J. Vance

1 week ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther

I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary. Trees are the lovely works of God, still living in every city among the ugly works of man. These large friendly vegetables are not just plants, but stores of goodness, peace and calm. I once tried hugging one and got nothing out of it.

1 week ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Mary Rogers |Matthew Walther

I’m bad at games. I always have been. My competitive chess career ended in middle school, when I decided that spending a day of Swiss-system combat at a school library in the lugubrious suburbs of Baltimore was not worth it if I wasn’t going to place. My brother was more naturally gifted, as seemed to be the case in most of these sorts of things, but he was young and undisciplined, so he didn’t pursue it much longer than I did.

3 weeks ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Ross Douthat

Not far from the house where I spent my infancy and early childhood was an abandoned sanatorium. It had been built in the Thirties for tuberculosis patients, and closed in the Eighties on account of asbestos and lead. A decade later it already looked as if it had been empty for a century: ivy up the red-brick walls, trees growing against the foundations, every visible window a black hole with a ring of dental glass.

1 month ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Ross Douthat |Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther

I used to be a movies guy. I called the movies film or even cinema, and I was the film editor on my college newspaper. I had the same boring opinions every twenty-one-year-old liberal arts major has about movies, but I thought I was very daring. Movies, like much of my life in those days, were a higher-order form of sloth.

2 months ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Ross Douthat

From my chambers in the county courthouse, I can hear the bells of my parish church. The tinny Runic rhyme wells outside my window, between the courthouse and the jail, across to City Hall and the crooked lines of tent villages beside the park. If one is quiet, the bells are even discernible at the bottom of the hill, in the business district. They are merry bells for weddings, and somber bells for funerals, and irksome bells that remind me that there is a holy day that I forgot.