“I lighted a cigarette, and gave myself up to meditation.” Thus runs the most expressive quote from the entire canon of P.G. Wodehouse, who wisely leaves the actual content of Bertie Wooster’s meditations to our imaginations. I was reminded of the metaphysical aspects of smoking when the manager of my favorite cigar dealer—Sautter’s on London’s Mount Street—described a certain petit corona with a shrug and the simple words: “It’s a moment of reflection.” And yet the same reflective qualities can be found in a humble cigarette—as this timely deposition from The American ...
Dave Weigel has a typically vivid piece about what the Knob Creek machine gun shoot was like this year, capturing the mix of gunnies, gawkers, conspiracy nuts, and folks looking for cheap ammo. ...
Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. ...
It has never ceased to amaze me that, as our stalwart editor commented to me, "it reveals much about our age that the term "adult fun" evokes pornos and strapons and ...
This might surprise you, but I wasn’t always such a mild, soft-spoken guy. Before my conversion to St. Francis of Assisi’s gospel of peace, you might have called ...
During the Cold War, conservatives rightly pointed out that the collectivist materialism of the Soviet Union was anti-human in the worst ways. It elevated the state to ...
Some immigrants assimilate more slowly than others. My best friend from childhood had parents from Abruzzi who lived in NYC for 40 years and never learned English"the need for ...
It was a balmy New England dawn, in that brief slice of the year when our clime is as mild as Malibu's and the pine trees bend in sweet obeisance to the breeze.... On such a day, ...
Like a catfish slipping off deck into cool, polluted waters, I’m back in NYC tonight"staying in an Orchard Street apartment rented off Craig’s List, taking a much ...
Tomorrow I take my first driving lesson: New Hampshire be warned! I did once drive, in Baton Rouge between 1994 and 1996, having almost achieved my lifelong goal of getting a ...
I know this is supposed to be a lifestyle column, but each week I seem to find out that one or more of the habits which makes my life liveable could also possibly kill me. Last ...
The cultural contrast between intriguing guests and apparently brain dead yack TV hosts has John Derbyshire lamenting : ” It’s not the dumbing-down ...
There's nothing to put a damper on your columns about food and wine like a grumpy old doctor who tells you have to lose 50 pounds. A dour World War II Navy veteran, he was the ...
Perhaps the greatest compensation for trading cramped digs in Rome for a spacious house in the U.S. is that I have my beagles back. Susie and Franz-Josef are out back now, ...
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