Life Archives

Monday

June 17, 2024

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.

Kathleen Willcox

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.

Wednesday

May 15, 2024

Bill McMorris

The ins and outs of fatherhood

Alexandria, Virginia It is impossible to read through the transparent eyelids of an eight-day-old just what kind of young lady she will become, but I already know Katherine Matilda is going to have impeccable comedic timing. She announced her existence a week after we donated all the maternity and infant clothes, diapers and, natch, car seats — a month after we signed off on a renovation that demolished the entire ground floor for the duration of a pregnancy. She came home on a Saturday, a week into a pinkeye epidemic in which half of her sisters proved allergic to antibiotic eyedrops. There was a time when such chaos would have sent sleep-deprived parents into crisis. That time was Monday.

Bill Kauffman

Gazing at the eclipse in Walt Whitman’s perfect silence

The day before the April 8 eclipse — our postage stamp of ground sat smack dab in the middle of totality — we abounded in sunshine and birdsong, with nary a cloud in the sky. The day after, too, was dominated by the yellow star moseying along the ecliptic, but on the big day — we won’t be similarly situated for another 120 years — ole Sol was obscured by thick gray clouds. (Which parted, as if on mischievous cue, two hours after the celestial spectacular.) This is why Western New Yorkers exhibit a cheerful “oh well” fatalism, and why we know that the Buffalo Bills kicker will always miss the game-ending field goal. The hungry and hotel-hunting eclipse trackers who were predicted to overrun our rural county, leaving a spoor of tourist dollars, never showed.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Should elders be respected?

For the left, the world has always been, and always will be, a scandal. In this American election year, it has not escaped their anger and disgust that of the two presumed candidates for a second residential lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the incumbent is eighty-one years of age, while his challenger is seventy-eight. Yet that societies should be governed by their elders was taken for granted through all of human history down to very recent times. This was owing not to their experience alone, but to the fact that premodern people lived substantially in the past, recognizing that it — as Faulkner said — “is never dead, it’s not even past.

Tuesday

April 16, 2024

Ross Anderson

The VR and AR arms race

You probably don’t remember the Humane Pin, despite its dominating the tech-news cycle a few months ago. It’s an elegant AI-powered square that sticks to your lapel and can send messages, search for information and tell you about what you’re seeing, all through voice commands. The Humane company raised more than $230 million in venture backing, and its rollout included a runway appearance at Paris Fashion Week, a TED talk and a chic announcement video where the pin repeatedly misinformed its user. According to the pin, almonds have far more protein than they do, and April’s solar eclipse would have been best viewed from Australia, where it wasn’t even visible. Also, there’s no way to use the pin other than with voice control.

Chadwick Moore

Must we ‘be safe?’

Atlanta, Georgia "Be safe,” the grocery checkout girl says as I grab my box of orzo and turn to leave. From what, I wonder? Had there been a surge in pasta-related fatalities? Were packets of orzo exploding in homes across America and, if so, why are these dangerous things still on the shelf? Or was it some kind of threat? “Have a great weekend and be safe,” says the flight attendant over the intercom as we stand to deplane. Does she really care about my safety? Granted, we just touched down in Atlanta and some situational awareness isn’t a bad idea. But maybe she could have been more specific. “Have a great weekend, don’t take the MARTA after dark, and avoid Lenox Mall.

Cosmo Landesman

The death of good conversation

London At London parties you can find plenty of smart beautiful women and handsome charming men. You can find a cornucopia of drugs and drink. And you can find someone who will sleep with you, marry you, publish you and best of all, flatter you. But what’s hard to find is someone to have a really good conversation with. Think about it. When was the last time you went to a social event and had a really interesting conversation with a stranger? You meet someone and suddenly you click: they get you, you get them. There’s no secret agenda — sexual or otherwise — just the pure pleasure of talking. And now that I don’t drink, take drugs or look for love, all that London parties have left to offer me is good conversation.

Bill Kauffman

The story of Vince Maney

Batavia, New York 'Tis spring, and if a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, as Tennyson opined, an older man’s reveries turn — no, not to lawn-mowing — to baseball. Not, in my case, to the grotesque parody of the American game on display in the major leagues, with their automatic extra-inning runners and TV timeouts and $100-plus tickets, but to the sandlot, the high school or college field, the amateur and independent and minor-league ballparks built on a human scale and played in with joy, even in error, by mere mortals.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

A canyon caper

Lavender Canyon, Utah Spring, and the Manhattanite’s fancy turns to thoughts of West Palm Beach. Me, 2,000 miles away in Wyoming, mine turns to the slickrock canyon country of southeastern Utah some 600 road miles southwest from Laramie, a trip that requires a stayover in a motel along the way to relieve the horses and rest ourselves before continuing on to God’s country by way of Grand Junction, Colorado, and Moab, Utah; within recent memory raucous with the shouts of uranium miners, ranch hands come to town and whores, today the playground of mountain bikers, runners and rafters from Salt Lake City and its environs.

