Why DC loves to hate Partiful
The app has done more for the city’s social life than a decade of think-tank happy hours
Life
Tuesday
Tuesday
The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types
My social life is meeting a different character every week
How Trader Joe’s became a way of life
The supermarket is a kind of secular religion with frozen orange chicken as communion
Tuesday
The tyranny of the mass-intellectual
Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority
Gossip is good for you… so I’m told
Indeed, it has some evolutionary advantages
Tuesday
Polite society is a thing of the past
Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up
Tuesday
Thoughts on moving houses
Technically we are moving south, though I doubt we qualify as snowbirds
Tuesday
The problem of the progressive middle class
They believe in everything and anything – and thus in nothing at all
Tuesday
The Erie Canal at 200
The first spade hit the dirt on July 4, 1817, near the appositely named Rome, New York
Tuesday
The rise of millionaires, valet parking and facelifts in Palm Beach
New-found popularity brings high-end problems
How Major League Baseball lost its soul
Homestand is the most anti-MLB but pro-sandlot and hick-circuit baseball book ever published
The sad decline of painting
Pick up a paintbrush in a state-funded art school these days and you’ll be shown the door
Thursday
Why I won’t date younger women
I may be thirty-six on the inside, but on the outside I definitely look seventy
Monday
The controversy of Daylight Savings Time
Like so many intrusions upon our liberties, it was introduced to America by war
Friday
Bryan Johnson and the meme-ing of life
There’s a difference between living and existing
Are we still doing phrasing?
In our irony-sodden age, children may be the last reminder that words mean something
With reference to
You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league
Thursday
Road-tripping with Wittgenstein
Prior generations of children grew up with definitive signs of when they had entered an adult space. Their senses told them so
On embracing the winter years
I don’t know where the time has gone
A week at the World Backgammon Championship
Only 300 players entered the World Championship in 2024 — and I was one of them