emotion | The Smart Set

The Successful Gesture

Matt Hanson — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed […]

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On Saudade

Alex Viviano — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

“Saudade, saudade. Nothing more that I can say says it in a better way.” The artist Maro sang these lyrics while representing Portugal in the annual Eurovision song contest in 2022. These lyrics in particular acknowledge the difficulty of making a concept with a high degree of cultural connotations from the artist’s home country accessible […]

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Lonely Teardrops

Stephen Akey — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” Robert Frost admonished. He was talking about the “clarification of life” that poetry brings, and you don’t see clearly through tears. Also, being a stoic New Englander, Frost was temperamentally disinclined to emotional display, even in the face of extreme tragedy, of which his poetry […]

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The Small-Screen Wedding

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:12:43 +0000

So the royal wedding has come and gone and I saw enough to give me fodder for a few musings. Yes, I am a sucker for the spectacle and back story, but even I was surfeited. At some point, as Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters blathered on with help from Tina Brown (who was taking […]

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Brick Master

Morgan Meis — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:12:43 +0000

Sean Kenney makes life-size sculptures of endangered animals out of Lego bricks. Adam Reed Tucker reconstructs famous buildings throughout the world in Lego form. Beth Weis specializes in Lego as home décor. Some people grew up building with Legos, and then never stopped. Lego invaded their minds and now they view the world through a […]

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