Generated by All in One SEO v4.9.4.1, this is an llms.txt file, used by LLMs to index the site.

# The Smart Set

A magazine of arts & culture from Drexel University

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://www.thesmartset.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [For Dad, On His Day](https://www.thesmartset.com/for-dad-on-his-day/) - It’s been 20 years since my father died. Over the past few months, I’ve been writing down stories: what I know about his life and what I remember most vividly, the good and the bad. A newspaper published a profile of him just after World War II, but that was a flattering human interest story
- [[See:] Weed [Read:] Control](https://www.thesmartset.com/see-weed-read-control/) - The problem with perfectionism is that impossibly high standards can keep you from starting. Ideas are immaculate. The moment you set them in words, they become damaged — dented, wounded, half-dead — disappointing, less-than, wrong. Which often means you don’t write. Then you kick yourself for not writing and feel worse. You read someone else’s
- [ Read like a guest, not like a tourist! ](https://www.thesmartset.com/read-like-a-guest-not-like-a-tourist/) - Every time you pick up a novel from another country, you open the door to a new journey. You might discover new (to you!) foods and customs, pick up a few phrases in a foreign language, or gain a new perspective on something you thought you understood. If you are fluent in English — a
- [A (Stone Cold) Stunner of a Picture](https://www.thesmartset.com/a-stone-cold-stunner-of-a-picture/) - Despite only recently breaching his 20s, director and writer, Pedro Vasquez, a 2024 Drexel University graduate, completed an ambitious project: a film that marries existential anxieties, action-packed sequences, and challenging counterpoints to those with preconceptions about the life of professional wrestlers. Within this interview, we talk about his road to completing the film Slow Dancing
- [A Year that Defined a Lifetime](https://www.thesmartset.com/a-year-that-defined-a-lifetime/) - Any given year of one’s time roaming the earth unavoidably has some effect on who they are as a person. It is perhaps especially so when a person has just turned 14, been forced the previous year to swap daily life with his family for the company of strangers and is on the cusp of
- [Shots Fired](https://www.thesmartset.com/shots-fired/) - Rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud felt almost like it started with an inextricable bang and ended with a dull murmur. Everyone resides in the aftermath wondering if this is just a mere ceasefire – a pause before the next clash. But – and I’m just going to speak for everyone here — a fortune
- [The Holy Spirit of Alice Coltrane](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-holy-spirit-of-alice-coltrane/) - Alice Coltrane has been lionized for her light and her loving devotion to God and the spirits since her first collaborations (on albums with Terry Gibbs and her husband, John Coltrane), and her earliest band-leader albums on “Impulse!” such as 1971’s “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Universal Consciousness.” With her newest work, however, the posthumously released
- [Finding Inspiration in Chaos](https://www.thesmartset.com/finding-inspiration-in-chaos/) - In Zürich, I saw no drunken Bolsheviks at the Cafe Odeon. Down the block at the Terrasse Restaurant, there were no anarchists partying with war deserters. This wasn’t 1916. Yet in the river, the swans were a feature still left over from more than a century earlier. They lilted on the surface of the water,
- [Pokey's Cinematic Multiplex](https://www.thesmartset.com/pokeys-cinematic-multiplex/) - I often think about my deceased dog, Pokey. He was a Wheaton terrier with a genetic predisposition toward stomach problems, and he eventually succumbed to gastric cancer in his 11th year. I miss Pokey and have nostalgia for his daily routine. He had a fairly mellow disposition (except with the mailman and the gasman, for
- [1984 in 2024](https://www.thesmartset.com/1984-in-2024/) - Like existentialism, surreal, and (sorry, Alanis Morisette) ironic, the term “Orwellian” is ubiquitous and often misused. It’s typically applied to government surveillance or totalitarianism in general. This is understandable, given that British author Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, is likely best known for his novel 1984, which generations of
- [Reimagining Excess](https://www.thesmartset.com/reimagining-excess/) - “All Things Are Too Small” declares the title, borrowed from a 13th-century Dutch mystic, of the new collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld, one of the most prolific and versatile critics working today. The claim initially confused me. Too small? Casting a weary glance at the way we live now — visual excess blaring from
- [Out of Hiding](https://www.thesmartset.com/out-of-hiding/) - This piece contains detailed discussions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), including descriptions of intrusive thoughts, compulsions, and rituals that may be distressing to some readers. If you are sensitive to content about mental health conditions, particularly OCD, or if you find such topics triggering, please proceed with caution. When I first came across Emma Noyes promoting
- [More Human Than Ever](https://www.thesmartset.com/more-human-than-ever/) - For Alejandro Jodorowsky, art is life. An artist’s role is to follow a continuous thread of liberation between worlds. Over his nearly eight-decade adventure in art, he has dealt in literature, theater, mime, comic books, tarot, spiritual texts, repulsive performance, cinema, poetry, visual art, music, therapy. He intended his unrealized film of Dune in the
- [First Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/first-story/) - On my first birthday after the death of my father, all I wanted was to spend the afternoon with him at the cemetery. He had never missed a birthday of mine; not even when he was in a wheelchair in a recovery facility, and I was a little girl on the other side of the
- [Life in Mississippi](https://www.thesmartset.com/life-in-mississippi/) - I was born in the Jackson, Mississippi Baptist Hospital on June 27, 1938, to parents Isaac Gresham Riley and Vernella Gertrude Riley; a younger brother (Keith) would come along three years later. Both my parents were in their early 30s at the time and had only recently moved to Jackson from farming communities located in
- [15 in '59](https://www.thesmartset.com/15-in-59/) - “I still love Tom Petty songs/and driving old men crazy” "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Nostalgia, as many of us undoubtedly learned from this classic Mad Men scene, literally means, “pain from an old wound,” which raises the question of why we seek to relive and revive that pain. For about as long as people
- [Loneliness, Love, Hope and the DeBarges ](https://www.thesmartset.com/loneliness-love-hope-and-the-debarges/) - I hope you will excuse me if I share with you an obsession, a compulsion maybe, borne from the constant search for solace. No one knows how these obsessions manifest, but they come, a salve for a bleeding soul, sometimes late at night when YouTube on autoplay presents a song that raises you from stupor,
- [Revenge Condo](https://www.thesmartset.com/revenge-condo/) - My friend Iskra sent me the condo real estate listing on the last morning of my trip to Turks and Caicos a few months ago. I awoke to her texts urging me to buy this and rent it out, and let’s be Golden Girls one day and that we’ll build a fireman’s pole connecting the
- [The Un-Making of Made in America](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-un-making-of-made-in-america/) - As far as popular music goes, 2024 will be remembered for Beyoncé’s reach into her Houston country roots for Cowboy Carter, the return of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band to stadium rocking, the continuing bad beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and the multi-billion-dollar streaming sales of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets. For better
- [Forgetting Gareth](https://www.thesmartset.com/forgetting-gareth/) - 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
- [The Creator Almost Broke Me](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-creator-almost-broke-me/) - Typically, the career path to film criticism doesn’t start with a 7-year-old in class declaring that they want to review movies when they grow up. As a kid from Nairobi, my journey toward a life dedicated to analyzing film began when my elder brothers exposed me early to movies that required me to access more
- [Off-Trail at Your Own Risk](https://www.thesmartset.com/off-trail-at-your-own-risk/) - There is an inch-long scar snaking across the top of my index finger, a thin white line that bisects my permanent government records. You should know I’m no giant to begin with, 5 feet 4 inches at my bravest, with hands that were never going to palm a basketball. What looks like a forevermore smudge
- [Saudade for Library Book Sales ](https://www.thesmartset.com/saudade-for-library-book-sales/) - In Berlin, Germany, there is no such thing as a library book sale. This is a reality I have had to come to terms with over the past 10 years. A library might have a small bin of sale books near the checkout desk, but certainly nothing compared to the annual tradition at many libraries
- [The Hard Sell](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-hard-sell/) - The season has passed when the girls (and their guardians) are loading up the wagons, setting up tables, and selling the beloved, but seasonal Girl Scout Cookies. Whether you go for the low-key shortbread cookie (Trefoils) or the high-powered Caramel deLites (formerly Samoas), most of us are delighted to see the girls in brown and
- [Freedom or Texas](https://www.thesmartset.com/freedom-or-texas/) - Part One: The Dominican I suppose you could say I was hungry, but I’m not sure it was food I was looking for. After coffee and bagels slathered with jalapeño cream cheese, Nikhil and I meandered back toward the apartment, passing a dicey New York boulevard that, to me, felt as potentiating as it did
- [Let By-lines be Bylines](https://www.thesmartset.com/let-by-lines-be-bylines/) - Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours
- [Don't Sing, Scarf, or Spit](https://www.thesmartset.com/dont-sing-scarf-or-spit/) - Culture, if we can still call it that, has taken a definite downward turn in the last couple of decades. Tee shirts with I HATE YOUR F---ING MASK (the F word spelled out) printed in large letters on the front. Texting at the dinner table. Parents using profanity to children. Being honked and tailgated while
- [Girlhood](https://www.thesmartset.com/girlhood/) - If there’s ever been a time to dissect the experience of being a girl, it’s now: there’s girl math and girl dinner, “I’m literally just a girl” is a viral meme, pink bow emojis are rampant, you can dress like a ballerina and no one bats an eye, and No Doubt’s '90s anthem “Just a
- [Town and Country](https://www.thesmartset.com/town-and-country/) - Some time ago, I embarked on a personal reading project: An informal survey of books that once had been widely read — so widely read, in fact, that they had earned their place in the literary lexicon. The criteria for my project did have certain strictures. The operative word was once. The contents of these
- [We Are the Martians](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08180901/) - It was exactly 10 years ago, 1999, that the heat of a rocket ship on its way to Mars turned the dark Ohio winter into summer. The First Expedition landed men on Mars but it would be three expeditions later before the men of Earth would fully inhabit the red planet and make it their own.
- [Cutting Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/cutting-up/) - “A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this
- [The Art of the Photo Dump](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-art-of-the-photo-dump/) - Culture is a pendulum swinging back and forth between tail ends of a spectrum. If the previous decade saw conservative politics, liberalism is on the forefront; if the starlets of yesteryear were curvy, today’s will be skinny; if your closet is stocked with skinny jeans, be prepared for the takeover of the straight leg. Culture
- [The Successful Gesture](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-successful-gesture/) - There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed
- [Days of Long Ago](https://www.thesmartset.com/days-of-long-ago/) - Dozens of young adults, most of them Scandinavian tourists, were happily chattering in the lobby of Eilat’s Hotel Snapir soon after sunset, after having spent another toasty day on the beach. The lobby was uncomfortably warm, maybe due to the heat that radiated from the tourists’ sunburned skins. Passing through the lobby, I opened the
- [Daisy Goodwill and the Montana Rockies ](https://www.thesmartset.com/daisy-goodwill-and-the-montana-rockies/) - I remember a lake rimmed with lily pads; a meadow filled with sun. The uphill stretch of trail where I stepped round a bend and came eyeball to eyeball with a mountain goat. Now, the goat may have been a bighorn sheep. It wasn’t the curve of the horns, so much, or the softness of
- [Me and Bobby Miller](https://www.thesmartset.com/me-and-bobby-miller/) - Everybody needs an oldies station. WKBJ was equal parts doo-wop and PG hijinks, faceless friend to commuters from Saugerties to Secaucus. It was the late ’90s, when Neil Diamond and the Beach Boys jostled for room in the nostalgia car. Bobby Miller was the manic maestro behind the wheel. Favored by parents and Earth Science
- [To Binge or Not to Binge: That Is the Question ](https://www.thesmartset.com/to-binge-or-not-to-binge-that-is-the-question/) - 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
- [My Cousin Lenny](https://www.thesmartset.com/my-cousin-lenny/) - With the debut of the Bradley Cooper movie, Maestro, we were reminded of writer Paula Marantz Cohen’s testimonial to the inimitable Leonard Bernstein some years back. She and Cooper, though a generation apart and from different backgrounds, were both fascinated by Lenny. Here's her take from 2017. For our third piece in our Oscar series,
- [Brilliant Zingers and Vodka Stingers](https://www.thesmartset.com/brilliant-zingers-and-vodka-stingers/) - During the second episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — producer Ryan Murphy’s streaming series based on author Truman Capote’s lived-in-and-laughed-over 1960s among Manhattan’s “ladies who lunch” — titular actor Tom Hollander truly has his way with spite. Leaning with persnickety dread into a line that all but explains the raison d’etre of biting
- [Our Oscars, Ourselves](https://www.thesmartset.com/our-oscars-ourselves/) - In our second Oscars story republished from 2016, writer Alex Dabertin examines the red-carpet race for Best Actress. The cultural landscape was marked by a significant emphasis on issues of gender equality, diversity, and representation in Hollywood. 2015 brought the #MeToo movement and infused discussions surrounding the Oscars with a heightened sensitivity to issues of
- ['Tis the (Oscar) Season](https://www.thesmartset.com/tis-the-oscar-season/) - This is the first story in a package celebrating all-things Oscars, republished from The Smart Set archives. Entering the dazzling world of Hollywood's glittering extravaganza, 'Tis the Oscar Season' is a whimsical journey through the pomp and circumstance of the Academy Awards. From the opulent red-carpet spectacles to the meticulously crafted speeches and the delightful
- [Greetings From Abkhazia](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11130701/) - The Republic of Abkhazia is one of the few countries, if you can call it that, where every tourist who shows up gets a handshake and a friendly chat with the deputy foreign minister. Or rather, it would be such a country, if it were a country at all. A wee seaside strip in the
- [Sequins & Scandals](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11080703/) - Figure skating is the quintessential American sport, not merely because it is fiercely individualistic while at the same time incredibly conformist, but also because the athletes and fans, like the American electorate, have an extraordinarily high tolerance for corruption. It is surprising that the sport is not more popular in the U.S. It has long
- [Santa™](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12210701/) - I write a column about booze every other week for a major newspaper, and I often travel outside of the country, sometimes simply to drink some type of alcoholic beverage that I will eventually write about in my column. I also happen to be a father of two young boys. It therefore may not come
- [The Oberlin Experiment](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12140702/) - Oberlin College is a Division III school better known for incubating Ph.D.s than pro athletes. Athletic events attract a smattering of fans. The sports teams lose with astounding regularly. The last time the Yeomen made national news was when the football team ended a 44-game losing streak in 2001. Academically, athletes are, taken as a
- [Seismic Center](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12140701/) - On the empty surface of the East Antarctic ice cap, about 680 miles from the South Pole, I kneeled inside a fluttering tent to fiddle with the HF radio dial. It was mid-December of 2000, peak summer in the heart of the Earth’s austral region. Our thermometer stretched toward a balmy 15°F as the sun
- [At the Body, Mind, and Spirit Expo](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12070701/) - The Oregon Convention Center hall had the artificial lighting and concrete walls of a nuclear fallout shelter and not a very cozy one. It was a space used to accommodating big shows for attendees making big decisions about college, holiday gifts, or RVs, but this weekend it was exhibiting three equally grand concepts: the body,
- [Boomtown on the Barents](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12040702/) - The dingy waiting area at gate 25 in Tromso, Norway, with its stained cloth seats and strewn candy wrappers, could be anywhere. Except for the signs in both Norwegian and Russian. And if the passengers waiting to board aren’t suited up in collars and pinstripes, then many of them are bundled up in all-weather jackets
- [Boob Tube](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09201001/) - I’m addicted to the idiot box (television). Help! — Dan K. I must say, I’m intrigued by your metaphor for television. It demonstrates both television’s power over you and your manipulability — the television has the power to make you an idiot and you are an idiot when you watch it. Now, I’m only good
- [Rhinestone Dreams](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09171001/) - I’d like to dedicate this very special Valentine’s song to my mother, he tells the audience. Her favorite composer is Frederic Chopin. I’d like to play this, he says, for all the mothers here, and all the mothers tuned in at home. He’s dressed as a man should be dressed on Valentine’s Day, if the
- [Only Half the Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09161001/) - Soon after I began reading Sharon Wilkerson’s new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which uses ethnography to explore the great migration of African-Americans from the South to Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century, I came face to face with another treatment of this subject during a visit to Washington, D.C.
- [Seeking Balance in Belize](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09151001/) - “Favreau.” My boyfriend says my name as a warning, with a cautionary edge to his voice. I look down in the dim light of our LED flashlight to see that I am three inches away from stepping on a tarantula, furry and the size of a lime. I yelp and hop to the side
- [Film at 50](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09141002/) - It is 50 years since Federico Fellini made La Dolce Vita. That fact alone makes the film fresh again. It is no longer a movie about the contemporary world, even if its critique of shallow, fame-obsessed popular culture feels relevant as ever. It is said, often enough, that La Dolce Vita represents the transition from
- [Punk'd in the Great Depression](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09141001/) - When historians compile lists of the stuff that helped make America America, they don’t even rank the DeMoulin’s Patent Lung Tester alongside even relatively minor inventions like the cotton gin, the telegraph, and the automobile, much less epic game-changers such as instant coffee and air conditioning. Surely this is an oversight. Catalog No. 439: Burlesque
- [A Bridge Over Troubled Water](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09131001/) - What is it about autumn and the dedication of major engineering projects in the American Southwest? Seventy-five years ago, on September 30, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt traveled to the Colorado River just south of Las Vegas to dedicate the Boulder Dam, better known as the Hoover Dam. On October 16, 2010, dignitaries and public spectators will
- [Body Issues](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09101001/) - Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s wife Libby may have erected an impressive obelisk headstone for him at the military’s West Point Cemetery in New York, but it is very unlikely that the remains buried below are his. After the battle of Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 — where Custer and 209 of his men
- [Varna to Varna](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09101002/) - Varna is a city in Bulgaria. The Black Sea lives here. It probably got its name from the old Turkish word Kara, which means both “black” and “north.” Because of the depth, the water in the middle of the sea does look black sometimes. Once you move out from the shores a few thousand meters,
- [Some Birthday](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09081001/) - My birthday cake sat on the dining room table. Fluffy, Linda’s elderly tabby, made an unhurried entrance to join the more-energetic Sam, who’d claimed a close place as soon as we put the cake box on the table. Sam’s full cat-name is “Sammy-get-down from-there.” I’ve never seen Sam leap from the floor to the
- [Animal House](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09071001/) - I’ve always had pets, but the guys I’m rooming with in college aren’t animal lovers and don’t want one in the apartment. I want a dog, but even a less traditional animal, such as a turtle or even a fish, would be OK with me. Can a poem help out in this situation? — Mike
- [Music to a Poet's Ear](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09031002/) - A couple of weeks ago, Billy Collins was quoted in The Wall Street Journal opining the merit of music lyrics to that of poems: “‘Lyrics just don't hold up without the music,’ says Billy Collins, professor and former poet laureate. When his students argue that the lines by their favorite rock stars should be assessed
- [Tan Lines](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09031001/) - Still, Obama is not George Bush on a practical as well as a policy level, and he spends a lot of time in the Oval Office. Given that he is prone to more substantive talk than his predecessor, things like couches and chairs seem important accessories. The taupes and beiges of the new décor, moreover,
- [The Home Front](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08311001/) - There are two lives I'd like to lead. One has opera. It is an urban life, a European life, with ballet and pastry and sleeper cars on Russian trains and holding hands with the fella along the banks of the Danube. It involves needing extra pages in my passport. Radical Homemaking: Reclaiming Domesticity from a
- [Cream, Sugar, and a High-Speed Connection](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08271001/) - On Virginia’s Eastern Shore, in the middle of a patchy square of lawn that fronts a fading seaside motel, a plywood sign emblazoned with orange spray-paint letters announces the motel’s latest amenity: free Wi-Fi. A continent away, in the gray outer reaches of San Francisco, in a part of town where tiny, dingy laundromats outnumber
- [The King's Two Bodies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08261001/) - They dug up the body of Nicolae Ceausescu. Or did they? The Romanian dictator and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas, 1989. But there are those who still won’t believe it. So last month, Romania dug up the body in Ceausescu’s grave to perform DNA tests on it, and to pronounce Nicolae Ceausescu dead,
- [Life's Work](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08251001/) - August 26 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of William James, a giant in American intellectual history. James was a founder of pragmatic philosophy and of modern psychology. His two greatest works, The Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), are towering achievements, still relevant today in providing insights into
- [Lady Trouble](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08191001/) - Part of Chicago froze in the 1930s. I’ve been thinking of my old home city of Chicago a lot lately, and of my new home in Berlin. The thread that ties them together seems to be that they’re both stuck in time. In the same time. They have one foot in this chaotic contemporary period,
- [Monster Movement](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08191002/) - I came across the frog rabbit in the basement of the Petit Palais in Paris. A medium-sized plaster sculpture, the frog rabbit is a hairless beast with a pointy reptilian nose, rabbit ears, long talon-like toes, and a stubby rabbit tail with no fur. He is a monster, though it is unclear whether he bodes
- [Feeding Ganesh](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08181001/) - I watch an 18-month-old girl hold tight to her father’s hand as she waddles over to the decapitated goat. Blood, oozing from its neck, has coagulated; flies land furiously on the bright red stump where the head once was. The little girl stops to stare at the carcass a few inches away from her feet.
- [Mother's Ruin](https://www.thesmartset.com/mothers-ruin/) - At the height of the 18th-century Gin Craze, London didn’t just have an alcohol problem. It had a woman problem. If you believe the reformers of the time, women were sloshed beyond reason, neglecting their husbands and children, keeping messy homes, pawning their household goods, even selling their bodies and spreading syphilis. No fewer than
- [Shehan Karunatilaka Will Kick You Out at Midnight](https://www.thesmartset.com/shehan-karunatilaka-will-kick-you-out-at-midnight/) - Ventriloquism “I only became famous in October,” mumbled Shehan Karunatilaka as he leaned on the wall of the Chandni Chowk metro station and lit a cigarette. Here, in downtown Kolkata, with its crumbling office blocks and chaotic sidewalks, the long-haired, eyebrow-pierced writer from Sri Lanka was about as conspicuous as a dirty napkin in a
- [The Death of Millennial Pink](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-death-of-millennial-pink/) - On January 20th, 2017, I went to see a music show at a small queer-centric community space in East Hollywood. It was the night of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the day before the first Women’s March. The mood was somber. An artist called Cuddle Formation was playing, and they sat in the middle of the
- [Puckleman's Way](https://www.thesmartset.com/pucklemans-way/) - “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
- [Manic Pixie Dream Tribute](https://www.thesmartset.com/manic-pixie-dream-tribute/) - The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins’s novel whose 2020 debut was followed up by its cinematic release last month, brings the audience back to Panem, back to the wilderness of District 12, back to an arena where 24 unlucky children encircle a cornucopia of weapons as an announcer counts down to their deaths.
