Addison Schacht, the protagonist of Sam Munson’s debut novel, is a foul-mouthed 18-year-old dope dealer who lives in an affluent neighborhood in Washington. He tells disgusting jokes about the Holocaust. He is rude to his single father, his girlfriend, his teachers, and his fellow students. He has few friends. He’s enrolled in the gifted and talented program at John F. Kennedy Senior High School in the District, where he’s applying to the University of Chicago. He scored a combined 1420 on the SAT, got excellent marks on his Advanced Placement exams, and won both silver and gold medals in the National Latin Exam. He quotes Virgil. He is, in other words, one of those intelligent, arrogant, and troublemaking teenagers whom you’d want to rap upside the head and ship off to a military academy in rural Virginia.
For the rest of The Weekly Standard review of "The November Criminals."
What I do for a living is unique: I teach people how to disappear. I show them how to live off the grid and erase any connection to their former lives.
My clients range from the paranoid to the extremely wealthy. I hear from victims of dangerous stalkers and the corporate whistleblower who thinks retribution is finally coming his way. This past year it’s been mostly people in the finance industry. My concern there is that six months from now it could come out that they’ve done something illegal. I don’t like to help criminals.
Read the rest of the Men's Journal article here.
Get a load of the menu that Verging on Pertinence has planned for Thanksgiving.
The man has, as they say in some Italian neighborhoods, a heavy fork. In comparison, I'll be attending a diet camp tomorrow.
Since he provides some nifty links for recipes (the one for pecan pie looks especially interesting), here's a pumpkin pie recipe involving cream cheese and see if you can guess the mystery ingredient for Red Velvet Cake.
He stared in wonder at the tops of trees and the texture of the ground and vowed he'd never let the view be so controlled again.
From Unhappy Hipsters.
Trip leader Hendri Coetzee has three rules leading up to our entry into the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Rule #1. Everything is going to take twice as long as it should.
Rule # 2. Everything is going to cost twice as much as it should.
Rule #3. No matter what happens, don't panic!
From "Kayaking Africa" in Outside magazine.
It is shameful that we lack the public discipline to live within our means, and will leave our children obligated to pay twice the taxes we do, for what we're spending today.
It is shameful that we've hijacked the language of rights, intended to preserve our common freedoms, in order to advance our own self-interest at the expense of everyone else in society.
Read the rest of Philip K. Howard here.
