Of the many things that a young fellow, barely knee-high to a grasshopper, might aspire to be when he grows up, one that doesn’t often come to mind is “grifter.” Yet in my early 20s, intoxicated by the demimonde allure of pulp novels by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, I was reminded of a time…
Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the…
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French armies sacked the Chinese Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), looting it of what the Chinese government today estimates to have been 150 million objects. The British effort was led by James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, and with his blessing…
"I bear the creature no ill-will,” William Hazlitt wrote of a spider in his 1826 essay, "On the Pleasure of Hating."
For years, a friend and I have been engaged in an informal contest (so informal, in fact, that it may exist only in my mind) to see who will be first to visit all 50 states. With only Alaska, Idaho, and Montana remaining on my list, it looks as if I'll win. In the spirit of sportsmanship, I will…
The first time I fell victim to a prop bet (not to be confused with the sports bet) was in New Orleans in 2000. I was on spring break with some fellow greenhorns from my Jesuit high school. We were weaving through the French Quarter, loaded on Hand Grenades and freedom, wearing bull’s-eyes on our…
For years, a friend and I have been engaged in an informal contest (so informal, in fact, that it may exist only in my mind) to see who will be first to visit all 50 states. With only Alaska, Idaho, and Montana remaining on my list, it looks as if I’ll win. In the spirit of sportsmanship, I will…
As grounds either for having children or for having an irreversible vasectomy, these words from Christopher Hitchens have remained with me a long time: "Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened" as fatherhood, he wrote. "[I]t's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to…
When Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in the department of environmental studies at New York University, was a child, she persuaded her mother to buy her a book called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth. One of the simple things that the book induced her to do was to shame her…
A character in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel Swag devises and swears by “ten rules for success and happiness.” He carries them on his person, scrawled “in blue ink on ten different cocktail napkins from the Club Bouzouki, the Lafayette Bar, Edjo’s, and a place called The Lindell AC.” This budding…
"Thomas Pynchon is up to his usual business,” promised a blurb written by Pynchon himself for his previous novel Against the Day (2006). Promised, that is, or warned, depending on whether the reader is a free and accepted 33rd-degree Pynchonian or a hopeless “normal” who finds the author’s “usual…
The line that opens Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944), a minor novel but a masterpiece of addiction literature, is bracing and unforgettable: “The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.” That the line is not Jackson’s own—his protagonist and surrogate, Don Birnam,…
"What really matters,” said Rob (John Cusack) in High Fidelity, “is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films—these things matter.”
Graham Greene famously divided his books into two categories: novels, and what he called “entertainments.” He wished from time to time to indulge an appetite for pulp, and it was only fair to let his readers know what they were getting into. The joke, of course, is that, being Graham Greene, he…
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean — armed with nothing more than a camera, a flashbulb, and a police-band receiver. Before Law & Order, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, and the “eight million stories” of Jules Dassin’s Naked City, there was the wandering eye of Usher…
Near the end of Moby-Dick is an indelible description of two boats lost to the White Whale: “The odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Reality rears its ugly, barnacle-encrusted head, and the mind retreats to cheerful…
Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies
A traveler passing through the Mid-Ohio Valley might see little incentive to stop in Parkersburg, West Virginia, with its landscape dominated by strip malls, windowless gambling parlors (deceptively styled "cafés"), and billboards advertising the hazards of copper wire theft and crystal meth. But…
The Second Plane
Last Night at the Lobster
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Summer People
The Overachievers