Of all the rituals I count on to give my life shape, there is none so sacred as witnessing my former brother-in-law, Mike Benton, stand for local office in our pleasant burg of Calvert County, Maryland. Though my wife’s sister wound down with Mike two decades ago, he and I have a same-time-next-cycle arrangement, in which we use each quadrennial Election Day to catch up on the families, celebrate public service, and drink until we can’t feel our legs. 

Los Angeles

On a pleasant Super Tuesday afternoon—one of 10 or 11 Super Tuesdays we seem to be having this March—I am standing in the bloated carcass of that much-maligned beast known as The Establishment. In the unmarked suite of a generic mid-Wilshire office building (The Establishment can't be too careful, with all these populists sharpening pitchforks), I have come to Right to Rise, Jeb Bush's $118 million super-PAC, to watch Mike Murphy and his crew pack it in.

It's that magical time in the presidential cycle again, when all the preelection year’s wild conjecture, clueless handicapping, and abject foolishness has ended, so that the election year's wild conjecture, clueless handicapping, and abject foolishness can begin. It's that time when panicked, demoralized citizens, who believe that our country is dying, compose themselves, do their civic duty, and choose the man or woman best suited to finish it off.

To all but the most obstinate poll-science deniers, that man could very easily be Donald J. Trump. In an impossibly large field, Trump has dominated for seven months. He hasn't, in fact, placed second in a national GOP primary poll since early November, when Ben Carson briefly

I've never been one for elaborate New Year’s rituals. I don't thump the walls with bread to rid the house of evil spirits, as some do in Ireland. Nor swing caged fireballs around my head to torch last year's misfortune, as they do in Stonehaven, Scotland. I don't make hollow resolutions, since I might fail not in expected ways, but in spectacular new ways yet to be imagined.

If Christmas is about giving, New Year's is about taking. So come New Year's Day, I take a fistful of ibuprofen and a nap. Then, after coming to, I take mental inventory of the old year's final moments, praying it was my wife I goosed as the ball dropped, since a sour-mash fog leaves me easily confused, and all white people start bearing strong

Sanger, Calif.

On this late October day, as I wheel into the Wonder Valley Ranch Resort nestled in the foothills of the spellbinding if drought-scorched Sierras, I'm struck by the notion that it's a bit late in the season to be going to a summer camp for adults. But then, it would seem a bit late to be going to summer camp at all. For at age 45, I am what noted gerontologist Cedric the Entertainer calls "a grown-ass man."

But that hardly matters anymore. For I am also a citizen of Infantilized America, where getting old has gotten old, and youth is no longer just wasted on the young. Maybe it's due to narcissism or nostalgia, or all our institutions atrophying.

As a committed, long-standing Twitter detractor, I’ve exhaustively bashed the social networking site for all imaginable crimes, and even unimaginable ones.

Seattle
Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you offended? I know I haven’t said anything yet, but it’s never too early to be aggrieved. Studies I’ve invented, since we’re all entitled to our own facts these days, show that 4 out of 10 Americans are offended by something at all times. Ten out of 10, if they’re taking a course containing the word “intersectional” at Swarthmore. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been ignoring Bruce Jenner. As a child of the ’70s, I ignored him in the cereal aisle, where his Olympic-champion mug couldn’t entice me to pick his terminally bland Wheaties over more healthful Sugar Smacks. I ignored him in the ’80s, during his star-turn in Can’t Stop the Music, a disco-tinged Village People biopic that saw him nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for worst actor. In the ’90s, I don’t recall Jenner at all, as I was rather busy ignoring him.

I've had a lot of dogs of many different physical types, but each has come loaded with the same daunting reminder: the countdown clock I can’t help but hear ticking away inside of them. I suppose I come with one of those, too, if I care to confront reality. Denial may be easier on the nerves, but the actuaries don’t lie. Your average American these days lasts 78.8 years. My average large purebred lasts about 8. Meaning over the course of a lifetime, I’ll bid farewell many more times than they will. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Matt Labash reading his casual essay "After Moses, Solomon."

