Carol Hanner

What's so bad about failure, really? Botching, blundering, bungling, blowing it, bollixing it. Faltering, flunking, fumbling, flopping. Nothing. Not a damn thing. In fact, only people over 40 (careful, there), or maybe over 50, see failure as an embarrassment. Those who are living the young, fast-paced turnover of the new...

I've heard ex-smokers talk about the after-dinner jones, how they hunger for that ritual cigarette, the sweet inhalation of tar and nicotine that tops off a great meal in a way nothing else can. So they settle for the other half of their ritual, a fine brandy or the slight...