- [Five-Finger Discount](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08171001/) - Shoplifting rates are soaring, at least among the grabby progeny of New York state mayors and former mayors. On the last day of July, Byron W. Brown Jr., the 19-year-old son of Buffalo mayor Byron W. Brown, was nabbed stealing $58 worth of clothing and iPod accessories from a bargain apparel store. Four days later,
- [Busy as a Working Father Bee](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08161001/) - I used to write and read poems often when I was in college, but now I have a demanding job and a family with three kids. I’m just too busy these days, and I fear that poetry has become a thing of my past. How can a regular guy bring more poetry into his life
- [ACK!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08131001/) - I can't say that I'm upset that Cathy, the comic strip by Cathy Guisewite, will be ending it's 34-year run on October 3. I've never been a huge fan of the strip, preferring more political bite (Doonesbury) or more lively domestic pratfall (Zits) in my comics fare. Still, the end of Cathy marks the end
- [A Wedding Trip](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08131002/) - I’ve never found a reason to cry at a wedding, which gives me an advantage when I’m wearing mascara for the occasion. As a wedding guest or as a member of the wedding party, I want to look my best — if not a natural beauty, then “beautified,” an “ill phrase” — even though nobody
- [Dictating a Masterpiece](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08121001/) - More and more writers are using voice recognition software, which is constantly improving and even has an app for the iPhone. The novelist Richard Powers has explained his process of dictating novels to his PC tablet as a return to “writing by voice” as done by authors through history. But earlier writers, such as Milton,
- [Couture Is Dead](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08111001/) - Yves Saint Laurent killed himself in January of 2002. He died six years later. When you are as great as he was, you've earned the two deaths. The second death was bodily, cancer finally caught up with him. The first death was in the form of official retirement, the closing down of the Yves Saint
- [What Happens in the Colonies...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08101001/) - The Empire may have been built by men and women trying to escape Britain’s terrible weather — or even, as Cecil Rhodes once said, to avoid the lamentable cuisine — but it was kept fully staffed by refugees from the conservative sexual code. Accounts of life in colonial Bombay, for example, read as if the
- [Washed Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08051001/) - I never imagined a 12-foot tower of orange rubber work gloves could be so sublime. Before walking around the Schipbreuk- en Juttersmuseum on the little Dutch island of Texel, beachcombing meant a shell or two picked up on vacation, something to decorate the bathroom, a sand dollar if I was lucky. The jutters (beachcombers) of
- [The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08051002/) - Everything I know about cutting grass I learned from my father. He had three rules and one quasi-rule. The three rules undoubtedly reflected his occupation as a systems analyst. Rule 1: To maximize efficiency and, thus, save energy, plot the yard into squares and mow inward from the outer edge. Rule 2: To prevent the
- [Celebrities Today!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08041001/) - “Would you rather be rich or famous?” It’s one of those meaningless questions you ask when you’re trying to crack open the person you’re all smitten and warm and stupid over, when you’re trying to figure out their capacity. And maybe he has the capability to be both, but you want a value system. You
- [The Simple Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08031002/) - I am trying to simplify my life and am especially ridding myself of extraneous "stuff." Can you help inspire me with a poem? — Ella I empathize with you, Ella, as I’ve been trying to do the same thing for quite some time. I’m one of those people who likes to save every ticket
- [Death to Belgium!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08031001/) - A war has been brewing in Europe and no one seems to care. Admittedly, the hostilities have been mild so far: hurt feelings, insults, diplomatic wrangling. Yves Leterme (a Flemish politician) questioned whether people in the French-speaking part of Belgium have the "intellectual capacity" to learn Dutch. Belgium, Leterme suspects, holds together as a nation
- [Tipping Point](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08021001/) - Earlier this month, a Florida restaurant called the Chicago Pizza and Sports Grille started adding an “automatic gratuity” of 15 percent on every in-house order. In staid, statist Europe, that’s par for the course. In America, you see it on cruise ships, in tony establishments run by celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller, and in
- [Old Girls' Club](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07081001/) - You could be forgiven for drawing certain conclusions about sexual relations from the work of Shirley Jackson. Something about the malevolence of men, the witchy insularity of women, and the powerful bonds between girls that sometimes border on incestuous. There are the sisters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one who sings rhymes
- [She's a Little Runaway](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07081002/) - When I was about seven years old, I ran away from home. Today, the word “runaway” conjures images of pre-teens and teenagers going to the city, falling prey to pimps, sexual exploitation, and destructive drugs. I was just a chubby little girl with ribbons in her pigtails. For some years I’ve tried to tease apart
- [Limp Laws](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07121001/) - The Catholic Church has long enjoyed involving itself in the most intimate details of the conjugal bedroom, although its motives took a radical turn in the Middle Ages. Early thinkers often looked on sex-free marriages as the Christian ideal, celebrating the saintly couples who abandoned the pleasures of the flesh and lived like sterile hermits.
- [Fancy Schmancy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07131001/) - Last month, I went to the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade’s 56th annual Summer Fancy Food Show, held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. Over three days, more than 24,000 attendees wandered among 2,400 exhibitors hawking thousands of so-called “specialty food and beverage products,” which is a $63 billion
- [I Like Candy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07131002/) - Or, to be more correct, I rediscovered it. Between the ages of five and 12, candy was all I thought about. I couldn’t walk into a drugstore or a supermarket without being attacked by longing. The game Candy Land had a visceral attraction for me: just looking at the board would make me dizzy with
- [Notes from a Video Game Developer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07151002/) - Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen. — Marshall McLuhan Video games As fodder for criticism As travel writing I started developing games in 1992, working at Looking Glass Technologies (then Blue Sky Productions), and
- [Art of the Game](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07151001/) - Tom Bissell is a David Foster Wallace man. I mean that specifically. DFW's essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again contains "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." In that essay, Wallace wrote these momentous sentences: Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture … seem both to take TV
- [It's Your Birthday](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07191002/) - Wherever you go, it’s the same song. Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday, dear (name) Happy birthday to you! Today has the possibility to be many things: a day of triumph, a day of mourning, a judgment day, a holiday. But we know with certainty that, for all the things today
- [Printing Money](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07191001/) - Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The newspaper, Information Age dinosaur, superannuated leftover from the glory days of mass culture, cheap and disposable booster of middlebrow department stores and network TV shows, is about to become next year’s $299 chambray work shirt, the must-have accessory for signaling one’s artfully off-handed connoisseurship. Kill your Facebook page.
- [The Culture of Sex](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07201002/) - In the early ’90s, amid high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits and rape awareness campaigns such as Take Back the Night marches, two students accused a master at an Australian university of assaulting them at a school party. Hotly denied by the master himself, the charges consisted of a drunken grope while dancing, and a come-on later
- [Profiling](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07201001/) - Is online dating weird? I don't like the idea of it at all. Relying on technology for something so primitive and organic as meeting and wooing a woman goes against every Romantic and idealistic sentiment I possess. Also, there are some weird people out there. On the other hand, I am realizing that it might
- [Stuff](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07211001/) - What’s the line between collecting and hoarding? If you’re a collector, you’ll be in the Sunday supplement: a personal profile accompanied by a photograph of you, surrounded by your collection and smiling as you hold a prize specimen (teddy bears or baseball gloves, it doesn’t matter). But if you’re a hoarder, you and your home
- [Summer Reading](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07221001/) - The Roberto Bolaño craze has been in full swing for a few years already. It is to the point that publishers are publishing anything they can find (Bolaño died at age 50 in 2003). Lost works are creeping out of their hiding places. First came Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer. Now
- [Matter of Fact](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07271001/) - Caravaggio was a son of a bitch. He killed people. He drank and brawled and painted and died. We love him for that, for being the difficult genius, for giving us stories. It's 400 years since he died and the Caravaggio buzz is up to fever pitch. Everybody wants to talk about Caravaggio. There is
- [Just the Factories](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07301002/) - Adjustable beds. Beer. RVs. Cigars. Cheescakes. If something is made in this country, chances are you can witness the process. The field’s main guidebook, Watch it Made in the U.S.A., includes more than 300 factory tours and company museums scattered across the country. Nobody ever really plans a vacation around a factory tour the way
- [Fresh Grouper](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07071001/) - The economy is still so weak that one in eight Americans now relies on food stamps to help pay their grocery bills, and yet in May, Mission Minis — a San Francisco purveyor of expensive pygmy cupcakes — experienced such high demand that its exhausted employees were threatening to quit after several marathon days of
- [A Question of Timing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07071002/) - How does a poet who aims to make his or her expressions timeless react to a contemporary tragedy steeped in politics such as the disaster in the Gulf? — Dr. Sunshine It’s always tricky when poetry, current events, and politics intersect, but it happens all the time. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote “An Elegy to Dispel
- [August and Everything After](https://www.thesmartset.com/august-and-everything-after/) - It’s the natural way of things, that some works of art are remembered, some revived, some forgotten. Nirvana has had a revival among Gen Zs, or at least Nirvana T-shirts. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, far less so. So far, it seems to me, August and Everything After, the 1993 debut album by the
- [The Last Emperor](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-last-emperor/) - The boy of 11 is at a book fair. School is out in Cochin, India, and he has dragged his father along to the book fair in the city. In two days’ time, the family is going on vacation to Ahmednagar, where his father’s elder brother stays. The uncle works in a sugar factory there,
- [What is Not Imaginable](https://www.thesmartset.com/what-is-not-imaginable/) - I’m trying to find the interview where Robert Hass, in speaking of his children, says something along the lines of having enjoyed having them around while he wrote. At first, I found the comment somewhere between comforting and inspiring, having a young child myself in the house as I try to write. Then, I could
- [No Way to Bresson](https://www.thesmartset.com/no-way-to-bresson/) - At 18 I began to teach myself about sex by watching foreign films. And when I write “sex,” I am at the same time inscribing the word “women.” I was introduced to many intellectual types across the oceans, which heavily contrasted with the vacant Julia Roberts’s and Michelle Pfeiffers’s I could not get too excited
- [Rock 'n' Roll by Any Other Name](https://www.thesmartset.com/rock-n-roll-by-any-other-name/) - John Lennon once said that if you wanted to give rock ’n’ roll another name you might call it Chuck Berry. Far be it from me to disagree with him, but that’s not quite true: There are a few different founding fathers and mothers in the mix. Consider the incendiary flamboyance of Little Richard or
- [Swift Transformation](https://www.thesmartset.com/swift-transformation/) - I’ve been on the fringes of music and pop culture for many decades now, immersed in an underground hardcore punk scene that often derides popular music’s influence. That’s not to say that I’ve always ignored or dismissed what’s popular. There are plenty of popular performers and bands I’ve found magnetic and genuinely enjoyed, despite all
- [On Friendly Ghosts](https://www.thesmartset.com/on-friendly-ghosts/) - Scarier than the thought of ghosts is the thought of no ghosts. Ever since I was a kid, watching re-runs of ancient cartoons at my Grandma Marge’s house in Hubbard, Nebraska, I’ve been a fan of Casper the Friendly Ghost, especially the original episodes from the late 1940s. The first installment opened with baritone radio
- [Tree Knocks and T-Shirts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tree-knocks-and-t-shirts/) - “I guess we’re really doing this,” I said, and squinted into the late morning sunlight. Mark, my partner, and I exited the car just outside the Lakeland, Florida convention center. It was mid-July 2021, and we were about to attend our first “Great Florida Bigfoot Conference.” Neither one of us had ever experienced a Bigfoot
- [Dysmorphia, Degenerate Art, and the Dormancy of Toxic Thoughts](https://www.thesmartset.com/dysmorphia-degenerate-art-and-the-dormancy-of-toxic-thoughts/) - In 1910, a successful bacteriologist from Denmark put his medical practice on hold to focus on hindering the progress of expressionist art. Carl Julius Salomonsen thought that modernism in all its forms was pathological. Defective eyesight, he argued, was to blame for expressionist aesthetics. He termed it “ophthalmic psychosis,” and designated cubism and Dada poetry
- [True at First Flight](https://www.thesmartset.com/true-at-first-flight/) - The omission of airplanes in much artwork is understandable. It’s not a question of talent, but of choice and visibility. When used in art, the most visible kind of planes — those used for war and commercial purposes — signal the glorification of aviation’s base functions — to kill and to carry. There is no
- [In Search of Proust's Genius ](https://www.thesmartset.com/in-search-of-prousts-genius/) - Can a work of art be deeply flawed and still be great? One of the reasons that some once-revered works in the Western canon have been treated so shabbily in recent years is that, once a new lens is introduced that illuminates their flaws, critics have been exceptionally severe. But great things need a certain
- [The Long Goodbye](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-long-goodbye/) - I still remember my excitement that first time — the red and white envelope from Netflix arriving in my New York City mailbox like a present waiting to be opened. No more schlepping to a video store only to find out that the movie you wanted to see wasn’t there or, worse, that you and
- [From Paris to Nowhere](https://www.thesmartset.com/from-paris-to-nowhere/) - Paris, C’est Cher! For 18 years, I lived with my (now) husband in a charming old artist atelier in the 6th arrondissement in Paris. My home was a short daily walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg with its spring blossoms and fall foliage, and lay in the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse, where I not
- [Battle Scars](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06301001/) - There’s a grand old tradition of celebrating the Fourth of July through dissent. Of famously dissenting July Fourths, the 1976 Bicentennial comes to mind, when World’s Fair-style displays of pyrotechnics and nautical parades were joined by civil rights protests nationwide (including a celebrity-organized rally on the National Mall by the People’s Bicentennial Commission featuring Jane
- [Independent Streak](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06291001/) - One of the most amazing thoughts in that most amazing of documents, the Declaration of Independence, comes in the second half of the second paragraph. The lines directly follow the more famous ones about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They address the question of (for lack of a better term) revolution. The case
- [My Drug Problem](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06281001/) - The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) held its annual convention in Chicago recently, and I was there. Let me make clear at once that I am not a member of this august body but am instead married to someone who is; I was thus in the logistical position to report (with some admitted bias)
- [Theater of the Completely Normal](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06231002/) - In grade school we went to the Saturday afternoon movie matinees for the same reason a subscriber goes to a season's performances of the orchestra: That's just what we did. While the program was not a matter of indifference, we'd go almost without regard to what was on the bill. In my small town we
- [Photographic Memory](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06231001/) - Sometimes, when you really want to know what America is all about, you have to go to Belgium. Or so it would seem at the “American Documents” show at Antwerp’s FotoMuseum (FoMu). The star of the show is Walker Evans. You're not going to get a whole lot of dissenters if you claim that American
- [Human Nature](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06221001/) - Stick to nature poetry. Ignorance doesn't show quite so painfully. — Jerry C. This is a representative example of the e-mails I received in response to my column on Arizona’s recent immigration legislation. Many were rude in one way or another. Some attacked my position (four), my usage and mechanics (two), or my analysis
- [Tube at the Tank](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06221002/) - In your living room, the broadcast age is over. Remote controls, VCRs, DVRs, on-demand cable, videogame consoles, Netflix, and the Internet killed it. But at the gas pump, broadcast lives on in its purest, most potent form, like an ostensibly slain slasher movie villain who’s come back from the dead, stronger than ever. It is
- [Best of 2023 ](https://www.thesmartset.com/best-of-2023/) - In between deliberating over submissions and brainstorming accompanying artwork for the well-crafted memoirs and cultural critiques sent to The Smart Set throughout the year, we also like to discuss and cheerlead for our favorite movies, headlines, books, TV shows — and even dog breeds and reptiles. We skipped reading about Prince Harry’s 'todger,' questioned why
- [Location, Location, Location!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06181001/) - In these troubled economic times, real estate is a subject of more obsessive interest than usual at dinner parties from Manhattan to Milwaukee. Perhaps it’s time for us to take a longer-range view of the housing market and its endless cycles of boom and bust: Whether you’re a humble tenant or shark-like developer, it should
- [The Wise Men (and Women!)](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06171002/) - Since the age of the Druids, bees have been a symbol of wisdom. The Greeks and the Celts used the symbolism as well, as did cultures in India and Egypt, Sumerian mythology, and Christianity. Bees were the symbols of sun gods, earth goddesses, and the Virgin Mary. In the Jewish story, Deborah — whose name
- [Counter Argument](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06171001/) - I was strolling through a department store recently, killing time before meeting a friend, when I became lost in the maze of cosmetic counters. I was not literally lost, of course. I could make my way past the makeup into the shoe department blindfolded. The problem is when I’m not blindfolded. That’s when my head
- [Sunday in the Park with Georgia](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06151001/) - Looking for some outdoor summer fun but hate the crowds of Yellowstone, the remoteness of Dry Tortugas, the heat of Death Valley, and the obviousness of the Grand Canyon? Maybe you'd instead enjoy picnicking in James H. "Sloppy" Floyd State Park in Georgia. Or swimming at E.P. "Tom" Sawyer State Park in Kentucky. Or walking
- [Foot Doctor](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06141001/) - You hear people say things such as, "That parking job was a work of art." The sentence is really just a fancy way of saying you like something. The phrase "a work of art" can usually be replaced with the word "good" to no discernible loss of meaning. Lionel Messi's goal on April 18, 2007
- [Strike a Pose](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06101001/) - I’m in the St. James Theatre watching the new Broadway production American Idiot, and I’m imaginig Sid Vicious watching with me. The production really begins in the lobby, which is full of messy graffiti and black paint. An air of menace is further created by signs that warn of graphic language and strobe lights. This
- [Greenwashing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06091001/) - Jan Vanriet's “Closing Time” show is about exactly that. The Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp, Belgium is closing for a few years to undergo major renovations. Antwerp is a smallish city that can easily be overlooked, in art as in other things, in favor of nearby cities like Brussels and Amsterdam. But as a fine arts
- [The Things We Carry!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06081001/) - I don’t need an iPad. I don’t want an iPad. But every few days for the last two months, I’ve spent some time thinking about whether or not I need an iPad, or want an iPad. Apple’s TV commercials for the product aren’t making me ask these questions. Neither are all the cool things an
- [Girl Talk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06071001/) - I think of poetry as a boys’ club. Do female poets have to learn to write in a “masculine” style to gain any praise for their poems? — Sarah, Malden, Massachusetts P.S. Do you know of any good poems about female relationships? You’re right, to some extent: Poetry is a boys’ club, as are many
- [Laugh Riot](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06041001/) - Want to see a corpse dance? Just ask someone to write an article about the state of women in comedy. Before you know it, the author will have slid his hand into that sack of bones known as the Christopher Hitchens “Why Women Aren't Funny” article and have it shimmying around like Kermit the Frog
- [Plotting Along](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06031001/) - Every year when the Orange Prize announces its longlist, or its shortlist, or its jury members, or an anniversary, or is mentioned in the press, people start to write long opinion pieces about the sad state of women's fiction. This year's award will be announced next week, and we've been enduring months of such complaints.
- [The Explorer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06021001/) - The longer we were in it, the smaller it seemed to get. — William Beebe The final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey begins not in the sea but in the sky. Sideways, we soar though the clouds, glimpsing a solitary island below, far into the Pacific. As always, we hold our breath in
- [Kids Wear the Darndest Things!](https://www.thesmartset.com/kids-wear-the-darndest-things/) - Trying to understand why kids are in love with what amounts to a rubber band.
- [Print is So Last Season](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05271001/) - From a marketing perspective, the film is brilliant, something that Leo Burnett may have wished he came up with. The purpose of an advertisement is to ultimately convey the designer’s vision and serve as an extension of their collection. It also represents a philosophy — you can’t wear Versace and be a wallflower and you
- [Art³](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05261001/) - Sol LeWitt was fond of cubes. Sometimes, he would make sculptures that were nothing but cubes, cubes within cubes upon cubes. In the early 1970s, LeWitt produced works like “Cube Structures Based on Five Modules.” The title captures the essence of the work. LeWitt took a bunch of open cubes made of wood, painted them
- [Take My Card...Please!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05251001/) - On a warm spring evening in 1922, M. Sturtz — a burglary insurance broker who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — left her apartment for a few minutes to run an errand. While she was gone, a pair of thieves gained entry through a dumbwaiter, locked the doors and windows from the inside, and
- [The Odd Couple](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05241001/) - I think my wife is losing her mind. She kept calling me by the wrong name all weekend, and when we were out yesterday, she dug through the garbage can near the bus stop and double-checked all the discarded lottery tickets. And she recently started doing other odd things (alphabetizing our books and DVDs, ordering
- [The Sound Effect](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05211001/) - As you've probably heard by now, NBC recently announced it was canceling Law & Order after 20 seasons on the air. So yes, they're canceling all the drama, all the crimes, and all the intense courtroom action. But moreover, they're also canceling this: The Law & Order “doink doink,”“bamp bamp,” or “chung chung,” depending on
- [Always Searching](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05201001/) - There have been Sundays, in bed, in a hotel room, hungover or not, wherein my prospects for getting out of bed seem slim, what with the television right there, and the remote control so near my head. Despite hundreds of channels and the free HBO — generally just showing something directed by Ron Howard over
- [Sugar, Sugar](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05191001/) - When I was a little girl, my mother would put a teaspoon of sugar, maybe two, in my glass of orange juice. I loved the taste of the sugar slurry at the bottom of the glass. I'd get as much of it as I could, having drained the juice. I never got much of
- [On Big and Scary Wines](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05181002/) - People in the wine world spend an awful lot of time wringing their hands over alcohol content, creating what blogger Alder Yarrow calls “the modern hysteria about rising alcohol levels in wine.” I did it myself just the other night when my father opened a bottle of 2006 Alto Moncayo Veraton ($25), a Garnacha
- [Best Friends](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05181001/) - By Lyle Rexer In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes remarks somewhat enigmatically that in order to be a photographic portrait, a face must first compose itself into a mask. What does he mean, that the face must somehow perform for us in order to be recognized? Can we look at another person and experience that person
- [Ladies' Choice](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05171001/) - In the 19th century, Americans really turned to the business of thinking about themselves. "What have we got here, anyway?" was the operational question. They came up with two big answers. The first answer was that America is nothing. The second answer was that America is everything. Simple and obscure all at once, just like
- [Fine Print](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05131001/) - The great state of Arizona, by changing the gun law (we don’t even have to have a special permit to carry a concealed weapon) earlier this year, embraced the Second Amendment. However, with its recent immigration bill, the state is trashing our freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, which is also guaranteed by the Bill
- [A Woman of a Certain Age](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05121001/) - She makes for a beautiful corpse. That alone is impressive. Factor in that she is almost 4,000 years old and she may be the most impressive corpse in human history. You can gaze at her for as long you want at the Bowers Museum in Los Angeles County (she's in the “Secrets of the Silk
- [The Vatican Hall of Shame](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05111001/) - “Lord, give me chastity and self-control — but not yet." — Prayer of the young Saint Augustine, c.380 A.D. The scandals may be coming thick and strong from the Vatican at the moment, but the Church has always waged a losing battle with its own vice-ridden staff. The problem was that transgressions from official policy
- [Say Grace](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05101001/) - Beauty, the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder. In Grace Kelly’s case, however, it isn’t. Her beauty was so pure that all eyes see the same thing. After all, she had a nose so straight it didn’t cast shadows, hair so blond it seemed sprinkled with gold dust, and lips so finely
- [Double Trouble](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05071001/) - At just 540 calories, KFC’s new chicken sandwich, the Double Down, makes for a modest meal. Even skimpy Hollywood movie star Megan Fox would have to down nearly five of them each day to sustain her weight of 114 pounds. But if the sodium-drenched morsel seems more tooled for casual snacking than a serious feast,
- [Slick Reporting](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05071002/) - The moment I heard about the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, I knew I'd soon see depressing photos of animals. That's how it goes with oil spills and oil leaks. Animals are threatened, and some die, and this is both news but also a source of dramatic imagery to accompany coverage of the accident. And
- [Bad Call](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05061001/) - Have caller ID, return call, call block, and reverse look-up put an end to obscene phone calls? I'm not talking about telemarketers. Nor am I including paid phone sex with a hostess working a 900 number. Nor consensual phone sex — the ultimate safe sex in prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (safe, that
- [National Treasures](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05051001/) - I didn't understand the fuss. Sure, the redesign of Berlin's Neues Museum — unveiled last October — seemed awfully nice; the place was finally fixed its World War II-era damage. But for all the queues that wind around the museum and the sell-out exhibitions, most of the fuss centered on one Egyptian bust. The Nefertiti
- [Balancing Act](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05041001/) - I remember hearing Gang Starr for the first time. I was in my friend's garage, the one at his mom's house in South Central L.A. that he'd converted into a hangout spot, which was the fashion at the time. The neighborhood dogs were barking pointlessly in all the yards and the LAPD helicopters chop-chop-chopped the
- [Play Ball!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05031001/) - My favorite baseball team has been in a slump for over 20 years, and this year, their season is not starting well. Could poetry help in any way? — Henry I’m going to give you two answers: one that reflects my idealistic opinion that poetry can fix everything by virtue of simply being itself, and
- [East Meets the American West](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04291003/) - An old Chinese man went to Yosemite and it blew his mind. To explain why, we have to go back a few thousand years. Chinese people have an old civilization. Older, perhaps, than anybody else's civilization. That depends on how you define "civilization," but who has the time to fight about these things? Point is,
- [Postcard from Maha Shivrati](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04291004/) - The Hindu calendar has 70 holidays, some lasting days or weeks. It is therefore almost impossible to visit India without having the opportunity to celebrate at least one of them. I was especially lucky on my recent trip to experience the biggest and most sacred of them all — the Kumbh Mela, a three-month long
- [Throw Your Wands in the Air](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04291001/) - “Don’t worry, ‘muggle’ isn’t a derogatory term or anything. “ But I wasn’t offended by 28-year-old Freya Fridy’s using the M-word that Friday afternoon on the phone, mostly because I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. “It’s just our term to refer to people who don’t know much about Harry Potter.”
