Con-vention | The Spectator

Why cats are a vintner’s best friend

The internet has been good for cats. “Cute cat videos” dominated early YouTube and continue to be default Instagram Reels and YouTube Short recommendations. Some influencer cats — like Grumpy Cat and Karl Lagerfeld’s heir Choupette — hog the headlines, control tens of millions of dollars in social media and advertising contracts and out-earn many famous human influencers. There are cats significantly richer than you, whose selfies pay their owner’s mortgage. Taylor Swift’s cat Olivia Benson has a net worth of $97 million, which makes her only the third wealthiest pet in the world. It seems odd.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The joy of experiencing the Mountain West on horseback

In his introduction to Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote: “you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.” While what he says about driving, walking and crawling is true enough, my late friend Ed neglected to mention the alternative — and best — way to see and experience the Mountain West. That is on horseback, the optimal mode from the point of view of observational perspective as well as speed of travel.

Solveig Lucia Gold

Plane stupidity: my waking flight-mare

The skies above the Atlantic As airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767. A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window. It was still plugged into the outlet, so naturally I gave the charging cord a little tug, hoping to rescue the phone without incident. Instead, I felt it disconnect. No big deal, I thought. I scoured the area around my seat: no phone.

Bill Kauffman

The awesome Alan Pell Crawford

The great nineteenth-century novelist Harold Frederic (The Damnation of Theron Ware) had a character complain “I cannot read or listen to the inflated accounts” of the role played in the Revolution by Massachusetts and Virginia “without smashing my pipe in wrath.” Frederic’s pipe-smasher would smoke in peaceful raptness while reading Alan Pell Crawford’s engrossing new book, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South.

Cosmo Landesman

The tantric sex retreat that wasn’t

When my girlfriend suggested we go away to a tantric retreat for the weekend in the English countryside, I couldn’t believe my luck — and neither could my male friends. Suddenly I was no longer the guy with the weird-wokey-woman, but the luckiest man alive. And all because of that one little word: tantric. Say it and people instantly think: Sting and sex marathons. Strange esoteric erotic practices that produce cosmic orgasms. Now add “tantric” to “retreat” and it conjures up visions of couples doing it, throuples doing it, everyone doing it together in one great fireball of fornication! And all in the name of spiritual growth, of course. If only!

Life