Nearly 18 months ago, the Canadian-born Mr. Brûlé, 40, was in the exact same spot, laying out his vision for "organically" growing the Monocle brand to The Observer.

Since that time, the company has opened a Hammacher Schlemmer–esque lifestyle store in London (with another one on the way in Los Angeles), and more than a few more bureaus. And yet looking at the April issue, with its "global retail survey," a casual reader might wonder what planet this thing comes from. When even Condé Nast—the canary in the velvet coal mine—is cutting budgets for its most established titles, how does Monocle continue to support correspondents in Beirut, Bogotá, Nairobi and Moscow?

Mr. Brûlé said that the previous issue—also the magazine's second anniversary edition—was its most successful to date, and who can doubt it with ads from Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Prada in just the first six pages. But one does wonder if the global economic crash will throw cold water on the international beach party Monocle embodies.

The magazine’s jet-setting worldview (forget the Next Brooklyn, where's the Next Shanghai?) seems even odder now than at the tail-end of the boom when it merely felt like a series of dispatches from a strange—but excellently designed—alternate universe populated by strikingly beautiful people. (Who knew Slovenian medical students were so attractive?)

According to Mr. Brûlé, who owns 70 percent of the company, Monocle’s 10,000 subscribers "get it." (Another 150,000 copies are shipped to newsstands—though not at the Four Seasons, leading Mr. Brûlé to gripe, "I don't even know why I stay here"; one of his alternate-career fantasies is opening a hotel in New York.) He said his readers are "people in public policy and diplomacy, a lot of people in transport," as well as ambassadors and workers at non-governmental organizations. Recently, someone from the U.S. State Department called to ask for two free copies of the magazine. Mr. Brûlé said the answer was: "No. Subscribe like everybody else."

It's hard to imagine many people who can relate to the editorial Mr. Brûlé wrote in the March 2009 issue that began, "London-Milan, Milan-London, London-Milan, Milan-Barcelona, Milan-New York, Stockholm-Milan... We might have our base in London but all roads end up leading back to Milan..."

Yes, quite.

Mr. Brûlé estimates that he spends 250 days a year traveling. Maybe that's why so much of Monocle feels like the sort of conversation one might have with a business consultant or high-level bureaucrat in an airport lounge: It’s like a climate-controlled pod, sealed off from the current economic climate’s roiling seas.

"There is a sense of optimism," Mr. Brûlé argued. "And it's interesting how so many readers—and this has certainly been of late, this has been in the last six months—have gone, 'I really enjoy the magazine because you're not naïve about what's happening in the world, of course you nod to it, it's always put into context, but you actually close the [magazine] and you feel pretty good about the world.'"

An example of such “nodding”: In the September 2008 issue, the magazine smuggled a writer and photographer into Turkmenistan—a country entirely closed to journalists—and noted in some display copy that life under Turkmenistan's late president, Saparmurat Niyazov (a.k.a. "Turkmenbashi"), was "an eccentric personality cult." (Human Rights Watch was a little less equivocal, calling Turkmenistan under "president for life" Turkmenbashi "one of the world's worst tyrannies.")

Asked about the Turkmenistan piece, Mr. Brûlé said, "I didn't think we had to overdramatize it."

A similarly tossed-off aside in the same issue opened a 10 page photo spread of men's swim trunks shot in Beirut: "Despite the rather unsettled summer in Lebanon it was business as usual at the iconic 1960s Sporting Club—or simply 'Sporting' if you're a Gemayzeh resident." (See: Deadly gun battles shake Beirut, BBC, May 9, 2008.)

Mr. Brûlé doesn't concern himself much with the worldwide economic downturn, calling talk of collapsing markets "a conversation opener only in the United States, almost to the point that it's boring."

While the magazine feints at the topic, its podcast tends to handle it more directly. A recent installment found Mr. Brûlé wondering ominously if Dubai—precisely the sort of booming, architecturally daring, globalized megalopolis Monocle celebrates—would crumble into the desert now that its economy has stalled and thousands of its fun-loving, high-spending expats have fled for fear of winding up in debtors prison.

But even there, Mr. Brûlé seemed to be envisioning a potential Ralph Lauren-styled spread. "There is such a good story to be done there," he says, imagining a photo essay or an article about "young princes ... who have to get out and work."

Related: Monocle v. Monocle.

Dixie Chicks -- Taking the Long Way and Alejandro Escovedo - Room of Songs

Arctic Monkeys -- Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not and Pearl Jam -- Pearl Jam

Bruce Springsteen -- We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy -- The Letting Go

TV on the Radio-- Return to Cookie Mountain and Beirut -- The Gulag Orkestar

Gnarls Barkley -- St. Elsewhere

I set the phone down and ordered a cup of tea. It was brought not by my usual waitress, but by the café’s owner, who wore a grim expression, introduced himself hurriedly as Raed, and—to my great surprise—pulled a chair up next to mine and sat down.

“Excuse me for bothering you, but I can tell you’re not from Beirut, and you may not know what has just happened.”

I certainly didn’t know, but felt—as one always feels in Beirut—that the news couldn’t possibly be good.

“Pierre Gemayel has been shot, in the middle of the day. Can you imagine? I recommend that you go home and stay there. It will be hours before your phone works again—the government turns off the mobile-phone service on these occasions. The important thing is to get straight home. This will mean war, you know.”

I can be a bit slow on the uptake where political topics are concerned, but discussing politics with a Beiruti always makes me feel especially dull-witted. Politics in Lebanon is often a life-or-death matter, and so naturally everyone takes a keen interest. Childhood nights crouched in bomb shelters, gauging whether the rockets were incoming or outgoing and decades spent following alliances and assassinations in Lebanon’s prominent families have a way of honing native political intelligence to a very fine edge.

I made a clumsy attempt to piece together the implications of this news, as the Lebanese do so instinctively and immediately. Pierre Gemayel was a government minister, I knew, but already that seemed beside the point. Gemayel was from one of the country’s important Maronite families, the grandson of the founder of the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalange. This meant that he was a symbol of Christian power in Lebanon, which meant that his enemies were many, which meant that those wanting him dead could be … well, almost anyone, really.

I turned to Raed. “Who do you think would have the most to gain from Gemayel’s death?”

Raed shrugged. “Almost anyone, really. The point is that our government is being destroyed. This is nearly on the level of the Hariri assassination. This will almost certainly mean civil war. He was shot, can you imagine?”

Pierre Gemayel was shot. It took me another hour and several more conversations with Lebanese friends to grasp the import of this fact. Here in Beirut, arranging a car bombing is seen as a relatively easy way to murder an enemy. But shooting a man on a crowded street in the middle of a sunny afternoon?