- [Hot Springs and Sunk Costs](https://www.thesmartset.com/hot-springs-and-sunk-costs/) - The last afternoon of the conference I had no business attending was warm and sunny. Tailor-made for naps. Or a quick dip in a shimmering lake nearby. Or a hike along one of the wooded hillsides I could see from my hotel room’s window. Just outside, along the two-lane cobblestone street straddling a narrow median
- [Land of the Rising Sunshine](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04281001/) - These things are by nature impossible to see, but the Florida Atlantic University parking lots in Boca Raton are built on a lost civilization. In 1903, 29-year-old Japanese pioneer and recent NYU graduate Jo Sakai had a notion. He would gather together a small band of enthusiasts, investors, and hangers-on, he told the Jacksonville
- [Take My Wife](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04231004/) - Wife Swap, however, flies under the critical radar. This is a surprise, since Swap is one of the more insidious reality shows on television today. The series, now in its sixth season, follows a rigid format that takes two wives, and then swaps them. The key is choosing families that exist at either end of
- [Appetite versus Appreciation](https://www.thesmartset.com/appetite-versus-appreciation/) - Our “appetite for newness” is not unique to our times, but habits of replacing not retaining are. We’re familiar with the impact on our world, but have we considered its impact on our minds? The practice of “darning” — mending holes and tears in garments by interweaving yarn — was once a common one. Now
- [A Century of Hank Williams](https://www.thesmartset.com/a-century-of-hank-williams/) - In his wry, self-deprecating “Tower of Song” Leonard Cohen reflects on his legacy and his place within the grand tradition of songwriters. “I asked Hank Williams how lonely does it get/ Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet/ but I hear him coughing/ all night long/ a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.” It’s
- [Sleeper Hit](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04231001/) - Can poetry cure insomnia? I’m having a terrible time sleeping lately. — Alex M. Hmm, I’m not sure. Whenever I can’t sleep and I think about poetry, I get too excited. I either have to get up and write for hours or sketch several poetry-inspired tattoos that later my husband will beg me not to
- [In The Case Of A Failing Friendship, Don't Settle — Break Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/in-the-case-of-a-failing-friendship-dont-settle-break-up/) - 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
- [Sweating the Small Stuff](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04231002/) - I like little books. Actually, I like little things of all kinds, miniatures. But tiny books are a special delight. Northern Europe in the 15th and early 16th centuries was a good time for little books. I'm thinking in particular of the work of Simon Bening. He was the last great Flemish miniaturist. You can
- [VW Recall](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04221001/) - The Nano, made by Indian car manufacturer Tata, is billed as "the people's car." We've seen this sort of thing before. The first time was in Europe — Germany to be precise. The car was the Volkswagen, which means, quite literally, "The People's Car." It was Hitler's idea, more or less. He wanted to build
- [The Tree of My Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-tree-of-my-life/) - Once in a lodge in a forest a day’s drive from where I live in the great metropolis of Bostonia, where the hobgoblins, trolls, and grandmother-eating wolves had long since been scared away and only the mosquitoes lingered to protect the trees, I read about the era not long ago when the eastern white pine
- [A Hair Piece](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04211001/) - I'm part of the grow-your-own movement. Hair, that is. You'll find no extensions in my waist-length mane, not that you'd think about it if you saw me on the street. Women my age can't wear their hair down loose without being thought eccentric, perhaps because long, flowing hair is associated with sensuality. Unfettered sensuality in
- [Beauty and the Beast](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04141001/) - There are many lies you will hear when you're newly single. Your girlfriends — the ones that have been married since they were in their early 20s and can't have dinner without their husbands, meaning you are forever making reservations for three — will tell you that you'll find someone the minute you stop thinking
- [Play it with Tremolo](https://www.thesmartset.com/play-it-with-tremolo/) - “Whisper!” the priest commanded. In a second, the sound of my grade one classmate’s recitation plummeted from stentorian, to sotto voce, to smothered. He had just intoned the opening words of the Roman Catholic ritual of confession, “this is my first confession.” I was next in the confessional queue, but I couldn’t hear him mumble
- [Puzzled](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04131001/) - Why would anyone want to play with a toy that is so damn hard? The Rubik’s Cube entered our collective cultural experience 30 years ago, next month, and there is still no satisfying answer. At first, in the early ’80s, we all had fun just spinning it around in our hands. The original Cube was
- [Writing Circle](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04121001/) - The other week I popped into an outlet of major retail bookstore chain just to use the restroom. I walked out with Marion Meade's Lonelyhearts and Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man — biographies of Nathanael West (and Eileen McKinney) and Donald Barthelme respectively. That's me down $52. In my bag, as my commute read, I already
- [Unbearable Bodies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04091001/) - I bought groceries three times a day, an ectoplasmic effluvium three times a day. I did not sleep or work. Food detritus bloomed in lavender plastic bags around the room, cautioning against visitors. The day and night were textured with throwing up in bags or toilet or shower — water running, viscous puke swirling and
- [A Dressing-Down](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04081001/) - One of the reasons many of us watch the AMC series Mad Men is “for the clothes.” This isn’t as superficial a reason as one might think. Clothes say a lot not just about a person but about a period. It’s true that fashion trends are often resurrected, and we are now seeing the narrower
- [Brick Master](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04071001/) - Sean Kenney makes life-size sculptures of endangered animals out of Lego bricks. Adam Reed Tucker reconstructs famous buildings throughout the world in Lego form. Beth Weis specializes in Lego as home décor. Some people grew up building with Legos, and then never stopped. Lego invaded their minds and now they view the world through a
- [Dirty Little Secrets](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04051001/) - "A place for everything, and everything in its place" could be the perfect homemaker's rule to live by. The maxim's perfect, but I'm not, even though I won't buy anything now unless I know where I can put it. I've abandoned all aspects of recreational shopping. And that policy includes a can of sardines. As
- [Call Me Crazy...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04051002/) - I think we are entering a new Freudian era. This struck me as I was recently reading some stories in the New York Times science section: Depressive disorders may have a beneficial mechanism behind them; dreams may be meaningful after all; and hysteria — now called conversion disorders, and by which they mean the physical
- [A Gated Community](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04021001/) - “Can we take a picture of the bunnies on the way out?” I look where Kris is pointing, and sure enough, there are bunnies. Two of them, not real ones but painted ply-board cutouts, smartly dressed in painted sweater jackets with painted buttons. They stand on their hind legs and peer primly over painted ply-board
- [American Bling](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03301001/) - Larry Hart got the idea to decorate his mansion with spackle squeezed out of cake-frosting tubes from a book on Versailles. “As I looked at those pictures,” he said, “it just struck me that it [Versailles] looked like a giant wedding cake.” As Joyce Wadler recently described it in The New York Times, ornate plasterwork
- [Battle of the Sex](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03291001/) - I’m three months pregnant and my husband and I disagree about whether or not we should learn the sex of the baby. He wants to be surprised when I give birth, but I want to find out at our next ultrasound. What should we do? — New Mom Why am I getting all these
- [When the Satanists Moved In](https://www.thesmartset.com/when-the-satanists-moved-in/) - Writer Paul Crenshaw found himself trying to make sense of the fear that engulfed everything in his 1980s childhood in small-town Arkansas and the world around him. The Cold War. Stranger Danger. Satanic Panic. In his most recent book of essays Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils, published by The Ohio
- [On Value](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03251002/) - In my previous column I ruminated on logo-ed merchandise and confessed that I coveted a Louis Vuitton handbag (Artsy GM — $1,630, as advertised on the Louis Vuitton site). I realized that the thing was made of laminated canvas, stamped with muddy LV monograms, and had the unprepossessing shape of a beach tote. I understood that
- [Smile!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03251001/) - If any zoo or botanical garden or nature center has its hands on your e-mail address, you've probably been invited recently to view its Web cam. This isn't as NSFW a proposition as most invitations to view live Web cams, but is instead an offer to intimately view an animal, usually a bird with eggs
- [Is That a Stovepipe Hat or Are You Just Happy to See Me?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03241001/) - Some Republicans have been distressed in recent years to hear that the icon of their party, Abraham Lincoln, may have been playing for the other team. It had been whispered for years that Lincoln was gay, and there is no doubt that some of his behavior would point that way today — most notably, for
- [Well That's Just Grate'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03231001/) - Hippies, for all their faults, were a peace-loving sort. That's why people started calling them Flower Children. Who can ever forget the image of tie-dyed young things sticking flowers into the barrels of soldiers' guns? "We are stardust," said Joni Mitchell, "we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
- [Nights in Black Satin](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03191001/) - My love affair with the little black dress began when I read Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar. I was far too young to be reading that book, and I'm sure that my desire then to wear black as the ultimate in sophistication was a symptom of a deep corruption that I have been able to suppress
- [Memory Lapse](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03171001/) - Poor Saint Augustine. For years now people have drawn the source of the memoir back to his Confessions. As if because of that book, Augustine's hands now bear the ink stains of James Frey, tales of addiction, incest and mental illness, the word "momoir," and a dozen Holocaust survivor fakers. Just like Jane Austen, who
- [Circle of Angels](https://www.thesmartset.com/circle-of-angels/) - A foreshortened dove soars to us, wings outstretched. The pure white bird has dipped down to clear the trees, or perhaps has just condensed from cloud. Moving or frozen in space, the bird is perfectly centered above a hand holding a clamshell, gently pouring water. It is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit and is
- [Goo Goo Gaga](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03161001/) - What is a super-fan? I think immediately of the Beatles. There's that scene in A Hard Day's Night in which adoring fans chase the band. The guys are smiling — John and Paul and George and Ringo — but there is a note of hysteria. Madness has been unleashed, some special category of desire that
- [All Good Things...?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03121002/) - Why have there been so many earthquakes lately? Do you think it’s a sign that the end of the world is coming? How should we prepare? — Jackie Oh boy. If you’re looking for signs that the end of the world is coming, you can find more convincing ones than earthquakes. From what I
- [Indian Winter](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03111001/) - The town of Alwar in India is a couple of hours to the north and west of New Delhi by car. The Alwar Government Museum is found by ascending a series of connecting stairways within the City Palace of Anwar, now used largely as a headquarters for various government agencies. It is easy to get
- [Miss Cleo](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03081001/) - If Hollywood epics have taught us anything about the ancient world, it’s that Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt was drop-dead gorgeous. The original femme fatale has only been played by sultry screen goddesses — Claudette Colbert, Vivian Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor. But just how beautiful was she? According to the ancient biographer Plutarch, men were hypnotized
- [Lo' and Behold](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03061001/) - The other day, I saw a Louis Vuitton handbag with a price tag of $750 locked inside a department store glass case, and, I confess, I coveted the thing. The bag was made of laminated canvas, was covered with muddy LV monograms, and resembled, in shape and size, a beach tote — none of which
- [A Matter of Convenience](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03051001/) - Many complaints have been written about the pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick, and its kid brother, the Pancake & Sausage Minis. There is, first of all, the look of them: a reviewer on the Impulsive Buy blog describes the minis as “tiny, diseased Russet potatoes.” And that's just on the outside. When I look at the
- [In English, Please?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03041001/) - Edith Grossman is one of the finest literary translators working today. She has translated some of the greats of the Spanish language — from Marquez to Llosa, Fuentes to Dorfman. Her translation of Don Quixote was masterful and is widely accepted as the new standard text. She is the perfect complement to these writers, translating
- [Say "Fromage!"](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03031001/) - Surrealism isn't surreal anymore. It doesn't shock or jolt. It isn't confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, "Surrealism is based on the belief
- [All Symbolic Roads...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03021001/) - The funny thing about Rome is that anyone can invoke it. The whole death-to-Caesar thing is popular. John Wilkes Booth seems like something of a quack, quoting Brutus' "Sic semper tyrannis" as he jumped to the stage after shooting Lincoln. But Abigail Adams thought the same of George III, and signed her wartime letters to
- [Poetry on the Podium](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03011001/) - Should writing poems be an Olympic event? — K. Stevenson I’m glad you asked that. I’ve been thinking of something similar for a long time. I don’t think that poetry should be an Olympic event per se, because writing poetry involves our mental resources more than our physical ones, but some competitive event, definitely, should
- [Gas Problem](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02261001/) - In 1896, H.G. Wells, father of science fiction, published a romance about bicycles. The star of The Wheels of Chance is Hoopdriver, a lower-middle-class draper who embarks upon a 10-day cycling holiday. Along the way, he comes across pretty young Jessie, cycling alone, and the two share a magical tour of South England. Jessie imagines
- [Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02251001/) - Killing cats is illegal in Italy. And eating them was understood to be something only done during times of deprivation. Bigazzi said as much when he explained that this was the case during his childhood in the 1930s and ’40s. (Obviously Italy is not alone. During the siege of Paris in 1870, certain restaurateurs resorted
- [END...END...END](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02251002/) - Just now, after I pressed "quick min" twice, I turned away. That's too long to stand, watching the countdown. I can't stomach letting 120 seconds pass while I gaze, mindless, at the clock. Even 30 seconds seem like a stretch. But some days I'm reckless, and I watch the numbers change, marking the seconds remaining
- [Dress Code](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02221001/) - The spectacle of the fleshy FBI chief lurching around the corridors of New York’s Plaza Hotel in drag is now indelibly lodged in American popular folklore. The story is deeply satisfying since it suggests the powerful Hoover — who monitored, harassed and blackmailed thousands of Americans about their sex lives — was a rank and
- [Wrong Place, Wrong Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02191001/) - Six weeks after Kari and I sat together in the surgi­cal clinic, I drove to Hyde Park to meet him at his grand­mother’s house. The house sat on a narrow two-way street not far off American Legion Highway, which lies just off Blue Hill Avenue, the main road that cuts through Roxbury, Dorchester, and finally
- [Blue Brothers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02181001/) - Once when I was small, after my dad had told me that I’d be going to the U.S. Poetry Academy, I thought I should get some practice. Or actually, I don’t remember thinking very much when I was small, so maybe my dad thought I should get practice, and one day he taught me to
- [Postmodern Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02181002/) - It's been more than 30 years since Jean-François Lyotard closed the historical door on Modernism. It was 1979, to be exact, when Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Rumors of the death of Modernism had been swirling for years. But death comes in stages, especially when the mortally wounded is a "movement"
- [City Views](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02171001/) - There comes in the life of every city an era of unsurpassed greatness. Whether it's an aligning of the stars or simply a convergence of social pressures, cultural influences, history, and politics, the city bursts forth with great innovation, creative outpouring, and a lively sense of community. They are exciting times to live through, if
- [The Others](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02151001/) - Why do women seem so normal at the workplace or in a board meeting or in evening classes, but then when you get to know them, you find out that they’re just so damn unreasonable and complicated? I like your column, but I bet you’re obnoxious, too. Just like the rest of them. —
- [Stamped Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02121001/) - Post offices must die. Nothing says world of yesteryear like a post office. Post offices remind us of the heavy and stupid material world that the 21st century is trying so earnestly to shed. Luckily, the post office will soon be dead. Last summer the United States Postal Service announced it would close more than
- [A Sticky Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02121002/) - As far as the United States Postal Service's problems go, a dust-up over a stamp probably doesn't rank very high. But for the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), the post office's dire financial straits don't mean it can just go about issuing stamps of whomever it wants. That's why the organization — whose focus is
- [Nether Nether Land](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02081001/) - Philip the Second is an afterthought. That's what a college professor once said. We were reading Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The professor was pointing out the significance of the book's title. Philip II comes at the end, and he's really just the name for
- [Spirited Debate](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02071001/) - I used to think that what distinguished Jews from other people could be boiled down to the balance of food and alcohol at a festive occasion. A Jewish affair would have lots of food but little to drink — and no one complained about it. I now know that there are exceptions to this rule, and
- [Safe or Sorry?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08040901/) - If you’ve ever shopped at Best Buy, Office Depot, or any other retailer where the sales associates all wear polo shirts in the same color, then you know what an Extended Service Contract is — it’s that piece of paper covered with tiny print that you agree to buy for $69.99 because you’re so happy
- [The Straight Talker](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08050902/) - Leszek Kolakowski died a couple of weeks ago. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the 20th-century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best of a bad situation. The opening lines of the Polish National Anthem are, after all, "Poland has not perished
- [Hotel Munch](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08050901/) - Art critic Peter Schjeldahl once compared looking at Edvard Munch’s paintings to “listening to an album of a certain blues or rock song that, once upon a time, changed my life. I can’t hear the songs, as I can’t see the Munch images, without recalling earlier states of my soul, as if to listen or
- [The John Hughes Canon](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08070901/) - John Hughes, best known for directing a string of 1980s hit movies, died on Thursday. He was 59. For those who came of age during that era, Hughes' films — such as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off— left an indelible mark. Many of us have watched these films over and over, memorized
- [Working Blue](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08100901/) - Why are all the best poems sad? — Your father That’s a good question, though I’m sure not everybody feels that the best poems are sad; they think that the best poems are the erotic ones by the 14th-century Indian poet Kabir. But seriously, people tend to think that the best poems are the ones
- [Central Booking](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08110901/) - A few weeks ago I sat in on my friend R.'s memoir writing course in Paris. The class was filled with students — most in their early 20s — learning about structure, about research, about how to frame a story. I was trotted out at the end to answer any questions the young writers may
- [Bauhaus Tour](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08120902/) - There was nothing nice about Bauhaus. The Bauhaus artists were in love with death and destruction. Sure, they wanted to build. But they wanted to build from a fresh pallet, a tabula rasa. They were militants when it came to art. Art, for them, wasn't simply about beauty, or function, or form. Art was about
- [Ticket Masters](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08130902/) - This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, and if the young billionaires who’ve amassed fortunes via YouTube, Facebook, and various other exercises in selling crowds to themselves for free are grateful, well, they should be. The three-day gathering in upstate New York was a watershed moment in the history
- [The English Patient](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08130901/) - I like English muffins. Some mornings they're the only breakfast food that feels right: just filling enough, covered with butter and jam that melts into the nooks and crannies Thomas' has taught us to love so much. But I will admit that even though I bake my own bread and boil my own bagels, I've
- [Digital Drama](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08270901/) - In 1909, E.M. Forster published his short story "The Machine Stops" as an antidote to H.G. Wells' optimistic tales of the future. Set in a world where The Machine (read: the Internet) controls all aspects of life, and a person can communicate with friends through "Plates" (read: Skype) or push a button (read: e-mail) and
- [Fast Food Nation](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08170901/) - America was booming in the Gilded Age, the era after the Civil War when robber barons hammered out vast empires and enormous fortunes were made overnight in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. At the same time out West, American chefs were refining their own contribution to international culture: Fast food. Tony's Social Pages Dated Reference
- [The U.S. Poetry Academy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08140901/) - Alime Sadikova was one of the smartest, most ambitious young women in Jizzakh, and one of the smartest, most ambitious women I had ever met. She was the first to learn English in her family — encouraging and helping her younger brother who was studying on a grant at a high school in Colorado at
- [Facing the Issue](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08180902/) - “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” — Isaac Bashevis Singer One morning recently I woke up and found I no longer wanted to eat meat. It seemed a sudden and unaccountable distaste. I had seen the images and read the books decrying animal slaughter over the years, and they had provoked the predictable
- [Love of My Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08240901/) - I have a rare form of cancer. I only have a few months left. Can you offer any consolation? — Yuki M. I will try. I don’t know if you’re afraid or not, but I would be, and maybe what you’re afraid of is not dying, but rather love. I guess that does sound
- [Bird Brain](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08260902/) - I've always been suspicious of the birds. Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above. The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces. They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell. They wondered whom the birds were working for.
- [Tortilla Pressed](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08260901/) - Then again, the flour tortilla has always been fighting for its identity. Its brother, the corn tortilla, gets all the glory. The corn tortilla is, first of all, older than the flour version — wheat didn't even show up in Mexican cuisine until the Spanish brought it over in the 16th century. The corn tortilla
- [The Dinner Party from Hell](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08310901/) - Dinner parties are often about power. A host can lord over his captive guests, so many have been the setting for cruel practical jokes. Tony's Social Pages The First Fast Food "0" Anniversaries German Theme Restaurants Around 90 A.D., the twisted Emperor Domitian invited a crowd of aristocratic couples to a banquet at his palace
- [Michael's Menagerie](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07020901/) - Who, if anyone, will benefit from Michael Jackson's death? The obvious answer is TMZ, the Web and TV tabloid organization that was supposedly legitimized by their breaking the news that the King of Pop was indeed dead. The more obscure answer is the Center for Great Apes in central Florida. It's not that anyone
- [On the Great Silk Road](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07020902/) - The U.S. Poetry Academy One of the few Peace Corps pamphlets I ever read came to my home in Arizona about three weeks before my departure to Uzbekistan. I don’t think I read all the way through, but it told me that I should only bring what I could carry, so I arrived in
- [True Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07070901/) - "I'm like, I don't believe this shit." That's the opening line of Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. The thought is coming from Alison Poole, the protagonist of the novel (if you can use that term). McInerney based the character of Alison Poole on a woman he dated in the ’80s. Her name back
- [Good Times](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07080901/) - A common complaint about the Internet, whether it’s being leveled by a journalist who just lost his newspaper job or someone who found herself the target of online rage, is that it’s such a shallow, spiteful place. While it’s a ludicrous statement — the Internet is merely a medium, not anything homogeneous — the complaint
- [Non-renewable Resource](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07130901/) - How many poems are left? There have been thousands of years of poetry writing; when will we have it all? — Dr. Sunshine, Boston, Massachusetts I just got REALLY depressed because I actually calculated — seriously, I brought out my calculator and scrap paper and even contacted my friend who works as a computer
- [Symbolic Gestures](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07140901/) - Ken Burns has a new film coming out. In September, the documentarian presents The National Parks: America's Best Idea on PBS. If Burns' fans are excited, they can hardly be surprised. The guy's obsessed with America. More specifically, he's obsessed with the things that make America America. His previous films have explored its figures (Mark
- [Crossing the Tan Line](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07140902/) - It’s that time of year when you see the racks of oddly configured swaths of cloth hanging in the front of stores. Bathing suits: absurd, wrong-headed garments. I continue to be mystified by how people continue to buy and wear them. It’s a given that women of a certain age don’t like the way
- [Drug Deals](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07150901/) - Amongst true connoisseurs of female beauty, it has long been a well-known fact that the otherwise stunning Brooke Shields had been cursed with one striking flaw: puny, stick-thin eyelashes that resembled the legs of a sickly spider. But no more: The disease of “inadequate” lashes now has a cure, and as Shields explains in
- [Town Crier](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07220901/) - Popular culture seems to have two general depictions of small towns. The first is a naive, sleepy, hamlet where nothing ever happens, populated with lovable eccentrics and warm-hearted folk (always folk, never people). Generally this setup sees the return of the prodigal son or arrival of an outsider, almost always from the "big city," of
- [The Return of the Epigram](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07200901/) - People find a great deal of satisfaction worrying about attention span, at least for a little while, and especially in the realm of popular culture. Twitter is the latest culprit. It's recent importance in organizing Iranian street protests notwithstanding, the 140 character posting limit on Twitter makes a certain kind of person nervous. Such
- [Dinner and a Show](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07210901/) - Berlin in the 1920s boasted a string of theme restaurants that rank as the forgotten precursors of Disneyland and Las Vegas. The most popular was the colossal Haus Vaterland (Fatherland House) on Potsdamer Platz, where customers entered beneath an electric sign that announced “Every Nation Under One Roof” to wander through a domed entertainment complex
- [The Dying of the Light](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07240901/) - Rumor has it we’ve tired of trash. That people who watch soap operas — women between 18 and 49, married, at all levels of income — have become more sophisticated and are therefore less interested in melodramatic plot lines that revolve around tawdry love affairs and characters who disappear and reappear with little explanation. The
- [Close Encounters of the Poetic Kind](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07270901/) - Do poets believe in extraterrestrials? Do you think they have tried to contact us? — Mike, Santa Fe, New Mexico Unless the idea of life on other planets violates any theological beliefs, I think most poets living today believe the universe is too immense for them to conclude that humans are alone. Former poet laureate
- [Light Fixtures](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07280901/) - The day that Christ comes to Brussels will be magnificent. There will be a huge parade. In fact, it will be a Mardi Gras parade. The streets will be in chaos. Costumed buffoons will march around, one woman in a blue cat suit. Death will show up, wearing a green and black top hat.
