Ghost town | The Spectator

The age of mass revenge

Journalists have never been noted for originality in their choice of metaphor, so readers must be wearied by now of hearing that the world is on fire. Skeptics will observe that the flames have been more or less constant for well over a century, as the major powers and their allies, satellites and acolytes maneuver to establish, or reestablish, global power or hegemony. In fact, the present crisis extends well beyond the collapse of the international order that prevailed since 1945. The situation is actually far more complicated, the world today being infused with a generalized and simmering anger that extends beyond the great powers to include middling and minor ones everywhere, their societies and their various elements.

Bill Kauffman

My biggest regrets

Regrets, I've had a few, but unlike Mr. "My Way," mine are enough to mention. (Didn’t Hoboken Frank at least regret slapping Ava Gardner or hanging out with Joey Bishop?) “When you see the end of things coming close and staring at you,” as Jason Robards tells his son in Ray Bradbury’s filmic adaptation of his own novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, “it’s not what you’ve done that you regret — it’s what you didn’t do.” (For good or ill, cataracts prevent me from seeing the coming end.) Surely some missed opportunities are worth missing. For instance, I doubt if any of the awestruck Lou Reed fans whom the rock’n’roll coprophage famously invited to defecate into his mouth regretted turning down the chance.

Birdie Hall

My initiation into breastfeeding

The most fastidious of us prepare for the marathon of our first labor and birth, but still fail to wrap our minds around the unpredictable onslaught of intense sensations that breastfeeding brings. I knew that only a genuine catastrophe would prevent me from birthing my baby at home with a midwife, and I didn’t leave the prospect of using formula as a feasible outcome in any possible world. Despite this, I had no idea that my initiation into breastfeeding would amount to psychospiritual martyrdom. The distinctively American cultural complaint that nursing women (or “chest-feeders” as we are now called) must not discuss the importance of breastfeeding from fear of offending formula users need not apply here, but the benefits of breastfeeding are numerous.

Life