The United States of paranoia

Democracy by numbers

The world of 2023, which scarcely speaks for the intelligence, the competence, or the success of the human race, does revive the age-old question of whether the individual is wiser than the species. One answer, stated in its simplest form, is the old saw that two heads are better than one. But is that true? And if so, are three heads better than two, und so weiter? Where do we come to the end of this? The key to the conundrum relates to government. Does oligarchy provide wiser rule than monarchy, aristocracy than oligarchy, and democracy than aristocracy? Consider the history of Britain and British government over the past centuries. Has democracy, in progressively greater measure, improved the management of British affairs since the eighteenth century?

Bill Kauffman

Oneida: the nineteenth-century sex cult behind the flatware giant

If ever I write a sex farce — the demand so far has been muted — I need only head east 150 miles and detour back 150 years to the Oneida community, the utopian experiment in free love that thrived from 1848-80 before the colony’s unorthodox sexual arrangements led to its collapse — and, in a characteristically American turn of events, its road to riches. Headquartered in a sprawling mansion house — open today to visitors of all carnal habits — Oneida was a cerebral nineteenth-century soap opera awash in high-minded American radicalism and directed by the brilliant and charismatic megalomaniac John Humphrey Noyes. As a Yale Divinity School student, Noyes had declared himself free from sin: a perfected Christian.

Cosmo Landesman

Stuck in a love triangle with a shrink

I’ve met someone. The One. And now I’m in love. It’s a lunatic love, driven by insatiable lust. She’s funny. Smart. Sexy. I’d say she was perfect for me but there’s one major problem — she has another man in her life and refuses to give him up. Let’s call him The Other Man (TOM). She sees him five times a week and tells him all her secrets. I only get to see her once a week and she tells me she loves this man because he listens to her. She is in my bed and he is in her head — by which I mean TOM is her therapist. The One talks about TOM when we’re in bed, and he talks about me during her therapy. I talk about him — and her — to my therapist. My life at the moment isn’t imitating art; it’s imitating bad Woody Allen.

Life