- [Playing Ketchup](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07290902/) - It’s like a movie: One day you wake up and discover that ketchup — the condiment you’ve loved for as long as you can remember, with whom you’ve shared countless juicy burgers and hot french fries with — has a past it never shared. You thought ketchup always came in a familiar bottle or, at
- [Working for Peanuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07290901/) - As recently as 15 years ago, peanut butter was nothing but wholesome. It was rubbed on Mr. Ed's teeth, slathered on sandwiches, tucked into lunch boxes across the country, and stuck to celery and covered with raisins for “ants on a log” (a treat that always sounded more awesome than it tasted). Peanut butter was
- [Caked On](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07300901/) - If you listen to the naysayers, America is in a dangerous, vulnerable place right now. We keep losing manufacturing business to overseas competitors, factory activity is at a 28-year-low, and the only thing we know how to make any more is dinner reservations. Also, if you haven’t heard, we’re in a recession. But how
- [Dated Reference](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07310901/) - Our modern passion for marking anniversaries can be traced back to the ancient Etruscans, whose belief in the cosmic significance of historical cycles was absorbed by the Romans. According to their augurs, every 110 years — then the maximum possible length of a human life — formed a distinct historical epoch called a saeculum, represented
- [Now What?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06010901/) - I’m graduating soon (BA in Art History) and I’ve never felt so uncertain as to what to do next. Should I get a full-time job? Should I go to graduate school? Should I do something like the Peace Corps? I want to take the road not taken. — Amy, Syracuse, New York Amy, keep
- [Aging Stressfully](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06040901/) - I celebrated my 39th birthday the other day, and, for the first time ever, I legitimately felt a year older. Times have been hard lately. I discovered two totally new emotions — hopelessness and panic. I realized my plans for the future now turn less on ideals and more on necessity. Wrinkles and gray
- [*This Blog Is an Advertisement](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06030901/) - According to her blog, Kathy Anderson — a mom who just happens to live in a city near you — started thinking about how to improve her smile, yellowed from years of smoking and eating sugary foods, after watching a segment on CNN about teeth-whitening products. Cathy Anderson — a mom who just happens
- [Say AHHHHHHHH!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06050901/) - Francis Bacon is a scream. He will always be a scream. Just think of the roar from that fleshy maw under the umbrella in “Painting” from 1946. Bacon didn’t just paint screams. There are "religious" triptychs, portraits, angry animals, and the ongoing presence of raw meat. But Bacon would not be Bacon without the
- [Faith-Based Initiative](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06050902/) - Some parties are fun, others are un-missable “cultural experiences.” The strange and exotic festivals held during the French Revolution would have to fall in the latter category. There was one particular event — the Fête de l’Être Suprême, or Festival of the Supreme Being — that was easily the most bizarre. Held during the height
- [Swan Song](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06080901/) - Neil Patrick Harris was invited to host the 2009 Tony Awards partly because of his Saturday Night Live sketch from January called “Save Broadway.” Standing before a variety of recognizable musical theater characters, the Phantom of the Opera calls a meeting to order. “As you all know,” he says, “Broadway is in trouble.” This sentiment
- [Medical Drama](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06090901/) - On Sunday, May 31, a man walked into a Wichita Lutheran church and shot Dr. George Tiller to death in front of his wife. The man accused, Scott Roeder, had been following Dr. Tiller, attempting to vandalize his clinic and appearing at Tiller’s misdemeanor trial earlier in the year. Wrath of Angels: The American Aborition War by Jim
- [Animal Crossing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06120901/) - When it comes to leisure, the public face of this summer will not be built of Caribbean cruises and European jaunts and August-long seaside rentals, but of state parks and neighbors' pools. Many people will still enjoy the former, but the latter feels a lot less conspicuous, and that's a collective self-image we feel
- [Alternative Medicine](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06150901/) - My right foot has gone numb. It happened all of a sudden so I thought I was having a stroke, even though I’m too young to have a stroke. I went to the emergency room. The doctors on staff couldn’t figure out what my problem is. I was not having a stroke, they said, but
- [King Me](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06170901/) - As in many rural German villages, the public life of contemporary Coburg plays out in the marktplatz, the main square, where locals in cafes linger over tall glasses of cloudy beer topped with two inches of head, cappuccinos, and apfel strudels. They smoke as if news hasn’t arrived yet that tobacco may not be good
- [Deus ex Machina](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06180901/) - "Employ these new technologies to make the Gospel known, so that the Good News of God’s infinite love for all people will resound in new ways across our increasingly technological world!" These could have been the words of Johannes Gutenberg or Billy Graham. In fact, they belong to the current pope, Benedict XVI. He spoke
- [Dracula's Charity Ball](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06190901/) - You’d think even the most eager partygoer would hesitate to accept a dinner invitation from someone known as “Vlad the Impaler” (1431-1476). The Central European warlord got his catchy nickname as a young sadist in his 20s, soon after he assumed the throne of Wallachia, next door to Transylvania: After entertaining 500 boyars (nobles) at a sumptuous feast, he had
- [Summer Holliday](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06220901/) - A sexy, dolled-up blonde enters a fancy hotel suite with an oaf of a man. Her face is impassive and haughty, her posture erect. This dame is not easily impressed. She stands around as the hotel’s manager attempts to please the oaf, showing him around, but she hardly pays attention. The manager politely leads her
- [The Family Business](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06230902/) - Certain books are better discovered than sold. On a lonely library shelf, say. Or better yet, pressed into one's hands by the one clerk at Borders who actually reads. Or, ultimately, recommended by another writer through the power of literary broadcast. Charles Bukowski pushed a few books into the hands of a generation when he
- [Surf's Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06230901/) - Chet Atkins' "Walk Don't Run," was recorded in 1957. It's a groovy little number. A soft, jazzy drum beat rumbles along beneath a wide-ranging guitar melody backed nicely by a second guitar. In 1960, a young group called The Ventures did a re-make of Chet's song. It was the same song, but it wasn't the
- [Beating Hearts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06240901/) - I was recently sitting in the back of a cab with a boy, the radio on. A commercial began with a woman telling her husband in a teasing, sexy voice that she had something that would excite him. Instead of a trip to Turkey or a pair of handcuffs and a paddle, the item was
- [Study Abroad](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06260901/) - One morning earlier this year, students gathered for the weekly assembly at Aitchison College, an elite school for boys between the ages of five and 18 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. It was, as always, a dignified affair. Shuffling to their places in an outdoor amphitheater, the boys wore school ties, blazers stitched
- [Long Live the King of Pop](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06260902/) - For many performers, top billing at the county fair is as good as the comeback trail ever gets. Michael Jackson had bigger ambitions. Two years ago, London's Daily Mail reported that the singer was not only planning to go a 250-date reunion tour with the Jackson 5, he was also going to build a Las
- [Do You Remember the Time?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06290901/) - Don’t you feel bad that you made fun of Michael Jackson after hearing the tragic news of his death? — TCP To say that I “made fun of Michael Jackson” ignores some of the complexities of my response to that query a couple of months ago. I quoted poet Mary Jo Bang, and if Michael
- [Meis on Rye](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06300901/) - I'm for the kids. It’s crazy not to be. Are you, dear reader, mighty Atlas, going to hold the world in place and keep it from changing into something new? One lesson of all hitherto existing human history is that the kids have the advantage in the long run. This is a function of
- [Operators Are Standing By](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06300902/) - You probably don’t remember the first time you saw the human-powered public address system known as Billy Mays, but chances are it was a lot like the 10th time you saw him, or the 100th, or the 1,000th. It was late at night, you were nodding off to a Law & Order rerun, and
- [The Sky's the Limit](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05040901/) - The populists are up in arms today about Wall Street moguls awarding themselves huge bonuses, but a little international economic collapse has never really stopped America’s super-rich from living it up. Take the Great Depression. Things were getting pretty rough for the masses: New York’s Central Park had become a shantytown known as “forgotten man’s
- [Infinite Wisdom](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05010901/) - For several decades in the early 20th century, it looked like mysticism, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and religion would become cozy roommates. Physicists, excited by the new quantum arena, were looking for God in the particles. Mathematicians were pondering the infinite. The best minds from Einstein down were embracing the idea of God. It didn’t last
- [Port Authority](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05050901/) - Last month, Portugal’s port wine producers unanimously declared 2007 to be a vintage port. A declaration of vintage port doesn’t happen every year — the last was in 2005, when the 2003 vintage was declared. It pretty much only happens a couple of times a decade, and so a declaration is a very big deal,
- [Paper Makes the Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05060901/) - Stroll the least-trafficked aisles of your local office megastore and you might be surprised to find a few ghosts from job searches past haunting the shelves. 100% cotton resume paper in almond linen? With matching envelopes? Isn’t it illegal now in most states to send paper resumes to prospective employers? Hasn’t study after study
- [Beat It](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05070901/) - Michael Jackson wants to give you a kiss — what course of action do you take? — Ian, Kent, England I have to admit, I often do things that will make a good poem, and that would make a pretty good poem. I suppose your query is in response to Michael Jackson’s poems that
- [Style Mavens](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05110901/) - Omit needless words! That's what you'd have if you reduced the 105 pages of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style — which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year — to three words. The idea is that fewer words leads to clarity. Clearness and brevity go together, as do confusion and
- [Pill Poppers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05130901/) - Publishing – and not just nature – abhors a vacuum, and the chasm between Peter Kramer (Listening to Prozac) and the assorted others who sing the praises of psychopharmacology, and the group led by folks like Eric G. Wilson (Against Happiness) who believe depression is good for you, certainly was airless. It was only a
- [Here Is the Church, Here Is the Steeple....](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05140901/) - I spent an hour this morning on the flat roof of the church where I am the pastor with a can of tar, searching for a hole. It wasn’t an obvious hole otherwise I would have found it the last time I was on the roof. I’ve been on this crummy roof so
- [The Elephant in the Room](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05150901/) - When the Bronx Zoo recently called lights out on the World of Darkness, I was disappointed. That's not to say I was surprised: It's news to nobody that the Bronx — like almost every other zoo, aquarium, museum, college, industry, company, household, individual — isn't exactly flush right now, and something had to give. But
- [The Cooking Class](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05180901/) - What sinister historical forces have converged to create the freakish likes of Sandra Lee, Emeril Lagasse, Gordon Ramsay, and Jamie Oliver? As with so much else in the history of dining, we can trace the rise of celebrity chefs to the early 1800s, when he was transformed from a humble artisan into a revered artist
- [A Bloody Mess](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05190901/) - Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (originally published in French in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes) features Nazis, incest, and tons of human excrement — literally, tons. It is a novel thus difficult to ignore. Also, it is huge. When you plop it down on a bar in the East Village, for instance, people stop and take
- [A Room of One's Own](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05210901/) - In a bygone era of gray flannel suits and ad copy that read as sincerely as a minister’s sermon, masculine sanctuary within the realm of the family home came in three flavors: the study, the workshop, and the bar. Kids weren’t allowed in these places, not just because Dad needed some time away from the
- [Art or Bust](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05270901/) - Move over horse head, water bird, and lion man. At 36,000 years old, a busty broad unearthed in a cave in Germany is now the oldest sculpture ever found. Indeed, Busty beats those other sculptures, also discovered in a Southern German cave and carved from mammoth bone, by around 5,000 years. Dubbed the "Venus
- [The Wages of Sin](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05280901/) - Western society does not have much time for sin. Not the sins themselves, of course – those we like very much. We pursue them, wrap our arms around them, brag about how Courtney Love we got the other night. But when it comes to the idea that fornication or ditching work or imbibing excessive amounts
- [Consider the Hermit Crab](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05290901/) - If summer needs an animal ambassador, might I suggest the humble hermit crab? Autumn has its migrating geese fleeing winter's creep, the spring its chicks and lambs and bunnies and other quasi-religious symbols of annual renewal. Summer is a different beast. Nothing is being ushered in, nothing escorted out. It just is, which
- [Memoirs of an Ex-Pentecostal](https://www.thesmartset.com/memoirs-of-an-ex-pentecostal/) - During the wee hours of New Year’s Eve, I was reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days and got to the third chapter where I came across an interesting conversation between two characters namely: Flory and the Doctor. In the course of the dialogue, Flory poses a profound question to the Doctor which stopped me in my
- [The Good Fight](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04020901/) - I became very dizzy while watching Cloverfield in the theater last year. I sank into my seat and muttered, "Oh man, I don't feel too good." "What's the matter?" my friend Geoffrey asked. "Taiji," I said. "I think I may have a bruised rib from taiji." Even the kids in front of us had
- [Quiet Ripples](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04030901/) - Back in the olden days, philosophers thought a lot about water. Thales (sometimes considered the first philosopher) went out on a limb and proclaimed that "all is water." This was a gutsy move given the fact that a simple walk around the block will convince most human beings that all is, in fact, not water.
- [Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 248 A.D.](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04060901/) - Everyone loves a party open to all comers, and the emperors of Rome were history’s most magnanimous hosts. But while their citizens were accustomed to lavish freebies, living as they did on grain handouts and endless public entertainments, one particular day — April 21, 248 A.D. — must have stood out as the ultimate bash.
- [Crocs on the Rocks](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04070901/) - Has America really lost its passion for antifungal clown clogs so quickly? In February 2006, Crocs, Inc. raised $208 million in its IPO; it was the most successful stock market debut for a footwear company in the history of feet. In 2007, Crocs sold 30 million pairs of shoes worldwide. In October of that
- [In Memoriam](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04080901/) - From the editors: We are saddened by the passing this week of Drexel University President Constantine Papadakis. Quite simply, this publication would not exist if not for the strong and unwavering support of President Papadakis. Contributing writer Paula Marantz Cohen reflects on his legacy. Constantine Papadakis, president of Drexel University, died at the age
- [Court Papers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04090901/) - The last week has been good for homosexuals. Most recently, the Vermont legislature overrode Governor James Douglas’s veto of a bill legalizing gay marriage. The vote was pretty lopsided in favor of gay marriage. Just four days before that, the Iowa Supreme Court came down with a decision making it illegal for the state
- [There Once Was a Question From Nantucket...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04130901/) - Do you think it's therapeutic to have arguments with your loved ones in verse? I read it in another advice column. It said that if you write your arguments in song or poetry, eventually you'll realize how ridiculously silly they are. But I think that if I recite a limerick about how much I
- [French Lessons](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04140901/) - I’m just back from Paris where the architecture is dazzling and the food scrumptious. In the matter of fashion, however — that third prong in the Parisian esthetic — I was disappointed. It’s just not what it used to be. French women are still thin (their secret, presumably, is small portions — I say
- [Birth Rights](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04150901/) - Every once in a while some woman gets fed up with the constant news of war, poverty, greed, environmental degradation, and corruption, and publicly growls, “You know, if women ran the world, it would be a better place.” Detractors immediately howl back, reminding us of the plague that was Thatcherism, but it turns out that
- [Bootylicious](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04160901/) - As everyone now knows, there are pirates in Somalia. Most of them come from Puntland, the region bordering the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean at the far Northeastern edge of Somalia. They hijack large shipping vessels passing through the Gulf and then hold them for ransom. Generally, they use small speedboats and
- [On Reading Liebling](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04170901/) - I first read A.J. Liebling while lying in a bathtub at the Château Frontenac in Quebec. It was an August evening, not yet half-a-lifetime ago, and I had spent the afternoon driving in the rain from Montreal in the company of a woman to whom I am no longer married. The days were already perceptibly
- [Get Solvent Fast!!!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04300901/) - Investors have lost faith in the economy. Employers and consumers, too. In contrast, the nation’s infomercial hucksters still believe in the American Dream. In the darkest hours of the night, they offer hope. Get rich fast? Well, no, that was a 1990s thing. But get debt free fast? That they can deliver. Remember Don
- [Weimar Club-Hopping](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04190901/) - Americans might have flocked to Paris in the ’20s, but the real action was in Berlin — the modern Babylon where every night felt like New Year’s Eve and any pleasure could be obtained for a price. In fact, if ever a historical era blurred into one continuous, manic party, it was Berlin in the
- [Final Edition](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04220903/) - The traditional obituary is an exercise in curtness. It is an art form nasty, brutish, and short, taking the scrambled up, complicated thing that is a human life and smashing it into a tidy, coherent narrative. Take, for example, the 1897 obituary of Margie Zellner in the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call: Margie, the adopted daughter
- [Into the Sunset](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04220902/) - Last week, the BBC informed the world that many persons would like the music of AC/DC to accompany them in the act of shuffling off their mortal coils. This information came by way of a poll asking people in Britain what song they would like to have played at their own funeral. There were, of
- [What About Bob?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04220901/) - Our singular social interaction outside the building came two years ago. I invited him to a reading I was giving at a local Barnes & Noble to celebrate one of my books on censorship. But even at that festive occasion we men of words exchanged but few. Over the years, I gleaned hardly anything else about Mr. Aronson.
- [Over the Top](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04240901/) - Call it a perk of the recession. Or maybe just another example of how our quality of life is diminishing in these troubled times. A topless cafe has opened in the town of Vassalboro, Maine. It’s called, appropriately enough, the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop. Customers can purchase $3 cups of java and $2
- [Pocket Prose](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04270901/) - What poem are you going to carry in your pocket on April 30 [Poem in Your Pocket Day]? — Cassy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I am going to carry at least three, and they’ll be color-coded, so that I’ll be sure to read the appropriate poem to the appropriate audience. My green poem, for all audiences,
- [No Exhibit for Old Men](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04290902/) - Every once in a while you get an epiphany. Something you've been meaning to say for a long time jumps, crystal clear, to the front of your brain. You've always known it, but you've never been able to say it. This happened to me while reading an essay by Sasha Frere-Jones about Lady Gaga.
- [A Red-Checkered Blanket](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04290901/) - The past year’s headlines from Eastern Europe bleed together like a Virginia Woolf novel whose characters hang on in quiet desperation: Bulgarians are Europe's most dissatisfied – survey Poll finds Hungarians increasingly glum Romania’s anti-corruption efforts slow down — or go backwards Sad and depressed generation is being created [in Croatia] Even suicide is stagnating
- [Duck, Duck, Goose](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04300902/) - To most of the American public, chicanery is pretty gauche right now: Bernie Madoff, risky bank investments, torture memos, Blago. Yet some deception is just too ingrained in our heritage to easily dismiss. Which is why competitors from around the world recently gathered in Ocean City, Maryland to celebrate and compete in the only American
- [Poem for One](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03020901/) - I’m unbearably lonely. Can you help? — John B., Chicago, Illinois Well, you’re in good company: It’s cold outside, and the only thing this last Valentine’s Day did for those without a partner is jab little daggers into their hearts. But aren’t we all lonely, really, in our little worlds, with each click of
- [Green Economy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03040901/) - It's hard not to feel for the people behind the Philadelphia Flower Show, the largest in the world and the oldest in America. When they chose this year's theme — "Bella Italia" — they couldn't have known that the stock market would hit its lowest level in more than a decade during their show,
- [A Fuzzy Memory](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03040902/) - There's a Donald Barthelme revival afoot. These things sometime happen to writers who have the temerity to die. Time moves on. Literary fashions wax and wane. Great writers are inexplicably forgotten. Forgotten writers are suddenly reborn in the literary imagination. Such is the story with Barthelme. He was never exactly forgotten (he died in
- [Experimental Nonfiction](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03050901/) - There are times in life when it seems that nothing ever changes — life goes on and on in the same frustrating old way, cliché after cliché. Decades go by. Then suddenly, or so it seems, important parts of life change instantly and forever: a word processing computer replaces my clumsy typewriter, a microwave oven
- [Buck Wild](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03060901/) - The average American is soft as a cashmere Snuggie™. He can’t even bag a Big Mac and fries without the assistance of a large identifying photograph and an easy-to-use numeric ordering system. When the stock market finally collapses, when Domino’s stops delivering and our global Snickers supply dwindles to the double digits, how many
- [Body Snatchers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03100901/) - Not since Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch have readers and critics had such a Rorschach test for their body issues as this year’s novel Wetlands. Charlotte Roche has said in interviews that she was horrified at how women were treating their bodies and wanted to shock readers into confronting their need for perfection — the
- [Holy Smoke](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03110902/) - Long ago, in a distant age partially obscured by the mists of time, people made movies like The Holy Mountain. I'm talking about the 1970s here. In one memorable scene, the Jesus figure (“The Thief”) presides over a colonial war between toads and chameleons dressed as Spanish conquistadors. The reptiles clamber over a scale
- [World View](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03160901/) - I am a Ph.D. student in a political science program, and I've been getting more and more annoyed. Most of the major voices in the field want to pin human behavior down to a series of standardized, quantifiable measures. Not only is this approach terribly boring to read, but it totally ignores the complexity
- [Trog Want Book!!!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03110901/) - Usually when someone starts talking about how our inner cavemen chafes against our modern lifestyles, it’s a man justifying his cheating on his wife: “I am not built for monogamy — I am programmed to spread my seed!” Our sex lives are not the only part of us that goes against “nature.” From our diets
- [My Other Sofa Is a Bookcase](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03180901/) - Have you noticed how ambitious furniture has gotten these days? An easy chair that is simply content to be a place to sit is taking the easy way out — why shouldn’t it also be a table? Bookshelves are reinventing themselves as couches; prim, buttoned-up benches lead secret lives as voluptuous sofas. The Calypso
- [Egg Head](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03170901/) - Martin Kippenberger was a wreck. When he finally died at 44, he'd so beaten himself up with drink and bad living that the grave must have been a relief. The show currently on view at MoMA, "Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective," is something like a catalogue of everything Kippenberger had been doing in the
- [Wing Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03180902/) - What is it that drives some members of the human community to defy their physical limits, to exceed the norms of logic and reason, and to stand alone on the frontier of the impossible? I had occasion to contemplate these questions at the first bi-annual Hot Wing Challenge, held the other weekend at the Grand
- [A Brief History](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03200901/) - Less is more. Omit needless words. Brevity is the soul of wit. Offer very little information about yourself. There's a temptation to create some tenuous, half-baked linkage between the recession and a newfound desire to be economical with words. But concision, be it motivated by pragmatic or aesthetic reasons, is hardly a 21st-century
- [Black Tie and Stetson](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03230901/) - Elegant parties were a dime a dozen in Gilded Age New York. If you were in the right social set, you could attend an Europhile black-tie event on Fifth Avenue any day of the week, drowning yourself in French wine and beluga caviar. But not just anyone could get an invitation to a quintessentially American
- [Lords of the Ring](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03240901/) - Boxing is an ugly thing. The outcome is considered a great success when one combatant has beaten the other into unconsciousness. Old boxers are a sad lot, a compound wreck of irreversible physical and mental damage. The details are well known. Yet no one seems to care all that much. As someone once quipped,
- [Gorilla Warfare](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03270901/) - None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used by any State or local government, or any private entity, for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool. - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (or, The Stimulus Bill) When the oldest
- [What Would Ovid Do?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03300901/) - This is an Italian journalist at D, the weekly magazine for the main Italian newspaper la Repubblica. I’d like to write about your column? When did it start? What’s the point? — Laura P. It started in July 2008. The point of the column is to bring poetry into the lives of everyday people.
- [Middle Ground](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03310901/) - Looking back, it’s almost unbelievable that Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s cynical theologies reigned for as long as they did. Luther was a reformer, yes, but also rabidly anti-intellectual. Luther’s desire to do away with the teaching of philosophy, however, could never top Calvin’s warped worldview, which revolved around the idea of predestination. He believed
- [The Writer's Dress Code](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02020901/) - I work in an office full of very smart, well-meaning people. But they don't read poetry! What can I do to get them more interested in this most important of endeavors? — Dr. Sunshine, Boston, Massachusetts I’m about to describe a scheme that is so calculated and maniacal that you might appreciate it, Dr.
