critique | The Smart Set

Brilliant Zingers and Vodka Stingers

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

During the second episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — producer Ryan Murphy’s streaming series based on author Truman Capote’s lived-in-and-laughed-over 1960s among Manhattan’s “ladies who lunch” — titular actor Tom Hollander truly has his way with spite. Leaning with persnickety dread into a line that all but explains the raison d’etre of biting […]

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Agatha Christie Redux

Laura Berlinsky-Schine — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I was 11 years old when I first broke the spine of And Then There Were None. That was my introduction to Agatha Christie, and what an introduction it was. Arguably the Queen of Crime’s most famous work — although there is some stiff competition — it hooked me. I devoured it in hours. I […]

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It’s a MAS*H World Now

Daniel Vollaro — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I heard two kinds of war stories growing up in the 1970s. First, there were the World War II tales about how my grandfather had shipped out to the Pacific Theater at age 35 while my grandmother literally took his place on the assembly line of the auto plant where he worked, a real “Rosie the […]

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An Elegy for the Working Class

Rhoda Feng — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 12:30:00 +0000

Before COVID drew a curtain over Broadway, the Public Theater in New York produced an improbable play about a real-life tragedy. Billed as a work of documentary theater, Coal Country told the story of a deadly explosion that tore a hole through the Upper Big Branch Mine and the lives of families in Montcoal, West […]

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Withdrawal of Duty

Doug Elfman — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:42:51 +0000

In my real life, I get flashbacks where I’m playing Call of Duty, standing in a silo, hiding from a tank. I have to count the tank’s assaults so I can run out of the silo in between blasts, then sprint close enough to the tank to throw C4 explosive on it, run away, not […]

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Anatomy of Wonder

Stephen Akey — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 13:50:42 +0000

On the first page of Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Northrop Frye irritably dismissed the “conception of the critic as a parasite or artist manqué … sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between the creative and procreative functions, so that we hear about the ‘impotence’ and ‘dryness’ of the critic, of his hatred for genuinely […]

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