The picture above comes from one of Katie Roiphe's "Personal Space" columns in The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the picture comes from Roiphe's column published in the Saturday-Sunday, January 10-11, 2026, edition of the paper. Roiphe titled that column as follows: "Why 20-Somethings Are Trading Their Vapes For Cigarettes."
The Journal's website tells us that Roiphe's "Personal Space" column "explores love, life, relationships and current cultural mores," and lets us know that Roiphe is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. The Journal also tells us that she is the author of several books, including The Power Notebooks, In Praise of Messy Lives, and The Violet Hour.
Wikipedia provides additional information about Roiphe's publications, calling out The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (1993), Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and Uncommon Arrangements, a 2007 study of writers and marriage.
What struck me most about Roiphe's column on how young people, today, seem to be returning to smoking cigarettes was her conclusion that while smoking was, indeed, "unhealthy," and should not, therefore, be celebrated, she nonetheless had sympathy for this new trend:
I find myself watching all these young smokers with mixed feelings. I want my students and children’s friends to be healthy, but I also understand the gesture, the fashionable nihilism, the hedonism, the why not. We could use a little more adoration of the present. Though I still hope the cigarettes are just a phase (emphasis added).
I have a long tradition, in my blog postings, of celebrating "the present," because it is in "the present" that we can act. Observing what's happening is great, and that occurs in "the present," too, but it is in "action," not "observation" that we create the world in which we live.
"Adoration" of the present, in other words, strikes me as the celebration of observation over action, and Roiphe's use of that term spurred me to remember one of my very first blog postings. I have published one blog posting, each day, since 2010, which means that I have been filing these blog postings for fifteen years. Here is a link to my blog posting from October 14, 2010, which I titled, "Now."
George Fox, the first Quaker, said the following, his words having been featured a number of times in my periodic writings since that first time, in October, 2010:
You have no time but this present time; therefore prize your time for your soul's sake.
I honor Roiphe's description of our current cultural mores, but I prefer Fox, who reminds us that it is "now," while we live, that we can act.
And how we act, and that we will act can (as Robert Frost might have said) make all the difference!
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