personality | 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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Kewl

Kristen Hoggatt — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:12:43 +0000

How can I be cool like a poet? — A. H. You’ve got to be kidding me. Most poets I know would not be classified as cool (except maybe Kim Addonizio — she’s pretty chic). But, you asked, so let’s see what we can discover from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”: We real cool. […]

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I Like Candy

Paula Marantz Cohen — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:12:43 +0000

Or, to be more correct, I rediscovered it. Between the ages of five and 12, candy was all I thought about. I couldn’t walk into a drugstore or a supermarket without being attacked by longing. The game Candy Land had a visceral attraction for me: just looking at the board would make me dizzy with […]

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Take My Card…Please!

Greg Beato — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:12:43 +0000

On a warm spring evening in 1922, M. Sturtz — a burglary insurance broker who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — left her apartment for a few minutes to run an errand. While she was gone, a pair of thieves gained entry through a dumbwaiter, locked the doors and windows from the inside, and […]

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