Cartography has been in the news recently. It was just five hundred years ago this April that a German monk named Martin Waldseemüller produced the first world map to use the name "America" for our continent. Only one copy of that map survived the centuries. It is in the Library of Congress, who currently have... Read More

The other day I met a very bright and beautiful young woman who had been introduced to me as "a dating columnist." As an old married guy, I am long past the dating stage of life, and our encounter was on far less intimate terms, but I was curious to know what a dating columnist... Read More

Hurricane Sandy came and went. What was left behind in the wake of the storm? A reminder of what America is in 2012, offering a powerful portrait of just why Barack Obama stands ready to be re-elected on November 6: America is a third-world nation, save for large geographic areas of the nation with low-population... Read More

My attic, like yours, is a place of dust and dark corners, exposed brickwork and beams, and piled boxes and bundles of forgotten or little-used items: luggage, old magazines, out-of-favor toys, medical mementoes from long-ago mishaps (did I really go round on crutches for three months?) and what department stores call "seasonals" — Christmas decorations... Read More

There is a specter haunting the Straggler household. The specter is not actually very spectral in form. It is, as a matter of fact, a large solid object weighing several hundred pounds, and occupying a prominent position in the living room. Still, it is haunting us — making us uneasy by its mere presence, robbing... Read More

The best relief from thinking about politics, I have found, is to spend some time at the other end of the labor chain, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface. Brute physical labor may be unpleasant and ill paid, but it can be mighty therapeutic for those of us who read,... Read More

Did you catch the last episode of The Sopranos? I missed it. Worse yet, I missed the entire Sopranos phenomenon — have never seen a single episode, nor even a fraction of one. Matter of fact, there was another program on that night I wanted to see: The Tudors. A friend had told me this... Read More

One day some years ago I was arguing with a Viennese friend about poetry. Though a well-educated and cultivated person, my friend claimed not to "get" poetry. How could that be? I protested. Don't we all respond quite naturally to strongly measured and evocative lines? Listen … and to make my point, I quoted Tennyson's... Read More

An old Scottish ditty complains that: I can't speak to precisely that, but the Straggler household has been in a sad way these past few days owing to the absence of Mrs. Straggler. A family crisis in China has to be dealt with, so off went Mom, leaving Dad and the kids to care for... Read More

Not a bad choice. Not very surprising, either, that Heinlein, an American, used a British brand of smokes to emphasize the unexpected classiness of that dinner in the middle of nowhere. When first getting acquainted with cigarettes, I took the opposite view. A classy smoke in provincial England circa 1960 was a Chesterfield or a... Read More

Winter break, bringing with it the school reports. I do my parently best with these, but rarely to much consequence. There was a semester a year or two ago when my son's grade plummeted dramatically in some area and we suspended his computer privileges for a month. That was the end of all major shifts.... Read More

Santa in his goodness brought me a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. It is quite a splendid one: a color photograph of Schloss Neuschwanstein, the alpine folly of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, and inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. The picture is beautifully reproduced "on fine papers and thick premium board" (I am... Read More

Procrastination, say the Gods of the Copybook Headings, is the thief of time. A house, says the Straggler, is really just a big black pit into which, every so often, you have to tip a wheelbarrow-load of money, or the equivalent in your personal time. Back in March we changed insurers for our homeowner's policy.... Read More

Reading Andrew Sullivan's new book The Conservative Soul (reviewed in the last issue of National Review by Jonah Goldberg), I was interested to see that Andrew, when in high school, acted in a performance of Hamlet. He played one of the minor roles, the foppish courtier Osric, who shows up in the play's last act... Read More

Just so with the humble Straggler. If the Census Bureau is to be believed, the resident population of these United States has just passed through the 300 million mark. Reading of this, my fancy became disordered, driving me to seek refuge in arithmetic. Here I shall try to reconstruct my train of thought. There seems... Read More

The kit presented some puzzles. There were seven white plastic pads of several different shapes. From vague recollections of seeing football players on TV I knew that the knees and thighs are padded. Exploring the interior of the pants, I found suggestive pockets sewn in. Some careful matching of pad shapes to pocket shapes got... Read More

On the indoor-outdoor thermometer attached to our bedroom window, the "outdoor" column is climbing up through the high nineties at 10 a.m. In the street there is no sign of life. Even the usual landscaping crews have apparently taken the day off. Front lawns bake under the kind of sky novelists call "brassy." The thermometer's... Read More

My wife, a very frugal person, ever on the lookout for household savings, recently instructed me that we must unplug all electric devices when we are not using them. What, the TV? Yes, the TV. Computers? Yes, computers. The standard lamps? Yes, the standard lamps. Apparently she had read something in a magazine about how... Read More

Is there any genre of literary endeavor lower — less significant, less regarded, more ephemeral — than the Letter to the Editor? Or any better illustration of the truth, first noted by one of the Roman authors, that writing is neither an art nor a science, but a disease? A person would indeed have to... Read More

Nature is, as one of Katherine Hepburn's characters observed, what we are put in this world to rise above. On the other hand, a Frenchman of at least equal sagacity pointed out that he who would act the angel makes himself a beast. Plainly, therefore, we should not aspire to rise too high above nature.... Read More

Watching those demonstrations for "immigrant rights," it occurred to me that we are the fools of the world. Americans labored and fought to create the freest, richest, most generous society that ever existed. Having done so, we threw open the doors and said to the rest of humanity: "Come on in and join the party!"... Read More

News of the death of Jack Profumo the other day had the same effect on me as the scent of a cookie famously had on one of Marcel Proust's characters. The years fell away, and I was, in imagination, back in the mother country at the time of the Profumo scandal. "Sexual intercourse began /... Read More

Our social commentators anguish over the Demographic Crisis of the West; our economic ones, over the relentless — and, they tell us, irreversible — rise in the price of oil. I must say, both concerns seem misplaced when, walking my dog, I pass the six-bedroom, four-bathroom, three-car-garaged McMansions rising to the sky from every vacant... Read More

"Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil," commanded Moses very wisely. The true-born straggler ("one that is separated by wandering off in some irregular manner from others" — Webster's Third) finds no difficulty in cleaving to this injunction. We stragglers are constitutionally averse to following a multitude to do anything, whether evil, good,... Read More

Oh, I remember. My very earliest Guy Fawkes Nights were family affairs. Dad would have made up a modest bonfire in the back yard and bought a box of assorted fireworks from our local store, the same place where we got our newspapers, candy, and soda. When darkness had fallen and we could already hear... Read More