, like his now-defenestrated potty-mouthed spokesman, is a New Yorker.
Enough, already! It is time for the commentariat to stop attributing every vulgarity erupting from this administration to the fact that the president, like his now-defenestrated potty-mouthed spokesman, is a New Yorker.
I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…
If you are an American man born after 1945, you have almost certainly played with Legos. Earlier generations had Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and Erector Sets, but Legos began taking over the world of building toys in the early 1970s. Meaning if you are under the age of 70, you likely played with…
I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…
My wife and I are record collectors. At the moment, we own 1,151 of them (I have an app on my phone cataloguing the collection), and that number has been growing at a good clip. There’s no real organizing principle—it’s a diverse collection of rock, classical, jazz, soul, and even a fair bit of…
My wife and I are record collectors. At the moment, we own 1,151 of them (I have an app on my phone cataloguing the collection), and that number has been growing at a good clip. There’s no real organizing principle—it’s a diverse collection of rock, classical, jazz, soul, and even a fair bit of…
I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a…
I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a…
To the recent college graduates who have somehow failed to spend all of Daddy’s money in five-and-a-half years, fear not, tradition says you deserve a vacation. Consider it your version of the Grand Tour, the jaunt through Europe that served as the capstone to a formal education in centuries past…
My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…
My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…
More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…
More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…
Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…
Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…
So, one day I'm in an antique store, looking at a dresser. Now, there's no denying it's a pretty little thing: late 1800s, walnut burl, brass drawer handles, an elegant shape. But the sales sticker says $4,800, which is more than a little out of my price range, especially for a dresser I don't…
Edward Said saved my life. And I don't mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said's work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about…
Edward Said saved my life. And I don't mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said's work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about…
The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…
The 19th-century Irish-American vagabond and travel writer Lafcadio Hearn opened the first of his many books on Japan by quoting an English professor whom he met in his first days there. "Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible," the old scholar said. "They are…
It's been over six years since IBM's Watson bested a pair of Jeopardy! champions, and now another venerable game show is getting the man-vs.-computer treatment. Starting this month contestants will battle a music-recognition app on #BeatShazam, a digital-age update of Name That Tune—a show I found…
It's been over six years since IBM's Watson bested a pair of Jeopardy! champions, and now another venerable game show is getting the man-vs.-computer treatment. Starting this month contestants will battle a music-recognition app on #BeatShazam, a digital-age update of Name That Tune—a show I found…
WHEN I LEFT HOME for my freshman year of college three years ago, my mother and father did what every diligent parent since Polonius has: They sat me down for the Talk. Unlike most 18-year-olds about to set off into the world, however, I did not receive the usual warnings about drugs, alcohol, or…
In Aristophanes' play The Knights, I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: "No, political leadership's no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the…
In Aristophanes' play The Knights, I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: "No, political leadership's no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the…
Whatever being a red-blooded American man means these days (not much, it seems), I like to think I am one. I chop wood. I’ve never had a manicure and refuse to wear skinny jeans. I relieve myself outdoors with great regularity, even when indoor options are available. And though I don't hunt my own…
My wife Cynthia forwarded me two emails in quick succession. The first was from a friend, recruiting volunteers for a cleanup on the Potomac River. It was on a day when I would be out of town. Good luck with that, I thought.
Up until opening day, I was wondering what to do with all the extra time that Major League Baseball’s new "Pace of Play" rules were supposed to free up. The commissioner's office and the rules committee wanted to move the game along faster, presumably to appeal to baseball fans with lots of other…
Up until opening day, I was wondering what to do with all the extra time that Major League Baseball’s new "Pace of Play" rules were supposed to free up. The commissioner's office and the rules committee wanted to move the game along faster, presumably to appeal to baseball fans with lots of other…
In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad.
In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad.
