Gone to Carolina in my lungs

Dara has already pointed out Dayo Olopade on David Sedaris on cigarettes, but in case you missed it:

David Sedaris has penned a lovely ode to his smoking years (inhale, exhale) in this week's New Yorker. With wicked precision, he ruminates on just what it is about cigarettes that allows one to be both self-debasing (the cough) and self-promoting (the cool) at once. He extols the many means of self-identification offered by cigarette consumption, pitting Newports v. Pall Malls v. Virginia Slims...

It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences, and somehow bring us together?

I believe anthropologists call this "gifting." And it's an all-too undervalued part of human intercourse.

Dara took Olopade to task for that last line—I suppose anthropologists would call that a "gift," in the same way they would call "London Calling" "the lead track from the Clash album of the same name"—and, if I can pile on, the most interesting thing about the Smoker's Code isn't that it involves gifts but that it involves ritual. The best line in the Sedaris piece nails it: It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. "Hold fast to your Mauss?" Hold fast to your Turner!

Lastly, the answer to what Sedaris, urbanist extraordinaire Ryan Avent and I have in common: all three of us hail from Raleigh, NC. Go Eagles!