You have a new boss (not the one portrayed above). Against all precedent, he doesn’t change all the old boss’s policies. He keeeps all the ones that working. You’re pretty impressed with your new boss. He is one of a kind. (more…)

I’ve been writing a lot about the nameless virtue, which is the virtue of unironically recognizing and praising standards that you yourself fall short of. The nameless virtue is easy to recognize when we’re talking about conventional sins and shortcomings. The inmate telling kids to stay away from the gangster life, the alcoholic who wishes he’d never taken that first drink, those are all standard fare. Along the same lines, what first brought the nameless virtue to my attention were Mormons who missed out on the basic steps of Mormon life extolling those steps. Those kinds of exceptions that prove the rule make the nameless virtue pretty apparent. (more…)

Those words would be as good an answer as I could give to the question originally addressed to Conan the Barbarian: “What is best in life?”

But they’re actually taken from this passage: (more…)

From Harpo Marx’s autobiography, regarding his New York City pals:

They had changed along with the times. Seven or eight years ago we would have wound up an all-night party in Aleck’s apartment arguing about croquet or the stock market, or making up wild puns and nasty menus. Now we wound up talking (they did, I mean—I still listened) about the NRA, the CCC, FDR’s last Fireside Chat, and Fiorello La Guardia, the new mayor of New York. Sooner or later Adolf Hitler entered every conversation, which killed it, and everybody went home wrapped up in his own depressing thoughts.