I'm about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still,…
I'll admit, I have few childhood memories of the nativity scene my grandparents kept on their mantel every Christmas. I recall more clearly the haunting portrait of Santa Claus hanging in the foyer and the towering Christmas tree, with its pink ribbons and bows. And, of course, the bounty of…
I'm about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still,…
Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at…
Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at…
A machete, a chainsaw, a potter's wheel, jumper cables, and an actual stack of Bibles: Anyone who saw what was sitting on my writer's desk right now would either diagnose paranoia or predict my imminent flight "off the grid." But the avocado-green Dutch oven, the cobalt-blue stemmed-glass dessert…
I HAVE OFTEN PRAYED that one day an authentic Jersey diner would spring up in Washington, D.C. It’s the only thing missing in a city full of trendy bars and expensive restaurants. When all the clubs close down at 2 A.M. (quite embarrassing when friends from New York visit), there’s nowhere to go.…
Up on the third floor, in a bookcase against the south wall—the second shelf from the bottom, maybe two-thirds of the way along—there's an aging copy of The Art of Memory, written by the British historian Frances Yates back in the 1960s.
There is nothing more boring than other people’s dreams, so I try to forget most of my own. Life's waking nightmares are vivid enough. But I'm dogged by one I had the other night. I was standing in a favorite fishing hole up to my waist, attempting to release a largemouth bass I'd just caught. Slow…
I like to think of myself as a writer-editor on call. If a metaphor needs rewiring or a talking-point has lost its pointiness, I am on it like butter on toast. But when a friend asked me to write an obituary for her mother, I wondered if I was really the man for the job. I didn’t know her mother…
The first words I learned in Italian were gamba di legno, or wooden leg, for which Benito Mussolini and Walt Disney are to blame: After the war, my mother, who was fluent in Italian, had been involved with a charity that provided artificial limbs for Italian amputees. And for decades thereafter,…
J. L. Penfold died early on the morning of January 10. He was 71 years old. He was at home. And he was surrounded by his family. All of which are blessings.
A relative told me this story: She had gone to a neighbor's party, only to have the neighbor announce her arrival by saying something like, "You don't have to worry, everyone. She didn't bring the conservative with her." And then, after telling me the story, my relative began to weep—not because of…
A relative told me this story: She had gone to a neighbor’s party, only to have the neighbor announce her arrival by saying something like, "You don't have to worry, everyone. She didn't bring the conservative with her." And then, after telling me the story, my relative began to weep—not because of…
Last week, I finally defended my dissertation at the University of Chicago.
Years ago, when I was writing about a wave of immigrant violence in France, a higher-up in the housing authority of a provincial city took me on a tour of some slum projects. Alphonse was his name. He was the directeur de régie de gestion, which, as best I could translate, meant "director of the…
I recently sent an email to the editor of the London Times Literary Supplement complaining about his running a longish lead article by a lunatic-of-one-idea feminist who would cite misogyny as the explanation for the behavior of Lady Macbeth, Lucretia Borgia, and the Wicked Witch of the West. He…
Urban strivers like to insist suburbia is a soul-deadening place to warehouse failed ambition. I, however, feel no need to defend my choice of safer streets, lower taxes, better schools, and local officials who are misguided rather than criminal. In fact, when my wife and I finally abandoned…
For the last many years, my New Year's Eves have had a ritual sameness: Put on my party heels, pour several warm-up pops, then take off for a friend's house to join him, his lovely wife, and a circle of regulars, who, as my friend delicately puts it, "come to watch you make an ass of yourself."…
For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a "lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…
For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a “lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…
Flocking. No one outside the millinery trade—ladies' haberdashery—should ever have occasion to use the word, but there it is: a category of artificial Christmas trees. You can get your tree flocked, or unflocked. Made of green nylon, like AstroTurf in the Astrodome, or made of metal, like pink…
Hillary Clinton could do worse than to take up the trombone.
Hillary Clinton could do worse than to take up the trombone.
Growing up in mitte middle-class New Jersey, I spent much of my adolescence riddled with an unbecoming status anxiety. I was forever worried that not having the right clothes, or the right backpack, or the right sunglasses, would mark me as not belonging to the smart set. The fact that there was no…
Growing up in mitte middle-class New Jersey, I spent much of my adolescence riddled with an unbecoming status anxiety. I was forever worried that not having the right clothes, or the right backpack, or the right sunglasses, would mark me as not belonging to the smart set. The fact that there was no…
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we've done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we’ve done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
My family and I recently moved to Virginia Beach. It is, according to my calculation, the 13th time we’ve moved since my wife and I were married 20 years ago and the 20th time I've moved in my 43 years.
The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We'll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…
The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We’ll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…
As if America isn’t suffering from enough anxieties in 2016, you may have noticed the country is gripped by a nationwide epidemic of creepy clown sightings. In fact, someone in a clown costume carrying an axe was recently spotted in a park a few miles from my house. This isn't technically illegal,…
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one…
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one…
A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he's being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.