That takes daring. That telegraphs insouciance, power wielded in complete confidence. The message to Lebanon’s frail, Western-backed ruling coalition couldn’t have been clearer: You are no longer in control.

Beirut is a diverse and profoundly class-ridden city; the newcomer feels it immediately. But in peacetime, these things seem not to matter. The people seem cheerful, almost supernaturally exuberant. They enjoy watching each other and parsing the differences among them, the small matters that divide neighborhoods and religious groups. The things they mention usually sound to my ear like harmless snobberies, but I wonder how the city would feel if battle lines were drawn as they once were, during the long civil war, when individual neighborhoods became strongholds.

Beirut in the fall smells precisely like Paris in a damp June—there’s an ineffable, very French smell of motor oil and detergents, butchers’ shops and cigarettes. It smells European and yet looks unmistakably Middle Eastern. For all its diversity, it is a very compact city, and I walk almost everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment in western Beirut to Martyr’s Square downtown, where the big demonstrations are always held. It takes no more than a half hour to walk over to friends’ apartments in Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian eastern Beirut neighborhood.

It’s fun examining the differences between the neighborhoods, which up till now have seemed matters of mere sociological interest, often sweetly comical and occasionally sad.

Bourj Hammoud is an image of the striving, jovial Armenian jewelers who fixed my watch. Hamra is the saj bread seller who always corrects my accent in Arabic so that I “don’t have to sound like a Syrian.”

Haret Hreik—or “Hezbollah Central,” as my friend Andrew calls it—brings to mind a certain very enthusiastic taxi driver who took me on a tour of the piles of rubble that were the result of multiple Israeli bombing raids; in the garbage that had collected on the site of one destroyed building, I noticed a Pekingese looking aristocratic and improbably clean as it trotted around among the boulders of smashed concrete.

And then there’s Achrafieh, which in its self-regard and Francophilic pretensions is Beirut’s greatest gift to the amateur sociologist in search of amusement. The image of Achrafieh that sticks most in my mind is of a young housewife I once saw, impeccably coiffed and chatting gaily on her cell phone as she walked out of the Monoprix grocery store. A tiny, elderly Filipina maid trudged a few paces behind her with the goods; the maid’s dress—blue gingham with a lace-trimmed white apron—looked weirdly girlish framed by those stringy brown arms and wizened face. I had briefly mistaken the maid for the woman’s child, the gingham for a summer-school uniform.

Whether the Gemayel assassination will turn out to have been the opening salvo in a renewed civil war remains to be seen, of course. But more than half of the Lebanese people I speak to in an average day seem to think so, and since Lebanon is widely seen as the canary in the mine of the greater Middle East—regional countries from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia all have political interests in Lebanon, and the collapse of the government in Lebanon will have implications far beyond its borders—this is very bad news for the region as a whole.

Marwan, who runs the shop where I usually buy my lunchtime sandwiches, asks me to correct his English.

“I don’t give a shit about this government we have now—there is a nicer way to say that, isn’t there?”

“You could say ‘I don’t care about this government.’”

“Oh, yes—all my English is from the movies. I mean, I don’t care about this government—but the problem is that if Lebanon falls now, we maybe take all the rest of the Middle East down with us.”

Katherine Zoepf is working on a book about young women in the Middle East for the Penguin Press.

I set the phone down and ordered a cup of tea. It was brought not by my usual waitress, but by the café’s owner, who wore a grim expression, introduced himself hurriedly as Raed, and—to my great surprise—pulled a chair up next to mine and sat down.

“Excuse me for bothering you, but I can tell you’re not from Beirut, and you may not know what has just happened.”

I certainly didn’t know, but felt—as one always feels in Beirut—that the news couldn’t possibly be good.

“Pierre Gemayel has been shot, in the middle of the day. Can you imagine? I recommend that you go home and stay there. It will be hours before your phone works again—the government turns off the mobile-phone service on these occasions. The important thing is to get straight home. This will mean war, you know.”

I can be a bit slow on the uptake where political topics are concerned, but discussing politics with a Beiruti always makes me feel especially dull-witted. Politics in Lebanon is often a life-or-death matter, and so naturally everyone takes a keen interest. Childhood nights crouched in bomb shelters, gauging whether the rockets were incoming or outgoing and decades spent following alliances and assassinations in Lebanon’s prominent families have a way of honing native political intelligence to a very fine edge.

I made a clumsy attempt to piece together the implications of this news, as the Lebanese do so instinctively and immediately. Pierre Gemayel was a government minister, I knew, but already that seemed beside the point. Gemayel was from one of the country’s important Maronite families, the grandson of the founder of the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalange. This meant that he was a symbol of Christian power in Lebanon, which meant that his enemies were many, which meant that those wanting him dead could be … well, almost anyone, really.

I turned to Raed. “Who do you think would have the most to gain from Gemayel’s death?”

Raed shrugged. “Almost anyone, really. The point is that our government is being destroyed. This is nearly on the level of the Hariri assassination. This will almost certainly mean civil war. He was shot, can you imagine?”

Pierre Gemayel was shot. It took me another hour and several more conversations with Lebanese friends to grasp the import of this fact. Here in Beirut, arranging a car bombing is seen as a relatively easy way to murder an enemy. But shooting a man on a crowded street in the middle of a sunny afternoon?

That takes daring. That telegraphs insouciance, power wielded in complete confidence. The message to Lebanon’s frail, Western-backed ruling coalition couldn’t have been clearer: You are no longer in control.

Beirut is a diverse and profoundly class-ridden city; the newcomer feels it immediately. But in peacetime, these things seem not to matter. The people seem cheerful, almost supernaturally exuberant. They enjoy watching each other and parsing the differences among them, the small matters that divide neighborhoods and religious groups. The things they mention usually sound to my ear like harmless snobberies, but I wonder how the city would feel if battle lines were drawn as they once were, during the long civil war, when individual neighborhoods became strongholds.

Beirut in the fall smells precisely like Paris in a damp June—there’s an ineffable, very French smell of motor oil and detergents, butchers’ shops and cigarettes. It smells European and yet looks unmistakably Middle Eastern. For all its diversity, it is a very compact city, and I walk almost everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment in western Beirut to Martyr’s Square downtown, where the big demonstrations are always held. It takes no more than a half hour to walk over to friends’ apartments in Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian eastern Beirut neighborhood.

It’s fun examining the differences between the neighborhoods, which up till now have seemed matters of mere sociological interest, often sweetly comical and occasionally sad.

Bourj Hammoud is an image of the striving, jovial Armenian jewelers who fixed my watch. Hamra is the saj bread seller who always corrects my accent in Arabic so that I “don’t have to sound like a Syrian.”

