Staff Picks

Think: David Brooks meets David Sedaris.

Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air−Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess. He comes away from his explorations hilariously horrified.