A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.
When I was growing up in a picturesque Vermont town, some family friends used to show old movies in a theater at the local college. From time to time, they invited me to go along. Almost always, I had some sort of excuse for staying home, where I would end up doing absolutely nothing. They showed…
It had been a long day, and I was famished. I'd flown to New York the previous night, and the plane was delayed three times. I walked into my hotel room at 1:00 a.m. After five hours of sleep, I woke to prepare for my midday speech. Between the event itself and chatting with attendees afterwards, I…
Back in the day, I threw papers for the Dallas Times Herald, the city’s afternoon daily. I was 12 years old when I took over a route of about 50 papers. I folded the papers and put them in a canvas bag about twice as big as a beach bag. I walked the blocks, pitching papers. Sometimes I'd ride my…
I've lately had the pleasure of being interviewed on John Batchelor’s cerebral radio program, which originates in New York but is heard all over the country. Since I am in Washington, and not New York, I speak to Mr. Batchelor by telephone—which means that his millions of listeners hear but do not…
Maps are a mystery to me, and my worthlessness in navigating has been a family joke for two decades. Google Maps and turn-by-turn smartphone guidance were a revelation—they have saved me from embarrassment and being late at least once a week since 2007. I am utterly dependent on them.
Maps are a mystery to me, and my worthlessness in navigating has been a family joke for two decades. Google Maps and turn-by-turn smartphone guidance were a revelation—they have saved me from embarrassment and being late at least once a week since 2007. I am utterly dependent on them.
Towards the end of a recent lunch, I found myself ogling a friend's bowl of chicken pista korma. He was done, but there were still a few tender chunks of chicken left. It required enormous restraint on my part not to ask him, "Are you going to finish that?" And considering we were in a restaurant…
Towards the end of a recent lunch, I found myself ogling a friend’s bowl of chicken pista korma. He was done, but there were still a few tender chunks of chicken left. It required enormous restraint on my part not to ask him, "Are you going to finish that?" And considering we were in a restaurant…
Stuart Stevens has found fame and fortune as a political strategist. He is one of the half-dozen or so campaign consultants in America who actually understands both politics and strategy and isn’t just grifting the needy, well-heeled marks who often find themselves compelled to run for office.
"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth,” said Mike Tyson famously. Many choose to understand the former heavyweight champion's one-liner metaphorically, as an American rendition of the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke's observation that no battle plan survives…
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage—that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping…
The story is told about Degas dining at the home of his contemporary, the painter Jean Louis Forain, a 19th-century gadget freak who had one of the first telephones in Paris. Forain gleefully showed his phone to the grumpy and greatly unimpressed Degas. During the meal, the telephone rang, and…
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage—that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping…
I spent a couple weeks this summer museum-hopping. Art museums, mostly, and while I don’t know much about painting or sculpture, I know what I like, and I know what I don't like, and I don't like people who go museum-hopping. Present company excluded.
It was delightful, as odysseys go, and I wouldn't mind doing it again . . . and again.