Haret Hreik—or “Hezbollah Central,” as my friend Andrew calls it—brings to mind a certain very enthusiastic taxi driver who took me on a tour of the piles of rubble that were the result of multiple Israeli bombing raids; in the garbage that had collected on the site of one destroyed building, I noticed a Pekingese looking aristocratic and improbably clean as it trotted around among the boulders of smashed concrete.

And then there’s Achrafieh, which in its self-regard and Francophilic pretensions is Beirut’s greatest gift to the amateur sociologist in search of amusement. The image of Achrafieh that sticks most in my mind is of a young housewife I once saw, impeccably coiffed and chatting gaily on her cell phone as she walked out of the Monoprix grocery store. A tiny, elderly Filipina maid trudged a few paces behind her with the goods; the maid’s dress—blue gingham with a lace-trimmed white apron—looked weirdly girlish framed by those stringy brown arms and wizened face. I had briefly mistaken the maid for the woman’s child, the gingham for a summer-school uniform.

Whether the Gemayel assassination will turn out to have been the opening salvo in a renewed civil war remains to be seen, of course. But more than half of the Lebanese people I speak to in an average day seem to think so, and since Lebanon is widely seen as the canary in the mine of the greater Middle East—regional countries from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia all have political interests in Lebanon, and the collapse of the government in Lebanon will have implications far beyond its borders—this is very bad news for the region as a whole.

Marwan, who runs the shop where I usually buy my lunchtime sandwiches, asks me to correct his English.

“I don’t give a shit about this government we have now—there is a nicer way to say that, isn’t there?”

“You could say ‘I don’t care about this government.’”

“Oh, yes—all my English is from the movies. I mean, I don’t care about this government—but the problem is that if Lebanon falls now, we maybe take all the rest of the Middle East down with us.”

Katherine Zoepf is working on a book about young women in the Middle East for the Penguin Press.

The impact sets a couple of car alarms off screaming into the greenish evening gloom, and from further away there’s a familiar clicking sound, that horrible, hard tick-tick-tick that means the bullets are real.

British Airways gave me a couple of foam earplugs when I flew here last week, and I’ve taken to wearing them as I type. But even so, I struggle to remember that all these bangs and pops are, actually, joyful bangs and pops: It’s the Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival that marks the end of the Islamic fasting month, Ramadan. This is a celebration. And yet it’s a wonder to me that the Lebanese haven’t lost their taste for fireworks.

After all, my bottle-rocket-loving neighbors are some of the same Beirutis who, this past summer, were kept awake by nightly Israeli air raids and real, very deadly explosions. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the 34-day war between Israel and the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, scarcely more than 10 weeks ago. My friend Soha tells me that her three small daughters, like so many Lebanese children, are still nervous, clingy, uncharacteristically tearful.

Foreign peacekeepers are still arriving—including a fresh batch from Turkey just today—even while many Lebanese are wondering aloud whether the fragile peace will last.

I’m definitely not enjoying the fireworks right now, I’ve decided, but of course, this isn’t my Eid, and I’m not one of the people that they’re intended to delight. And perhaps, seen in a certain light, it’s a healthy sign that Beirut is having such an apparently normal Eid al-Fitr, complete with syrupy clotted-cream sweets, firecrackers and bursts of celebratory gunfire.

But for many Lebanese, this is far from being a normal holiday. Many of the Beirutis I’ve been speaking to in recent days are furious with Hezbollah for dragging their country into a conflict with one of the best-armed nations in the region, and almost equally angry with their government for being too weak to prevent it.

Most of the Lebanese who fled the country during the fighting have returned home by now, but they’re resuming their work and their studies cautiously, weighted by anxiety.

“The feeling is different now,” my friend Elie tells me. “We are Lebanese, of course—we have that hope that just keeps pushing, no matter what. But people are getting depressed. Even in the early 90’s, just after the civil war, there was more hope than we feel now.”

Nada, another friend, who is in her early 20’s and thus can scarcely remember the civil war, seems to feel a bit of pride at having stayed throughout the summer, at having lived through the bombings and the sleepless nights and the hours of dull anticipation. “War,” she informs me in a world-weary tone, “is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent fear.” Young Lebanese of her generation, who had the greatest hopes for the so-called Cedar Revolution, feel almost overwhelmed by disappointment.

They are also struggling financially. The war dealt a terrific blow to Lebanon’s economy, and many Lebanese companies have slashed employee salaries. For Nada and her similarly ambitious friends, whether to stay in Beirut or to seek better opportunities overseas is a constant topic of discussion.

Of course, Nada and her friends—universally trilingual and well-educated, with the connections and family support necessary to start new lives abroad if they chose to—are the lucky ones. The day before yesterday, searching for cheap towels and sheets for my temporary apartment, I ended up in Haret Hreik, a predominantly Shiite suburb in southern Beirut that my friend Andrew has nicknamed “Hezbollah central,” and which was especially hard-hit by the recent Israeli bombing raids.

As we turned a corner in the direction of the shops I wanted to visit, my taxi driver, Mohammed, a smallish, wiry man in his mid-40’s, dapper in a crisp blue windowpane-checked shirt, gestured at a giant pile of scorched rubble.

“Before the Israelis,” he told me, “that was my apartment building.”

I can’t remember what I said, but Mohammed seemed so touched and delighted by my interest that he seemed to entirely forget that I wished to buy household supplies. For the next hour, he gave me a street-by-street, literally blow-by-blow tour of the Dahiyeh, as the southern suburbs of Beirut are known.

“That used to be an excellent supermarket,” Mohammed would say almost fondly about a certain heap of shattered concrete. And: “That used to be the building of our television station, Al Manar, run by Hezbollah.”

The density of destruction—whole blocks of buildings simply collapsed in on themselves—was stunning. I had seen some of this before, back in August, and found it dispiriting to realize that very little had changed.

The piles of rubble looked a bit more weathered, more trash-strewn, but few of them had been removed, and scarcely anything, so far as I could tell, was being rebuilt.

Mohammed, for his part, seemed to be greatly enjoying himself. Hezbollah, he told me, had given him $12,000 in cash to compensate him for the loss of his apartment, and he fully expected that he and his family would be moving into a better one soon. He slowed the car way down as we passed a clothing store called Gravity, with window displays of acid-washed jeans and bright, cheap, stripy men’s shirts, all at extra-low Ramadan prices, and nearly came to a stop by a massive hole in the ground.

“And this,” he said reverently, “used to be the home of Sayyid Fadlallah,” who is widely considered to be the spiritual father of Hezbollah.

