Philip Womack

  • The Whole Five Feet

    One day, walking back to the office after a bibulous lunch, Christopher Beha sees Benjamin Franklin walking beside him:

    “Eat not to dullness,” Franklin told me. “Drink not to elevation.”

    “Shut up, Ben,” I answered.

    Beha was not hallucinating but imagining: This was the first of many brushes with the past resulting from an experiment that was to inform his life for a whole year—and beyond. That is, a constant and continual dialogue with some of the greatest minds the world has known. A few days earlier, on New Year’s Eve of 2006, Beha, then twenty-seven,