- [Updike the Synthesizer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02020903/) - Updike gave a lecture on American art last year at the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was called "The Clarity of Things: What is American about American Art." Updike discussed how American painting finally managed to become American. Most of the early American painters were tradesman. They knew how to paint, but they
- [A Nice French Red](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02030901/) - When the McCain campaign labeled Barack Obama a socialist, it was one of the worst slurs they could think of. But here in France, socialists are banal. Hell, we’ve got more than a million communists — Marxists, Trotskyists, anarchists, even Bolsheviks. French far leftists of all stripes have been in a flurry of activity in
- [Gimme Even More](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02040901/) - "I think I’m ready for my close-up,” Britney Spears intones on her latest album, joylessly, mechanically, as if being the center of attention is now about as appealing to her as spending 72 hours locked inside an oil drum with Dr. Phil. And yet still there are suitors willing to bet on her capacity for
- [Nature vs. Nature](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02050901/) - When it comes to Sunday morning media, most people concern themselves that day of the week with the hefty Times or one of the number of political discussion shows you can find on any network or cable news channel. Fewer people concern themselves with CBS Sunday Morning. That's the tame general interest magazine that
- [Hot Wheels](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02060901/) - There’s an international battle going on. The prize is height, width, rotation. Its weapons are not guns, nor tanks, nor arrows. The weapons of this battle are wheels. Ferris wheels. This year, Germany will unveil the Great Berlin Wheel. Upon its completion, the wheel will be 606 feet high — as high as two football
- [Punk'd](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02090901/) - One day this month, 30 years ago, John Simon Ritchie, otherwise known as Sid Vicious, woke up dead. He had spent the previous evening shooting heroin in celebration of his release from Riker's Island after an assault charge. Sometime during the night, his heart stopped. He was 21 years old. No one can say
- [Yellow Journalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02100901/) - I should admit from the outset that I was not well disposed toward the Mustard Museum of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, when I set out to visit it last fall. I had just left my lover of three years and was heartbroken, in that state of emotional dishabille better suited to the glamorous desuetude of Paris than to the earnest
- [Life's Work](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02120901/) - Despite the tsunami of dire economic news — 401Ks washed away in a matter of days, home values nose-diving to less than the value of their outstanding mortgages — one buoyant piece remains on the personal finance front: Social Security. Until now, I'd ignored the Social Security statements that arrive in my mailbox with the
- [First Impressions](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02150901/) - Clement Greenberg was not a shy man. He was convinced that his taste was impeccable and that his gift of judgment was close to unerring. He would look at a painting and decide whether it was good or bad in an instant. With little pity, he dismissed the vast majority of the art he
- [Will Compose for Food](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02160901/) - I’m pissed that I can’t play my Wii all day to make a living. I’m really good at it. Don’t you think my skills are valuable in the job market? Or do I really have to go to work every day? — Buddy, New York, New York You know what? I’m pissed that I can’t
- [Painting from Memory](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02180901/) - For 20 years, the man mostly puttered about his house in the south of France. If the paintings displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's current show, "The Late Interiors" is any guide, Pierre Bonnard spent around 20 years or so in his pajamas. This, through the 1930s and ’40s, which weren't exactly placid
- [Happy Camper](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02200901/) - It seems a bit mean spirited to say that Reading, Pennsylvania feels like an RV kind of town, but that's what I honestly thought as I pulled up to the Greater Reading Expo Center for its 2009 RV Show. There were several reasons for this. Some were simply aesthetic. The Expo Center itself is
- [Money Talks](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02240901/) - You've got to admire a man who regularly wore a cape. This goes doubly if that man is an economist. But Joseph Schumpeter was no ordinary economist. Ending up at Harvard in the early 1930s, Schumpeter was an exile from the tumult of Central Europe, an orphan of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lost his
- [Mind Games](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02250901/) - Philosophy is disappearing from our college curricula. Our students are graduating without first being stuffed with Plato and Descartes and Hegel. While we used to teach students critical thinking through philosophy, we have replaced the Socratic method with the scientific method. Really, the idea of 19-year-olds discussing Truth and Beauty and Love seems so
- [Button Pushing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02260901/) - If you’re not overly familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary output, you might deduce that it’s perfectly natural for a Fitzgerald story to give rise to a positively Gump-ian movie like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thanks to its box office haul, critical idolatry, and stash of Oscar nominations, the film has become one
- [Surfing the Satellite](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01050901/) - Satellite TV in Jordan, I discovered on my recent trip there, is a chaotic pleasure. When my American friends talk about watching it, taxiing home after a long day, there’s a little dread mixed with the hope of going into the kind of coma that only television can put one. The standard satellite setup, dauntingly,
- [Space Invaders](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01060901/) - Currently there is a lot of space debris — generated by programs like NASA — circling the globe. It's becoming an increasing problem for satellites and new missions. How can we reduce this debris to ensure that future and current missions will be safe? — Linwood, Boston, Massachusettes Your mission, Linwood, if you choose
- [Poe at 200](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01060902/) - Imagine the school board meeting — the kids are reading some dangerous literature in English class. Murder, drunkenness, torture, madness, and not even a sliver of moral instruction. If the students weren’t already so resentful, they might even like what they’ve been given to read, it’s so cool. Imagine the class discussion about the theme
- [Fat Cats](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01090901/) - Once, at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., I watched an orangutan vomit on the glass wall of its enclosure. I was standing next to a group of schoolchildren, and they laughed in response. Then the primate stuck out its tongue, pressed it to the glass, and dragged it through the vomit. The children screamed.
- [Vegetable Stand](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01260901/) - “Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way — as anyone who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn…Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt
- [Marking Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01110901/) - Suppose the horse-and-carriage industry not only survived the introduction of the automobile but actually flourished as cars grew commonplace? What if 8-track tapes were a billion-dollar business today, more popular than iPods and Zunes? Would that be any stranger than the fact that consumers have purchased millions and millions of calendars in the last
- [Dining with the Stars](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01130901/) - It was never my intent to spend $650 on myself, by myself — at lunch, a credit-card-statement reality made all the more painful by the news, weeks later, that the U.S. economy fell off a cliff and that the reliability of my livelihood had suddenly come into question. I am by all definitions
- [Cult Classic](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01140901/) - This past November saw the 30th anniversary of the death of over 900 men, women, and children at Jonestown in Guyana. Thirty years, and our collective bafflement, fascination, and morbid curiosity have not waned. There have been countless documentaries, bad television movies, investigative books, survivor memoirs, and novelizations, and yet we still don’t quite
- [Weighty Topics](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01190901/) - I’m trying to lose some weight. Do you know of a poem that can help me? — Candice P., Newport, Rhode Island A poem to help in the short term, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser: “Sometimes my big front teeth bite my lower lip and my food gets all bloody…” Maybe that will
- [A Second Opinion](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01200902/) - Say what you like about Israelis, they know how to play the game. I'm speaking of the humanity game. It's a game with specific rules and expectations in Western civilization. Its centerpiece, the very core of the game, is self-reflection. Demonstrating your humanity (since the Enlightenment, at least, but the roots go back to
- [Homesick](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01210901/) - I remember seeing a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" when I was a child. It disturbed me. I felt that something horrible had happened to Christina and that she was left out there in the field, maybe to die. And what was happening in that lonely house up at the top of the hill?
- [A Sense of Loss](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01220901/) - A few weeks into the new year and I, like so many Americans, have already neglected my predictable resolution to eat more healthfully. This year I kept it pretty simple, endeavoring to eat more super foods like berries, nuts, and oatmeal, and fewer butter cookies and blueberry muffins. While I have eaten more of
- [Well, Are You Happy Now?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01280901/) - At the turn of the 20th century, Harvard University faced a quandary: Where should the new psychology department reside — among the science buildings, or in the new philosophy center, Emerson Hall? The argument was over more than just physical territory: It was about who was more qualified to make statements about human nature
- [The Obvious Solution](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-obvious-solution/) - Recently, a friend's husband told me about a time when he booked a gig to appear in a national television commercial. Prudently, he made sure to get a fresh haircut and line up beforehand, predicting that whoever was working in hair and makeup on set would be ill-equipped to handle his thick 4c curl pattern.
- [From Poesy to Carrot Carnations](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01201501/) - I had never heard of a carrot carnation. But when, back in the 1980s, several of my fellow staffers at the office of a Texas State Senator in Austin wanted to learn about them, I went along to kill some time. (There are downsides to working in the legislature of a state with an anti-government
- [California Dreamin'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01201502/) - You can smell the photographs of Larry Sultan. My wife noticed this before I did. She is a Western person (she grew up in Las Vegas). That’s to say, she’s a desert person, as am I (Los Angeles). So it makes sense that she could smell Sultan’s pictures. Most of the photographs of Larry Sultan
- [Master Pieces](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01051501/) - Between autumns of 1942 and 1943, the English critic Cyril Connolly took a break from writing articles and set out to write a masterpiece. This, he wrote on the first page of his book, is the true function of a writer. Nothing else is of consequence. “How few writers will admit it,” he wrote “or
- [Stumbling on the Sublime](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01231501/) - I ducked into the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue on a cold January day and found myself in one of its frequent free exhibitions, this one on the halls of the third floor (there are also exhibits on the ground floor). The show was of prints
- [On Snow](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01271501/) - When I was two years old, or maybe four years old, it snowed in Las Vegas. The snow covered the concrete and the sand, and the alleyways between the casinos downtown. Even though I’m sure the snow was only an inch or so deep, it made a big impression on the citizens of the city,
- [The Real Problem with Public Discourse](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01291501/) - I distinctly remember when I stopped reading online comments about my essays. For some time I had been reading them on a website of a magazine that published me and allowed unedited comments. To my disappointment, no knowledgeable critic had pointed out errors in my work that I could correct, or made informed arguments that
- [The Other Path](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12021401/) - In the early days of the 20th century, Picasso met some rich and careless Americans. “These folks,” Dave Hickey wrote in his book The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, “are no longer building gazebos and placing symboliste Madonnas in fern-choked grottos. They are running with the bulls — something Pablo can understand. They are measuring
- [All Beans, No Tomatoes](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12031401/) - Amina sits idle in the shade of her makeshift restaurant. A pot of boiling kidney beans near her toes and a cardboard case of fifteen brown eggs remind her of the work to be done, the work she can’t do yet. She counts the eggs again, tapping her henna-orange fingernail on the shit-and-feather encrusted shells,
- ["He's Nothin' Without His Chompers!"](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12051401/) - As David Brent put it in the original version of The Office, life is a series of peaks and troughs, but I think most of us, really, expect the Christmas season to grade out on the higher side of things, a spirit bumper even if the year that has just passed has not been a
- [Wild Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12101401/) - The last earthly home of the mystic-naturalist John Muir was a 14-bedroom Victorian mansion on the fringes of Martinez, California. Before that Muir’s home had been the wilds of America, days spent roaming the peaks and valleys of the West. But in 1878, when Muir turned 40, his friends urged him to leave the mountain
- [Getting Milk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12171401/) - Bored and agitated one summer day some years ago, I jumped in my car and drove 90 miles through a mostly green Pennsylvania to see some cows. But not just any cows. In the late sixties, I lived at the Milton Hershey School, an all-boys boarding school for orphans and semi-orphans founded by the inventor
- [Public Eyes](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12211401/) - “Whatever person you decide to photograph,” Antonino Paraggi says in Italo Calvino’s 1955 short story, Adventures of a Photographer, “you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night.” He adds, “Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.” Antonino becomes an amateur photographer obsessed with
- [The Sound of Scham](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12221401/) - You might have heard the story about the three Swiss. They were sitting around at an Inn together. They were: Arnold Böcklin (the painter), his son Carlo, and the writer Gottfried Keller. Nobody said anything for a long time. Then, Carlo said, “It’s hot.” More time passed. Finally, the elder Böcklin replied, “and there’s no
- [Pocket Protector](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11031401/) - It’s 1827, and you’re a social Englishman. Among fellow English gentlemen, you sit discussing the disappointment that was Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man. Bored with the subject matter, you excuse yourself for the evening. But as you rise from a fine mahogany chair, a hot sensation erupts in your pants pocket. Your trousers
- [Hitting the Road](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11051401/) - The cab dropped us off at a gas station, and we started to walk down a side street. The asphalt glowed in the early morning sun. My wife and I had never visited this part of San José, and we were too groggy to appreciate the new sights. We followed the directions specifically: 100 meters
- [On the Wall](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11101401/) - In the beginning, the Wall was made of barbed wire and soldiers. On some streets, cinder blocks had been stacked. In the Neukölln borough, on Harzer Straße, the Wall was about neck-high. East and West Berliners could look at each other over the Wall but they were not allowed to touch. In a photograph taken
- [The German Guy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11141401/) - He swiveled around on his bar stool and leaned close to me and put his hands down my shirt. They gave off little sparks. I leaped off my stool like someone escaping flames. “What the fuck are you doing? I’m married?” “So what?” He obviously had no respect for the institution. He followed me clear
- [Antique, Alive](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11211401-2/) - I turned a corner, and there it was: The Arch. I gulped down my surprise and walked down the cobbled street, toward the strange yellow structure. Plump women in patterned huipiles perched on the sidewalk with baskets of fruit. “Mango?” they murmured halfheartedly. I smiled and declined. I must have looked dazed, because I couldn’t
- [Verity Vs. Verisimilitude](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11241401/) - “A day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.” — George Washington, the first President of the United States, delivering the National Thanksgiving Proclamation, on October 3rd, 1789 • For the last thirty years of his life — the first thirty
- [I have a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. I'm leaving the tech industry.](https://www.thesmartset.com/i-have-a-masters-in-ai/) - After six months of searching-and-not-searching for management-level jobs in tech, I am done. I have done what society demanded of me. I have pursued what I thought needed to be pursued. I valiantly pushed on toward a goal that should have been mine but never was. I have given my time, my energy, and my
- [A Heady Affair](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12010801/) - The end of the Reign of Terror unleashed a wave of euphoria in Paris as citizens celebrated the fact that they were still alive. Hardly had the guillotine been trundled out of sight than some 100 dance halls opened in Paris, using any space available — even abandoned monasteries and half-wrecked churches were turned into
- [Help Wanted](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12020801/) - Oh, the endless promise of the self-help book aisle. Cheaper than even 10 minutes of traditional psychotherapy, and carefully worded to be completely unhelpful without overtly appearing so, it’s no wonder we get trapped by these shiny, happy books. Just follow these 10 steps, and you can turn your nervous breakdown into a breakthrough. I
- [Reality Check](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12020802/) - E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories don't make sense. That's how they first work into your brain. "The Sandman" may be his best for that very reason. It's the typical tale of a young dreamer tortured by childhood nightmares/memories of a bogeyman (The Sandman) who turns out to be a friend of the family who tries to
- [Skeletal Remains](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12050801/) - Look at enough dinosaur displays and you begin to ask questions beyond the scope of the exhibit. What would a sleeping dinosaur look like? How do you clean one of these things? Where's the cafeteria? It's not that the dinosaurs themselves are uninteresting — the danger they suggest infuses museum halls with a sense of
- [It's the Poetry, Stupid!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12080801/) - It’s my birthday. Will you write me a poem? — Ken S., Portland, Oregon It’s my birthday, too! Let’s celebrate together with a heroic couplet: This is for people whose name starts with K: you’re getting old — you better seize the day! Yuck, that was awful. Here’s a better one by Richard Wilbur,
- [Miss Venezuela](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12090801/) - The woman was decked out in a black one-piece bathing suit, her face matte and her body shiny. She wore gold bangles, gold platform heels, and a gold belt with a Miss Venezuela crown belt buckle so large that it looked like a rodeo or boxing trophy. And her pose — she wasn’t smiling, but
- [Fast Friends?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12100801/) - I imagine that one of the most universal but least discussed rites of passage is the discovery that the house you grew up in has a very distinct smell, and that it wasn't just everyone else's house that smelled peculiar. Recognized only on return from your first long time away, this is typically not the
- [Success Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12100802/) - A little background is in order. Last summer, I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book Blink. Then I wrote a belated review for 3QuarksDaily. The book, like most everything Gladwell writes, is a fun and sometimes exciting read. But I decided that, in the end, there wasn't much of an argument in it. A
- [Stadium Seating](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12110801/) - When I was a teenager in Los Angeles and newly licensed to drive, my friends and I began to tentatively road trip up and down the California coast, ostensibly looking for surfing breaks, parties, girls, but really just driving as far as we could on the $25 it took to fill a gas tank and
- [Wintry Mix](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12150801/) - As a native Californian deprived of real winters, I most definitely romanticize the season. I expect to sing “Silver Bells” while dancing down the street of town, past shops decorated with Christmas lights and snow. Truly. Alternately, I imagine ice skating on our local pond and wandering the nearby woods through quiet, soft snow.
- [Jane Addiction](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12160801/) - Picture this: Several hundred people, many in Empire gowns, buttoned boots, and bonnets pirouetting in a stately line across a large ballroom. Women are partnering women for the most part, though here and there one sees a male specimen in knee breeches, long coat, and curled wig sashaying happily amid the beribboned throng. The event
- [On the Nose](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12170801/) - I recently purchased a kit called "Le Nez Du Vin" that professes to teach me how to identify various aromas in a glass of wine. The kit, which is imported from France, comes in a dictionary-sized case covered in red fabric so that it resembles an old book. Inside are a dozen tiny glass vials,
- [Home Alone](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12170802/) - The word “domesticity” gives me the vapors. Just the sight of a ball of yarn and knitting needles makes me have to lie down and fan myself for a while. A deeply neurotic part of my brain appears to equate learning how to sew a button with giving up my career, marrying a dentist, and
- [Stocking Stuffers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12180802/) - I wanted to read a poem to my gathered family before our Christmas meal. Could you recommend several? What would your top five Christmas poems be? — Already-Frazzled-Preparer-of-a-Christmas-Feast I guess it would be totally lame to cite my favorite Christmas poem (“A Visit From St. Nicholas”—“’Twas the night before Christmas”), but that’s a really
- [It's a Rap](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12180801/) - Christmas music has never ranked highly among music aficionados. It exists, but no one likes to think about it much. Still, to create Christmas music is to belong in America. I don’t think this is a religious phenomenon. It is about homely feelings, about playing at tradition in a land that hasn’t any real ones. Americans imported their traditions from
- [Quitting Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12310801/) - I can think of no better poster child for the Twelve Step addiction recovery plan than James Frey. This is despite the fact that Frey argued extensively against the Twelve Steps method in his addiction, uh, “memoir” A Million Little Pieces, calling it spiritual nonsense. He wrote, “I’d rather have [relapse and death] than spend
- [Axis of Evil](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11040801/) - One fine day in the mid-'50s, the eminent British actor Charles Laughton and the brilliant (if doomed) American critic James Agee put their minds together with the aim of adapting David Grubb's novel The Night of the Hunter into a screenplay. Agee was drunk. He couldn't put together a coherent screenplay. But he had
- [Fire Hazard](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11050801/) - Medieval partygoers loved spectacles, and every decent feast would contain pranks such as dwarves leaping out of giant pies, or jesters climbing onto the dinner table and burying their heads into tubs of custard. But one joke performance went tragically awry in 1394 Paris. It was a wedding feast attended by the young French King
- [Bewitched](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11060801/) - Part of the development of a socially maladjusted teenage girl — right around the same time she starts carrying Sylvia Plath’s Ariel with her everywhere she goes, scribbling in the margins; hacks at her own hair with dull kitchen shears; and discovers a copy of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside — is an obsession with
- [The Wrath of Khan](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11070801/) - I found myself, at 23, in the land of Chinngis Khan, vodka, and milktea, completely unprepared to teach children. After living in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia for almost a year I concluded that anyone who came to Mongolia was running from something: an eight-year relationship, a gay father, law school, the pressure to get a real
- [Wedding Bells?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11100801/) - I am a poet currently in graduate school. I just finished a sestina. Do I owe Dana Gioia any royalties? — A.K., Lincoln, Nebraska A.K., you owe Dana Gioia no more royalties than you owe to the parent who taught you how to write a grocery list. Gioia uses the sestina form in an
- [A Hairy Predicament](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11140801/) - They were there in the caves of the Neolithic Stone Age. They were there in the temples of ancient Egypt and Rome. They were there at the coronation of King Henry IV. They were there on Napoleon’s battlefields. And they were there, in my very own house, just last month. Lowly, unlovely lice, that
- [A Giant Problem](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11170802/) - I imagine that one of the final disappointments of Michael Crichton's too-short life was the news that Japanese scientists had cloned a mouse from cells frozen for 16 years. Where were they when the rest of us were spending close to $1 billion to see Crichton's vision of biotechnology run amok? In the lab
- [Dear John](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11170801/) - November 19 is one of the only unsung days of the year Hallmark hasn’t yet exploited: World Toilet Day. We spend about three years of our lives sitting on a toilet. Though we in the Western world may not realize it, that white piece of flushable porcelain is one of man’s best friends. We
- [For Those About to Tread Water, We Salute You](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11180801/) - Are you tired of change? Are you fed up with extreme makeovers, disruptive innovation, the constant pressure to extend your product line? In a world overdosing on frantic novelty, are you perfectly happy thinking inside the bun? You may feel guilty about your lack of ambition, your indifference to life coaches, plastic surgeons, the spiritual
- [Let's Talk About Sex](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11190801/) - As I was filling out Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, doodling in the box that says “Draw a perfectly gendered person,” taking the quizzes to find my Gender Aptitude, and learning to adjust my definition of “transgender” to include anyone who breaks with the traditional portrayal of gender, which would include everyone from drag
- [Fruit-Forward and Fungus](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11200801/) - How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle? Meg and I asked each other this very question as we navigated the streets of Alba, lost on our way to Pio Cesare winery. We debated this because we were in possession of a tiny truffle that filled our tiny