Something, I suddenly realized, had changed. Driving around the Dahiyeh back in August with my friend Andrew, we’d seen scores of dramatic Hezbollah banners, some of them three or four stories high, stretched down the sides of building. On every block, there had been dozens of yellow Hezbollah flags and homemade signs bearing proud, militant slogans. Where were they now?

Even here, next to the destroyed home of Sheikh Fadlallah, they were nowhere to be seen. Was it possible that even here in Haret Hreik, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s core supporters were feeling disappointed and angry too?

I turned to smiling Mohammed in the driver’s seat, but here in the Hezbollah heartland, I felt just a bit too nervous to ask him. Besides, he’d been so kind already, and was starting to pepper me with questions about my family, about life in New York.

Katherine Zoepf, a writer based in Beirut, is working on a book about young Arab women for the Penguin Press.

The impact sets a couple of car alarms off screaming into the greenish evening gloom, and from further away there’s a familiar clicking sound, that horrible, hard tick-tick-tick that means the bullets are real.

British Airways gave me a couple of foam earplugs when I flew here last week, and I’ve taken to wearing them as I type. But even so, I struggle to remember that all these bangs and pops are, actually, joyful bangs and pops: It’s the Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival that marks the end of the Islamic fasting month, Ramadan. This is a celebration. And yet it’s a wonder to me that the Lebanese haven’t lost their taste for fireworks.

After all, my bottle-rocket-loving neighbors are some of the same Beirutis who, this past summer, were kept awake by nightly Israeli air raids and real, very deadly explosions. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the 34-day war between Israel and the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, scarcely more than 10 weeks ago. My friend Soha tells me that her three small daughters, like so many Lebanese children, are still nervous, clingy, uncharacteristically tearful.

Foreign peacekeepers are still arriving—including a fresh batch from Turkey just today—even while many Lebanese are wondering aloud whether the fragile peace will last.

I’m definitely not enjoying the fireworks right now, I’ve decided, but of course, this isn’t my Eid, and I’m not one of the people that they’re intended to delight. And perhaps, seen in a certain light, it’s a healthy sign that Beirut is having such an apparently normal Eid al-Fitr, complete with syrupy clotted-cream sweets, firecrackers and bursts of celebratory gunfire.

But for many Lebanese, this is far from being a normal holiday. Many of the Beirutis I’ve been speaking to in recent days are furious with Hezbollah for dragging their country into a conflict with one of the best-armed nations in the region, and almost equally angry with their government for being too weak to prevent it.

Most of the Lebanese who fled the country during the fighting have returned home by now, but they’re resuming their work and their studies cautiously, weighted by anxiety.

“The feeling is different now,” my friend Elie tells me. “We are Lebanese, of course—we have that hope that just keeps pushing, no matter what. But people are getting depressed. Even in the early 90’s, just after the civil war, there was more hope than we feel now.”

Nada, another friend, who is in her early 20’s and thus can scarcely remember the civil war, seems to feel a bit of pride at having stayed throughout the summer, at having lived through the bombings and the sleepless nights and the hours of dull anticipation. “War,” she informs me in a world-weary tone, “is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent fear.” Young Lebanese of her generation, who had the greatest hopes for the so-called Cedar Revolution, feel almost overwhelmed by disappointment.

They are also struggling financially. The war dealt a terrific blow to Lebanon’s economy, and many Lebanese companies have slashed employee salaries. For Nada and her similarly ambitious friends, whether to stay in Beirut or to seek better opportunities overseas is a constant topic of discussion.

Of course, Nada and her friends—universally trilingual and well-educated, with the connections and family support necessary to start new lives abroad if they chose to—are the lucky ones. The day before yesterday, searching for cheap towels and sheets for my temporary apartment, I ended up in Haret Hreik, a predominantly Shiite suburb in southern Beirut that my friend Andrew has nicknamed “Hezbollah central,” and which was especially hard-hit by the recent Israeli bombing raids.

As we turned a corner in the direction of the shops I wanted to visit, my taxi driver, Mohammed, a smallish, wiry man in his mid-40’s, dapper in a crisp blue windowpane-checked shirt, gestured at a giant pile of scorched rubble.

“Before the Israelis,” he told me, “that was my apartment building.”

I can’t remember what I said, but Mohammed seemed so touched and delighted by my interest that he seemed to entirely forget that I wished to buy household supplies. For the next hour, he gave me a street-by-street, literally blow-by-blow tour of the Dahiyeh, as the southern suburbs of Beirut are known.

“That used to be an excellent supermarket,” Mohammed would say almost fondly about a certain heap of shattered concrete. And: “That used to be the building of our television station, Al Manar, run by Hezbollah.”

The density of destruction—whole blocks of buildings simply collapsed in on themselves—was stunning. I had seen some of this before, back in August, and found it dispiriting to realize that very little had changed.

The piles of rubble looked a bit more weathered, more trash-strewn, but few of them had been removed, and scarcely anything, so far as I could tell, was being rebuilt.

Mohammed, for his part, seemed to be greatly enjoying himself. Hezbollah, he told me, had given him $12,000 in cash to compensate him for the loss of his apartment, and he fully expected that he and his family would be moving into a better one soon. He slowed the car way down as we passed a clothing store called Gravity, with window displays of acid-washed jeans and bright, cheap, stripy men’s shirts, all at extra-low Ramadan prices, and nearly came to a stop by a massive hole in the ground.

“And this,” he said reverently, “used to be the home of Sayyid Fadlallah,” who is widely considered to be the spiritual father of Hezbollah.

Something, I suddenly realized, had changed. Driving around the Dahiyeh back in August with my friend Andrew, we’d seen scores of dramatic Hezbollah banners, some of them three or four stories high, stretched down the sides of building. On every block, there had been dozens of yellow Hezbollah flags and homemade signs bearing proud, militant slogans. Where were they now?

Even here, next to the destroyed home of Sheikh Fadlallah, they were nowhere to be seen. Was it possible that even here in Haret Hreik, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s core supporters were feeling disappointed and angry too?

I turned to smiling Mohammed in the driver’s seat, but here in the Hezbollah heartland, I felt just a bit too nervous to ask him. Besides, he’d been so kind already, and was starting to pepper me with questions about my family, about life in New York.

Katherine Zoepf, a writer based in Beirut, is working on a book about young Arab women for the Penguin Press.

But even if Mr. Annan succeeds and the Israeli blockade is lifted, it will still come too late for Jack Yacoubian, a Lebanese Armenian goldsmith that I met in Amman yesterday. Mr. Yacoubian, who is in his early 30’s, has spent his entire life in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut’s Armenian enclave. He recently lost his job with a large Lebanese jewelry company because the Israeli blockade has made it impossible for his employers to ship their products to overseas customers, mainly in the Persian Gulf countries; about 170 employees were laid off, he said.

