Anointed | The Spectator

My World Series of Poker debut

I played in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas this summer for the first time. The most common question I got on social media and in person, from dozens of people who’ve never suffered through a poker tournament before, was: “How do you qualify for this?” The answer is: you show up, pay your money, and then you’re in. Anyone could do the World Series of Poker tomorrow. I don’t recommend the WSOP as an activity if you’ve never played poker before, but as a human with a bank account or some other sort of cash reserve, you’re technically eligible. The other question, once I started posting my results, was: “Are you still in the tournament, or are you eliminated?” Don’t be a dope.

Harry Cluff

A brief history of parties

As Enoch Powell pointed out, “all political careers end in failure.” More often than not, those failures are self-inflicted. Without Partygate, for example, Boris Johnson might still be Britain’s prime minister. Although the debacle may not have been the final nail in his professional coffin, it certainly arranged the wake. His fans and critics alike were infuriated by the idea of public servants living it up while the rest of the nation was locked down during Covid in May 2020. That sort of scandal, however, is nothing new — anger at Partygate is nothing to some earlier episodes in history. Alexander the Great was an Olympian boozer who habitually went on weeklong binges after subjugating his enemies.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Overnight in New Mexico

The three of us sat on folding chairs around the table where Dick had the microphone plugged into a tape recorder and directed toward the high-altitude evergreen forest and the sheer granitic bowl behind and above it. On the table also were three magnum revolvers and three blue enamelware cups of red wine. “I don’t expect anything the first night,” Dick McCuistion said. “Let’s forget about a watch, shall we?” The sound was the familiar half-human howl, beginning with a whoop, sustaining itself on the exhalation, and lasting three and a half minutes by my watch. It was a cry such as a man — a nine-foot-tall one — could produce; a headvoice bonded to a deep chest tone.

Cosmo Landesman

Why I never enjoy going on holiday

This Letter from London is coming from Kardamyli, a small town by the sea in the southeast of Greece. I’m on holiday. Readers who are now rolling their eyes at the thought of yet another account of someone’s “amazing” holiday experience have my sympathy. I feel your pain; there’s nothing worse than the “my amazing holiday” bore. In the 1970s people who subjected friends to long and tedious slideshows of their holiday snapshots appeared in British sitcoms as the bores next door. Now we don’t project our pics onto our living room walls; we post them on social media. And friends feel obliged to post comments like, “Wow! That looks amazing!” and, “I’m so envious!” But what they’re really thinking is: what a terrible show-off you are.

Bill Kauffman

Back to 1984 with Robert Dean Lurie

Robert Dean Lurie, who had written very good books on worthy rock music subjects (REM, David Bowie and the Church), sure picked the right year — 2020 — to slip into a time machine. Instead of finding Morlocks and Eloi, as H.G. Wells’s time traveler did, this married father of two in Tempe, Arizona, encountered Walter Mondale and Night Ranger — and he lived to tell his entertainingly perceptive tale. Lurie explains, “In 2019, I had a premonition that 2020 was going to suck. So I decided to spend the year re-experiencing my favorite year from my [Minneapolis] childhood: 1984.

Bill McMorris

A new approach to swimming lessons

If the meme is to be believed, I do not hate journalists enough. You would be hard-pressed to find a more self-loathing individual — and yet I cannot bring myself to cheer on AI or venture capital’s march through the newsroom. I worry not for my own sake but for the future of my favorite type of journalist: the foreign clickbait farmer. Armed with a broken pocket translator and battered Fourth Edition of Roget’s Thesaurus (1977), these writers fearlessly tackle the issues of the day.

Life