The War on Bores

In his American Scholar essay on dealing with bores who don’t know when to put a sock in it, Mark Edmundson cites Plutarch, William James, the Dalai Lama, Jacques Lacan and, best of all, Groucho. (To Margaret Dumont, in Duck Soup: “You know, you haven’t stopped talking since I came here. You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”) Read the essay, watch the clip.