“I have lost my work; I have lost everything,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “Many of us Armenians are jewelers, and our business has been ruined. Our boss tried to help us; he paid all of us out of his own pocket for a whole month, even though he couldn’t sell anything. But after that it was all over. He finally had to let us go.”

When I met him in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport early yesterday morning, Mr. Yacoubian was on his way to seek his fortune in Bogotá, Colombia, where he has friends that he believes may be able to help him to find a new job. He doubts that he will be coming back to Beirut any time very soon.

“I will give it two months, three months, in Colombia, and then I will see what is the situation in Beirut again,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “But I do not feel very hopeful now. I think that Lebanon has many difficulties still ahead.”

Whatever promises to aid Lebanon or to support its troops near the Israeli border that Mr. Annan succeeds in extracting from Arab leaders this week, rebuilding Lebanon’s economy will take a very long time. Many highly educated or specially skilled Lebanese like Mr. Yacoubian, even including some of those who stayed throughout the war, are now making very painful and personal choices: about whether to stay in their country, or to seek greater stability and better opportunities overseas.

Many Lebanese who fled during their country’s long civil war had returned in recent years, and thanks in large part to their skills, energies and investments, Beirut had once again become a thriving Mediterranean capital. But many middle and upper-class Lebanese have dual passports, and extended families abroad. They have ambitions for themselves and their families that are not necessarily rooted in Lebanon, and they have options.

“How many times in your life can you rebuild everything?” a middle-aged Lebanese woman asked me the other week in Damascus. “Two times, three times maybe? You rebuild your home, your business two or three times. And after that maybe you say, that’s enough, and you find a home someplace else.”

A extraordinarily cosmopolitan people, many Lebanese, particularly the educated elite, are asking similarly agonized questions these days, trying to figure out whether the ceasefire will last, trying to decide whether they can bear to start all over again in the midst of such a tenuous peace. Loving your country is all very well, they say, but what good is patriotism in the face of domestic factionalism and the constant threat of Israeli attack? What sort of crazy devotion would make an educated, ambitious young person forsake other opportunities in order to stay in such a place?

In Beirut last week, and among the groups of Lebanese who remain in Damascus and Amman in recent days, I’ve heard these questions asked constantly. How the majority will eventually decide to answer them will have a huge effect on Lebanon’s prospects for a speedy recovery.

Among those Lebanese who have already resolved to stay, there is naturally some resentment of those who are on the fence. A young university professor that I met in Beirut last week spoke witheringly of his privileged students, most of whom had fled to Europe or the United States with the onset of Israeli air strikes, and some of whom have said that they don’t plan to return.

“These kids are rich,” the professor told me bitterly. “That means they have the chance to decide whether or not they are Lebanese.”

For parents, the questions are even more difficult. It is impossible to spend much time in Lebanon these days without hearing a great deal about the effects that the war has had on Lebanese children, about the unusual tearfulness and aggression shown by even normally even-tempered young children. A Lebanese friend, Patrick, spoke of his decision to send his 10-year-old daughter to stay with relatives in Europe during the worst of the fighting, and then his eventual decision to bring her home again, despite some relatives’ urgings that he educate her abroad.

“These children, this generation, knew nothing of war,” Patrick said. “When I was a teenager, we used to go out dancing, and we’d hear explosions. We’d leave the club for a few minutes, pull people out of the rubble and take them to the hospital, and then go right back to drink and dance. We didn’t think anything of it. This was normal life for us.

“I had really thought that for my daughter it would be different,” Patrick continued. “I felt angry when the fighting began, and I decided to send her abroad, so that she wouldn’t see this. But I’ve decided to bring her home. She will start the school year here, whatever happens. She is Lebanese, and this fighting, these bombings, are her heritage. She is 10 years old; she is old enough to understand.”

But even if Mr. Annan succeeds and the Israeli blockade is lifted, it will still come too late for Jack Yacoubian, a Lebanese Armenian goldsmith that I met in Amman yesterday. Mr. Yacoubian, who is in his early 30’s, has spent his entire life in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut’s Armenian enclave. He recently lost his job with a large Lebanese jewelry company because the Israeli blockade has made it impossible for his employers to ship their products to overseas customers, mainly in the Persian Gulf countries; about 170 employees were laid off, he said.

“I have lost my work; I have lost everything,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “Many of us Armenians are jewelers, and our business has been ruined. Our boss tried to help us; he paid all of us out of his own pocket for a whole month, even though he couldn’t sell anything. But after that it was all over. He finally had to let us go.”

When I met him in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport early yesterday morning, Mr. Yacoubian was on his way to seek his fortune in Bogotá, Colombia, where he has friends that he believes may be able to help him to find a new job. He doubts that he will be coming back to Beirut any time very soon.

“I will give it two months, three months, in Colombia, and then I will see what is the situation in Beirut again,” Mr. Yacoubian said. “But I do not feel very hopeful now. I think that Lebanon has many difficulties still ahead.”

Whatever promises to aid Lebanon or to support its troops near the Israeli border that Mr. Annan succeeds in extracting from Arab leaders this week, rebuilding Lebanon’s economy will take a very long time. Many highly educated or specially skilled Lebanese like Mr. Yacoubian, even including some of those who stayed throughout the war, are now making very painful and personal choices: about whether to stay in their country, or to seek greater stability and better opportunities overseas.

Many Lebanese who fled during their country’s long civil war had returned in recent years, and thanks in large part to their skills, energies and investments, Beirut had once again become a thriving Mediterranean capital. But many middle and upper-class Lebanese have dual passports, and extended families abroad. They have ambitions for themselves and their families that are not necessarily rooted in Lebanon, and they have options.

“How many times in your life can you rebuild everything?” a middle-aged Lebanese woman asked me the other week in Damascus. “Two times, three times maybe? You rebuild your home, your business two or three times. And after that maybe you say, that’s enough, and you find a home someplace else.”

A extraordinarily cosmopolitan people, many Lebanese, particularly the educated elite, are asking similarly agonized questions these days, trying to figure out whether the ceasefire will last, trying to decide whether they can bear to start all over again in the midst of such a tenuous peace. Loving your country is all very well, they say, but what good is patriotism in the face of domestic factionalism and the constant threat of Israeli attack? What sort of crazy devotion would make an educated, ambitious young person forsake other opportunities in order to stay in such a place?

