James Parker

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Dear James,
My partner of six years is smart and funny. I never get tired of talking with him. He makes me laugh until I can’t breathe. The sex is fantastic. We’re great travel partners.

The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, drags, goes baggy with the weight of being alive. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and combusted as he ages, the lungs working like bellows, the larynx shooting flames.

“I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders. I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.

Here’s something we can all agree on: Jack Reacher kicks ass. Kicks it with relish. Kicks it with—not abandon, he’s too in control for that—but with a sense of near-blissful release. Kicks it, most importantly, in the name of justice, in the name of everybody getting what they deserve.
America loved Jack Reacher from the moment it met him. Lee Child, his creator, has written 28 Reacher novels, all of them best sellers. But there’s a special spice, a special piquancy, to our Reacherism right now.

It starts where it finishes, in a dead-end drone: a single accordion note that seems to refine itself, thin itself out, even as it goes nowhere and lasts forever. That the song was recorded in 1985 is a mere accident of history: It could have been written at any point in the past 200 years. It could have been written by nobody at all—by Anonymous or by some mystery of collective authorship.

And there were men there in attendance there with double faces, as they had been sutured one face to another with catgut and diabolic needle, and women with the nostrils of dragons.Monstrosities of democracy they came forth in their pomp in the noon of the day. From the backwoods, from the boggy peninsulas. From the gleaming mall-lands. From the sucking swamps. Sun it did throb like a thumb in the eye of God. And the chamber was a cauldron of mockery, bepopulate with jeerers and carousers.

I remember you, baguette. I made thousands of you.That’s one of the nice things about being a baker (which I was, for a few glorious years): You’re as ancient as Egypt, but you’re also Andy Warhol in an apron, mass-producing your art object. Baguettes in glowing dozens, repeating editions and series of baguettes, out of the great oven and onto the metal rack.

I don’t want to overstate this.
I don’t want to say that by watching World Cup 2022,
held in Qatar, on your personal entertainment device,
you’re stepping over the bodies of dead migrant workers,
standing on the heads of incarcerated queer people,
and bankrolling, in a tiny but critical way, the global grift.Because we’re all compromised, right?
We’re all implicated. We all live in webs of capital.
We’re all stuck in the mesh of consequence.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz once observed, the mark of a historic moment is that no one knows what the fuck is going on, then what we have here is a historic moment. (Pretty sure it was von Clausewitz who said that.) What we have here is President Donald Trump, the day after his people sacked the Capitol, trying to strike a tone. Which tone? He doesn’t know. And it’s making him very uncomfortable.

Of the great male voices to come out of the grunge era—Kurt Cobain’s, Layne Staley’s, Chris Cornell’s—the greatest was Mark Lanegan’s. It was simultaneously the fullest and the most evacuated by sorrow, the warmest and the closest to the grave, the strongest and the most self-immolating, the purest and the most polluted, the largest-hearted and the loneliest.

Metallica’s “Sad but True” is one of the metal canon’s great statements. The groove is ogre-ishly heavy, downtuned, encumbered, a fantastically oppressed/oppressing trudge, with guitar notes that seem to bend and bow under the conditions of existence itself—the incurved gravity between God’s hands.As for the lyrics, they are rich with a kind of deep-space irony.

Metallica’s “Sad but True” is one of the metal canon’s great statements. The groove is ogre-ishly heavy, downtuned, encumbered, a fantastically oppressed/oppressing trudge, with guitar notes that seem to bend and bow under the conditions of existence itself—the incurved gravity between God’s hands.As for the lyrics, they are rich with a kind of deep-space irony.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
who said: “Give me 40 million dollars.
I’m resurrecting my imploded multimedia empire.
And this time I’m calling it Shattered Visage Media.
Or no, wait—Trunkless Legs of Stone News Network.”“Listen,” I answered him.

Rock and roll’s relationship with time—as in Father Time, not, you know, tempo—is fascinating. Men and women barely into their 20s, dewy young people without a mark on them, somehow contrive to write songs of shattering, been-there maturity. Whiskery wisdom ballads, epics of regret, failure binge blues, and howling prophetic voyages. Wide-eyed they sing them, these songs of experience. And then they grow old, and it all comes true.

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.