First Person | The Smart Set

Days of Long Ago

Elliot Wilner — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Dozens of young adults, most of them Scandinavian tourists, were happily chattering in the lobby of Eilat’s Hotel Snapir soon after sunset, after having spent another toasty day on the beach. The lobby was uncomfortably warm, maybe due to the heat that radiated from the tourists’ sunburned skins. Passing through the lobby, I opened the […]

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Me and Bobby Miller

Angela Townsend — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Everybody needs an oldies station. WKBJ was equal parts doo-wop and PG hijinks, faceless friend to commuters from Saugerties to Secaucus. It was the late ’90s, when Neil Diamond and the Beach Boys jostled for room in the nostalgia car. Bobby Miller was the manic maestro behind the wheel. Favored by parents and Earth Science […]

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Arranging Love

Usha Raj — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would […]

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Mother’s Ruin

Tiffany Hawk — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

At the height of the 18th-century Gin Craze, London didn’t just have an alcohol problem. It had a woman problem. If you believe the reformers of the time, women were sloshed beyond reason, neglecting their husbands and children, keeping messy homes, pawning their household goods, even selling their bodies and spreading syphilis. No fewer than […]

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The Long Goodbye

Andrew Trees — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

I still remember my excitement that first time — the red and white envelope from Netflix arriving in my New York City mailbox like a present waiting to be opened. No more schlepping to a video store only to find out that the movie you wanted to see wasn’t there or, worse, that you and […]

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True at First Flight

J.R. Patterson — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

The omission of airplanes in much artwork is understandable. It’s not a question of talent, but of choice and visibility. When used in art, the most visible kind of planes — those used for war and commercial purposes — signal the glorification of aviation’s base functions — to kill and to carry. There is no […]

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Tree Knocks and T-Shirts

Vanessa Blakeslee — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

“I guess we’re really doing this,” I said, and squinted into the late morning sunlight. Mark, my partner, and I exited the car just outside the Lakeland, Florida convention center. It was mid-July 2021, and we were about to attend our first “Great Florida Bigfoot Conference.” Neither one of us had ever experienced a Bigfoot […]

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Play it with Tremolo

Thomas Laver — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 11:30:00 +0000

“Whisper!” the priest commanded. In a second, the sound of my grade one classmate’s recitation plummeted from stentorian, to sotto voce, to smothered. He had just intoned the opening words of the Roman Catholic ritual of confession, “this is my first confession.” I was next in the confessional queue, but I couldn’t hear him mumble […]

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The Tree of My Life

Daniel Hudon — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Once in a lodge in a forest a day’s drive from where I live in the great metropolis of Bostonia, where the hobgoblins, trolls, and grandmother-eating wolves had long since been scared away and only the mosquitoes lingered to protect the trees, I read about the era not long ago when the eastern white pine […]

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In The Case Of A Failing Friendship, Don’t Settle — Break Up

Kelsey Smoot — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:30:00 +0000

A friend of mine is in the midst of what I call “the shedding season” at the tail-end of her twenties. The shedding season denotes the transition away from young adulthood — often informed by new responsibility, changes in geography, and in my experience, a recalibration of relationships. Through tears, she recently recounted how a […]

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