In Beirut last week, and among the groups of Lebanese who remain in Damascus and Amman in recent days, I’ve heard these questions asked constantly. How the majority will eventually decide to answer them will have a huge effect on Lebanon’s prospects for a speedy recovery.

Among those Lebanese who have already resolved to stay, there is naturally some resentment of those who are on the fence. A young university professor that I met in Beirut last week spoke witheringly of his privileged students, most of whom had fled to Europe or the United States with the onset of Israeli air strikes, and some of whom have said that they don’t plan to return.

“These kids are rich,” the professor told me bitterly. “That means they have the chance to decide whether or not they are Lebanese.”

For parents, the questions are even more difficult. It is impossible to spend much time in Lebanon these days without hearing a great deal about the effects that the war has had on Lebanese children, about the unusual tearfulness and aggression shown by even normally even-tempered young children. A Lebanese friend, Patrick, spoke of his decision to send his 10-year-old daughter to stay with relatives in Europe during the worst of the fighting, and then his eventual decision to bring her home again, despite some relatives’ urgings that he educate her abroad.

“These children, this generation, knew nothing of war,” Patrick said. “When I was a teenager, we used to go out dancing, and we’d hear explosions. We’d leave the club for a few minutes, pull people out of the rubble and take them to the hospital, and then go right back to drink and dance. We didn’t think anything of it. This was normal life for us.

“I had really thought that for my daughter it would be different,” Patrick continued. “I felt angry when the fighting began, and I decided to send her abroad, so that she wouldn’t see this. But I’ve decided to bring her home. She will start the school year here, whatever happens. She is Lebanese, and this fighting, these bombings, are her heritage. She is 10 years old; she is old enough to understand.”

Of course, I can’t speak firsthand about the sound of the bombing raids. I came to Beirut last Monday afternoon, the first day of this U.N.-brokered cease-fire, traveling by taxi from Damascus with my friend Andrew. The trip from Damascus to Beirut is usually a two- or three-hour trip, crossing at Masnaa, on Lebanon’s eastern border. But the roads and bridges that make this crossing possible had been destroyed beyond easy repair, so like everyone else we took the long way round, circling up past the Syrian city of Homs and down into Lebanon from the north.

Driving into Lebanon these days, the visitor quickly becomes a connoisseur of Israeli bridge-destruction techniques. We passed bridges that had been punctured by a single circular hole, no bigger than the footprint of a Volvo sedan (local boys told us excitedly about the unlucky “resistance leader” who had been crossing one bridge at that exact spot when an Israeli drone found him); others were so thoroughly blown apart that they were scarcely recognizable as bridges—just twin snarls of reinforcing rod, twisted by fire, hanging on either side of a scorched ravine.

Crossing either style of bombed bridge is impossible, so we lined up alongside hundreds of other cars waiting to cross each river at its driest point. When our turn came, we would bump slowly down into a trickling riverbed and back up again into someone’s backyard, silently apologizing to these farmers whose orchards had suddenly become thoroughfares now that their property was the new path of least resistance across the Lebanese landscape. Near one river, a group of old men sat under a trio of locust trees on plastic lawn chairs, smoking and seeming to enjoy the spectacle.

Our taxi driver kept the radio tuned to a national call-in show throughout the trip. I struggled with the Arabic but, hour after hour, the topic remained the same: the effects of war and displacement, the horrors encountered by refugees returning to their homes after the cease-fire, angry or anguished voices crackling onto the air from different corners of Lebanon, taking comfort in the sharing of their stories.

It’s a meager comfort, perhaps, because now that the shelling has stopped, most of the Lebanese that I’ve spoken to are nearly as angry with Hezbollah as they are with the Israelis, and they feel hopeless about their government’s ability to disarm the militia and thus sustain the cease-fire.

“Why did these idiots have to go and start a war with Israel?” a new Lebanese acquaintance, Patrick, asked me as we walked along a street in Hamra, near the American University of Beirut’s lush campus. “I really didn’t have much hope for all that talk of Lebanese national unity last year, but I never thought it would come to this—another war.

“I feel like I’m in a hijacked plane, a plane hijacked by my own brothers,” Patrick continued. “And the police are all grouped outside the plane and they’re on megaphones, shouting that they’re holding me responsible for my brothers’ actions.”

“I mean, Hezbollah is only supported by maybe 30 percent of the population, but how on earth is the Lebanese Army supposed to disarm it?” Patrick asked. “Have you seen the Lebanese Army lately? They’ve got World War II–era guns and Vietnam-era flak jackets. They look like they’ve gone missing from the Battle of Stalingrad.”

The cease-fire, most people here seem to agree, feels alarmingly brittle. And yet the Lebanese have set to work putting their lives, and their country, back together again. Hezbollah’s “Jihad for Reconstruction” teams are out in bombed areas with bulldozers and teams of civil engineers, distributing cash to the homeless. The communal refugee shelters in Damascus that I visited 10 days ago—large extended families, in some cases whole Bekaa Valley villages transplanted, en masse, to unfamiliar institutional settings—are practically empty now, and throughout the whole of this past week Lebanon’s broken roads have been jammed with people returning home.

Of course, tens of thousands of Lebanese have found that they don’t have homes to return to. The day before yesterday, Andrew and I drove around Haret Hreik, the predominantly Shiite southern Beirut suburb that Andrew jokingly refers to as “Hezbollah central,” and which has seen, unsurprisingly, some of the worst of the Israeli air attacks.

A French aid worker that I spoke to in Damascus last week told me that Beirut’s southern suburbs now looked like Dresden after its infamous burning during the Second World War. The devastation that we saw in Haret Hreik and its environs was terrible, to be sure, but I don’t think that the incendiary-bomb analogy is quite fair either.

I’ve been very skeptical about Israel’s defense of its “precision-bombing” techniques, but several times Andrew and I passed a single building utterly destroyed, collapsed in on itself like a house of cards, only to notice that the buildings abutting it were unscathed—windows unbroken, flowers still blooming gaily on the balconies.

Did the Israelis have enough intelligence information to determine beyond a doubt that these particular buildings, among hundreds of nearly identical, cheaply constructed concrete apartment buildings, were the ones containing Hezbollah hideouts or caches of weapons? Only time will tell, I suppose. What is certain, for now, is that in their efforts to root out Hezbollah, the Israelis have killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, in proportions a whole order of magnitude higher than the casualties sustained on the Israeli side.

There are banners and posters all over Beirut proclaiming this fact. On one banner, four or five stories high and plastered down the side of an apartment building, there’s a photograph of a baby, perhaps a bit less than a year old, with his hand blown off, the stump swathed in bandages. There’s a blue pacifier in the child’s mouth, and his damp curls and eyelashes glisten as if he had just cried himself into exhausted sleep. The legend on the banner reads, in an ironic jab at the Israelis’ claims of precision, “Extremely Accurate Targets,” and then, in screaming capitals, “DIVINE VICTORY.”