In my house, summer is a time of dreams. The children are sent to camps, where they are accepted as near bursting with creative, athletic, and mental abilities far too great for mere school. My wife Cynthia takes poster board and sets up a wish list for the family. Each member writes in something…
For a minute or two last week, over coffee in a working-class bakery in Massachusetts, I recovered my optimism about the human race. To say working-class might be a stretch. It was in a gentrifying neighborhood once inhabited by factory workers. It had an Italian name. Everyone was welcoming,…
Each summer, my wife and children head up to Connecticut to spend a week with my in-laws. Believe me, I’d love to join them for a fun-filled week of swimming, cookouts, and cocktails—or as Jack Nicholson put it in As Good As It Gets, "good times, noodle salad." Alas, I am stuck in our nation's…
It's settled: The U.K. is in “uncharted territory." In the immediate wake of the British decision last month to leave the European Union, an aide to Prime Minister David Cameron got the mantra going, declaring, "We're in uncharted territory." The New York Times picked up the motif and proclaimed…
At a local library sale, I not long ago picked up for fifty cents a clean copy of The Olympia Reader, an anthology from the Paris publishing house that in its day printed the best high-class pornography then going. Olympia Press published the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland, Pauline Réage, Frank…
On Memorial Day, I was in my basement looking for a cat. (Yes, it was a cat, as opposed to my cat—but that's another story.) Anyway, I was sorting through the clutter when I came across a bag containing various tokens of my youth. At the bottom of the bag, I peered in and saw one of my possessions…
I’ve never liked feeling stereotypical. Which is why I would like you to know that this story does not involve a vanilla latte. As bland, generic—dare I say, basic?—as my tale might otherwise be, some lines cannot be crossed. Despite being the premier Starbucks drink of choice for women in their…
Last month, I had to stay a night in Oxford. Having not set foot there since my 20s, I was looking forward to it. If memory served, there were good B&Bs near the Thames and the Cherwell. There were rooms at the colleges where one could stay for cheap. Any place would serve, as long as it was close…
I just bought a bottle of Waterman’s ink for $11.34, tax included. The bottle contains 50ml, or less than two ounces, of black ink. This makes ink far more expensive than wine, even quite superior wine. I would have complained—or at least exclaimed—about the price, but the man who sold it to me was…
I recently gave a talk at a synagogue in Miami on the subject of Jewish humor—specifically on the jokes Jews tell about themselves. Freud, in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wrote: "I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its…
Twenty years ago, Bernard Lewis and I were walking along the Thames. We’d just seen a dreary English take on naughty French theater, which provoked remembrances of Paris in the 1930s when Lewis was a student of Louis Massignon, the great Catholic orientalist born in 1883, 33 years before my friend…
The picture I couldn’t get out of my mind from that dread-filled Tuesday morning—and still can’t get out of my mind more than a week later—is the image of the second plane, turning round and flying directly into the 110-story building, setting it instantly aflame. So insane, so like a comic book,…
Henry Clay Bottum was born in January 1826, in the town of Orwell, Vermont. As a young man, he moved west, first to upstate New York and then to Wisconsin, farming in Fond du Lac County. An abolitionist, he abandoned the Whig party of his namesake and became a Radical Republican, serving in the…
I'm being stalked by a pair of cheap eyeglasses. They keep looking out at me with their eyeless stare. They’re joined by a zombie pair of khakis, Hillary Clinton, and, creeping along on their spindly little legs, folding music stands. None of them will leave me alone.
Business schools are like sanatoriums for the English language—places where words go to languish and softly fade, easing towards a coughing, clichéd death.
My earliest memory of running—of making an effort to run as fast as I could—comes from first grade. There were a lot of footraces at school that year. They were short distance sprints across the blacktop and back. Maybe 75 yards. As often as not, I won. My only real competition was John Scotto, a…
Early in the Internet’s life, and relatively late in his own, the great journalist Christopher Hitchens embarrassed me away from the Web. This embarrassment, luckily, did not involve his writing anything. He had invited me to work on a project and deadlines were approaching. I emailed him without…
I first acquired a connoisseur’s interest in dull headlines in 1963, when I read, in a note in the air edition of the English New Statesman, that the London Times had staged a contest for the dullest headline to appear in the paper over the past year. The winning entry was "Small Earthquake in…
Let me be frank: I am a terrible citizen. I haven’t voted in any election since 2008. I'm a registered independent and a card-carrying member of exactly zero civic organizations. I've never been a Young Republican or, for that matter, a middle-aged Democrat or an old Whig. I'm unlikely to Lean In…
The invention of the smartphone has resolved a primeval fear of our species: What do you do when you’re out in public and forgot to bring something to read? Until a few years ago, the thought of facing a subway train, or the line at an ATM, or the waiting room at the Jiffy Lube, launched a…
It was my birthday, and I didn't have a drink to celebrate. A few nights later I made a dinner of pork tenderloin with mushrooms and olives. The only thing missing was a glass of red wine, yet I stuck with water.
"Do these things start on time?” These were not the words I was hoping to hear when I answered the phone, particularly not en route to the ballet, running late, and trying to catch a Metro train. I should pause to specify that I was boarding the train alone, which is why I took my friend Yakov's…
I'm a speed reader—a certified speed reader, certified ever since I was in junior high school and passed a genuine speed-reading course. An Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed-reading course, no less.
