Nathan Payne

Dec 6, 2024 | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Sam Kriss |Nathan Payne

It’s Saint Nicholas’s Day, which I mostly associate with the homeschooling families of my youth trying singlehandedly to reverse the central action of The Stripping of the Altars. I am afraid that I’m no fun, and not just because I am on day thirteen of a debilitating head cold.

Nov 27, 2024 | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Sam Kriss |Nathan Payne

There’s a scene in Éric Rohmer’s film The Green Ray in which the young heroine, Delphine, tries to explain to her dinner companions why she doesn’t eat meat. It’s because she prefers the lightness of lettuce, her body’s affinity with the airiness of plants, her fellow feeling with . . . well, it’s hard to say. Her hands flutter in the air like helpless stalks as the others smile with amusement and pity.

Nov 22, 2024 | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Sam Kriss |Nathan Payne

My head is much smaller than I remembered. I go long between haircuts in these dread latter years; it is difficult to find the time. The sad result of this regimen is that I forget the size of my own head, and spend days startling at the stranger in the mirror. The problem is stubbornness. I have been going to the same barbers since the age of seven; to find new barbers at this late date would be like changing my name.

Nov 11, 2024 | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Sam Kriss |Peter Hitchens |Nathan Payne

How many things there are which we think we know, but do not. What, for instance, are the “Grapes of Wrath” mentioned in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and also used as the title of John Steinbeck’s mighty novel? I know bits and pieces of scripture and idly supposed it must be in the Bible somewhere. I just did not know where.

Feb 2, 2024 | thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Carino Hodder |Steven Smith |Nathan Payne

There was a few years ago an article that drew some attention in one of the light “business” magazines, Fortune or Business Insider maybe, the substance of which was that peasants of the Middle Ages were clobbering the moderns on the time-off front. While the U.S. has eleven federal holidays—and, in truth, most of us work on at least half of those—your average medieval clod-buster had some three or four dozen days set aside for whooping it up.