Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” – Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet.” But there is a huge market of Lone Wolf Aspirants, as Byron explains: “The key with LWAs is to exhort rebelliousness, excessive eccentricity, and antisocial or even pathological rudeness. These are what we call... Read more

Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” – Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet.” But there is a huge market of Lone Wolf Aspirants, as Byron explains: “The key with LWAs is to exhort rebelliousness, excessive eccentricity, and antisocial or even pathological rudeness. These are what we call... Read more

In Bed and Board , Robert Farrar Capon points out how disordered sexual relations are deeply engrained in contemporary life. Capon wrote the book 40 years ago, but what he says is more true today even than it was then. Men, he says, “come to marriage after years of being conditioned to respond to certain more or less irrelevant features – the height of heels, the length of hair, the size of waistlines, the prominence of busts. When they become... Read more

Mark Edmundson examines the pervasive influence of Gothic themes not only in popular entertainments (horror movies, computer games, etc) but also in contemporary real-life life. He suggests that the evening news presents a Gothicized world, a world of unknowable threats and horrors that we cannot escape. Writing in the late 1990s, he is struck by the doubly Gothic structure imposed on the OJ Simpson story – whites telling a story of a man who was safely white in public but... Read more