February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

This is the 50th anniversary of one of the times I quit smoking. The last time I quit was maybe 7 to 9 years later (of that time, I lost track) – long enough ago that, as I understand it, my history of smoking is no longer medically relevant. Some of my medical records even say, incorrigibly as history but perhaps accurately as a medical term of art, “never smoked.”

The cultural shift against smoking in my lifetime has been remarkable.

Punked

[Poet Rolfe] Humphries may be best known, these days for a literary joke. He had received an assignment from Poetry magazine for a “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” in which, the editors asked, there needed to be one classical reference per line. Humphries sent in the requested poem, which appeared in the June 1939 issue, and began: “Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again, / Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone.”

But the poet nursed a hated of Nicholas Murray Butler, the long-time president of Columbia University (who, it must be said, had no editorial role at the Chicago-based Poetry magazine), and so Humphries built the poem as an acrostic, the initial letters of each line spelling out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”

“Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person,” the magazine apologized later that summer, and I have to say that while I appreciate snide poetry, my sympathies are with the editors who got used in the incident.

Joseph Bottum, commenting on the poet and his poem A Song for Mardi Gras.

Perspective

When it’s the most powerful nation on earth conducting a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries (one of which had precisely nothing to do with the inciting incident), leaving upward of a million civilians dead, revenge becomes a temporarily useful virtue. When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.

Omar El Akkadm One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

Do you see the theme there?

… In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

I graduated from Chicago in 1983, and at about the same time a group of people graduated from Dartmouth. We all moved to Washington about the same time. I knew them, and some of them have become famous, like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I came out of Chicago earnestly reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and all that, and my friends and I became pro-conservative. But the Dartmouth Review folks were not pro-conservative, they were anti-left. So in retrospect, I can see how big and vast a difference there was between people that I thought were part of the same movement. The sad news is that they now dominate conservatism and the Republican Party. Whereas my friends became Never Trumpers.

David Brooks

Caricatures

I spent most of my adult life thinking ill of [Jesse] Jackson, probably because of his infamous “Hymietown” remark in the 1984 presidential race … Then, about seven years ago, I met him for breakfast in New York. The man I spent an hour with was gracious, reflective, engaged, knowledgeable and more than a touch sad, probably because he was aware of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It reminded me that people are never the caricature that others make of them, and that there can be a lot to like and learn from people with whom we often disagree.

Bret Stephens

Shorts

It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. (George Will of VP JD Vance)
After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet. (James Van Der Beek)
Attention without feeling is only a report. (Poet Mary Oliver)
I’m at peace, and I’m excited, but my Oura Ring will tell you I’m not sleeping well. (David Brooks on his departure from the New York Times to take an interesting new position at Yale.)
The problem is that he overreacts. It’s like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, “You know what will fix acne? Decapitation.” That’s Trump. What he’s doing with scientific research is horrific. (David Brooks again.)
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. (Margaret Thatcher via Bret Stephens)
President Trump — who’d dip himself in gold if he were confident that it wouldn’t seal his mouth shut and prevent him from yammering. (Frank Bruni)
Someone who had been a Catholic longer than five minutes would perhaps grasp the irony of claiming a minority group had dual loyalty. (Sarah Stewart on the antisemitism of Carol Prejean Boller, washed-up beauty queen, “influencer,” and recent Catholic convert.)
My job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. (A headmaster at the Stowe School, quoted by David Brooks.)
Vigilence is metabolically expensive. (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.