Smoking

The Times spots a trend.

My topic today is a surprising trend that I found out about from the New York Times.

The Times is an excellent source of trend news. As far as I can tell they have like 800 writers who do nothing all day but sit around noticing trends. For example, I learned from this Times story that this year, your ultra-rich individuals — your billionaires — are all wearing clothes of a shockingly unexpected (at least to the Times) color.

"These days," states the story, "the hue preferred by the richest people on earth is that most bland and mousy of non-colors — beige."

Yes! Beige!

Apparently this is a major billionaire trend. The story cites Lindsey Woodcock, a "luxury travel consultant," who noticed the onslaught of beigeness "on the terraces and streets of St. Moritz, Switzerland, the exclusive Alpine resort town."

“It becomes something you can’t not see," Ms. Woodcock is quoted as saying. "There are flocks of people cruising around entirely in cream or beige or off-white."

If you can imagine.

Why are billionaires wearing beige? For the answer to that question, the Times turned to Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, who said: "The ultrawealthy don’t want to show off, and beige colors are good in that sense. This class of people is super discreet and doesn’t want to be seen."

That's right: Billionaires have apparently decided that even though they travel in private jets to stay at their luxury chalets in exclusive alpine resorts where a hamburger costs as much as a Toyota Corolla, the rest of us will not notice that they're insanely rich because... they're wearing beige.

This has to be legit, because it's in the Times. I'm thinking that even non-billionaires might be able to take advantage of the mysterious power of beige to disguise personal wealth:

IRS AUDITOR: You own two houses, three cars, a motorcycle, a boat and four jet skis, yet you claim your total gross income for the past five years is $436.70. Can you explain this?

TAXPAYER: I'm wearing khakis.

IRS AUDITOR: Well OK then!

One final note on this major beige trend before I get to my actual topic, assuming I can remember what it is: The Times article states that "in keeping with the shift away from bright hues among the wealthy, the Pantone Color Institute has named 'mocha mousse' its 2025 Color of the Year."

Like you, I never heard of the Pantone Color Institute, nor did I know that there is a Color of the Year. So I looked up "mocha mousse." Here it is:

I'm guessing the folks at the Pantone Color Institute decided to go with "mocha mousse" to describe this color because it sounds classier than the more obvious name, which of course is:

Whatever name we choose to call it — I'm going with "brown" — this is our Color of the Year for 2025, so please adjust your wardrobe accordingly. Although I imagine once the billionaires find out that nonwealthy dirtbags such as yourself are wearing this color, they'll switch to hot pink.

But again, this is not my topic. I was merely using it as an example of how the Times stays on top of trends. And the trend I want to talk about today is, as I said, surprising. Here's the headline to the Times story:

Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again

From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful.

The story notes that a bunch of recent movies and TV shows feature actors smoking cigarettes and looking cool. Also publicly smoking cigarettes and looking cool, according to the Times, are Addison Rae, Lorde and Charli XCX, who are famous celebrity musicians even if you personally have never heard of them. But I bet you have heard of Beyoncé, who, the story says, "has lit up onstage during her Cowboy Carter Tour."

"If Beyoncé is doing it, you know it’s reached the upper echelon of culture," states the Times.

Yes: Smoking cigarettes is now in the upper echelon of culture. Like beige!

The Times story does acknowledge, briefly, that smoking is — this is a direct quote — "not good for you." But the story spends way more time discussing how cool and chic and angsty and glamorous these celebrity smokers look when they smoke. When the Times says that smoking is "being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful," the celebrator that the Times seems to be referring to is: the Times. The overall vibe of the story — read it yourself if you don't believe me — is "Cigarettes: Except for causing cancer, they're pretty great!"

As it happens, this was exactly the view of many young people when I was a teenager approximately four million years ago in the mid-Sixties. Back then all the cool kids smoked cigarettes.

In my senior year at Pleasantville, N.Y., High School I was a hall monitor (really) which meant that every day, during fifth period, I sat at a desk in the second-floor hallway directly across from a boys' room. My job was to check students for hall passes, but of course I did not do that, as it might have made me unpopular. In fact I did absolutely nothing by way of enforcing the rules, the result being that, once word got around, every male student who wished to enjoy a cigarette would come to my boys' room. At any given time there could be easily a dozen cool guys in there puffing away; for all I knew, some of them were from other high schools. That was sixty years ago, and I bet that boys' room still reeks of Marlboros. That's how bad I was at monitoring the hall.

But my point is that long ago, way before Beyoncé was invented, many of us Boomers believed that smoking, despite being bad for you, was cool. I know I did.

I smoked my first cigarette in the summer of 1962, when I was 15 years old and working on the maintenance crew at Camp Sharparoon in Dover Furnace, N.Y. My main job was to try to keep the camp, which was constructed entirely out of rotting wood, from dissolving altogether by repeatedly smearing the buildings with a disgusting substance called "creosote" (I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know).

I bunked that summer in a cabin with the Rotando brothers, Louie and Hank, who were from Brooklyn. They were great guys, and we became good friends, often talking far into the night about a wide range of topics, by which I mean sex. Both Rotando brothers smoked, and one evening Louie gave me one of his cigarettes — it was a Kent, with the Micronite™ filter — and showed me how to inhale.

You know how sometimes you try something new, and even though you've never done it before, it somehow just feels right? This was the exact opposite of that. This felt like the wrongest thing I had ever done. I thought I was going to retch up my entire esophagus. My body was clearly saying that it would rather drink creosote than ever smoke another cigarette. Unfortunately at that time my body was under the control of my brain, which, being the brain of a 15-year-old boy, was biologically programmed, in any given situation, to do the least intelligent possible thing.

So I became a smoker. It wasn't easy, but through perseverance and grit, I got there. And I will not lie: For a long time I thought I was cool. In the 1970s, when I was a reporter at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., I always fired up a cigarette when I was writing a story. I'd take a big drag and cooly exhale a stream of smoke at the typewriter (we didn't have computers yet) and in my mind I was the epitome of the urbane yet world-weary yet suave yet hard-hitting newsman, just like my contemporaries Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the only difference being that they were breaking stories that would ultimately end the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, while I was reporting that the Downingtown Area School Board, after some debate, had approved the purchase of a new tuba.

So I really wasn't cool, with my smoking. I was just stupid. Eventually I figured this out, and when I was in my 30s I quit cold turkey (I'm using "cold turkey" in the sense of "after 157 attempts"). I haven't had a cigarette since 1980, and I haven't wanted one since roughly 1995. I'm not alone, of course; a whole lot of smokers have quit. These days I'm mildly surprised to see anybody puffing on a cigarette. I thought that one of the few things we all agreed on, as a society — even the people who still smoke — is that smoking is a cruel addiction that ruins lives and should never be encouraged.

But apparently not, according to the Times, at least not in the “upper echelon of culture,” where smoking is "no longer taboo" for celebrities. And the Times, always on top of the important trends, is here to tell us how cool it is. Thanks, Times!

There should be a funny ending to this Substack — maybe some clever callback to billionaires wearing beige — but I honestly can't think of one. Maybe you paying subscribers can bail me out in the comments. But first we have two polls: