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(The first piece I ever published: a profile of the world’s champion birdwatcher. This appeared in The Idler in 1988.)
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Terry Stevenson lives in the Kenyan Rift Valley. It is low land, near the equator and well into the interior, a formula for dry, choking heat. The soil parches into red dust, and the air, bewildered by sunstroke, wheels it up into dust devils and storms; much of the land ends up in the lake.
(A feature in Travel+Leisure Magazine that won the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal from the Society of American Travel Writers and was republished by Pico Iyer in The Best American Travel Writing 2004.)
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I have made a career out of not enjoying Canada. It is one of the few things I do well. My radical malaise, Canada-wise, is associated mainly with Toronto the Good, and my hellish adolescence in that winter-benighted place.
(A series on PETA that was a finalist for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.)
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A celebrity is at her most vulnerable when naked. This is when she is least likely to make sensible decisions. Often she is chilly and nervous. Hence, it is while naked that a famous person — who genuinely loves animals — finds herself shilling for people who are genuinely committed to slaughtering them.
(The second piece I ever published was a national scandal, causing Saturday Night, Canada’s oldest and most prestigious magazine, to be pulled from newsstands across the Rockies. It went on to win a National Magazine Award.)
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Peerless natural beauty? I’ve always found it annoying. If you’re staying at the Banff Springs Hotel or Chateau Lake Louise, there’s no getting away from it: everywhere you look they put a view in front of your nose.
AN INTERVIEW with Novelist Douglas Anthony Cooper.
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(A dialogue published in Architecture magazine, which is no longer with us. The piece never appeared online. I did not own a copy for years, but I recently stumbled over this transcript: the conversation looks a bit quaint, in this century, but it’s a nice time capsule.)
The NRA has done the nation a tremendous service by rating politicians. The most manly — which is to say, the most servile — earn a solid A. Those most resistant to lockstep loyalty earn an F. Guide yourselves accordingly. Refuse to vote for a candidate who has received anything better than a D from the National Rifle Association. Be generous: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may not run again, but if he makes good on his change of heart — if he trades his disgraceful B rating for a D or an F — then offer him your qualified support.
How does a saint become a butcher?
I am convinced that Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) was once a good person. What happened?
The story of Newkirk’s moral awakening — outrage in response to betrayal — is genuinely affecting. In 1972, when she was a young stockbroker in Maryland, Newkirk rescued a group of abandoned kittens and brought them to an animal shelter.
(Because I came clean regarding my fraudulence — a full disclosure, in their own magazine — Food & Wine decided they’d continue to let me write articles for them.)
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I have never cooked a meal in my apartment. Okay, let’s be frank: I have never cooked a meal in my life. I have fried the occasional egg, toasted the odd bagel, boiled random pots of water, but this is lilydipping relative to the great canoe trip that is true cuisine.
(THIS REPRESENTS rank consumerism, but also haute geekery; I’ve always been proud of it. It was long lost, until a discerning blogger/pirate posted it, and I stole it back. I no longer have the photos, which I was also proud of: it was my first photo shoot with a large-format rig. The prices, I’m afraid, are wildly out of date. As is some of the advice — but not all of it.)
I admit to sneering when I first encountered the vast international community of flashlight addicts. Who are these losers, I generously wondered. These “flashaholics.” Perhaps the nerd equivalent of, say, those neurally healthy folk who have sex with plush toys? Only less interesting?
That was a month ago.
Since then, I have spent an absurd sum on exotic lights, complex chargers, volt-ohm meters, and — the seductive bit — batteries whose energy density
These are not the dim Boy Scout torches of your innocent youth.
I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER when I last experienced the beheading of a close friend. Everyone assumes it must be a weekly, or even a daily event: after all, I live in Mexico. The truth, however, is that you are as likely to have your head removed against your will in my town — Oaxaca — as you are to be murdered by roving, machete-crazed gangs in Martha’s Vineyard.
IT IS PAINFUL to be called an anti-Semite by a deceased saint. Yet the dead speak, even when we wish they’d keep their thoughts to themselves. There is a tremendous effort to deny that Martin Luther King ever said these words: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”
Unfortunately, he did.
By all means let’s put armed guards in public schools. I remember in kindergarten really wishing we had cops stalking the hallways: the kind armed and trained to take down determined shooters in bulletproof vests. The problem is that I was raised in Canada, where people aren’t free, so there was no reason for hall monitors to be grownups with assault rifles.
