television | The Smart Set

To Binge or Not to Binge: That Is the Question

Al Sturgeon — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

I specifically hoped not to be an old person that longed for the good old days, but, well, here’s the deal: I remember when binge was considered a bad word. Now, it is a weekend plan. And I’m not talking about those darn kids today; I’m talking about my weekend plan. Decades ago, the only […]

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Puckleman’s Way

Evelyn Messinger — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

“I have a problem,” is how Leonard Puckleman struck up a conversation with me. “My 20-year-old girlfriend in Paris just learned about my 19-year-old girlfriend in Moscow.” It was 1991, and men could still say stuff like that to strangers. He was a moderately good-looking, physically fit American in his early 30s, wearing a nubby […]

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My Sister’s Bookshelf

Chris Orlet — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Throughout the long-gone days of my childhood a thick, worn paperback sat on top of the lid of the tank of our upstairs toilet. Wilt, a biography of Wilt Chamberlain, the Hall of Fame center for the Los Angeles Lakers. My father had checked out the book on the only trip he ever took as […]

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In Defense of Riverdale

Sloane Dzhitenov — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

When it was announced last summer that the upcoming season of Riverdale would be its last, I was — to say the least — heartbroken. Here was a show that was seemingly endless, sprawling across not just six seasons — each of them 19 to 22 episodes a piece — but also a multitude of timelines, approximately […]

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Tom Verlaine

Matt Hanson — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:36:34 +0000

To my rue, I wasn’t very adventurous in High School. My rebellions and transgressions tended to be mostly internal, generally taking the form of skipping gym class to go to the library. It felt a little extra wicked to discard my homework and dive into back copies of Rolling Stone and anthologies of rock criticism. […]

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Take Only One Memory

Joylyn Chai — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 12:30:00 +0000

If I could take only one memory into eternity, it would be the evening I fell in love with my husband. Long ago, I saw the film After Life by Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda. After watching two hours of an imagined purgatory set in what looked like an abandoned, unheated high school, I left the […]

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Surviving the Sting

Marie Johnson — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:30:00 +0000

Different kinds of pain summon different terms of art: hurt, suffering, ache, trauma, angst, wounds, damage . . . trauma implies a specific devastating event and often links to damage, its residue. In 2014, Leslie Jamison coined the term “post-traumatic girl”, a woman or girl who discards their wounded affect in response to the knowing […]

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american (tele)visions review

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 12:35:31 +0000

Meet the Estradas. The father, Octavio (Raúl Castillo), was the first member of the family to arrive in America. After nine months of working 10-hour shifts (and having his pay docked for six of those hours because he’s an “illegal”) he finally saved up enough money “to pay coyotes so that my whole family could come […]

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It’s a MAS*H World Now

Daniel Vollaro — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I heard two kinds of war stories growing up in the 1970s. First, there were the World War II tales about how my grandfather had shipped out to the Pacific Theater at age 35 while my grandmother literally took his place on the assembly line of the auto plant where he worked, a real “Rosie the […]

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Yu-Gi-Oh! and Us

Marek Makowski — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:30:00 +0000

The first time in my life I felt summoned to something — before writing, before love — I received an invitation to the Duelist Kingdom. It arrived in the mail: a VHS tape and letter from Maximillian Pegasus, CEO of Industrial Illusions. In the video the cartoon man appears in a red double-breasted suit, standing […]

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