Back to 1984 with Robert Dean Lurie
‘My forty-five-year-old self is inhabiting my nine-year-old body’
Life
Monday
Overnight in New Mexico
‘I think we can look forward to an encounter tonight, after all’
A brief history of parties
The political implications of soirées
My World Series of Poker debut
In the beginning, it looked great for your hero
Thursday
Waste not want not
Any child can transition out of diapers in a weekend so long as Dad commits to the Lethal Weapon 2 method of potty training
My Martin Amis FOMO
London literary life in the late 1970s to the late 1980s looks from today like a lost golden age
How one bad scene can ruin an otherwise great movie
When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces
The era of ideological, overreaching and omnipresent government
The faults and weaknesses of civilizations, like those of individuals, become more pronounced as they age
Should Olympians be paid?
Sporting events like the Olympics generate billions. But while officials, organizers and broadcasters are well-compensated for their roles, the athletes are not
Monday
The awesome Alan Pell Crawford
The writer has made a literary reputation on his fluid narratives of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Southern history
The tantric sex retreat that wasn’t
I could treat the whole thing with bemused Tom Wolfe snarkiness — or keep an open mind and get with the program
Plane stupidity: my waking flight-mare
My iPhone spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767
The joy of experiencing the Mountain West on horseback
I believe in going horseback for as far and as long as I can
Why cats are a vintner’s best friend
For many vintners, cats have become their favorite unsung but essential partners in pest control and free PR
Wednesday
The ins and outs of fatherhood
Our tolerance for panic blossoms alongside our progeny
Gazing at the eclipse in Walt Whitman’s perfect silence
Is it possible to love a science, or any branch of knowledge, despite one’s abysmal ignorance thereof?
Should elders be respected?
For the American people, the past is either dead or it is bunk, and the present, being unreformed and highly unsatisfactory, leaves them with only the future to believe in
Tuesday
The VR and AR arms race
Virtual worlds contain very real gold mines
Must we ‘be safe?’
It’s depressing this entire country finds it acceptable to part ways on a chipper note of menace
The death of good conversation
Ours is an age that prefers the battle of ideas and opinions rather than pleasure of discovering the mysteries of another person