On a recent not-so-wintry Thursday in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, when the only snowflakes seen were over text, a gang of 20-somethings stood in a circle outside Clearing Gallery, sharing a pack of American Spirits.
A few days earlier, at Columbia University, a 19-year-old pre-med student stared enviously at her phone screen — at Parisian women in cute dresses walking, cigarettes in hand — before stepping outside for a cigarette with her friends. (She requested not to be identified by name because she didn’t want her habit to affect her career in medicine.)
People are smoking online too. On Instagram, Tasmin Ersahin, a photographer and stylist, posted a story of her boyfriend, Arsun Sorrenti (son of the photographer Mario Sorrenti), catching a lit cigarette in his mouth. On TikTok, Charly Jordan, a D.J. and model, tried a sexy French inhale for her 7.7 million followers.
“Smoking is back,” said Isabel Rower, a 24-year-old sculptor, one of the spirited Americans outside Clearing. “Weirdly, in the last year or two, all my friends who didn’t smoke, now smoke. I don’t know why. No one is really addicted to it. It’s more of a pleasure activity.”
Across New York City, as the pandemic waxes and wanes, a social activity that had seemed diminished, or replaced (with vapes, cannabis and education), seems to have reappeared. Have cigarettes, those filthy, cancer-causing things — and still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — lost their taboo? Are we actually seeing more smokers? » | John Ortved | Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Please note that I post this article as an ex-smoker. Please note also that just because I have given up the very pleasurable habit, I do not expect the rest of the world and his uncle to give it up too. I am still very tolerant of smokers and smoking, and I shall remain so. Over the years, I have noticed that so many ex-smokers become very hostile to smoking and smokers once they have managed to kick the habit—please note I call it a habit rather than an addiction! (It is NOT an addiction)—but I shall not be like that. I have no desire or intention of depriving other people their pleasures just because I have quit. When I smoked, I expected others to be tolerant. Now that I have quit, I think it is only fair and decent that I be tolerant too. – © Mark Alexander
