friendship | The Smart Set

Forgetting Gareth

Mon, 13 May 2024 15:54:49 +0000

My all-boys high school seems more extraordinary to me the further away from it I have traveled in time. It was closer to Hogwarts than any real school should be. It had an assembly hall and a chapel and a music school and a gymnasium and a swimming pool and diving boards and a 20-plus-foot […]

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It’s Your Choice

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

When I was studying philosophy in graduate school, a professor told us that the work of philosophy happens in conversation, that you have to try out your ideas with others, because in the effort it takes to articulate and re-articulate those ideas in the face of questions and challenges, your thoughts actually take shape and […]

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

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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Friends in High Places

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It’s November 1943 in occupied France. Albert Camus, barely 30 years old, has just arrived in Paris. He is living a double life. By day, he is a burgeoning literary star, whose novel The Stranger (1942) has exploded onto the French literary scene to rapturous praise. He is working for his publisher, the famed Gallimard, […]

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God and Gabriel

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Gabriel Carlson drifted into my life unexpectedly as a mystery of God and then disappeared — for just a little while at first — only to miraculously and dramatically reappear. Then, like sand through an hourglass, he slipped away. This is the story of how God used Gabriel to change my life, though he would […]

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Wandering Jew

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It might have seemed appropriate, albeit a cliché, to get a new houseplant when my husband and I separated. “It’s good to bring in new life,” one friend said tritely. “Watering it will keep you from being depressed,” another friend mumbled as she left my apartment, gazing downward sheepishly. Another suggested I take up gardening. […]

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The Lost Art of Showing Up

Thu, 11 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Humans are social animals, and our brains are wired accordingly. When a brain is socially isolated, it will crave social interaction in the same way that a hungry person’s brain will crave food. And yet, we live life in defiance of these facts. While our brains want to be fed social-connection broccoli, we feed them Skittles […]

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Front Row of the Melt Show

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Tony and I looked on as the minister, in a pair of summery swim trunks, laid his hands on the top of Isaac’s head and lowered him into the hotel’s Jacuzzi. In the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, Isaac emerged with his white T-shirt clinging to reborn skin, his long […]

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On Wolves and Wild Things

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Almost three decades ago at Yellowstone National Park, 14 wolves were re-released into the wild. They charged ferociously into the landscape, lunging at elk, deer, and bison. They howled for each other, their sheer volume breaking miles of forest and land. Elk darted fearfully far from the woodlands in search of shelter from their returned […]

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Thanks for Coming

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 12:30:00 +0000

Save for certain varieties of romantic trysts, we like to think our relationships — especially our friendships — are built to last. We don’t enter into them so that they can end. Our aim is that they’ll remain present, adding to our lives whatever it was that drew us to that relationship in the first […]

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