This is a pun in Arabic: The last name of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, is a contraction of the words nasr (victory) and Allah (God). And whatever their private feelings about Hezbollah as a political party—which less than a third of the Lebanese support, according to most estimates (indeed, a Dutch journalist who has lived in Tehran for several years told me yesterday that most Iranians can’t stand Hezbollah, and hate that so much of their money is going to Lebanon when they’re a poor country, too)—the sight of so many killed and injured civilians has united the vast majority of Lebanese against the Israelis and their American backers.

Several months ago, my friend Wendy and I went to see a new Lebanese film called Bosta, about a Lebanese dabke dance troupe—a delightfully silly musical with some deeper themes about Lebanon’s history of communal violence, the sense of deep shame that came from that history of mutual violence and betrayal, and the potential for redemption, particularly among the younger generation of Lebanese, engendered by the so-called Cedar Revolution and its aspirations for democracy and reconciliation. I looked for a DVD of that film this past weekend, but now I’m not so sure I’d like to see it again. Already that film, less than a year old, seems like an artifact of a hopeful, innocent and very long-ago era.

Though I don’t agree with him about much of anything, I fear that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, was right when he said in his speech last week that America’s aspirations for democracy in the Middle East have collapsed. Unfortunately, the United States’ reputation in this region has been so profoundly damaged that many of our erstwhile allies, the region’s pro-democracy reformers, say that they now feel undermined and betrayed.

Rather than supporting Arab countries as they built up the kinds of solid institutions and civil societies that could sustain democracy—and without which concepts like freedom and democracy are meaningless—the U.S. has focused on cracking regimes and delivering short, sharp shocks to fragile states.

These efforts at short-order democracy haven’t worked, but as an American living in the region, I have to believe that we and our allies can learn from our mistakes, and that some of these hopes for stability, prosperity and democracy in the region may still be salvageable.

Astor Family Circus

“It’s like a seesaw, isn’t it?” said Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications, and Edelman’s former chief media officer, yesterday on his cell. “One day the grandson commandeers the media, and the next day, the father! And the next day, the son grabs the headlines!”

On Sunday, July 30—Day 5 of the Astor Family Circus—it was time for Anthony Marshall, the 82-year-old son of Brooke Astor, to shine in The New York Times. He appeared at the gates of the family estate in Westchester, on a maternal visit, with priest in tow. He spoke out strongly against his own son, Philip Marshall, who had recently filed a suit demanding a change of custody for Ms. Astor.

The elder Mr. Marshall is represented in the media by Brooke Morganstein, of Citigate Sard Verbinnen.

The next day, the paper wrote: “Socialite’s Son Pays a Visit, Then Lashes Out at Those Accusing Him of Mistreatment.” The article ended with local police informing the media that no more press conferences would be held outside the family home in Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor.

Sniffy police or no, his point had been made. “I think she did a great job in yesterday’s papers,” Mr. Himler said of Ms. Morganstein.

Not every public-relations professional agreed.

“I know a P.R. photo op when I see one, and that was the biggest setup I’ve ever seen—the other day, coming out the gates of his mother’s house? It was not a good setup,” said a major publicist, who asked for anonymity as part of a wise policy of never commenting (by name) on the public-relations activities of competitors.

Ms. Morganstein very politely declined to comment.

Fraser Seitel, of Emerald Partners, is “helping out” Ms. Astor’s grandson, Philip C. Marshall, he said on Monday—he has worked with the Rockefeller family for some time. “I was working for Mr. Rockefeller, and Ms. de la Renta,” he said—David and Annette!—before his duties grew to include the younger Mr. Marshall.

On Monday, the younger Mr. Marshall responded to an e-mail that one should “Please contact Fraser Seitel … with any questions.”

Sam Singer, who runs Singer Associates in San Francisco, handled a nasty family dispute a few years ago that resulted in Denise DeBartolo York seizing control of the San Francisco 49ers from her brother.

Mr. Singer said yesterday by phone that he thought the elder Mr. Marshall had battled back fairly well in the press. He also thought he saw a flaw in the avoidance of the No. 1 question being asked in New York City this week: Exactly what transpired in the Astor family in recent years that led to the distinctly un-Astor-like interfamily litigation? The absence of this information reflected slightly worse on Ms. Astor’s grandson. “What’s taken him so long to speak up?” Mr. Singer asked. “Why has Philip, the grandson, waited this long to file a legal complaint?”

Despite that potential shortcoming, and also despite being the bringer of the lawsuit, young Philip Marshall has, in his seeming silence, maintained a semblance of the family dignity both by not grandstanding outside the family manse and by using the reserved Mr. Seitel. Mr. Seitel never appears to be playing to the cheap seats—he manages publicity without much in the way of fingerprints. (If, indeed, he manages at all! The best public-relations work, after all, can be a rather Zen practice of extending one’s blanket of silence over one’s client.)

The Astor family debacle reminded Mr. Himler of the Pritzker family crackup a few years back, during which the Hyatt Hotel heirs squabbled over distribution of the family’s massive wealth.

“If you’re advising these families,” Mr. Himler said, “the ultimate thing is to not play it out in the court of public opinion. They both lose, in my opinion.

“It’s a stain on her legacy,” he said of Ms. Astor. “She was a grand dame and so revered, and it’s a shame that it’s come to this. Yeah, it makes sense for both sides to get their points of view across, but to me it’s a lose-lose. Here you have a wonderful woman who’s such a part of the fabric of New York—and here you have this dispute which is hurting her legacy, which is unblemished.”

Family disputes are always horrific, Mr. Singer agreed. And “published family disputes are the worst kind.”

—Choire Sicha

Priapus Shrugged

Mark Warfel, the sleek plastic surgeon with a tendency to turn up against a backdrop of Hamptons scenery on Patrick McMullan’s party-photo Web site, has been seeing quite a bit of the penis these days.

Dr. Warfel has a large storefront on 16th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, called the Warfel Institute. With designer discretion, it could pass as a dermatology clinic.

Oh, but it is not. Inside, Botox is shot and noses are Winona Ryder’d; breasts go up cup sizes and down; big calves are birthed or aborted; nipples snipped to stand at attention like little eraser-stub soldiers.

And now Dr. Warfel is considering crossing the line that, in the world of plastic surgery and urology, separates the men from the boys. He is considering adding penis enlargement to his repertoire.

“It’s an open field for improvement,” he said by phone the other day. “I don’t think there’s anybody good doing it.”

