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1 day ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Jude Russo |Peter Hitchens |Robert Wyllie
It is a hot June day, and my good friend Mr. Tom Collins is helping me noodle on what might be worth laying out in digital ink for the few, the proud, the loyal regular readers of the Russo Low Life. On the domestic front, things are the usual pleasant shambles. I have just discovered the toddler licking ketchup out of one of those little plastic trays shaped like bottles you get at Chick-fil-A now. (Did they have these when I was a child?
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2 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | Joseph Epstein |J. Vance |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Alasdair MacIntyre began to mean something to me as a third-year university student, since After Virtue hit harder than anything else on the syllabi for PHIL 372 Contemporary Ethics and PLPT 407 Liberalism and Its Critics at the University of Virginia. The former was wonderfully taught by his last dissertation student, Rebecca Stangl.
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2 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | Joseph Epstein |J. Vance |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Melancholy has settled in at the Russo manse. Journalism won the Preakness, but Pimlico is now closed indefinitely for renovations—that is to say, destruction and new building on the site—and vaguely described efforts to spruce up the track’s down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Disinterested observers expect this to go about as well as any other urban renewal project in Baltimore. Wednesday saw preschool graduation, which yanked a crystalline bead or two from your humble correspondent’s gleaming orbs.
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3 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
Now that hardly anyone actually reads Lewis Carroll, it is perhaps once again possible to speak of the old East Germany as a country which was “Through the Looking Glass.” Half a century ago, this was a terrible cliché, though anyone who passed from one side of Berlin to the other quickly found that (as so often) it was a cliché because it was true. Every feature of life at first appeared the same as on the other side. But then it turned out to be wholly, profoundly different.
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4 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
In the blue afternoon the bird appeared, perched on a high roof in the capital of the world. It was a seagull, dancing in the sun. Perhaps it felt lonely, for it was soon joined by its mate and their hungry offspring. Indifferent to the cheers below them in the ruined circus and to the old men who lurked in the gilded ossuary chattering and marking bits of paper destined for oblivion, the mother spat out the corpse of a rodent, which the chick happily devoured.
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4 weeks ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths
America has finally joined the ranks of great Western civilizations and produced a pope, along with the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Greeks, the Dutch, the Jews, and, somewhat inexplicably, the Poles.
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1 month ago | 
thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens
The sad fact of it is that any idiot can write a book. If you write two hundred words a day for a year, taking off on the weekends (don’t want to strain the system), at the end you will have a manuscript of respectable proportions that you can inflict on contest judges, agents’ slush piles, and so forth. It’s comparable to becoming fit; but, unlike becoming fit, I’ve actually done the book thing a few times.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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2 months 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.