- [Russia on My Mind](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11210801/) - The night was far from young when I flagged down what I thought was a typical gypsy cab in St. Petersburg, Russia, in early 2003. In fact, since the sun was just starting to show itself after the more than 16 hours of darkness that is the norm at that latitude at that time of
- [Fatherly Advice](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11240801/) - What do you tell parents of would-be poets who worry about their children's ability to make a living writing sonnets? — Your father, Sierra Vista, Arizona P.S. Do you want me to send you that law school application? It is perfectly natural to feel the worry you express, and especially if your child is
- [The Baked Goods](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11250801/) - From Toll House cookies to key lime pie, baked goods are among the foods Americans do best. And yet there’s still something stomachache-inducing about the thought of devouring a hefty slice of pecan turtle cheesecake at the end of a three-course French meal. So I was surprised to read in a French magazine that a
- [Broken Record](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11260801/) - At first glance, you might mistake Guinness World Records 2009 for a book-sized can of some energy drink. Its metal foil cover shimmers with such pulsating greenish-gold intensity it could give a disco ball a headache. Inside, its pages are jam-packed with factoids and photographs, including life-sized 3-D portraits of the world’s tiniest man and
- [Palate or Palette?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11260802/) - 1811: a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert publishes The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years. He discovers that if you boil your mutton and eggs in sealed glass jars, you can eat them much later. Napoleon, in person, gives him a prize and canned food is born. Early 1970s: American schoolchildren
- [Meet Me in the Art Museum](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10010801/) - Just got in to St. Louis. Being in this part of the country is about the Mississippi. The Mississippi rules. Has any natural body borne more symbolic weight, stood for so many different things? A painting by Henry Lewis hangs in the Saint Louis Art Museum. It's called, laconically, “Saint Louis in 1846.” The center
- [Unnatural Selection](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10030802/) - The latest public discussion about the fate of literary criticism features The Literary Darwinists. With articles appearing in The Boston Globe, The Chronicle, The Nation and elsewhere, there’s a certain buzz. Literary Darwinists are reacting to the rather pitiful — and undisputed — state in which literary criticism finds itself. Particularly within the academy,
- [Green Politics](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10030801/) - In the mid-1990s, a group of developers in search of a place to build a golf resort cast their gaze upon the 7,000 islands that form the Philippines. Golf course development had thrived under then-President Fidel Ramos, an enthusiastic player who saw the game as an integral part of tourism, and when the developers
- [Insufferable](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10060801/) - I hate living in Los Angeles, but I've been told that my film career will be best nurtured here. Another place calls me home, where I might suffer for my art in comfort (suffering aside). Should I suffer all the suffering there is here in LA to better tempt my destiny? Do poets ever
- [Porn Maze](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10100802/) - I know no faster way to divide a room of feminists than to utter the word “pornography.” We’re all pretty together on the choice and equal pay issues, and other disagreements have considerable common ground. But when it comes to porn, feminists retreat to their dogma. There is the camp that derides pornography as violence
- [The Term Paper Artist](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10100801/) - One great way to briefly turn the conversation toward myself at a party is to answer the question, "So, what do you do?" with, "I'm a writer." Not that most of the people I've met at parties have read my novels or short stories or feature articles; when they ask, "Have I seen any of
- [America Wants Talent](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10140801/) - John McCain was right. Lehman Bros., Fannie Mae, AIG be damned, American workers are strong. They’re still innovative, still entrepreneurial, still willing to spend long hours pursuing their dreams with no immediate reward in sight. Of course, you won’t find them amid all the short-sellers and subprime lenders on Wall Street. Or even in the
- [The Class of 1250](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10160801/) - If undergrads seem an irresponsible bunch these days, excelling in the extra-curricular subjects of dorm-hopping, beer-swilling, and the squandering of parental cash, they pale in comparison to their medieval ancestors at Oxford. The accounts from England’s first and most hallowed University read like Animal House in Latin. Tony's Social Pages Jackson's Inauguration Renaissance Art Reception
- [Brownfields](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10210801/) - By the time Giorgio Morandi discovered himself as an artist he had reduced his universe to a handful of things. These were primarily bottles, tins, jugs, vases, and a few bowls. In a pinch, Morandi was perfectly happy with two tins and a vase. He would arrange the three things and then paint them. Generally
- [Frankfurter](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10230801/) - Frankfurt by Day America loves to think of itself as the center of the literary world. Every year we expect the Nobel Prize to go to Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates, despite all the evidence to the contrary. We don’t need to import and translate literature, we guffaw. They should be translating us! And
- [Baby Talk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10230802/) - If you were to go looking for evidence of France’s huge North African population, you’d find it in the grim public housing projects of the suburban cités, in the gritty peripheral neighborhoods of Paris, and near my home in the relatively privileged 5th arrondissement, where the Great Mosque draws enormous crowds on Fridays
- [Political License](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10270801/) - I'm in love with poet Billy Collins. Do poets make good husbands? If so, how might I woo him? — Jaqi H., Watertown, Massachusetts Well, many poets haven’t had the best track records as mates, but I think Billy Collins would make a great husband. Unfortunately for you though, he already is one. But
- [Far Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10280801/) - It wasn't until the end of our few days' drive together through the extraterrestrial landscape of northern Colorado that this distant cousin of mine started talking about aliens. He was a bit older than my parents, and a Vietnam vet. Along the way he had shown me the remains of an old family farm, the
- [Chinese Take-Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10300801/) - “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world.” — Orville Schell, Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society Travel vs. Tourism Paul Fussell, in his nostalgic travel book Abroad, described the difference between travel and tourism: Travel is authentic and surprising; tourism, packaged and predictable. Fussell claimed that
- [Put It to a Vote](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10310801/) - Democracy, as we all know, is a Greek word. Literally, it means "rule of the people." To a proponent of democracy, then, it is not unfair to ask, “How have the people been ruling themselves?" In these days of election fever (or exhaustion), it is amusing, if not illustrative to remember that one prominent
- [Boob Tube](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09020801/) - One day, out of the blue, my husband decided that we needed a new television. We had until then been a minimalist TV family. We had one small set on the third floor of the house that had an indistinct static-y picture from which the color capriciously came and went. It was the kind
- [On the Environment, Leisure, and Loathing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09080801/) - What are poets doing to lessen their carbon footprint? — Lisa G., St. Louis, Missouri Dean Young’s “Whale Watch” captures the sentiment of many poets regarding the Earth’s environmental condition, no matter what our political persuasions: …You may want to fall to your knees and beg forgiveness without knowing precisely for what. You may
- [Food Pics](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09090802/) - Janna Gur’s The Book of New Israeli Food is confused about what kind of book it would like to be. It is a beautiful coffee table book with its lickable photography, silky paper, and hefty price tag. But it is also a cookbook with its imaginative food and usable recipes. Contrary to what the publisher
- [The Renaissance Art Reception](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09090801/) - Even prolific Italian geniuses had to unwind, although it should come as no surprise to learn that their revelries were a cut above the average mortal booze-up. Just as modern artists vie for invitations to the hottest receptions or Biennale party, so the hippest insider scene in Florence was La Società del Pauiolo, the Company
- [Bedtime Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09100801/) - Insomnia might feel like a punishment from the gods, but it is generally thought to be a mind-body problem. While your body would like to sleep, your mind is much more interested in listing every thing you need to do tomorrow. But there’s a difference between a bad night’s sleep and a night of
- [Music Therapy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09150801/) - Noncanonical Never has a blowjob sounded so sad. But Leonard Cohen is the sort of man who could read Mother Goose aloud and make it sound like Swinburne. The blowjob in question is rumored to have come from the lips of Janis Joplin, an extraordinary thing to ponder in the first place. The song, of
- [The Pale Cast of Thought](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09180801/) - The toxic yet vacuous phrase “self-indulgent” was often used by the detractors of David Foster Wallace (as if it isn’t self-indulgent to write anything at all). Another accusation, that Wallace was overly cerebral, misses the point completely. As a writer, the guy was as large-hearted as he was big-brained. Don Gately, the recovering narcotics addict
- [Death Watch](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09220801/) - I’m bored. I’m bored with my job, with my girlfriend, and with the current box office selection. I was hoping your column would be entertaining, but it’s not. Can you help me? — PJ, Phoenix, Arizona I don’t think you need any help at all, PJ; you’re rather observant. A principle of life is
- [Dear David](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09190801/) - Nobody ever really knows why someone else commits suicide — that's what makes it an ultimate act, an unsettling challenge to those of us who keep on. Anyway, it doesn't matter why. The death of David Foster Wallace is simply a fact now and we're the ones who have to deal with it. I
- [Dismissed](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09220802/) - Last Saturday morning my family slept in. The Saturday before as well. And the Saturday before that. This fact might sound banal — especially since by “sleeping in” I mean we got up at 8 a.m. But for me and other parents with grade school-aged children throughout France, it was practically revolutionary. As
- [Pizza Party](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09230801/) - Homemade pizza is one of the larger letdowns of cooking. Even if you follow the directions for the crust perfectly, spend $30 on artisanal cheeses, and make your own tomato sauce, the process never seems worth the bother when you can order-in a pizza twice as good. The Library Archives The Book of New Israeli
- [God's Words](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09240801/) - We live in an age of autobiography, one in which young writers cannot even bother to change people’s names to create a novel, in which a story being true is a greater virtue than being well written, or insightful, or interesting. I have a few unyielding standards for a memoir: Either your book must be
- [Ocean View](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09260801/) - To enter the National Museum of Natural History's new Sant Ocean Hall, you must first pass the institution's iconic African elephant. Here the taxidermied remains of an actual elephant — shot dead in the wild and given to the institution by a big-game hunter in 1954 — stand guard over the knowledge contained within. But
- [Political Party](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09300801/) - The symbol of American statehood a wreck. Drunken revelers in the lobby. Boozers romping through the bedrooms. And all this 140 years before JFK moved in. Tony's Social Pages Renaissance Art Reception Greek Symposia Roman Bacchanalia The most riotous party scene in the U.S. political arena occurred when the war hero Andrew Jackson, considered a
- [O No!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08050802/) - After getting the book-related information I needed out of O, I would flip through to find the cooking section. The food always looked pretty and seemed vaguely appetizing, yet not enough to make me cook it. I had the exact same reaction to the new recipe collection, O, The Oprah Magazine Cookbook: pretty, yawn. I
- [Refueling](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08050803/) - So there we are en route, it’s closing in on 1 p.m., and we’re hungry. “Let’s eat at the next rest stop,” says my husband. “I could really go for a Nathan’s hot dog or an Arby’s roast beef sandwich or maybe a Whopper with Cheese.” His reference to these items reflects his familiarity
- [Street Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08060801/) - Prostitutes were the big difference in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's life. When he lived in Dresden he showed definite artistic talent but he didn't have anything in particular to say. His paintings and drawings weren't yet fully his own. He was still learning about the world and still learning about his own talent. Then, in
- ["My Grandson, the Writer"](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08080802/) - The summer I turned 18, my parents went away to Europe and I lived with my grandmother in our family’s rambling summer home in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. It was an unusual housing scenario. My grandmother was the grande dame of an elite summer colony that had begun hosting cocktail parties and picking blueberries
- [Pus in Boots](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08080801/) - In No Laughing Matter, the novelist Joseph Heller outed his friend Mel Brooks as a world-class hypochondriac. "He is the only person I'm acquainted with who subscribes to The Lancet," Heller wrote. "Principles of Internal Medicine and Dorland's Medical Dictionary are Mother Goose to him." I grew up in a two-doctor home strewn with
- [On Fashion, Pay, and Patriotism](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08080803/) - How much does it cost to be a poet? — Kerri L., Cordova, Tennessee I wrote poems when I was 13 and it didn’t cost a dime. Unfortunately, most poets want recognition, and that can cost a lot. True, poets don’t need to go to school to write good poems, but these days poets
- [The Death of the Monoculture](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08130801/) - The season of popcorn blockbusters, beach reads, summer girls, and boys of summer has arrived. And the only thing missing is the (un)official song of the summer — a ubiquitous pop smash that demands we shake our hands in the air and sing along as though we had not a care in the world.
- [Notes From a Barbarian](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08140802/) - The idea of a "canon" is in tatters. A canon needs an established cultural authority, and there is no guiding authority in culture anymore. There are no real gatekeepers. The barbarians aren't merely at the gates — they long ago passed through the gates and are comfortably strolling around town. They are ordering lattes
- [Only the Lonely](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08140801/) - As every woman knows, men with mother issues are seriously dangerous. In the early- to mid-20th century, there was a group of such men that decided it could revolutionize the way mothers raise their children. First of all, stop kissing them — lord knows what germs you’re passing on. And really, just put them
- [Roe v. Chef](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08150801/) - But I don’t live in Sardinia, and I certainly don’t have a wood-burning fireplace in my kitchen. Nor do I have access to the ingredients that a good 50 percent of the recipes in Sweet Myrtle require. I live in Chicago, and while I have access to a good number of strange foods that rot
- [Great Minds Drink Alike](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08180801/) - If the Bacchanalia created a blueprint for our most depraved debauches, the ancients also bequeathed us its more elegant counterpart: the learned drinking party or symposium. Like the Algonquin roundtable of 1920s New York, it was a brilliant excuse for all forms of excess: In classical Athens, A-list philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates loved
- [The "Truth" Hurts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08190802/) - How Fiction Works isn't actually about how fiction works. To be obsessed with the mechanics of words and sentences, to see literature as essentially an enclosed system with internal rules, is to be a formalist, and James Wood, for all his formality, isn't a formalist. He admits as much. In the Preface to How
- [Bring Home the Bakin'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08190801/) - Baking can no doubt be complicated. If you are impatient and refuse to let eggs and dairy come to room temperature before mixing, your cake batter can curdle. You can set off the smoke detector trying to caramelize sugar. But really the worst thing you could possibly do is mistake salt for sugar, and that
- [Guiding Light](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08210801/) - The golden age of large-mammal discovery has long since passed. Maybe that’s why the recent news that a police offer and car salesman from Georgia had found the body of Bigfoot was met with both predictable skepticism and a bit of discreet excitement. Nobody’s ever identified a Bigfoot before, so nobody knew exactly how to
- [Romancing the Archivist](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08220801/) - Aly Ongoiba tapped a pen on his desk, studying me. I wasn’t too worried, though he’d just accused me of spying in the national archives of Mali — a half desert West African country shaped like an hourglass broken at the ends. I did not fear deportation or worse, not in Mali, one of
- [On Happiness, Love, and License](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08250801/) - I'm sad. I just learned that my own country didn't score very high on the annual Happiness Index. I'm thinking of moving to Denmark. What does a poet do when he or she gets sad like I am? — Justin L. , Kansas City, Missouri I’m a little sad, too, and right now I’m
- [Pool Boy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08260801/) - Driving through the hills of northern San Diego County in the evening is lonely. The sun sets due west over the Pacific Ocean, red sinking into blue. There's the scrub brush and the desert flora, dusty green against brown and beige. The streets are so wide, so empty. Streetlights throw down orange circles at
- [Lard Work](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08260802/) - There are endless ways to die with this cookbook — and so much animal fat that I expected each recipe to come with a doctor’s warning. You don’t even have to be particularly accomplished to do it; all levels of difficulty are represented. Sure, I could have cured my own pork belly, but damn it,
- [Marrying Type](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08270801/) - The meringue of a woman, floating down an aisle lined with flowers in her signature colors. The groom in his tuxedo, waiting for her with tears in his eyes. The photographer, capturing those special moments to be treasured forever. From the engagement ring to the honeymoon, every nut and bolt used to construct that
- [R.S.V.P.](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07070802/) - Since the dawn of time, all of humanity, from the most learned philosophers to the humblest working stiff, has wrestled with the question: What makes a great party? Tony's Social Pages Picasso's "Rousseau Banquet" Roman Bacchic celebrations One thing seems certain: The most famous celebrations were not the most enjoyable, and vice versa. From ancient
- [All Bottled Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07070801/) - The battle between a group of Maine villagers and mighty Nestlé is the hook upon which Elizabeth Royte hangs Bottlemania, an examination of the pros and cons of consuming bottled water. It’s a huge issue. Sales of bottled water surpass those of milk and beer; Nestlé’s 2006 profits from its water division were $7.46 billion.
- [Partying With Pablo](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07080801/) - As Jonathon Richman of the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers elegantly put it, “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole” — although the genius’ girlfriend Fernande Olivier must have been sorely tempted in the late summer of 1908, when she learned that Picasso had invited half of Montmartre to their squalid garret and given the
- [A Little Something](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07090802/) - In the earliest days of e-commerce, it didn't matter if you were ordering from a little old lady on eBay or a venture-funded start-up like Amazon or Webvan: Every transaction was a crap shoot. You browsed virtual stores that didn't even have the dubious glossy authority of a Victoria's Secret catalog. You studied photos
- [Zookeeping](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07110802/) - The Bronx Zoo’s historic Lion House is no more. The 1903 Beaux-Arts building still stands, but the felines long ago moved on to greener pastures beyond the zoo’s original Astor Court; their expulsion was recently made permanent with the opening of Madagascar! in the great cats’ former haunts. Madagascar! represents everything a modern zoo aspires
- [X-Men and Suicide Girls](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07140803/) - In the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center just outside Chicago, I bump into a crowd of Jedi wearing Obi-Wan-style robes and munching popcorn. I change direction and slip around the Star Wars fans, who are just a few of the thousands of people attending Wizard World Chicago, the second-largest comic book convention in the country.
- [Hominy Hunts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07140802/) - After one too many scenarios like this one, I decided to do a little investigating on whether cookbooks were tested before being slapped with a $35 price tag and shipped off to bookstores. Turns out, no. A cookbook editor at Doubleday-Broadway told me that the authors are trusted that they know what they are doing.
- [The Lifestyle Beat](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07150801/) - Not too long ago, I was at a party with a number of people who have successful careers in lifestyle journalism. I was chatting with a beautiful, sexy friend who writes for a magazine that covers luxury spa vacations. She got that job, in part, because she wrote a wonderful travel book about bathing culture
- [The Bio Sphere](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07160802/) - Kathryn Hughes recently wrote in the Guardian about biography overkill. For a while, the genre was so popular with successes like David McCullough’s John Adams that even the most insignificant of figures — heck, even the sisters of the most insignificant figures — were getting their own books. Every obvious choice for biography, from
- [Battle Scars](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07180802/) - I have just been watching Niall Ferguson bestride the globe. He does it in his documentary The War of the World, aired on PBS over the last three weeks. The documentary is the film version of his recent book of the same name. In the book he does a lot of bestriding, too. He
- [Western Civ 101](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07180801/) - I’ve just returned from Oxford, England, where everything is twice as expensive as it is here, where the weather is crappy and most of the food tastes like boiled cardboard. That said, I still want to take a room in one of those lopsided little houses built in the 12th century and stay for the
- [Embellished](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07220801/) - Page one of my scrapbooking-weekend scrapbook would contain a cardstock minivan pasted onto a gray chalk outline of a Virginia highway. A photo of my face would be slipped into the driver’s window, and my hands would be cut out and pasted to a cardstock wheel at a sturdy 10 and two. Renting a
- [Divine Drunks](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07230803/) - Today, the term “bacchanal” is bandied about at almost any gathering where the guests get a bit tipsy and mildly frisky, but it originally referred to a specific ancient Roman celebration — the frenzied rites of Bacchus, god of wine and intoxication. Unlike the formal banquets so beloved by Roman aristocrats, these were essentially outdoor
- [Call-in Cooking](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07230801/) - The book itself is fertile ground for more mocking. There’s the title, for starters. Surely How to Cook Supper would be more appropriate. Then there’s the layout, which looks like someone just downloaded a bunch of new fonts and wanted to use all of them in one book. The recipes are interspersed with a strange
- [Power Hungry](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07250801/) - It’s not easy to get to the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., without driving. But if you were determined to do so, you’d take the Metro from downtown, then transfer to the B2 bus. There’s no stop at the Arboretum itself, but if you ask the driver whether that bus goes by the institution,
- [Got Gout?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07280801/) - Gout is a strange, medieval type of medical condition that manifests without warning, often in a person’s big toe, of all places, and causes almost unbearable pain and suffering without being fatal. Gout disappears just as mysteriously, and always threatens to reappear at any time, like some sort of invisible, unreasonable, otherworldly punishment. If
- [On Dining, Hygiene, Miracles, and Publishing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07290802/) - What do poets eat for dinner? — Molly M., Chicago, Illinois The poet Thomas Lux eats boiled potatoes and chicken carcasses among other delicacies cataloged in “Refrigerator, 1957,” but not anything whose ingredients call for maraschino cherries, “full, fiery globes like strippers/ at a church social.” Maybe he is outraged by the cruel treatment
- [Gone Fishin'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07290801/) - Coming from a landlocked state, I have a deep distrust of cooking seafood. My memories of it from childhood mostly involve unrecognizable fillets from deep within the grocer’s freezer. As far as I could tell, there were two types of fish: white and salmon, which came from a can. I have certainly not outgrown this
- [Safety First](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07300801/) - In my seventh-grade health class, I was made to undergo the semester-long torture that is abstinence-only sex education. We were made to chant, “Don’t be a louse, wait for your spouse!” We were told that sexual urges could be calmed with Better Than Sex Cake, an out-of-the-box monstrosity that used whipped cream and chocolate syrup
- [Olympic Fever](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07310801/) - If the Olympic Village descends into orgiastic debauchery this summer — as it did during the 2004 Olympics, when 130,000 free condoms were given away along with 30,000 sachets of lubricant, or during the 2000 Sydney Games, when the Durex supply had to be supplemented with an emergency shipment of 20,000 extras — athletes
- [The Painter and His Process](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12081101/) - In 1953, a young Robert Rauschenberg arrived at the studio of Willem de Kooning with a bottle of liquor and a proposition. Rauschenberg was daunted by the task of asking one of New York’s most innovative painters for one of his works. After some conversation and a shared drink, the boyish Rauschenberg finally reached his
- [Must Love Kids](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12121101/) - “Out of sync with their time, yet deeply, longingly feminine, neither knew how to be a woman.” I have been fussing over this sentence from Susan Hertog’s biography of two remarkable writers, Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, for weeks now. Hertog is obviously not referring to how West and Thompson felt about themselves.
