language | The Smart Set

Walking Autistic with Skoliogeography

Natasha Burge — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I am going to the corniche because I am always going to the corniche, but then diversion: in the butcher’s window, the gloss of a goat’s gelatinous eye and the reflection of electricity fizzing from streetlights that should have gone dead at dawn. From the shop next door mannequins jamble the doorway, their faces piously […]

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Beautiful and Damned

Colin Fleming — Mon, 15 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Having unfortunately passed through many dating sites as I navigate this life in search of a person I find hard to believe exists, I’m accustomed to the reoccurring bromides people share about their lives. They can, for instance, stay in or go out, which is quite a marvelous feat. They are all living their best […]

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Pins

Christopher K. Coffman — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:37:22 +0000

2023’s London fashion week offered numerous designers a chance to honor the late Dame Vivienne Westwood, whose career was built on the rich union of traditional British styles and the edgiest of urban fashions. Daniel Lee at Burberry and Erdem Moralioğlu, among others, have been praised for following Westwood in daring this year, and evaluations of their work have […]

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Be Happy Happy

Amanda Jaffe — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 11:27:00 +0000

At every stop, the prerecorded reminder exhorts riders in the pristine Singapore subway car to put on a cheerful countenance as they exit. The words seem to be nothing more than white noise to the Singaporeans sitting around me, talking with friends, looking at phones, reading a book; for me, though, they’re a comforting reminder […]

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Portrait of a Lady

Lev Raphael — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 12:23:39 +0000

I was only about ten when my mother returned from visiting her aunt in a lavish New Jersey rest home and said, “That’s my worst nightmare — not knowing who I am.” I’d been on one of these visits myself to what looked like a Colonial mansion out of a movie, and was dazzled by […]

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Reading the Self

Matthew Duffus — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 11:30:00 +0000

I discovered Paul Auster’s City of Glass through an odd, never-to-be-repeated experience. While home for spring break in college, I learned the local armory was hosting Free Book Day. There, I encountered an auditorium filled with remaindered copies, front covers slashed in half. Stacks of the same hundred or more books filled long banquet tables. I […]

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What Yeats Has To Do With It

Frances McCue — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Normal People’s Sally Rooney dismissed him. His beloved tower has been damaged from flooding and it is disintegrating from a lack of repairs. Three more contemporary Irishmen have won the Nobel Prize since he claimed his. His late-in-life eugenicist remarks about the benefits of a “rich” Irish heritage mar opinions of his verse, tarnishing his image as a poet, and a senator. His most potent […]

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David Foster Wallace’s Problematic Tenses

Arvind Dilawar — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 11:29:00 +0000

In “Tense Present,” an essay published in Harper’s Magazine in 2001 and later reprinted as “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace makes what today might be considered a startling admission: While working as an English professor at Illinois State University — and perhaps also earlier as an […]

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Literally and Seriously

Jeffrey Mitchell — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 14:14:16 +0000

Not long ago the New York Times ran an op-ed by the philosopher Agnes Callard. On the Times website its headline was a question: “Should We Cancel Aristotle?” A subhead began to answer: “He defended slavery and opposed the notion of human equality. But he is not our enemy.” Later the op-ed appeared in the Times’s print edition — the same op-ed but with a different headline: “Aristotle Is a Jerk, […]

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The Best Book in the World

David Kirby — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:37:04 +0000

After I finished Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, I couldn’t sleep. So I got up at 4:22 a.m., downloaded an image of its cover, uploaded the image to my Facebook page, and wrote, “This is the best book in the world.” Macfarlane is a nature writer, travel writer, and literary critic who is in large part responsible […]

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