Life

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The era of ideological, overreaching and omnipresent government

It was a law of classical political philosophy that democratic polities devolve inevitably into tyrannical ones. This law is being validated in the twenty-first century, as liberal democracy creates societies antithetical to both liberalism and democracy by shaping citizens of a character for which neither was designed nor developed. In a parallel development over the past decade or so in Europe and the United States, liberals and democrats view their response to the problem as “reaction,” pure and simple, against the sort of thing they have been fighting since 1789. Only it is not reaction; it is apparently something new in history.

government
Olympics
Ed Horler

Should Olympians be paid?

The Olympics are the pinnacle of athletic achievement, a global stage where the very best compete for ultimate glory. With the XXXIII Olympiad now underway in Paris, we’re reminded of their magnitude as 206 countries participate across thirty-two different sports. Until recently, winning an Olympic gold medal was a reward in itself, but with World Athletics’ (the body that governs track and field) decision to introduce prize money this year, there is now extra incentive to win. Leaving behind 128 years of Olympic tradition, forty-eight gold medalists will receive an award of $50,000 this year. Not every athlete is eligible.

Monday

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.

Crawford
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!

retreat
phone plane
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.

horseback
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.

cats
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

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.

fatherhood
eclipse
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.

elders
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

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.

VR
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.

safe
conversation
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.

Maney
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.

canyon
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

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.

breastfeeding
regrets
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.

revenge
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

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).

Ripert
car
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.