- [Immortal Combat](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12141101/) - Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die — "In Memoriam", Lord Alfred Tennyson This much is true. We do not want to die. And some say everything we do comes down to this. We look to fame, to children, to heaven, hoping all the while to
- [The Eco Chamber](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12161101/) - As someone familiar with the publishing industry, I know that one of its edicts is that a novel protagonist should be in some way likeable — if not likable to begin with, at least eventually so, and if not on the outside then there should lie buried some vestige of humanity that the reader can
- [Oh, Really?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12221101/) - Edward Hopper’s stark street scene in “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) is one of the first paintings you encounter at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition “Real/Surreal.” The canvas invites you in; it’s almost as if you are standing on the other side of the street, staring at the humble line of brick and glass
- [Always the Optimist](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12231101/) - The recently deceased Václav Havel — Czech writer, political dissident, and first president of the Czech Republic — wrote some very funny plays. Living through the dark times of communist Czechoslovakia, Havel was committed to keeping a sense of humor. Laughter, he felt, was not just an antidote to misery, an escape; it was a
- [Waves of Memories](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11041101/) - Somewhere around Bentota, you start to notice the graveyards. Small clusters of tombstones emerge here and there along the coastal road, grown over with tropical shrubbery and mold. Some of the graves fall back into the hills, where fishermen’s wives hang laundry, and some are right along the beach, not far from the little wooden
- [Personality on the Page](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11081101/) - It was supposed to be a groundbreaking work of anthropology. And for the most part, it was. In 1890, Sir James Frazer unleashed the massive The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion into the world. It was the first work that collated worldwide, history-spanning religious and magical beliefs, and then sifted them through
- [Pre-Occupy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11101101/) - Fall is a season for insomnia. The temperate weather and the knowledge that Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming triggers a kind of physiological alarm, a manic desire to live the year-end. At 3:30 in the morning, after hours spent tossing and turning, I abruptly stood up and put on pants and a shirt. A magnetic
- [The Bead Goes On](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11171101/) - I have become in recent years an aficionado of the “expo.” An expo presents a product in all its permutations and variations — a product lifted to the level of a lifestyle. The motorcycle expo featured bikes, jackets, helmets, and boots; also, flasks, decals, magazines, and T-shirts, all the accoutrements that designate and embroider the
- [If You Pick Us, Do We Not Bleed?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11221101/) - In a room near Maida Vale, a journalist for The Nation wrote around 1914, an unfortunate creature is strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. When the subject is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very
- [Don't Hate the Player](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11291101/) - “Find Madame Wagner, and you will find yourself,” the man told me. It wasn’t quite the spiritual quest I had been expecting as I sat waiting for the U-Bahn to arrive. One second I was enjoying my book; the next, a man was jabbering excitedly to me in very quick German. I interrupted to ask
- [World Views](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10031101/) - Few writers capture the experience of exile better than Andre Aciman. Forced out of Egypt at 15, Aciman explores the relationships between exile and memory in his writing. In the essay “Shadow Cities,” he reflects on the power of a figment in the experience of exile: I see only the New York that either sits
- [Mean Girl](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10051101/) - I am trying to get a handle on the latest publishing event: the transcription and accompanying CDs of Jacqueline Kennedy’s interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in 1964, less than four months after her husband’s assassination. Upon her order, these tapes were not to be released for 50 years, but her daughter jumped the gun
- [Privacy Policy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10131101/) - We have no more privacy. That’s what we’re told; certainly it’s something we feel. Of course it’s been thrilling, for those of us with the means and the Internet, to be more connected to each other and the world than we could have ever imagined. We can correspond at lightening speed. Vast, seemingly infinite quantities
- [Taking up a Collection](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10141101/) - Collecting always seems to start with rocks. My pack-rat father was explaining to me that his first collection was a box of strangely colored stones from the roadside near his home in Tecumseh, Kansas. He remembered one particularly exciting day in his collecting history. “I remember finding a pile of small clear crystals in the
- [American Dreamer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10171101/) - Eighty years ago, James Truslow Adam’s Epic of America was released. As its title implies, the book was a grand but concise story of the nation, from the time of Native Americans (who Adams routinely refers to as “savages”) to the industrial transformations of the late 19th century. Epic of America has long been out
- [A Reckless Autonomy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10211101/) - The thud of slamming car doors jolted me awake. Car doors had been slamming in the underground parking lot for what felt like the entire night, but when I pulled back the thin sheet to check my phone, I realized they’d probably only been slamming for part of the morning. It was 7:31 a.m. I’d
- [A Different Drummer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10261101/) - For some people, discipline is freedom. Not just a path toward freedom, the bondage itself is a state of liberation. The coterie of band geeks at my high school had waited forever for the opportunity to wear itchy heavy uniforms, to march in black, regulation roll step orthopedic shoes that most people don’t get to
- [Made to Disorder](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10281101/) - Your therapist is probably giving you multiple personality disorder. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt. 372 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95. Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan. 320 pages. Free Press. $26. Oh sure, he’s going to deny it. He will say you
- [Creative Class](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10311101/) - The idea of Picasso always precedes the experience of seeing Picasso’s art. Looking at drawings from the artist’s early years in the Frick Collection’s cramped basement, I wondered what we can say about Picasso that hasn’t already been said. I’ve previously encountered this question with artists whose reputations (and market value) are in such high
- [The Code War](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09021101/) - A building is a compromise — a bundle of risks safe enough to use, but dangerous enough to regulate. How tall is too tall, how safe is safe enough? Before September 11, Americans thought little about such questions. And then the most extraordinary buildings in New York City burned and collapsed in front of a
- [Going Hungary](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09061101/) - One of the most compelling photographs in the Royal Academy of Arts show “Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century” is László Fejes’ “Wedding” (1965). The linearity of the well-dressed party walking single file along a balcony, all framed against a shell-pocked building façade, makes for an unusual wedding photograph. By its title, the photograph
- [A Question of Timing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09071101/) - Everybody is talking about ruins these days. That could be a bad sign. Detroit, in particular, seems to have captured the fancy of the ruin enthusiast. Detroit has experienced a 25 percent reduction in population over the last 10 years or so. Whole areas of the city have been abandoned. You can see entire neighborhoods
- [The Economy, Stupid](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09131101/) - “Everyone in the resistance knew of [Václav] Havel.” In Anna Porter’s The Ghosts of Europe: Central Europe’s Past and Uncertain Future, Havel plays the role of rock star. The former blacklisted-playwright-turned-national-leader is a star, of course: The poet turned president. The intellectual who will lead the people out of corruption; out of despair; out of
- [To the Devil](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09261101/) - CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision. One hundred and five years ago, in 1906, a book written by the infamous curmudgeon Ambrose Bierce was published as The
- [The Ugly Truth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09301101/) - This is the story of two sisters. One sister is blonde and beautiful; the other is dark and dowdy. The lighter sister has the appearance of an angel, and the world is kind to her. People give her what she wants without asking any questions — all she has to do is wish. Things do
- [The Sweet Smell of Species Success](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06030801/) - Sometimes the smell of body odor means more than just “Wash me!” A person whose sweat starts to smell fruity may have developed diabetes, and an ammonia smell may indicate liver or kidney disease. Odor of rotting fish may signal trimethylaminuria — a rare syndrome caused by a defective gene that prevents people from
- [Women's Studies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06040801/) - One of the unfortunate side effects of being female is the constant marketing of products as specifically “for women.” It’s not just deodorant and cheap pink razors. There are books, and then there are books for women. Seal Press calls itself the publisher of “Groundbreaking Books For Women, By Women,” but theirs is a very
- [Gallagher? Seriously?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06050801/) - On a recent Friday night, in a 100-seat club in the hotbed of comedy known as New Brunswick, New Jersey, wild applause rose from the from the audience. The clapping mingled with the clank of bottles, the muted sizzle of the fryer from the kitchen in back, and something else — a rustling noise. It
- [Exhibit A](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06060801/) - The National Museum of Crime and Punishment opened in Washington, D.C., two weeks ago with McGruff the Crime Dog greeting guests outside the entrance. The museum (which was financed by an Orlando lawyer and produced in conjunction with the Fox TV show America’s Most Wanted) strives to bring interactivity and entertainment to a museum about
- [Sex?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06090801/) - It’s odd how prudish educated people become when the topic turns to consumerism. They’re fine with the raunchiest sex talk, but bring up product talk and they get all fussy and judgmental. We’ve seen some of this in the response to the new Sex and the City movie. All the high-brow types are appalled by
- [Plimped Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06110801/) - Is the world a stale and weary place, now that George Plimpton (1927-2003) is no longer in it? Hardly. But if it still seems fresh with possibility, Plimpton deserves his share of credit for making it so. His legacy is the magazine he edited — The Paris Review — but he is known
- [The Impracticality of Poets](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06110802/) - I identify myself as a poet because I can’t do anything else. Really, I’ve tried. My journey to find a marketable skill took me all the way to Uzbekistan with the Peace Corps, where I found that my biggest success was writing a haiku everyday to entertain a summer camp of eager ESL students. So
- [Monkey Brain](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06120801/) - When I started walking the 450 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I wanted to hear birds and waves and let my mind wander towards contemplations of life and philosophy and the divine. That was what I hoped for. My brain, however, had its own agenda. The trip began pleasantly enough on a
- [Health Nuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06170801/) - We think of it as a modern craze, but there have always been those amongst us who are obsessed with healthy eating. By the Middle Ages, doctors still accepted the ancient Greek doctrine that each individual body was made up of different amounts of the four essential “humors” — blood, bile, choler, and phlegm
- [War Stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06180801/) - In James Meek’s new novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, the war reporter Kellas returns to the U.K. from Afghanistan and has a few problems readjusting. At an awkward dinner party that includes his neo-con ex-girlfriend (“I couldn’t help it. The right-wing ones are so dirty”), the host makes the mistake of asking
- [A Room With No View](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06190801/) - It's a standard part of the hospitality industry: To make guests feel pampered, cared for, at home on the road, hotel operators grievously overcharge them for hardcore pornography. The hotels make a modest but effortless profit on these transactions. The bored and lonely guests who rent on-demand porn feel even more bored and lonely after
- [Let the Sunshine In](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06200801/) - The strangeness starts with the Steven King fog — or, more accurately, with the cackling scarecrow demons that live in the fog. To get to Glastonbury Tor in time for the summer solstice sunrise, I leave London at midnight. Halfway there I’m gazing at the swirling Hammer Horror-movie mist with childlike wonder. I allow myself
- [Smell Ya Later?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06240801/) - Who out there knows that butterflies are scented? Their aroma can be that of flowers like honeysuckle or jasmine, herbs and spices like lemon verbena or cinnamon, or confections like vanilla or chocolate, depending on the species. It can also be unpleasant, like vinegar, or urine. According to Avery Gilbert, author of What the
- [Nobody's a Critic](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06260802/) - Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real
- [What's up, Doc?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06270801/) - Pity the penguin. Darling of the animal world in the wake of March of the Penguins’ success in 2005, penguin fever quickly begat penguin fatigue. First, the film’s makers went and accepted their Oscar for best documentary carrying penguin stuffed animals. Then Hollywood inundated the market with penguin-centric films including Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and
- [Have Tour, Will Travel](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06300801/) - It begins in September. My husband starts trolling travel sites on the Internet and, after dinner, retires to the living room with brochures emblazoned with pictures of the vast Sahara and the high Himalayas. Then he begins to throw out possibilities for our summer vacation: Barcelona? Kyoto? A trip down the Volga? I resist.
- [Orgy Etiquette](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05010801/) - If you happened to be wandering the streets of ancient Rome at dusk (or, in the summer months, the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples), you might be accosted by a slave inviting you to an imperial banquet. All rich Romans were expected to be fabulous entertainers — the more extravagant
- [Gray Areas](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05020801/) - Mohammed had a squirrelly look in his eyes, which together with his green-flecked teeth made me wonder whether to trust him. We had met that morning in Jijiga, Ethiopia, and he volunteered to show me — and then devour with me — the bleak town's one real attraction: qat bushes. Here, near the Somali border,
- [Now Just Relax...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05050801/) - Daily relaxation is now a doctor’s order. It comes from one of the most influential names in medicine, former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. At a recent meeting of doctors and health policy makers, Satcher presented an amended version of his long-touted “prescription for health”. The prescription advises Americans to practice regular physical activity,
- [The Pacifism Quandary](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05060801/) - Pacifism is like virginity. It doesn't work half way. Anybody can be a pacifist when nothing is at stake. The trick is to be a pacifist even in the face of aggression against oneself or the people one cares about. The principle of pacifism, genuine pacifism, is that violence is always counterproductive. Always. A
- [Farmed Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05080801/) - No one expected the comforts of home. Yet I did hope for something a little more pleasing. A little more, what, pretty? Maybe rolling fields, a big red barn, rustic flavor in that roadside-farmstand, bed-and-breakfast kind of way? But on this organic farm in rural Western New York there are no gently weathered chairs, no
- [Small Town Cinderella](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05090801/) - At 9:05 a.m. in Story Land, a 16-year-old boy dressed as the Mad Hatter started up the Alice in Wonderland teacup ride. He watched the cups clank and churn around. If a child accidentally stepped into one of the holes where the teacup attached to the ride’s base, the kid’s leg could get ripped
- [Fully Booked](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05140801/) - It starts when you’re in the first grade. All of a sudden, reading is no longer this exciting thing you just figured out how to do, it has become “good for you.” You’re given free books through a program that says Reading Is Fun-damental, way before any of your teachers will tell you what “fundamental”
- [Flatliner](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05160801/) - Walking into the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art is like walking inside a toy store that is itself inside of a comic book. You’re immediately confronted with a life-sized statue of Miss Ko, one of Murakami’s leggy cartoon broads, directly referencing the Japanese comic traditions of anime and manga. She fits somewhere
- [The Holy Guide to Coital Positions](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05190801/) - Somehow the human race survived the Middle Ages, no mean feat when you consider how much literature was out there condemning sex. Church thinkers like Saint Jerome announced that carnal relations were “filthy” even within the bounds of holy matrimony: “The wise man should love his wife with cool discretion,” Jerome opined, “not with
- [On Watching Plain People](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05200801/) - At the Lancaster Heritage Museum I read a standard Amish school assignment that said, “As dead leaves ruin a lawn, so bad habits ruin a life.” On the page there was a simple drawing of a tree with leaves falling to a lawn. Underneath the lawn the instructions read, “Write a bad habit on top
- [You Can't Take It With You](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05210801/) - Robert Rauschenberg died last week. That makes it, I suppose, the end of an era. There’s no question that Rauschenberg changed art — the way it’s practiced, the way it is received, the things you can do and still call it art. Contemporary art is Rauschenbergian. Even Warhol, the other father of contemporary art,
- [Picked On](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05220801/) - In Japan, most of us in the dorm honestly preferred to meet and talk in the communal shower rather than have people over to our rooms because the shower was more spacious and less intimate than our rooms. The dorms were narrow, and they took on the smell of our trash, our dirty laundry,
- [Perused Furniture](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05230801/) - Let’s get one thing straight: The International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which just finished its run at the Javitz Center in New York City, is nothing like the Philadelphia Home Show I wrote about earlier. For one thing, it’s not in Philadelphia, and for another, it’s not about the home, at least no home
- [Anatomy of an Earthquake](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05270801/) - When I’m working on my computer, my nights tend to stretch until daylight, and that’s how the earthquake found my girlfriend and me still sleeping. We were jolted awake: The wardrobe door was banging, the walls were shaking, and the whole building was wobbling. Outside we could hear screaming and glass shattering. Momentarily,
- [Bag Ladies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04030801/) - A friend of mine took her 13-year-old daughter to the mall the other day to visit Aerie, a subsidiary of American Eagle that features lingerie for teens. (Yes, this is a legitimate business and not a Web site that the FBI is monitoring for predators.) But the panties her daughter purchased at the store were,
- [John McCain: Worth the Fighting For](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04040801/) - Some say he's a maverick. May be. He's done his share of things his own way for his own reasons. But that isn't the part of him that is most interesting. Candidates' Stories Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope Hillary Clinton: Living History John McCain: Worth the Fighting For John McCain really grabs your attention
- [Make-Your-Own Condoms](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04070801/) - Not long after the Renaissance doctor Gabriello Fallopio invented a silk prototype for the condom in 1564 (see "Columbus Discovers the Clitoris"), European men-about-town took to wearing so-called “gold-beater skins” woven from the dried intestines of sheep, calves, and horses. The learned scholar H. M. Hines speculates that it was a slaughterhouse worker who
- [Charlton Heston's Last Act](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04080802/) - As the story goes, Cecil B. DeMille chose Charlton Heston to play Moses in his epic The Ten Commandments because Heston looked a hell of a lot like the Moses of Michelangelo's famous statue. Apocryphal or not, I believe it. It had to have been an awesome experience being approached by a young Charlton
- [The Golf Courses of Berlin](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04090801/) - One hot and, for Hamburg, uncharacteristically sunny afternoon we turn left out the door of our apartment building and head toward the Innenstadt for a bit of shopping — “downtown,” that is, and not the “inner city” of a literal translation. Down the Rothenbaumchaussee and then cross to cut through Dammtor station; up and over
- [Sole Survivor](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04110801/) - This year, Converse turns 100, and to celebrate its heritage, it's running an ad campaign that features a single token athlete, NBA superstar Dwyane Wade, amidst a dream team of Hall of Fame screw-ups. James Dean, Hunter S. Thompson, and Sid Vicious: Just try to imagine any one of these maverick malcontents in high
- [Haitian Dreams](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04140801/) - “This was not the tourist season, and in any case the island to which we were bound was no longer an attraction for tourists” — Graham Greene, The Comedians As we puttered along in the bumper-to-bumper Port-au-Prince traffic, rolling over occasional streams of raw sewage, Saíntil explained to us that his favorite actor was
- [Booking a Room](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04140802/) - The first time I traveled around Japan I came across a capsule hotel with a live video feed outside that was broadcasting the guests inside relaxing in towels in a steam room. It seemed like a weird invasion of privacy. In real time I could see the sweat puddling up in the crease between
- [Here Comes the Pope!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04150801/) - The pope is here. Ratzinger. Pope Benedict XVI. It is thus a good occasion to figure out what this pope is up to. So far he's done two notable things, at least for those of us outside the arms of the Church. He did the first just before he became pope, and that was
- [Losing My Mind](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04160801/) - I have a poor memory for details. Just about everyone who knows me will say this is true. My husband loves to make me uncomfortable by quizzing me to name the band when a familiar song comes on the radio. He knows I almost never can recall it, even when the answer is ridiculously obvious.
- [Disposable](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04170801/) - In my bedroom, my father crouches close to the ground. He’s wearing jeans, a long-sleeve collared shirt, and a dark-green fleece vest. In his right hand he holds a hammer. His face is solemn, and his eyes are focused down. He’s staring at a small plastic bag of screws, pegs, and nails. My dad understands
- [Great Expectations](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04180801/) - Monday There is a romantic notion that much of the literary world exists apart from the rest of mankind. Authors will appear at a festival or two and say things like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, because I have not owned a television in 30 years.” They talk about their time living
- [Rabu-Saati](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04210801/) - At one point on a bus trip in Japan, I heard two foreigners wondering aloud about how best to prepare some Japanese root vegetables they had seen in the supermarket, and it took everything in me not to interject the answer, which I knew. That’s when I realized, to my amazement, that I had
- [Body Service](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04220801/) - I knew something was in the air when the local hair salon started calling itself a day spa. Now all the blue-haired old ladies in town are going to be able to get a Brazilian wax. When I was growing up, my mother used to go twice a month to the beauty parlor. That
- [At a Crossroads](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04230801/) - When I moved back to my parents’ home in Reading, Pennsylvania, I thought it would be a brief stopover. I had recently graduated from college and just returned from a year in Japan; I was hoping to live with my parents while I worked on a book. What started as a three-month visit grew into a 23-month
- [Private Eye, Public Ear](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04240801/) - When I was 14 I wanted to be a private investigator. I had watched television shows about them — Simon & Simon; Rockford Magnum, P.I. — and it was clear from my research that this was an exciting job with shootouts, fistfights, sexy women, and fast cars. The P.I.s on television weren't like the adults
- [A Day at the Beach](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04250801/) - At the end of the film Venus, the character played by 74-year-old Peter O’Toole is taken by a young friend to a British seaside resort in winter, where he dies. If any viewer didn’t know that this was a sad turn of events, he was cued by the fact that it occurred in a happy
- [A $3 Cover](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04280801/) - “I have a car,” he whispered in my ear while we danced, and for a moment I was tempted to whisper back, “Me too. It’s a Corolla. Do you know anything about how to fix window seals?” For the last six months I danced every week at a place with a $3 cover called
- [Light Show](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04290801/) - Olafur Eliasson likes light. He also likes color. He likes to combine light and color and then sometimes he likes darkness, the absence of light. The first room I walked into at his major MoMA/P.S.1 exhibit has a spinning prism in the middle. It throws colored strips of light onto the white walls, and when
- [Man Overboard](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04300801/) - Last year a few video trailers for Chad Kultgen’s novel The Average American Male came online. In one, a man bitches about the price of the dinner, demanding a blow job in return. In another, a man tells a girl he loves her only to get her to give him a blow job. And finally,
- [The End of the Affair](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03040801/) - The best birthday present I ever received was for my 8th birthday. It was The Audubon Book of Birds, an oversized volume full of colored plates with birds of every imaginable variety. I have no idea why my parents bought this for me; I had never shown an interest in birds. Regardless, the book
- [The Serenader](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03070801/) - Tonight, as he does almost every night, Roberto Corroy leaves his house in the Barrio de los Mexicanos and walks through the curving streets of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, his jacket zipped up to his neck, his hands stuffed into his pockets, and his guitar tucked under an arm. His thin-soled shoes slap the
- [Sixty Hours to Mexico City](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03070803/) - The bus thumps across the Bay Bridge, over Treasure Island, past container ships and massive cranes, a yard of cargo boxes, the Horizon and Hapag-Lloyd lines, and under a wren of overpasses. I switch seats because my light is broken, then switch again because the seat cloth is torn. In Oakland, young men wearing baseball
- [The Depression Book Blues](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03050801/) - “I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a
- [The Pizza Police](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03070802/) - I should start by revealing the location of my own perfect pizza: Denino’s Pizza Tavern, which has made its home on Port Richmond Avenue on Staten Island since 1937. The place is run by the family of the original founders, a fact that some claim contributes to the consistent quality of the pie throughout the
- [The Curse of Self-Abuse](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03100801/) - Masturbation’s bad rap can be dated with surprising accuracy. Around 1712, a short, anonymous pamphlet called Onania began to circulate around the 2,000-odd coffee houses of London, published by the private press of one P. Varenne. Little did anyone know it would become history’s most successful advertorial. The pamphlet made the sensational claim that masturbation
- [Stretch Pants](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03110801/) - I pulled a packaged alfajor that I bought for breakfast at the bus station out of my backpack and got into my new hotel room hide-a-bed. The photo on the foil packet of two sugar cookies held together by a thick layer of dulce de leche and coated in shiny chocolate promised a good
- [Tales of a Home Shopping Employee](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03130801/) - It’s my first week of work, and I’m standing in a walk-in fridge that’s bigger than the entire kitchen back in my apartment, blowing hot breath onto my stiff fingers and trying to find the fresh herbs. There’s plenty of other food in here: zucchinis and lettuce, chicken breasts and beef cuts. Finally, I see
- [Eliot the King](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03130802/) - I can’t stop thinking that Eliot Spitzer’s downfall is extraordinary in its Oedipal dimensions. I don’t mean this in the Freudian sense, but in the classical. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex a man, Oedipus, attempts to engineer his own fate in the face of a terrible prophecy. In the end, Oedipus comes to realize that his
- [Open House](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03170802/) - It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve read the Sunday Times (skimming the Week in Review and studying the wedding announcements), fiddled with an essay in progress (taking out a paragraph and putting it back in again), called my sister to hash over our insecurities (which parent was more to blame?), and watched a rerun of Girlfriends.