Sunday

March 17, 2024

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.

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.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

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.

Thursday

February 15, 2024

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meeting Eric Ripert, chef of America’s best restaurant

For Eric Ripert, cooking is like jazz. Ad-libbing, balance, motion. “One day the garlic is very pungent, one day it is not pungent. One day the onion is very juicy and sweet, one day it’s less, so you have to adapt all the time,” says the celebrated chef, who is the co-owner of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a close friend of the late Anthony Bourdain and a TV personality in his own right. “So, it’s very similar to music — I do not play the same notes all the time, I take a lot of freedom and liberties. Because I can.” Ripert is French but has — like his storied restaurant — become a New York institution. The chef lives on the Upper East Side with his glamorous, dark-haired wife Sandra (a real-estate broker who is Brooklyn born-and-raised, of Puerto Rican descent).

Bill McMorris

The car seat cartel

I work on the back deck and must work quickly while I have the midday sun. The mixing bowl holds distilled white vinegar, quantity unknown; Dawn antibacterial dish soap, the blue one, quantity unknown; rags, four; toothpicks, innumerable; toothbrushes, medium bristle, two; a single sponge destined for the garbage by day’s end; a pipe cleaner that should return to its post next to the sink. The target is mildew. The spots are irregularly shaped. If they appeared on your skin, you would bypass the dermatologist and head straight to the oncology ward, but against the firm cotton and rough polyester, they are mesmerizing. I concentrate as I scrub. On closer inspection they are not irregular, but pointillist. I am at war with a poisonous Seurat.

Cosmo Landesman

My friends keep dumping me

T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month — January is. It’s cold and bleak and days end in premature darkness. And worst of all, it’s the month when friends start to dump you. OK, maybe not you, but definitely me. Here was my January dump tally: two ex-girlfriends, one lover, five friends (three I thought were close friends) and one person I never wanted to be friends with in the first place. And get this: I do what’s called “befriending” for a local charity. It involves calling people who feel lonely and isolated on the phone and talking with them. The woman I’d been befriending for over two years suddenly said to me, “Please don’t call me anymore. This relationship isn’t working for me,” and just hung up. There were no thanks. No goodbye.

Bill Kauffman

An introduction to presidential grave-hunting

Where better to talk about dead presidents than over beer and wings at Jim's Saloon in East Pembroke, New York, three days before Millard Fillmore’s birthday? Across the table from me is Pat Weissend, a convivial bank manager and former museum director who has visited the gravesites of all thirty-nine dead presidents and all but two of the forty-three dead vice presidents of the United States. (The hard-to-get veeps are Walter Mondale, whose ashes have yet to be interred under the cold hard Minnesota ground, and Nelson Rockefeller, whose private and inaccessible burial spot is the Holy Grail of the grave-hunting community.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The digital habit

In an era that claims to value the authentic, the direct and the natural, the word "processed" has negative connotations, as in “processed” food. Nevertheless, it describes exactly how perhaps nine-tenths of the human race — including, I imagine, the lost Indian tribes of the Amazonian wilderness — experience reality these days, which is to say processed through electronic media, social media and the oxymoronic smartphone.

Tuesday

January 23, 2024

Kevin Cook

Does boxing still matter?

Quick — can you name boxing’s heavy-weight champion? If you’re like most readers, you drew a blank. If you’re a sports fan you may at least have heard of Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk, who holds three of the world’s four heavyweight title belts. Usyk has a good story: an Olympic gold medalist in 2012, now unbeaten and untied in twenty-one pro bouts, he took time out from training to serve as a soldier in his country’s war with Russia. The fourth title belt, symbolizing the WBC’s heavyweight crown, belongs to England’s Tyson Fury (yes, he’s named after Mike Tyson). The 6’9”, 278-pound Fury is also undefeated, with a record of 24-0-1. His parents are Irish Travellers; Fury proudly calls himself the “Gypsy King.

Zoe Strimpel

Drinking during pregnancy just isn’t the same

There are many cruel ironies in life. One of them is getting pregnant (and intending to keep it) at just the age at which you begin to understand how and where to drink good booze and feel justified in spending money to do so. So, finding myself with a bun in the oven just after my forty-first birthday this summer, I had to bring to a screeching halt the habits of the last few years: drinking really good wine, sometimes quite a lot of it, fairly regularly. Indeed, I spent the first week of pregnancy in the Languedoc drinking a bottle a night, plus the odd gin and tonic, because of course I didn’t know. Just last year I made a special journey to an industrial park outside Brussels to collect six bottles of 2013 white Bordeaux — it was that good.