politics | The Smart Set

Misunderstanding Maggie Haberman

Stephen Silver — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Maggie Haberman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times political reporter, CNN commentator, and now biographer of former president Donald Trump, is one of those figures who inspire anger and hatred from different people on different sides of the political spectrum. While Haberman has been an active journalist since the mid-1990s, it was her Trump-era work […]

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The Business of Unicorns

Rachel Messier — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 14:58:14 +0000

Let’s imagine that a corporation transforms into a person. Pretend that it inhabits a human body with a beating heart and a back that aches when it sleeps on the wrong side of the bed. Who is that person? What are they like? Do you see them as a co-worker or even a friend? Would […]

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Megan Walsh’s The Subplot

Jeremy Ray Jewell — Mon, 16 May 2022 11:30:00 +0000

There has never been a better time to begin acquainting yourself with contemporary Chinese literature, and Megan Walsh’s The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters is an invaluable guide to that journey. It is a slim volume, but it is broad in its scope. It is focused on Chinese works published and read within the last […]

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Chucho Bedoya’s “Chucherías” Exhibit at Bogotá’s Galeria Fenix

Jeremy Ray Jewell — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 12:30:00 +0000

As you walk uphill from Bogotá’s iconic Colpatria Tower and through the Parque de la Independencia, you have only a few blocks before you meet the Cerros Orientales . . . the Eastern Hills. There the Adean city’s center abruptly ends in the shadow of Monserrate Mountain, a pilgrimage site since pre-Hispanic times. This plateau […]

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The Radicalism of W.E.B. Du Bois

Arvind Dilawar — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:20:12 +0000

In the April 1919 edition of The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an editorial lambasts the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for its position on World War I. As a revolutionary, anti-capitalist labor union, the IWW opposed the war for pitting workers against one another, […]

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Yours, Mine, Ours

Megumi DeMond — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 12:30:00 +0000

Two corgis. One squirrel. Three turkeys. And many more presumably educated, ostensibly left-leaning young people. I pass these creatures on my first day back in Cambridge, on a riverside run that used to be routine. After a two month hiatus from the brick university buildings and green lawns that are within walking distance from my apartment, I am jarred into recognizing […]

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Gnosticism and the Smoking Gun

David Frost — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 12:30:00 +0000

In July 2018, my fiancé, Kelly, and I hiked the Neahkahnie Mountain trail on the Oregon coast. We needed a break from the incessant news cycle and my future father-in-law’s pro-Trump shares on Facebook. Days earlier, the President appeared quisling-like in his deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a joint press conference in Helsinki. […]

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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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Catch My Grift

Jon Skolnik — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 12:30:17 +0000

This piece originally appeared on BuzzFlash. The art of the con in the marketplace of ideas Remember John Stossel, that slender mustachioed man whose shrill and facetious voice you were forced to endure lecturing you in your 9th-grade economics class about why sweatshop labor is a force for good? Yes, that’s the one. The guy […]

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Canvassing

Matt Hanson — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 11:31:17 +0000

This essay contains derogatory language that has been included to articulate the abuse experienced by some canvassers. You’re cold. Shivering. Your legs pump back and forth, trying in vain to generate heat. Your feet are cracked and aching, fingers turning to steel. You can feel your breath leave your body as you wait, exhaling plumes […]

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