Four Ways to Lose Yourself: August’s Most Popular Selections

A Thousand Cups of Coffee

It’s a privilege to bring something warm and slightly sweet first thing in the morning to someone you love. Whatever else happens in the day, it will have started with a kindness. Not a special kindness; an ordinary one. The coffee arrives like dawn, as a matter of course. I say a thousand cups, but I’m not counting.

In Vino Veritas

Edward Slingerland on the Hidden Truths about Our Relationship with Alcohol

Though some academics, particularly those in the medical establishment, have come to see humanity’s taste for alcohol as an evolutionary mistake, philosopher and religious-studies scholar Edward Slingerland sees how drinking played an important role in humanity’s development. It helped an aggressive, untrusting primate to build mainly cooperative, and undeniably successful, large-scale societies. . . . Although the behavior is not uniquely human — species as varied as bats, fruit flies, dolphins, and reindeer all use substances to alter their minds — we are far and away the most adept at it.

Fifteen Ways to Survive the Coming Collapse of Civilization

Here is the stupidest thing I ever said: I was talking to my mother-in-law about a relative who was aging and unmarried. “It’s easy to get married,” I blithely opined. “You just have to lower your standards.”

Then I remembered I had married her daughter.

Nonetheless, my advice is correct. Lower your standards. Once civilization is undone, this will be essential.

The Narrows

In the beginning Leona thought the river was a horrible way to meet men. She thought Nell and I should meet them through normal channels, at church or a coffee shop, and not immediately after they’d tried to end their lives. Over the years, though, she’d accepted that my sister and I weren’t attracted to churchgoing, coffee-shop sorts, that we liked men who’d reached the ends of their ropes, guys who’d been gut-punched by life enough times to know they would be gut-punched several more.