Smoking Diary #20: Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law

But it’s a very soft breakage of the law.

by Sarah Hepola

Smoking Diaries’ first walking tour takes us past: a statue of drowning horses (??), an epically bad dorm, and the site of the first mass shooting on American soil, perpetrated in 1966 by Charles Whitman and captured brilliantly in the documentary Tower by Keith Maitland (based on Pam Colloff’s Texas Monthly story “96 Minutes”). We talk good times and troubled history, why the kids love the Nineties, and how on earth a campus where smoking was once practically mandatory became a place where it’s against the law. This is also the Smoking Diaries’ first low-key act of civil disobedience, though in fairness, it was like 4:50am. (P.S. There will be tears.)

The UT Tower looks like an owl from certain angles. Why is that?