Please accompany me along the career trajectory of my English friend Minty. She receives an expensive education at which she is careful not to excel. She then wanders the world, trying on ethnic clothes and people. Having broken a few hearts in Rajasthan, she wanders home again. Some of her friends ...

Your musical day should start with works written closest to our own time, then work backward. The reason is simple. Nineteenth-century music is filled with the forward momentum necessary for the mornings; whereas early music—similar to jazz—is based on an interplay of harmonies, giving it the ...

“I lighted a cigarette, and gave myself up to meditation.” Thus runs the most expressive quote from the entire canon of P.G. Wodehouse, who wisely leaves the actual content of Bertie Wooster’s meditations to our imaginations. I was reminded of the metaphysical aspects of smoking when the ...

We live in an Ice Age of selective puritanism. You can bed who you like and cross-dress to your heart’s content, but God help you if you order a drink with lunch—or, for that matter, breakfast. I did just that recently in the bourgeois surrounds of St John’s Wood, London. I had a minor ...

Seeing you’ve read this far, I’d better let you in on my secret. It’s called Lifemanship. Like all the best things, it is nearly impossible to define. It is an attitude that speaks to both our most gnawing existential impulses and to the interstices of everyday life. As such, it is a distant ...

My eponymous father always kept cigars. I remember when I first stole one. I had drained myself at the thought of the new Filipina maid—it was that time of life, before I’d embarked on the more wholesome business of fancying my cousins—and was feeling hollow. I wandered down to the library ...

It’s the one-liners I remember most. As a polyamorist who prided herself on sexual liberation, orgasming during sex was far too déclassé. “If I wanted an orgasm,” she said, as if I were an idiot, “I’d use my vibrator.” A week later, the vibrator was gathering dust. Yet as each ...