DEMOCRATS HAVE been disgracefully uncharitable to Rush Limbaugh. He has apologized for calling a perfectly decent woman a slut and a prostitute; he deserves generosity in return. The man’s fickle sponsors have been departing all weekend, like ships from a sinking rat, so I propose that Democrats demonstrate bipartisan moral support, by sponsoring Mr.
The NRA’s famed slippery slope argument is entirely valid. Nobody seems to have noticed, however, that the slope is tilted in the opposite direction. Give the gun lobby a millimeter, and they’ll slide a mile. If they could dig a hole in the Second Amendment and stuff shoulder-launched missiles into it, they would never give up their cherished right to own them.
The Maya never predicted that 2012 would be the Year of the Cigar Box Guitar. They missed the most important story. The end of the world, which ought to be in a couple of hours, is not this year’s crucial event.
Should the world end, it won’t be remembered as vividly as Paul McCartney’s appearance with the surviving members of Nirvana: an incident that produced indifferent music, but introduced the world to the Next Big Thing — an instrument that will change the face of rock and roll.
Nathan Winograd believes that PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk, is mentally ill. That to him is the only credible explanation for her monstrous compulsion to kill healthy shelter animals. In contrast, I have argued that she is fully rational: Her viciousness has its own internal logic; moreover, it is counterproductive to psychologize evil.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES, June 29, 2000. They wanted to know what it felt like to have Stephen King make a fortune on an idea which had originally been mine, and upon which I had famously not made a fortune. This piece ushers in my much-lauded period of faux self-effacement.)
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Stephen King, as I’m sure you know, made headlines — and a small fortune — when his e-novella, “Riding the Bullet,” was published online in March.
THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER of a congressional candidate in Arkansas returns home to find his children’s cat bludgeoned to death. The creature’s skull is caved in. The word “liberal” has been scrawled on the corpse. Why should you care?
It is easy to dismiss this as a small crime, relative to the atrocities we read about daily.
I HAVE BROWSED the relevant entrails, and it will be an amusing if shallow year. In particular, I have weighed the Mayan prophecy of the Unrapture against a countervailing but potent sign: the mental health of Tom Cruise. No, I cannot verify that he has become a well-adjusted human being, but Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol — which ought by rights to be incoherent franchise fodder — is a surprisingly sane vehicle for a miraculously sane Tom.
Bill Maher is a merciless bastard. And I say that with the greatest respect. Lesser guys may be conned by righteous charlatans — not Bill. He’s the one in the front row, shining a rude light on the emperor’s flashed genitals. Lo, if you have stupid beliefs, Maher’s going to haul your ass onto the Carpet of Reason. Hence, he is pretty much the last person you’d expect to get sucked in by PETA, Ingrid Newkirk’s cult of euthanasia.
Let’s do what doesn’t work. That way we’ll feel like adults, as our loved ones are massacred. The “middle ground,”‘ in particular, is the place to stand if you care more about guns than children.
We know what does work. Truly responsible hunters and target shooters will endorse it, but a certain demographic will howl.
IN 1886, AN unpleasant man strapped to a bomb wandered into a novel; he had a detonator in his pocket. Thanks to him, we ended up with Hannibal Lecter. And the Unabomber. This was a new kind of human: the condescending scientist, with a peerless intellect and a slow athletic pulse, who is morally insane. (Bear with me — this is a review of the new Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows.)
We care about the parents of children murdered. We care when they lose their loved ones to psychopaths enabled by the NRA. We care deeply, don’t we? That’s why we’re all so livid about this: the father of a boy shot in that school massacre, who was taunted by a proud militiaman, “Your son should have had a gun, you stupid….”
I DISLIKED CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. I’m fairly sure of this. So why did the news of his death affect me as it did? Even though many of my friends knew him personally, I knew him only through his writing, where he came across always as amiable, literate, shallow, and wrong. That made him a better man than most pundits — by two adjectives — but I never understood the adulation.
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to write an unrealistic novel. I give up. No matter how peculiar your invention, reality inevitably sprints past you, cackling. I thought I was conjuring something nicely absurd for my YA heroine, Arabella, when I gave her a mother with academic expertise in the mating habits of vampire bats. This was only a few years ago.
IF A THEORY is too ugly to float across the table at a dinner party, it probably doesn’t merit the cover of a respectable magazine. One of the low points in mainstream American journalism was October 31, 1994, when The New Republic decided that it would be a good idea to devote the journal briefly to the promotion of racism.
The decision was to feature a book called The Bell Curve.