Seoul
From the moment his dead-of-night emails, texts, and encrypted Wickr messages start flooding my inboxes like a storm surge, it’s clear that Thor Halvorssen, who keeps vampire hours, is not your average clock-punching do-goodnik. 

Editor's note: "[F]our-time former governor and ex-convict Edwin Edwards -- a Louisiana icon, both beloved and reviled -- has lost his first, and likely last, political race at the ballot box," the Times-Picayune reports. We're reprinting this article on Edwards's attempted comeback, which originally appeared in the issue dated July 28, 2014, below.

The news broke hard in my house this morning that Marion Barry, Washington D.C.’s former Mayor for Life, was dead at the age of 78. Of the profile subjects featured in my 2010 collection, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader, he’s the third I’ve had to eulogize in the last few years.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Matt Labash reading his essay "They Like Mike."

Remember, when you sign up for our digital premium access, many of our print magazine articles are available to you courtesy of our professional readers.

As a lifelong white person​—​or Person Without Color, for the more sensitively inclined​—​I have nothing against white people. I mean, sure, at this late date in their history, I’m all too aware of the dubious and disheartening white-people statistics. Nearly all Prius owners, Vineyard Vines wearers, and girls named “Addison” are white. Almost 8 out of 10 Canadians are white. And the most reliably annoying person in the world, Gwyneth Paltrow? You guessed it: white.

If I sported a hairpiece, I’d be wearing it at half-mast right about now, upon hearing that the world just grew a little less interesting.  For the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress, former Ohio Democratic Rep. James A .

The surest way to know who you are is to understand who you are not. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought myself a simple man. I prefer hamburgers to fancy cheeseburgers, with all their dolled-up, dairy-fied excess. I have a “Simplicity” calendar with lots of Lao Tzu quotes. I would rather micturate outdoors than indoors, as it connects me to the land while keeping down the weeds. And as long as we’re showing our simplicity cards, I would rather say “squirt” than “micturate.” 

Gonzales, La.

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.” ​—​Philip K. Dick

Now that “software is eating the world,” in the words of Marc Andreessen, every once in awhile, we dinosaur types like to try our luck in the land of Web 2.0, 3.0, or Whatever.0 we’re on at the moment. To that end, I recently applied to become a driver at Lyft, the “ride-sharing” service where drivers who drive their own personal vehicle with a giant pink moustache lashed to the grille (the Lyft trademark) are summoned to your location at the touch of an app. This way, users don’t have to do the unthinkable, like look away from their smartphone while hailing a cab.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with senior writer Matt Labash, reading his recent casual, "My App-Lyfting Story."

Remember, when you sign up for our digital premium access, many of our print magazine articles are available to you courtesy of our professional readers.

Hollywood, Fla.

Though four decades shy of being an octogenarian myself, I’m starting to know how they feel. For at the hurtling speed of change these days, even a casual observer of the scene is unwittingly turned into a perpetual obituarist, forever marking the loss of old friends. So it was again last week, when news broke that Blockbuster was shuttering all of its bricks-and-mortar video stores. 

Berwyn, Ill.
Tom Day is not a man given to extravagance. He thinks he’s living high on a reporter’s nickel if he orders a beef sandwich to go at the local Buona sub shop. He shops at Goodwill every Sunday, hoping to pick up bargains, like his handsome $35 suits. But if there’s one superfluity that Day especially can’t abide, it is that of empty rhetoric.

Baltimore

Like most civilized people of goodwill and sound reason, I’ve always held that violence isn’t the answer. It is, however, an answer. Which is why if I ever see Larry Randolph again, I intend to knock his teeth out. 

“The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. .  .  . [T]he Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.” —E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909)

Austin
At the risk of being abrasive, I am about to say something unthinkable, heretical. I am about to say six words you have likely never heard from a working member of the media, and may never hear again: Do not follow me on Twitter.

Romney, W.V.