By Joshua Cohen, from “Hat Lessons Gleaned from Attending a Film Noir Marathon with a Nonagenarian Ex-Milliner Who Never Stops Talking,” a journal entry that is included in Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. The essay collection will be published next month by Random House. Cohen is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.
“Twentieth-century men can be divvied up chronologically into two groups: those who wore hats and those who didn’t. Conventional wisdom has it that hats went out of fashion with JFK, who was the first president not to wear a hat to his inauguration. But the truth…