identity | The Smart Set

The Art of the Photo Dump

Lindsey Staub — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Culture is a pendulum swinging back and forth between tail ends of a spectrum. If the previous decade saw conservative politics, liberalism is on the forefront; if the starlets of yesteryear were curvy, today’s will be skinny; if your closet is stocked with skinny jeans, be prepared for the takeover of the straight leg. Culture […]

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Why Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is the perfect novel for a world in turmoil

Honors 480 — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Since its much-celebrated publication in 2017, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, an uncompromisingly modern story of love, migration, and transformation, has continued to gain relevance. Amidst continuing geopolitical, technological, and cultural turmoil, readers of Hamid’s tale gain insight into the complexity of the contemporary world while finding unexpected comfort in the novel’s central truth: that “we […]

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The Death of Millennial Pink

Misha Scott — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:22:16 +0000

On January 20th, 2017, I went to see a music show at a small queer-centric community space in East Hollywood. It was the night of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the day before the first Women’s March. The mood was somber. An artist called Cuddle Formation was playing, and they sat in the middle of the […]

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Friends in High Places

Jake Levine — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It’s November 1943 in occupied France. Albert Camus, barely 30 years old, has just arrived in Paris. He is living a double life. By day, he is a burgeoning literary star, whose novel The Stranger (1942) has exploded onto the French literary scene to rapturous praise. He is working for his publisher, the famed Gallimard, […]

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Belonging

Usha Raj — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

One evening when I was seven, my mother showed me and my brothers a large neon sign on the side of a high-rise in the heart of the bustling city of Calcutta. Against the dark outline of the building, a huge ceiling fan whirred, its blades outlined in neon. As I watched, the projection faded, replaced by the outline of a table-top sewing machine with the wheel on one end turning around as […]

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When Antisemitism Happens to Good People

David Stromberg — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:39:30 +0000

One of the most powerful films I’ve seen about anti-Jewish hate during the Second World War isn’t a period piece depicting the ferocious brutality of Nazi death camps or an action flick about partisans fighting German soldiers in forests covered with snow. It’s a picturesque French film called The Two of Us about a Jewish boy who […]

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The Problem With My Name

Louise Turan — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 12:25:57 +0000

In the fall of 1971, my father took me to look at colleges. We had recently moved back to the US from Stuttgart, Germany, where we had lived for the past four years. During the many years we were overseas, my family had traveled extensively throughout Europe, but only on a couple of occasions did […]

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Reading the Self

Matthew Duffus — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 11:30:00 +0000

I discovered Paul Auster’s City of Glass through an odd, never-to-be-repeated experience. While home for spring break in college, I learned the local armory was hosting Free Book Day. There, I encountered an auditorium filled with remaindered copies, front covers slashed in half. Stacks of the same hundred or more books filled long banquet tables. I […]

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Handle with MMA Gloves

Andrea Crummy — Mon, 03 May 2021 11:26:00 +0000

Last month The Smart Set published my essay about teaching an introductory composition class for first-year students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had dreaded the thought of the class, imagining it as a kind of detention hall where students would chew gum and throw crumpled paper balls and inflict suffering on me with the […]

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Capturing the Invisible

Theresa Lin — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 11:30:00 +0000

I have long understood the appraisal of the Asian American in the public conscious — as a vagrant third man, situated between white and Black. The Asian American has sought to extricate themselves from this precarious position since their arrival as imported labor, then later as empirical evidence of American justice. The challenge, in part, has been to define, in terms that are shrewd and […]

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