James Parker

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.What do you need for a driving playlist? The fizz of the white line, the pull of the horizon, the tires beneath you slurping up the miles … You need forward momentum and you need space—expansiveness. You need regular beats and loads of deep repetition. Spiraling guitars.

Tim Lahan
This article was published online on April 17, 2021.I raised the drumstick, brought it down, and a dreamworld opened beneath me.A dreamworld, to be clear, of incompetence. A dreamworld of crapness and debility. A slump in tempo, an abyss. I was sitting at my practice drum kit, attempting one of the signature moves of the late John “Bonzo” Bonham, of Led Zeppelin: triplets with a left-hand lead.

Florida man, Florida man,
great head of hair, studio tan,
if I were hitching in the Everglades
and you pulled up, I’d be afraid.I wouldn’t climb into your minivan,
your swampmobile, O Florida man.
I’d wait for a ride with an honest trucker.
Anyone but you, you sleazy fucker.

Florida man, Florida man,
great head of hair, studio tan,
if I were hitching in the Everglades
and you pulled up, I’d be afraid.I wouldn’t climb into your minivan,
your swampmobile, O Florida man.
I’d wait for a ride with an honest trucker.
Anyone but you, you sleazy fucker.

Illustration by Oliver Munday; Bernard Gotfryd / Hulton Archive; Bettman; Bob Peterson / The Life Images Collection / Getty
This article was published online on March 13, 2021.

Tim LahanThis article was published online on February 15, 2021.So there I was, staring at my mug of tea.It was 1993. I was sitting over a plate of eggs in the New Piccadilly Café in Soho, London. Things were not going well. As a man, as a person, as a unit of society, I was barely functioning. More acutely, I was having panic attacks, in an era when people didn’t yet say “panic attack.” They just said Oh, dear. As far as I was concerned, I was going insane.

Tim LahanThis article was published online on December 19, 2020.With the nap, it can go either way.It can succeed, which is to say it can perform its function of refreshment and revival. Twenty minutes or so of light, untroubled sleep, just when you need it. After lunch, perhaps; nature gently makes the suggestion. So you settle; you sink. But not too far. A delicious shallowness. You open your eyes.

Did pandemic shutdowns make music sound different? Without concerts, parties, and (for many people) commutes, some of the best venues for enjoying the art form vanished. But isolation and panic gave music a more urgent job to do: help people survive. Here are the albums that made 2020 bearable.

My uncle once told me about a visit he made to an English friend of his, who was going through a divorce. “Right,” said this friend, “I’ve got a bottle of whiskey and the DVD of Tinker Tailor … We’re going to stay up all night and watch the whole thing.”Not the first choice, one might think, for someone in need of a bit of cheering up.

Tim LahanIt’s time to be grateful.For the courtesy, even when (especially when) it is feigned or forced. For the big, brassy hellos as we all file onto the plane, and the smaller, lines-around-the-eyes goodbyes as we all file off again, having gotten to know one another a little better.

America is loose as a gooseIt avoided becoming Belarus.But that sulking Caesar, POTUS—where’s he gone?Is he watching Fox News with a big frown on?We’ll seize the cycle. We’ll make allegations.Reverse these numerical humiliations.A major press conference, that’s the thing.At the Four Seasons … Total Landscaping.So the gods of bathos displayed us allon pickled asphalt, by a lumpy green wall.

Tim LahanWhat will it be, the thing that finally makes me write to an advice columnist?A quandary of the heart? An out-of-control kink? A high-stakes issue involving wedding invitations? Deeply schooled as I am in the lore of the problem page, I still don’t know which of the standard cries for help I’ll end up emitting.Because they’re all standard—that’s the point. The problems are the same, now and forever. The same dilemmas, the same misunderstandings.

Illustration by Katie Martin; images from Kean Collection / Getty; National Museum of American HistoryWas Thomas Jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course.

On the day of his death, an irregular cortege rolled in pieces across America, a scattered celebratory motorcade: maybe a pickup truck at a traffic light in Louisville, Kentucky, with the puffy, moon-landing chords of “Jump” coming out of the window; maybe an electrician’s van changing lanes in Long Beach, California, while quaking to the shocks of “Unchained”; maybe a Lexus in Boston, spewing the preposterous fluency of “Eruption” in its wake.

“It’s so lovely now,” Jimi Hendrix said in his muzzy mumble, his topplingly elegant, close-to-gibberish, discreetly space-traveling undertone, onstage one night in 1967 at the Bag O’Nails in London. “I kissed the fairest soul brother of England, Eric Clapton—kissed him right on the lips.”This is one of many groovy scenes recorded in Philip Norman’s new Hendrix biography, Wild Thing. The fairest soul brother, we can be sure, was transported.

Tim LahanThe correct answer to the question “How are you?” is Not too bad.Why? Because it’s all-purpose. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions, Not too bad will get you through. In good times it projects a decent pessimism, an Eeyore-ish reluctance to get carried away. On an average day it bespeaks a muddling-through modesty. And when things are rough, really rough, it becomes a heroic understatement.

I met a traveler from an antique land
who stopped me with a blue-gloved hand
and said, “That’s close enough.
You might be carrying viral lint in your trouser cuff.”
I could tell from the smell in the room
he’d been having sex on Zoom.
It was a shame we were so out of phase.
It was a shame we met in these dog days.
The parks are brown.
The rich are out of town.

Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin; Fox Searchlight Pictures; GettyThe child and the writer are born at the same moment, to the same mother, each to his separate destiny. The child’s is to see everything, feel everything, be everything, and live in the scraps and sparks of language by which he understands everything; the writer’s is to wait, and hide, and grow, until the day when he steps in—pen in hand—to take possession.

Tim LahanThere are balloons, and then there are balloons.There’s the domestic balloon, over which we shall quickly pass—the sad little sphere that you blow up at home, with your own laborious, why-am-I-doing-this carbon dioxide. A lot of pathos, for whatever reason, attaches to this balloon.Then there is the irrepressible balloon, the balloon pumped taut with cartoon levity. A balloon of this sort is essentially an arrested impulse. A trapped prayer, if you like.

Illustration by Oliver Munday; Eamonn McCabe / Popperfoto / GettyIn a lecture called “Frontiers of Writing,” Seamus Heaney remembered an evening he spent as the guest of an Oxford college in May 1981. A “quintessentially Oxford event,” he called it: He attended chapel alongside a former lord chancellor of the U.K., went to a big dinner, slept in a room belonging to a Conservative cabinet minister. Heaney would not have been ill at ease in these environs.

Daniel SavageYou have to get up.That’s the first thing. Don’t just lie there and let it have its way with you. The sea of anxiety loves a horizontal human; it pours over your toes and surges up you like a tide. Is your partner lying next to you, dense with sleep, offensively unconscious? That’s not helping either. So verticalize yourself. Leave the bed. Leave its maddening mammal warmth. Out you go, clammy-footed, into the midnight spaces. The couch. The kitchen.