SOMEHOW, AND NO ONE seems to even imagine how, this country managed to survive and thrive before 1984 without a national minimum drinking age. Before that, the drinking question was left to the states.

BY PURE LUCK, I happened to sit down next to a man last week who has been my benefactor for my entire life and the large part of his, and yet we had never met. In fact, though he has been serving me faithfully for three decades, looking after my well-being and trying to improve my standard of living, he didn’t even know my name. Actually he still doesn’t, because it is slightly odd to get too personal with the guy in the next seat on a plane. We all know this. And yet I did tell him of my deep gratitude for all he has done.

SOMETIMES, FOR YOUR OWN mental well-being, it is a meritorious act to remove yourself from the hustle-bustle of daily life, with its mind-boggling busyness, technological frenzy, ever-changing professional demands, and relentless pressure to be drawn into ephemeral fripperies, and instead reflect on what T.S. Elliot called the Permanent Things—the things that bind us across time and space and unite the generations, the things that we know will long outlive our limited days on earth.

Co-authored with Manuel Lora

SOMEONE NOTED A STRANGE aspect of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: before being broken, the students had made an exceptionally organized life for themselves—a cell of ordered liberty on so-called public property in a totalitarian society. For a brief time, they lived and experienced the possibility of self-organized social order but failed to see the implications.

A MERICA RETURNED FROM THANKSGIVING holiday oblivious that Washington is still whipped up into a frenzy about the War on Terror, the prospects for another attack on the homeland, the creation of a new homeland security department, and the impending war.

What’s odd is that these people are convinced that everyone else in the country is as hysterical as they are, following every twist and turn in the on-again-off-again war, glued to the newspaper’s details about the new department, hanging on every new terror war.

MY 7-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER ASKED me the other day whether I was born before email. “Yes,” I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: “Where you born before plastic?” “No,” I said, “I was born after plastic but before email.” Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.

I’M IN FLORIDA FOR an event sponsored by the Mises Institute, and flying into Fort Myers meant walking through the glorious micro-civilization that airports have become, little utopias of commerce and plenty.

THE GREATEST SINGLE LIFE-ENHANCING step you can take in early summer is to change your lawnmower blade. It’s a thing that gets ever duller with use, and you adjust and adjust to the diminished cutting ability with each mow, until the point that you think it is normal that it takes all your strength to shove the thing across the yard and leave a trail of clippings and unevenly cut grass in your wake.

EVERY EVENING WAS A magic evening in the household of Mrs. Rede who lived across the street and made fresh flour tortillas for dinner every day in her kitchen that smelled of cumin and peppers and in which hung a captivating Aztec calendar that enticed me with pagan charms.

There was no rolling pin anywhere in sight. She would mix up the ingredients (Recipe? What recipe?) and let them rest in a bowl in the shape of balls.

THE ASTONISHING POPULARITY OF Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video—which became the YouTube meme of all memes in the course of a wild six weeks—has mystified many critics.