Christian Lorentzen has worked as an editor at US Weekly, the New Leader, Harper’s and the LRB and has edited two volumes of pieces from n+1. He has a newsletter on Substack.
I was walking down Great Russell Street a few weeks ago when a young man emerged from a house wearing sandals, khaki trousers, a backwards University of Tennessee baseball cap, and a yellow T-shirt that had FUTURE WORLD LEADERS CONFERENCE emblazoned on it. This, I thought, is why they dislike us: sockless boys from Knoxville asserting their place in the hegemonic order a block from where Marx...
I misaddressed an email yesterday. It was about meeting up on Kingly Street in Soho. It went not to Nick in London but to Nick in Boston. ‘Kingly St?’ Nick replied. ‘It’s motherfuckin’ Patriots’ Day, dude. Don’t forget the struggle, don’t forget the streets.’ I had forgotten all about it. Patriots’ Day is a holiday peculiar to Massachusetts (and its former disconnected appendage, Maine). It marks the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first shots fired on the morning of 19 April 1775, and it’s the start of a week of school holiday. But somehow everything in Boston must be defined in terms of sport, so it really only has one meaning: Marathon Day. I was on Kingly Street when I heard the Boston Marathon had been bombed.
A father is in despair about his daughter’s unhappiness. All Lilly’s friends at school are richer than she is, and one lives in a mansion, with a pet horse, a llama, a luxurious treehouse and an antique merry-go-round. Her own family’s backyard is a mess, and her father knows it. Her birthday request is more than he can afford; his three credit cards are nearly maxed out....
When I was a boy, a seagull once swooped out of the sky and stole a grilled cheese sandwich out of my hands and flew away. An hour later we saw a seagull with black spiky hairs growing out from under its feathers. I was certain the mutation was an instant result of its stealing my human food. Seagulls only terrorised me one week out of the year, on my summer visits to my cousins in Hull, a small town on the Nantasket Peninsula in Massachusetts. I was also bitten by a dog, very porous as a goalie at street hockey, basically a whiffer at backyard wiffleball – but a real whiz at remembering baseball statistics, and the accumulator of jars and jars of seaglass. Otherwise, growing up in Hopkinton, 26 miles west of Boston – site of the start of the Boston Marathon, the first tricklings of the Charles River and a reservoir with a rope swing not quite ready for TV – I was and am a land lover. My parents, who grew up in Hull and the neighbouring town of Scituate, left Hopkinton ten years ago to return to the sea, and settled in Fairhaven, on Buzzards Bay, in the armpit-like area between Cape Cod and Rhode Island. Last week I went back for a full dose of family gatherings, my first since the Bush administration. ‘Hey shitbag, try some of my moonshine,’ my uncle greeted me when I pulled up to my aunt’s house. In the back of his pickup truck he had two jars, one clear, one dark. That was the spirit.
Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after...
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