The Smart Set

Don’t Sing, Scarf, or Spit

John Capista — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:28:17 +0000

Culture, if we can still call it that, has taken a definite downward turn in the last couple of decades. Tee shirts with I HATE YOUR F—ING MASK (the F word spelled out) printed in large letters on the front. Texting at the dinner table. Parents using profanity to children. Being honked and tailgated while […]

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Girlhood

Marti Trgovich — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:54:14 +0000

If there’s ever been a time to dissect the experience of being a girl, it’s now: there’s girl math and girl dinner, “I’m literally just a girl” is a viral meme, pink bow emojis are rampant, you can dress like a ballerina and no one bats an eye, and No Doubt’s ’90s anthem “Just a […]

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Town and Country

Richard Klin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Some time ago, I embarked on a personal reading project: An informal survey of books that once had been widely read — so widely read, in fact, that they had earned their place in the literary lexicon. The criteria for my project did have certain strictures. The operative word was once. The contents of these […]

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Cutting Up

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this […]

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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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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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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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Daisy Goodwill and the Montana Rockies

Darlene West — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I remember a lake rimmed with lily pads; a meadow filled with sun. The uphill stretch of trail where I stepped round a bend and came eyeball to eyeball with a mountain goat. Now, the goat may have been a bighorn sheep. It wasn’t the curve of the horns, so much, or the softness of […]

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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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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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