Drinking in midday and smoking as casually as men, both women at the table are distracted by the little video screen in their hands, paying more attention to it than to each other. In one woman’s case, she’s looking in on her child, and on the other’s tiny round screen, a man, a lover in all probability. There’s a lot of fashionable, imaginative conjecture here in one picture, but nearly a century later, minus the aviatrix hats, wouldn’t this be a pretty close 2019 approximation of two young women at lunch, wearing earbuds, using FaceTime on their phones? For almost 90 years this idea looked futuristic. Now, the liberated lifestyles of those modern ladies of leisure and the pocket “mirrors” of their hand-held video screens are commonplace 21st century reality.
TV was always supposed to be two-way, face-to-face communication. The idea of television was born in the wake of the telephone, not radio; the idea of mass broadcasting, one to a million, wasn’t yet dreamed of when the first dense webs of phone wires were formed. The image of the ladies on their picture phones was what most educated people of 1900-1925 expected the television of the future to be like.
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I hate to admit this, but 
He was many things. A gag writer, a sailor at war, a novelist, the grandson of a rabbi. But above everything else, he was a storyteller. Herman Wouk has died at age 103.