“Fringey people do it,” Dr. Warfel said, “and you get fringey results.”

A great number of penis-enlargement surgeries seem to take place in California, or, at least, outside of New York. One major local practitioner has been Dr. Douglas Whitehead, who is also the president of the American Academy of Phalloplasty Surgeons.

Bad news, boys!

“At the present time, I am not performing surgery due to a medical injury,” Dr. Whitehead said the other day.

There are other locals, including on Long Island. But.

“There are a couple of people who are known for it,” Dr. Warfel said. “One went out of business, one died, and one had his license removed.”

So Dr. Warfel has gone to view a couple of penis-enlargement surgeries at “a surgery center in New York” that he declined to name.

Who goes in for enlargement? About 20 to 30 percent of the clients, Dr. Warfel estimated, had rather small penises.

Wait—only 20 to 30?

“Probably the majority of people who come in—just anecdotally—are young, good-looking guys in their 20’s and even 30’s, with average to above-average penis size.”

Weird, right? At a little over 10 grand for both girth and length operations, one of these average-sized guys could just pay 100 hookers $100 each to come over and moan about how large it is.

Right now, there are two methods of adding girth to a penis: injecting fat, or wrapping the penis in layers of cadaver skin.

Both have drawbacks, in that the body would like to absorb both fat and skin. Even corpse skin.

For length, the penis is separated from its mooring—its suspensory ligaments—and, essentially, given a yank to bring more penis above-board. The problem then is that an erection, without that tether, may not be able to point itself in its former preferred direction. Picture a gravity-free Snickers bar stuffed in a deflated balloon.

Oh, and one also runs the risk of cutting nerves along the way to the yanking, according to Dr. Paul Weiss, a plastic surgeon in Manhattan.

(For those who would like to learn more, one can find more pictures of bloody and freshly sutured male members on the Internet than on a bad field trip to the nudist-run blender factory.)

Soldiering on, then:

Dr. Warfel’s barrier to entry in this exciting (and lucrative!) field is dealing with practicalities: insurance, in particular. And he’s not crazy. “There is a climate of litigious people in our country,” said Dr. Weiss.

If you think all those women with problem breast implants were quick to court, wait till you see a guy with a malformed crotch run for his lawyer.

None of that seems to bother Dr. Warfel.

“You could probably do two in an afternoon,” he said.

“I think if I could put my hand to it, I could make it last,” Dr. Warfel said, and he didn’t even giggle.

—C.S.

Our Beirut

At an Upper East Side dive bar last Thursday night, Beirut dominated conversation. Patrons discussed strategy, identified targets, questioned alliances.

Many Manhattan bars offer, with various degrees of irony, darts or video games. The Big Easy, a vaguely New Orleans–themed establishment at 92nd and Second, is perhaps the only watering hole in New York City known for its Beirut. Past its long bar and a deer-shooting arcade game are four Beirut tables.

Beirut is the frat-house admixture of Ping-Pong and the drinking game usually called “quarters” that gave many children of the 80’s and 90’s their first experience with alcohol poisoning, as well as their first exposure, however limited, to the sometime tragedy that is modern Lebanese history. It is played on tables about twice as long as they are wide.

At each long end hovers a team of two. Ten plastic cups, each half-full of beer, are arranged before each team in a bowling pin formation. Play begins when one team projects a Ping-Pong ball toward the cups of the other team. Gripped aloft between thumb and forefinger, the ball is usually wrist-flicked directly at a target cup. More ambitious players will attempt to bounce the ball off the table. When the ball lands in a cup, the cup is removed and a member of the defending team must drink its contents. Teammates take turns launching balls and imbibing after losses.

The ball frequently ends up on the floor; cups of water wait on either end of the table for token cleaning.

On Thursday, splashings could be faintly heard over the roar of 18-month-old hip-hop hits, each dropping Ping-Pong bomb the sound of another young American becoming slightly more intoxicated.

“I think this place is for a bunch of guys that think they are still in college,” said Jessica, the bar’s blond server. She squeezed her way around Beirut players and spectators, hawking $6 shots of vodka and Red Bull. “They are losers who work all day, who want to relive the good old days. Beirut is the closest they can get.”

Every few minutes, someone barked, “Re-rack!” The request, which must be fulfilled as a matter of etiquette, forces the opposing duo to refashion the remaining cups before them back into triangles or diamonds.

The vodka–Red Bulls were proving a hard sell. Jessica is a recent college graduate and an aspiring journalist. “They tip horribly,” she said. “And they claim that Beirut is enough for them—so they’ll never buy a shot!”

The Big Easy pricing equation is already decidedly nonlinear and possibly ethically challenged. On Thursday nights, women can purchase cups of beer for $1, while men pay five times that for the same. Either gender, though, can secure a pitcher—for use in Beirut, or just for downing—for $10.

“This bar is great,” said Shaun, a young man in a dark blue dress shirt, his top three buttons undone. He was at a Beirut table with five or six friends. “We all work for the same place; we all work for—wait, I shouldn’t say where we work. Anyway, we come here together after work every Thursday night.”

He was later seen aggressively grinding his khaki’d pelvis against the buttocks of a young blonde woman, a co-worker.

By 9:45 p.m., the Big Easy resembled a war zone. Movement became difficult as the crowd swelled in numbers and the terrain deteriorated with stickiness. All paths into and out of the narrow room appeared blocked or in the crossfire of increasingly wayward Ping-Pong balls.

This chaos raised a question. Is it appropriate for American adults to be getting drunk with a game named after the past aerial bombing of Beirut, considering, well, the present aerial bombing of Beirut?

“Yeah, we are aware of what’s going on,” Shaun said. “In fact, we are tributing every game we play to Beirut and the turmoil going on there.”

And what did waitress Jessica think of the political implications? “I think they should probably just concentrate on making a living,” she yelled of her customers. She rolled her eyes at a man in shorts, who had just told another waitress to dispense whipped cream directly in his mouth in exchange for the purchase of a Jell-O shot. “They are disgusting.”

At 10:20 p.m., one of the tables buckled in on itself, sloshing beer all over the grimy floor and sending grown men chasing after the clicks of tiny bouncing balls. Already the crowd was starting to thin. Tomorrow, Friday, was a workday, and people needed to catch commuter trains. Also, the last U.S.-chartered cruise ship would slip out of the Bay of Beirut with 500 fleeing Americans onboard.

Still, hopes for international understanding weren’t completely doused. “I’ve never been in a club like this before,” said a fellow named Sebastian, a German expatriate left behind in the bar. “In Germany, we just drink the beer; we don’t play with it.”

—Jonathan Liu