life | The Smart Set

Wandering Jew

Liz Shulman — 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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Questioning De-Extinction

Emma Wilkins — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I came across a surprising claim the other day. Shortly after reading that in the last 200 years, Australia has suffered the largest documented decline in biodiversity of any continent, I read that my home state’s habitat has remained “relatively unchanged” since 1936. The quote was on a US biotech company’s website. Last year the […]

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We Tell Stories in Order to Die

David Stromberg — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I turned 39 not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. So I looked at the bookshelf of […]

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A New Scar in Time

Greg Gerke — Thu, 26 May 2022 13:48:06 +0000

One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic fortress rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a painted window. An arm of the sea […]

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Death Lessons

Larry Patten — Mon, 23 May 2022 10:33:00 +0000

Death has been a wise mentor for my ongoing journey of faith. Now a retired pastor, death has also broken me, along with challenging me to heal. Did we discuss dying, and death, and how they would impact ministry in the bygone days of seminary education? Not so much. There were the predictable discussions about […]

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A Year Without DMX

Akshay Pendyal — Thu, 19 May 2022 15:28:39 +0000

Picture it — the year is 1998. You are 16. You’ve just bought your first car, a gold/bronze 1986 Honda Accord EX. The A/C is broken; the power steering doesn’t work, the result of a permanent, occult leak in steering fluid, reminiscent of Lyle’s ‘23 Farmall tractor in James Galvin’s The Meadow (“It leaks exactly […]

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The Lade Leaves Us Longing

Q Manivannan — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 12:34:36 +0000

I read Sumana and remember my longing for you, to you, as a tree. The Lade Braes is a kind meandering walk that twists itself, like an apology, through the heart of Saint Andrews in Scotland. As I trudge through, the trees breathe with the breeze, with me, with the cold, the stream speaks and […]

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Haunted Memories, Sifted Dreams

Melinda Lewis — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms is a book of passages. I mean this literally in its form, a collection of nonfiction narrative poems that construct the book, and also metaphorically as each paragraph moves us from one sensation to another, unlocking a series of memories and feelings. Covering Nutt’s childhood, early adolescence, and adulthood, the collection as […]

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Black Holes in the Time of Coronavirus

Daniel Hudon — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 12:30:00 +0000

Black holes are prisons of light. They are both metaphor and physical entity, mute commentary on what is known, unknown, and unknowable. Well-studied but poorly understood, like a virus. What happens gravitationally if you squeeze the mass of an object to a point? This was Karl Schwarzschild’s question while stationed at the Russian front of […]

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Restoration

Colin Fleming — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:53:20 +0000

Like many high school swains — or would-be swains — I was accustomed to being jolted in affairs of the heart. Allowing that we have not experienced parental or sibling death, substance abuse, abandonment — which is to say, tragedy — by that point, these teenage blows are often when life starts to discomfit us. They make us […]

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