Account information for this Lucianne member

In the first season of Mad Men, the Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of smoking has just been released. Executives from a large tobacco company gather at Sterling Cooper to hear how they should proceed in this new environment—or whether they should find a new ad agency altogether. Don Draper asks a simple question: how is their tobacco processed? An older executive explains that it’s grown in bright North Carolina sunshine, then cut, dried, and toasted. Draper writes the words on the board, turns to the room, and says, “That’s it."

Today’s gambling scene is as close as your palm. You don’t have to bet win or lose, or even point spreads anymore. You can bet on the next pitch, the next snap, the next free throw — hundreds of micro-events within the same game. And increasingly, it’s the officiating calls governing those micro-actions that are coming under scrutiny, not from message boards or barroom grumbling, but from reputable outlets and institutional voices.

Some Goodbyes Don’t Announce Themselves. Forty-nine years ago tonight, I had plans to meet up with friends—people I barely know anymore. Before leaving the house, I stopped by my dad’s room to say goodnight. He was lying in bed, recovering from hip surgery he’d had a couple of weeks earlier — after having slipped off a ladder. He was watching television to pass the time. Everyone who knew him admired him.

Written on Christmas Eve, 2025. A personal reflection on faith, loss, ancestry, and finding my way home. This Christmas, life is really different for me. Since September, I’ve been attending RCIA, or Catechism, with the aim of converting to Catholicism and joining the church. Presently, I’m about 40% of the way through, and to say it’s been eye-opening would be the boldest understatement I’ve ever made.

One thing that annoys me — despite fully understanding why it exists — is the two-step authentication now required for just about everything. I know it’s there for security and to prevent your life from being financially ruined, but it always seems to kick in at the worst possible moment. And trust me, I’m of an age and time when I easily carried fifty different phone numbers in my head. In the smartphone age, that ship has sailed.

When I was a kid, my middle sister’s birthday was December 10th. As part of her celebration, the family went out to buy a live Christmas tree. Not because we were virtuous. Not because of tradition. Because that’s when the tree lots opened. There were no pre-lit artificial trees waiting in plastic coffins in the attic. You didn’t unbox Christmas. You went outside and found it, standing upright in the cold, guarded by a man with twine and cold hands in a worn corduroy jacket.

Writing this in December as I am you might be tempted to think I’m something of a money-grubbing Scrooge, but let me assure you in this first sentence I’m nothing of the sort. In fact, when it comes to tipping good service, I’m renowned for being generous, and was going twenty percent years before it was standard. My formula for a tip is this. When I enter an establishment, the wait staff is at twenty percent, perhaps even a little more. The tip is built into my tipping psyche. At that point, it’s up to the wait staff to begin working their way down.

Now that we’re firmly in December, I can comfortably drive around in the truck with Jimmy Durante’s gravelly crooning of Frosty the Snowman for the eighteen-millionth time in my life, rather than tune into what passes for talk radio these days. To be sure, I’ll even turn up The Chipmunks—poor old Alvin being screamed at by Dave—before I switch over to the local AM station carrying Clay and Buck, or, God help me, Sean Hannity.