Whenever I’m driving with my wife, I have this nasty habit of smacking her in the face. No, it's not because of the innumerable times she says, "It's green. You can go now." Or "Slow down, there's a stop sign." It's not even when she thinks I don't see the car in front of me braking and yells, "Oh,…
As I watched the last few Republican debates, I was distracted, not for the first time, by a most nonpolitical thought: Don't they feel silly all wearing blue suits, white shirts, and red ties?
Istanbul
He always seemed happy—at least to my 9-year-old self. At my Little League games, he had his photo taken with each team. At the grand opening of a bakery owned by my friend's mom, he showed up at the last minute to personally cut the ribbon. He'd tuck into plates of pasta on Federal Hill, the…
My combined roles as television couch potato and language snob have not been easy on me. What I most watch on television is sports and news, with a fair amount of DVDs, these chiefly of English detective stories. Much of this television watching is done in the evening, when, as they say about…
Sometimes in January, often in February—always somewhere in the course of the winter—I feel it settling down on me and the season: that icy fog that dulls the senses, the cold that gnaws the bone, the sadness that deadens the will.
I've never been one for elaborate New Year’s rituals. I don't thump the walls with bread to rid the house of evil spirits, as some do in Ireland. Nor swing caged fireballs around my head to torch last year's misfortune, as they do in Stonehaven, Scotland. I don't make hollow resolutions, since I…
I never save anything—or rather I save lots of stuff that I don't want while I throw away an equivalent amount of stuff that someday I will. Improbably I've saved a sheaf of letters I got from Florence King, the great journalist and memoirist, and when I heard the other evening that she'd died, at…
It is sad to walk down a poor street lined with $60,000 houses and to see, as one often does, a $45,000 car in one of the driveways. It is often some kind of macho Mustang, freshly washed, gaudy of hue, souped up, and glittery with detailing. What are these people thinking? Why not get a perfectly…
Every morning, I make an egg for my son. The task doubles as a chance for daydreaming, a rare occurrence when you're the parent of a toddler. I strap Henry into his chair, toss a few Cheerios in his direction, and get to work.
Christmas these days is signaled not by the music played in shops and the wreaths hung along lampposts, but by the increasingly heavy load of catalogues that begin arriving in the mail late in October. Pity the poor mailman, having to lug such stuff around. These catalogues give recycling a bad…
"Some idiot just flew his plane into the World Trade Center," a friend told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the south tower, and I watched the TV more or less constantly until late in the afternoon, when I took a break for a couple of hours before…
Friends of mine once saved for a trip to Europe by emptying their pockets at the end of each day and placing any money in a big plastic jug. Occasionally, when short of cash, they had to turn the jug upside down and withdraw a bill or two with a pair of tweezers, but the system worked. After a…
The other day, sitting around naked in a Bavarian hotel with a woman I'd just met, I thought of the best-mannered person I ever knew. Andrzej came from an elegant Warsaw family. I met him at the very end of his long and difficult life, when he was singing "Sto Lat" at his American grandsons'…
Having a decidedly anti-romantic view of college, I find myself not entirely opposed to the student radicals besieging campuses across the country.
I taught at a university for 30 years, from 1973 until 2002. The timing of my departure was exquisite. I left before smartphones became endemic and political correctness, with triggering and microaggressions and the rest, kicked in. The courses I taught—in Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather,…
Rummaging around the other evening in a box of magazines and newspaper clippings with my byline, I stumbled upon the November 1975 issue of a journal called the Alternative: An American Spectator. Mindful, as always, of capricious mortality, I have lately been subtracting from the volume of paper…
She seemed more curious than frightened, the doe-eyed . . . doe, I suppose, and we studied each other for a long moment or two. She, calm in a farmer’s field, looking over the fence line. And me, unmoving in the wreck, staring back at her through the shattered glass.
I’m a sophisticated guy. A deep thinker, even. Shallowness’s scourge, you might say.
Now that playoff baseball has returned with the onset of autumn, and baseball becomes more intense, more excellent, and more precious, I’m thinking again about Harvey Dorfman. Little known to most casual fans, he was one of the great men of baseball, for he taught his students and friends and all…
We never thought we would find ourselves stocking a pantry in Arizona. But now that Phoenix is our winter base, there we were, on line at the deli counter of a supermarket located in one of the ubiquitous strip malls that we love because they are home to thrusting small businesses as well as huge…
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