Activity

She began to come by in the evenings, and often she was drunk. Are the rich very different from you and me? Judge for yourself. She was drunk and it was my role to sit in the room I shared with Ferdinand and try to work on my sophomore paper. “It’s important that you do this,” Ferdinand told me the…

And I had grand notions, too. I had quit hockey because I was too slow, but also so that I could read Kierkegaard. My history teacher’s list was nice, but here was Fear and Trembling. Here The Sickness Unto Death. I considered dipping into Weber. Occasionally the word Foucault would float from my t…

Paul Auster, a writer who has built a large work out of coincidence, catches this side of smoking perfectly in the script for the movie Smoke. A series of events and improbable friendships arise out of random meetings in the smoke shop, presided over by Harvey Keitel’s salesman, Augie.2 Black, whit…

Travelers, however, like the poor, are not people whose lives are “insufficiently structured,” as Franzen would have it. Their lives are structured from above. The poor are also time-poor. They own their time as little as they own anything else. They are waiting in line to cash checks, or in front …

For Richard Klein, author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, a book written with an odd intellectual boosterism about all aspects of smoking, the cigarette transforms anxiety at the overwhelming sense of impending death—your own or someone else’s—into a manageable death by bits and pieces:

By smoking …