Sure, we'll all live longer, but how will this affect the future of flirting?

These days, Americans flirt feebly, liquor-soaked and anxious. But for lo, these many years we at least have had cigarettes, instruments of seduction.

"Girl comes up and she says, 'Can I bum a smoke?' and it was obviously a pretext," says Jason. The girl talked to him awhile after that, one of those classic Washington dialogues about law school.

Hrm...

Not sexy: those people outside office buildings.

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Efforts to make us more like the rest of the world in that regard strike a blow at the very essence of Spanishness: should our schedules change, we'll be much more like France or Switzerland - and definitely more boring.

A totalitarian state is one that sticks its nose where it doesn't belong and attempts to intervene in every aspect of its citizens' private lives, and many governments today, whether left, right or center, have developed this practice of behaving like busybodies. The old notion that only dictatorships can be totalitarian seems terribly naïve nowadays. And that is the worst thing about this antismoking law and others of the same ilk: they unfortunately prove that totalitarianism is no longer incompatible with the democratic systems that once guaranteed our freedoms.

Got a Light? A Ritual Gone in a Puff of Smoke