- [The Death of Gadget Worship](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03170804/) - America's supply of executive nostril foliage, kept in merciful check for the last three decades, is on the verge of rapid proliferation: The Sharper Image has filed for bankruptcy protection and is closing half its stores, and suddenly it may be much harder to obtain titanium-enhanced nose-hair trimmers that can prune even the most
- [The Forest and the Trees](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03170801/) - Given the state of the natural world right now, it’s hard to get through a book of nature writing without getting depressed. It’s not about documenting these trees, this stream, that coastline. It’s these disappearing trees, this dying stream, that polluted coastline. The most optimistic nature writing in the last several years was Alan Weisman’s
- [Bottled Water World](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03170803/) - When I was a youngster in Appalachia, my grandfather and I would sometimes go to the Black Valley Spring to fetch water. Granddad’s summer cottage had no plumbing. We made do with rain barrels, a couple of intermittent springs near the house, and extreme conservation methods that included an outhouse. It was never absolutely
- [D Day](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03190801/) - Despite its familiarity, vitamin D is pretty puzzling. Not really a vitamin at all, it is actually a fat-soluble nutrient that is a prohormone (a precursor substance to a hormone). Milk is fortified with it, but it does not come in most other dairy products like cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, and it occurs in
- [MoMA Has Designs](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03200801/) - It's more like entering a fun house than an art exhibit. There's so much going on. The clutter gives the impression of people with too little time and too much they want to show you. Lights twinkle and blink. A spiraling green design winds down the central corridor to a slight dizzying effect. Electronic
- [Columbus Discovers the Clitoris](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03240801/) - Renaissance men could barely keep up with all the exciting discoveries of their era, not least in the field of anatomy. Sixty years after Christopher set off for the New World, another Italian by the named of Renaldus Columbus (no relation) announced to his spellbound colleagues that he had finally discovered “the seat of
- [Trying Not to Bail](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03250801/) - At the bouldering gym my instructor was wearing a shell-and-nut necklace. A choker, really. He was ripped and humble like most climbers, with the defined veiny forearms of a heroin addict, but the good nature and good looks of someone who gets high the natural way: from climbing rocks and walls. I hadn’t been at
- [A Bigger Boat](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03260801/) - At Cape Cod in August, my girlfriend and her ex-boyfriend say they want to go to the beach. It’s her birthday weekend, and he’s visiting from St. Louis. He’s tan, like she is, and blond, and taller than I am. My skin is pasty white. He also has big hands, which he uses to fix
- [A Critic at Large](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03280801/) - It's not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what's written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered,
- [Tour of Duty](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03290801/) - I tried getting into Iraq the easy way first, by applying for a tourist visa. The first Iraqi I ever met, a diplomat in Bangladesh, clapped me on the shoulders when I rang the embassy's buzzer and asked for a visa in early 2001. "Let me tell you about my country," he said, shifting in
- [An Informal Economy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02040801/) - The boy had the kind of ears no human could possibly hope to grow into, and when he showed up at my restaurant table, just tall enough to mouth-breathe into the backside of my newspaper, I told him to eff off. I had become the anti-Mother Teresa in my first month in India. I
- [The Second Sex, the Second Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02060801/) - Last month, anthropologist Helen Fisher opened a speech at the Economic Summit in Davos with, “I am definitely not a feminist.” The irony of the situation was lost on her apparently. The word “feminist” has become almost meaningless. Some people will twist themselves into knots trying to avoid the label, and others will wield it
- [Idoltry](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02070801/) - It ought to be mentioned just once that American Idol is one of the best pieces of culture produced on this planet so far in the 21st century. It is also to be admitted that the century is young. Other things will happen. But I don't want the people of the future to think that
- [Body Triple](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02080801/) - Fret not, guardians of authenticity! Bubbly, super-assured pop variable Miley Cyrus does virtually all her own lip-synching when she performs live in concert. All her own costume-wearing too. Her PR firm has assured us of this. Yes, there is that YouTube video clip that shows the 15-year-old star of the Disney TV series Hannah Montana
- [The Oily Truth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02120801/) - Just what makes the Mediterranean diet so healthy has been a matter of debate for years. The diet is recognized for significantly reducing the risk for stroke and heart disease, certain cancers, and dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease. Although not a uniform diet, it typically features an abundance of grains, fruits, and vegetables, and also
- [Pornography of the Kitchen](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02130801/) - If the Marx brothers had ever taken to food writing, they might have produced something very like F.T. Marinetti’s marvelously slapstick work, The Futurist Cookbook. The provocative (and regrettably Mussolini-approved) Italian artist Marinetti was infatuated by all things sleek, sharp, electronic, and shiny, but he was also an avowed enemy of pasta, which he denounced
- [Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02140801/) - If platitudes had weight, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope would be impossible to lift off the table. Still, it’s a good book. By the standards of “writings by politicians” it’s in the top percentile. You read it and you like the man. You read it and feel that he has managed somehow to be
- [The Quiet Italian](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02180801/) - Once I met a man who did not travel. He lived in the Swiss city of Locarno, on Lago Maggiore — the city, famous now for its film festival, that Hemingway’s Frederic Henry rows across the Italian border to reach in A Farewell to Arms, making his sad separate peace with the Great War. It
- [Home Bodies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02190801/) - My father is a home-improving sort of guy. He grew up a poor kid in a cramped Brooklyn apartment, so when he finally got a split-level in the suburbs he never stopped expanding and renovating. There was the deck with carcinogenic charcoal grill in the `50s, the den with full-wall TV and stereo unit
- [How to Shop](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02200802/) - Quick: How do you tell if a woman in a movie is supposed to be intelligent? First off, she’d probably be brunette, but past that. Glasses, yes. Little to no makeup. Her hair is probably in a ponytail. Clothes she probably bought at the Gap in a size too big. You know she’s the
- [Stare Master](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02210801/) - It's The Look that gets to you. Frida Kahlo took up a variety of subject matter and dabbled in a number of styles. All of it worth seeing. But in the end it is the self-portraits that endure and that fuel her ever-increasing stature in 20th century art. That's because in the portraits you get
- [English as a Second Language](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02220802/) - Rumi looks pure. Her skin is porcelain-colored from high-end, Japanese-brand foundation and a layer of bone-colored powder. Her eyelashes are curled at 90 degrees, coated with black mascara and lined heavily. Her lips are glossed clear with just a hint of pink pigment. I have learned to negotiate the labyrinth of her weird papers without
- [No New Developments](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02220801/) - It looks like instant film photography is set to go the way of the VCR and cassette player, and become another commercial casualty of the digital revolution. The last wheeze of analog photography came recently, by way of an announcement from Polaroid headquarters that the company was effectively shutting down production of its film manufacturing
- [Horsing Around With Catherine the Great](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02250801/) - The list of misogynist rumors about strong women leaders is long and fertile, but none lodge in the memory quite so vividly as the notorious “horse story” involving the Empress of Russia, Catherine II. Upon her death in 1796, word swept around Europe that she had been involved in a tryst with a stallion;
- [The Mosquito and the Itch](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02260801/) - A scientist once told me that she wished for a safe way to obliterate mosquitoes from the Earth. I was kind of shocked, since it seemed like this would tinker with the natural order of the world. Don't worry, she said: “They have absolutely no ecological value.” And just imagine the benefits: Without mosquitoes
- [Hillary Clinton: Living History](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02270802/) - In a move seemingly calculated to tease and titillate Right-wing conspiracy theorists around the globe, Hillary Clinton wrote a senior honor's thesis at Wellesley on Saul Alinsky and then later had it sealed from the public during the eight years of her husband's presidency. The thesis has taken on legendary status since then. Peggy Noonan
- [Outside the Box](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10011401/) - “You don’t know how terrible it is,” Joseph Cornell once told a gallerist who praised his work, “to be locked into boxes all your life.” Boxes were Joseph Cornell’s obsession. He collected everyday objects and photographs and arranged them inside wooden shadow frames. Often he placed glass panes over the boxes, which makes them feel
- [Waiting, and Waiting, and Waiting for Godot](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10031401/) - This year, the Walker Art Museum in Saint Paul, Minnesota, has centered its 41st annual film series on the concept of time. It’s curated around Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which won Marclay (who is credited with the invention of “turntablism” and has collaborated with Sonic Youth) the Golden Lion Award for best artist at the
- [The House](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10081401/) - It was the house. Bats flew in. The basement was crawling with snakes. The day I stumbled down there in the dark holding a laundry basket, my heart froze. Conversely, the stove was electric and not very good at maintaining a temperature. I was always burning things. The house caused multiple losses. If I were
- [No-bel](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10141401/) - If the members of the Nobel Academy felt slighted when Jean-Paul Sartre rejected their prize 50 years ago, they didn’t show it. The Academy set out the dinner plates and made their speeches anyway — without the philosopher. The 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced Anders Österling — longtime member of the Swedish Academy, and
- [Dancing in the Dark](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10151401/) - In the year 1905, Henri Matisse painted a portrait of his wife wearing a rather extraordinary hat. The painting was displayed at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that same year. Much shock and controversy followed. To many, the hat looked like a giant lump of randomly chosen colors sitting atop the poor woman’s head. What,
- [Angry with His Own Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10201401/) - The great Austrian novelist Robert Musil, born like Mencken in 1880, placed these prophetic words in the mouth of his protagonist Ulrich, in The Man without Qualities: “One can’t be angry with one’s own time without damage to oneself.” It’s a warning H. L. Mencken may never have read, or have held up to him
- [Looking Good](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10221401/) - A few years ago, the journalist Janet Malcolm interviewed the German artist Thomas Struth in Dusseldorf. She accompanied him to a nearby factory where he photographed industrial machines. Malcolm watched from a distance as Struth worked at his meticulous and time-consuming process. At one point in this visit, Struth discussed the work and influence of
- [Half Sight](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10241401/) - Here in the crowded retina clinic, we’re waiting to have pictures taken of our macula with marvelous cameras, the backs of our eyes are about to be zapped with lasers or, like me, our central retinal veins have occluded — fancy term for a blood clot — and the retinas have swollen. The result is
- [Deep Surfaces](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10271401/) - One lure of taking photographs is that you get to hide behind a machine and safely observe the world. You get to look, without being seen. This was especially true in the early days of photography when photographic equipment was bulky and when exposing the film or plate required a dark area at the back
- [Slipping Away](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10291401/) - The 1940s film Portrait of Jennie begins up in the clouds, with questions: “What is time?” asks a voice. “What is space? What is life? What is death?” A quote from Euripides comes onscreen to the strains of Debussy: WHO KNOWETH IF TO DIE BE BUT TO LIVE … AND THAT CALLED LIFE BY MORTALS
- [To Twist the Tongue](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09021401/) - Everyone has that one book they fondly remember from their childhood that takes them back to the cozy winter nights snuggled up to mom or dad. Perhaps, like me, you’d beg them to read it through one last time before you drifted off to sleep, never satisfied hearing the words only once though you’d memorized
- [Be Fruitful](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09021402/) - During late summers, I become almost fruitarian. Sometimes, nearing the dinner hour, I suddenly realize that the only things I’ve eaten all day have been fresh melon, berries, nectarines, and plums. The root of this fruity love affair is clearly my childhood summers, which I spent at my family’s open-air, roadside produce stand in southern
- [Boom & Bust](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09051401/) - Just past the front door, in the Atrium of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, are six “ideal” busts. The busts are installed near window ledges and against walls, high above the floor, so that everyone is guaranteed to walk right by them. The busts are female figures, carved in white marble. Their
- [Age of Loneliness](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09101401/) - It is a heart-wrenching love story. That alone would put it in the category of “good summer read.” It is a short book, clocking in at one hundred and fifty-one pages in my edition. It’s thus an easy book to stick into a beach bag or to carry on the train. It is also highly
- [Will Walk for Beer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09121401/) - A few years back, while I was driving through the States, I passed a hitchhiker holding a sign that read "Hiking for Beer." This abstruse notice made me wonder. Was he offering drivers beer for their service or if this were the goal of his trip — to hitchhike in search of the best beer
- [The Last Walk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09151401/) - Here’s a question: Are we evolving to become quadrupedal, needing four limbs to get around as we once did on the African savanna? The Last Great Walk: The True Story of a 1909 Walk from New York to San Francisco, and Why it Matters Today. Available now from Rodale Books. After all, we now need
- [Passing On](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09171401/) - In the last years of her life, Martha began to lose her feathers. Sol Stephan, General Manager of the Cincinnati Zoo, where Martha spent most of her years, began collecting the feathers in a cigar box without much idea of what he would do with them. Martha lived a sedentary life at the zoo. Her
- [The View from Diggerland](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09191401/) - In June, West Berlin, NJ, became the home to the country’s first construction theme park, Diggerland. When I first saw the billboard on I-95, I was skeptical, but intrigued. The whole thing seemed like a showcase for JCB construction equipment and a tool to encourage children over 36 inches tall – the height requirement for
- [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09211401/) - When protestors in Istanbul’s Taksim Square last year refused to back down to soldiers trying to remove them ahead of a massive government-sponsored construction project, more than a few people must have nodded to themselves: I know that place, where Galip and Kemal, protagonists of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul novels, go to the cinema, hail a
- [Nothing is Hidden](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09241401/) - All is not well. But we do not see that at first. The white house and the white picket fence are in perfect order. The sky is blue and bright. The flowers are red and yellow. The grass is green. We’re surrounded by primary colors and clarity. "David Lynch: The Unified Field" Through January 11,
- [Buggin'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09291401/) - I once spent a year living in a quaint, drafty first-floor apartment. Moving in and out was a breeze, and 2 AM dog walks were slightly more bearable without having to schlep up and down flights of stairs half-asleep in my slippers. One of the prices you pay for a first floor abode, however, is
- [Celestial Thinking](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08011402/) - In the first few weeks of World War I, Evelyn Underhill published a little book about mysticism. Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People was written during the last months of peace. But was a book about mysticism for the common man really necessary when the whole world was collapsing? Underhill decided it was,
- [Cooking Local](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08011401/) - Like many of the pieces I write for Foodstuffs, this is a combined story of love and revulsion.* But unlike those pieces, this doesn’t reach back into history to pluck out Victorian funeral cookies or pre-microwave bachelor foods. No, this month I’m writing about recipes that are much more recent, but still forgotten — the
- [Stolen Gold](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08061401/) - Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. This sentiment has been echoed in every sport, at all levels of competition, and throughout time. Legacies have been sealed, fortunes have been made, legends have been forged on the back of victory. History remembers winners, not losers. Would we even know who Michael Jordan was even if
- [Beyond Ragù](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08081401/) - In the town of Crema, less than an hour east of Milan, they make a stuffed pasta that goes by the straightforward name of tortelli cremaschi. The name, however, is about the only straightforward aspect of this local speciality. Federico Fellini may have famously said, “life is a combination of magic and pasta.” But even
- [Home Again](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08111401/) - Salman Rushdie wrote an amusing little book in 1992. The title of the book is The Wizard of Oz. It’s about the famous movie with Judy Garland’s Dorothy and Toto and the Wicked Witches, East and West. The movie The Wizard of Oz is celebrating its 75-year anniversary this month. For three-quarters of a century,
- [Bows and Bees](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08131401/) - I harbor a host of dreams — “ambitions” seems too vulgar a word to me — that, were they to be realized, would crystalize in something very quiet, contained, at ease, and not especially splashy so far as dreams go, but indicative of a repast that comes with more obvious victories. There will be me
- [Oh, Brothers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08151401/) - When I read Marguerite Duras’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Lover, I was twenty-four years old, just finishing my MFA in writing and wondering what I would do next with my life. I stared at her cover photo on the book jacket. She was seventy, wrinkled, yes, yet more so than any human being I had up until
- [Reading Wallace Reading](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08181401/) - I have David Foster Wallace’s personal copy of Don DeLillo’s novel End Zone. It is in my hands. It used to be his, and now it’s mine, albeit temporarily and under careful supervision by credentialed professionals. It is teeth-chatteringly cold in this room and brain-fryingly hot on the street because it’s July in Austin. People
- [Little Histories](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08201401/) - The United States of America has a short history compared to other nations. This does not stop it from having more historical societies than seems possible. Most American historical societies were founded between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, to preserve records and artifacts of a rapidly dissolving local way of life. Today, there are
- [The Speed of Inspiration](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08221401/) - Creative people walk. The philosopher and compulsive stroller Friedrich Nietzsche left little room for debate when he claimed 125 years ago, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” And he had a lot of company in this belief, especially among the pantheon of the early big heads: Tchaikovsky, Rousseau, Dickens, Mahler, Thoreau, Kant —
- [Cutting Edge](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08251401/) - Boats traversing the Panama Canal look strange and out of place, like mirages or optical illusions. That’s because the Canal — especially at places like the Culebra Cut — goes right through what would otherwise be continuous land. The Canal is, in essence, a trench. It was dug right across the width of Panama in
- [Pretty Vacant](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08271401/) - I am a Harry Potter fan. Like many adult enthusiasts, I was introduced to the novels by my children, who began reading them in pre-adolescence and continued into their teens. My appreciation was reinforced by my students. When I led a group of undergraduates to London as part of a course on Charles Dickens, the
- [Cashing Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08291401/) - You wouldn’t have known from the long line of people waiting to check in that the Showboat Atlantic City Hotel and Casino would be closing in just one week. My partner Rob and I arrived at the Mardi Gras-themed casino a few minutes after 4:00, when check-in began, and already guests had formed a long
- [Space Junk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07091401/) - Everyone wears underwear. Your grandma wears them, your dad wears them, your mailman wears them. Heck, even some dogs wear underwear. We are a society fixated on comfort, but also on functionality. Your personal trainer dons moisture-wicking underlayer, while your mom might be sporting spanx to hold in the result of years of childbearing. Suited
- [Sound Envisioned](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07111401/) - People often talk about the physical presence of Maryanne Amacher when talking about the artist Maryanne Amacher. They will talk about her yellow hair and her long solitary dreadlock that dates from 1962. Or they will mention the red ski suit she wore even in summer, or her aviator hat and goggles, or the way
- [Cooling Off](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07141401/) - Being cool is mostly about posture. It is a way of holding your body. It is a certain expression on your face. It’s the way you handle a cigarette, but not the way you smoke it. Maybe you never even take a puff; you just let the thing dangle in your right hand, smoldering, until
- [Sweet Words](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07161401/) - The Turkish delight was, in retrospect, a pretty big mistake. We were browsing a Middle Eastern market near our home in upstate New York, a festive, mom-and-pop place where I tend to buy way more than I need. It was winter — cars plowing down Genesee Street beyond the front window throwing plumes of brown
- [Second Nature](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07171401/) - I grew up in a world that some people might consider a paradise. Or was it more like hell? In any case, I was regularly surrounded by naked strangers. Sometimes I knew these encounters were coming my way, while other times they took me by surprise. The scene was Europe in the early 1970s. I
- [V is for Vexing](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07211401/) - Whatever happened to viognier becoming “the next chardonnay”? That’s what they told us back in the 1990s, when I was a young man first stumbling into wine. I drank a lot of viognier back then. You couldn’t avoid it. Viognier was found on nearly every wine list you’d encounter. Now? I almost never see it,
- [Solitary Pursuit](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07231401/) - Everyone knows the feeling: discomfort, annoyance, rage, an entire range of emotions provoked by other people when one might wish to have total solitude, or at least relative peace and quiet. Welcome to the modern museum experience. What do we want when confronting great art? Books are easy, ready companions, and it’s always possible to
- [As the World Burned](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07251401/) - What we learned about Europe after World War I — the war to end all wars that didn’t — is that everything was stable until everything fell apart. War caught Europeans by surprise, ripped its roots from the soil. Power in Europe had been balanced by a complicated and tangled system of alliances that worked
- [Face Off](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07281401/) - Willem de Kooning made a portrait of Marilyn Monroe in 1954. The painting consists of a few splotches of yellow and blue paint. There are two sketchy and lopsided eyes in the middle of the canvas. Two wedges of red surely represent Marilyn’s lips. Is that an arm on the right? Maybe. There’s a human
- [Served Cold](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07301401/) - Imagine yourself as a child, frolicking through your parents’ back yard and digging up worms. Your mother calls you in from the kitchen for dinner and you bound in through the back door, smelling the roast she’s been tending to for the past few hours. At the table your father sits reading the newspaper, your
- [Guilt Trap](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06021401/) - If I Did It is an extremely confusing book written by an extremely confused man. That man is O. J. Simpson. He wrote the book as an act of confession. Or, maybe not, since the entire book is hypothetical. O. J. Simpson didn’t even write the book. He told his hypothetical account to a ghostwriter
- [Forgetting Jimmy Darmody](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06041401/) - Not again, I thought, as I finished watching the second season of House of Cards and saw my favorite character, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), chief of staff and general fixer for the ruthless politico Frank Underwood, eliminated for good — if death is for good, which I realize that on television it may not be
- [Schnitzel Happens](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06061401/) - Not long ago, following an exhausting and not-prosperous work trip, my flight home from Bilbao was delayed seven hours by a terrible wind storm that shut down several European airports. I spent five of those seven hours stuck in a line of hundreds, while two overwhelmed workers at the Lufthansa desk ever-so-slowly attempted to reroute
- [The End](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06091401/) - The difference between the person who has considered suicide and the one who actually commits it is small. You could say the difference is conditional, accidental even. Committing an act of suicide is just the culmination of a journey, a journey of dangerous ideas that, once allowed into the mind, can never be fully shaken
- [Stolen Away](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06111401/) - I sat alone in Hillcrest Cafeteria picking through a salad, when I happened to turn in the direction of the table not more than five feet away. A guy I had seen around the graduate sculpture program held a tipped glass of ice water, about to spill it over his girlfriend’s head. I was horrified.
- [Ein, Zweigelt, Drei](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06131401/) - Who knew that expressing a warm affection for lovely, drinkable Austrian red wines could be construed as a revolutionary act that threatened civilized wine culture? Or that someone who champions Austrian grape varieties might be viewed as a wild-eyed radical, intent on casting the world of wine into a state of chaos “to the detriment
- [No Picnic](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06141401/) - If my life is indeed a picnic, like the cliche says, I’d argue that it’s specifically a late-1800s picnic – stressful, frequently overpacked, and requiring me to wake up a lot earlier than I’d like. At least, that’s how these “relaxing” Victorian outings often were for the women stuck with food preparation. 1883’s Practical Housekeeping
- [Humming Along](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06171401/) - Some hummingbirds are no larger than a thumb, and the smallest among them are the very smallest birds in existence. Yet it’s hard to avoid superlatives when talking about these tiny creatures. With their often magnificent jewel-like colors, they glimmer like finely wrought works of art. In fact, they are miracles of nature: extremely agile,
- [The Indomitable Lions](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06191401/) - The world was watching on June 8th, 1990 as the two teams ran onto the pitch. With the crowd chatting loudly, Argentina and Cameroon readied themselves for the opening game of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Just by watching the two teams warm up, it was pretty clear they came from very different circumstances.
- [Make It New](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06201401/) - One day in 1848, a trio of young Englishmen declared themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was an absurd name for a ridiculous idea. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, proposed to take art more than 300 years backward. They wanted art to return to the period
- [Take a Walk](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06231401/) - A person who eschews a car and walks by choice today seems willfully archaic, as curious a specimen as someone choosing to play professional football in a leather helmet. Why would you choose to walk when the gods of modern technology have provided us with cars? We’re in an age of rapid movement, and walkers
- [Our Apples, Ourselves](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06251401/) - Long has the fate of mankind been tied to apples. They got Adam and Eve banished from Paradise. With the apple, Johnny Appleseed tamed the New World. And then, in the late 19th century, Paul Cézanne declared he would paint the otherwise unremarkable fruit and “astonish Paris with an apple.” The World is an Apple:
- [Coming True](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06301401/) - The idea for The Ugly Duckling, writes Paul Binding in his newly published Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness, came to Andersen on a walk. Andersen was already famous by then. He was staying as a guest at an estate on the island of Sjælland. Andersen always got himself invited to places like this — grand
- [The City Sleeps](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05081401/) - I wander through the narrow passages and quickly lose my sense of direction. The limestone buildings are completely closed off from the outside world. They seem built to last forever. My presence, in turn, excites nothing more than an occasional passing glance. A young boy squats in a window framed with stone blocks. The framing
- [A Short Flight](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05121401/) - On April 11, 1969, Major League Baseball made its debut in the city of Seattle to a raucous crowd of 17,000 fans. On a pleasant, sunny, breezy sixty-degree day in the hastily renovated Sick’s Stadium, the expansion Seattle Pilots defeated the Chicago White Sox seven to nothing. Gary Bell, the ace of the pitching staff,
- [No Regrets](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05141401/) - Jasper Johns has a way of making a flip thing into a deep thing. Take his current show at the Museum of Modern Art. It is called “Regrets.” The title comes from a rubber stamp. Johns uses the stamp as a quick and painless form of R.S.V.P. When people send him letters or cards asking
- [Meet the Schwenkfelders](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05161401/) - The Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center is near the train tracks that cut through Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. Nearly every town in southeastern Pennsylvania is organized like Pennsburg: A few houses lining a short empty street that was once a thoroughfare for trains that stopped moving a long time ago. The trains once served the mills and
- [To Be a Ghost](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05191401/) - When It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us was published in 1996, the book was met with the kind of response that a serious nonfiction writer dreams about. The ideas presented in the book became the topic of conversation across the land, politicians and commentators felt obligated to respond to it, it
- [Into the Black](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05211401/) - Francisco Goya was felled by a mysterious illness in 1792. He didn’t die, he just fell. The illness made him dizzy and disoriented. Goya stumbled; he teetered. He was nauseous. Voices sounded in his head. He was frequently in terror. His hearing began to fail. Soon, he was completely deaf. By all accounts, he was
- [Divided, Together](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05261401/) - I’m at Atlanta-Hartsfield on a busy Thursday evening, and my goal is to walk a few dozen yards from Simply Books across the “A” concourse’s main hallway to the Chick-Fil-A. It’s a short but not a trivial journey — the wide hallway is packed from edge to edge with a swiftly moving river of thousands
- [Inside the Refugio](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05281401/) - A smiling cashier welcomed me in the lobby. His arms were akimbo. He wore a polo shirt that read, “Refugio Herpetológico.” “Welcome!” he exclaimed in Spanish. “How are you?” I forced a smile and forked over my 3,000 colones — about $6. He handed me a receipt and escorted me through the gift shop, toward
- [Old People, Young People, and Priests](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05301401/) - There’s one thing certain about the Dubliners: They’re looking to escape. They’re playing hooky from school to watch the ships along the riverside, or sneaking out of work to tip an elbow at the public house, or sitting in class dreaming about the Saturday evening bazaar. Mr. Duffy thinks that, in “certain circumstances” he could
- [The Children of Julia Child](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-children-of-julia-child/) - For two streaming seasons at HBO, the vividly colorful life, innovative culinary skills and cultural change-making of the late Julia Child (1912-2004) have been on display for all to enjoy as much as they would a fine bouillabaisse or cassoulet. As an American-born chef and author who taught the world an approachable way into worldly
- [Card Snark](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02051001/) - I missed the moment when shop window displays changed from Santa red to sexy scarlet: a fabulous froth of lace and slinky silken negligees. Most of the neighborhood still has Christmas lights up, but all the stores are pushing Valentine's Day. In spite of the omnipresent window displays and advertisements, I'll bet millions of men
- [In Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02041001/) - In 2008, Lori Gottlieb wrote an essay for The Atlantic entitled "Marry Him!: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough." She argued for a lowering of expectations, the deflating of the fairy tale expectation of a Prince Charming. There is no perfect man, and if you reject someone because he does not match your
- [Fleshed Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02031001/) - "Mannerism" sounds stupid. One immediately associates it with manners. And "manners" are not in the highest regard these days. Mannerism would seem to be a movement of affected and empty gestures, of style over substance. That's what many do mean when they use the term. Mannerism has come to refer, primarily, to the group
- [Name Recognition](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02021001/) - I’m having a baby this year. What name or names would a poet recommend? — Ana Well, a big congratulations to you! I would say that, in general, poets consider the four M's when deciding on a name: match, meaning, musicality, and meter, and not necessarily in that order. Let me explain. Match: This
- [Paternal Instinct](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01291001/) - My escape plan was short and sweet: 1. Quit day job. 2. Sell eggs. 3. Go to India and Sri Lanka. 4. Change everything. I knew my Asian father wouldn't understand. He sees my life in the long run, wanting to make sure I'm not on the streets selling my vagina for meth in
- [Diorama-o-rama](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01281001/) - When that poor women recently fell into and tore Picasso's "The Actor" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nobody questioned whether the painting should be repaired. The only issue seemed to be how — and as of right now, the Met either doesn't know or isn't revealing the answer. This is a no-brainer. The master
- [Love Means Never Having to Say 404 Error](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01271001/) - A New Jersey inventor unveiled a $9,000 sex robot at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas earlier this month, and it’s hard to say who should be more concerned: hookers, man’s best friend, or Elvis impersonators. With her silicone boobs and silicon brain, Roxxxy could eventually put them all out of business. Granted,
- [Sloppy O](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01261001/) - We're still under the sway of Orson Welles. Take, for instance, the movie he starred in and directed in 1946. It's called The Stranger, and Welles decided it was his least favorite of all the films he made. The critics and everyone else fell in line behind this pronouncement and the film fell into relative
- [How Do You Say 'Quickie' in French?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01251001/) - Power, as Henry Kissinger gloated, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. At his star’s highest point in 1810 — he was then aged 41 — the Emperor Napoleon was the master of continental Europe, with 44 million people under his control. Then, in a moment of candor, he confessed to an aide that he had done it
- [Eat Drink Actor Director](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01221001/) - In 1964, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published “The Raw and the Cooked” (“Le Cru et le Cruit”), in which he argued that turning raw food into cooked food traced a symbolic passage from nature to culture. Cooking, in other words, was a kind of bildungsroman for civilization itself. Lévi-Strauss’ essay theorized what Julia
- [The Foreign Service](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01201001/) - It is impossible to write about such a book as Best European Fiction 2010 without also writing about America's disinterest in such a book. Neither Zadie Smith nor Aleksandar Hemon could do it — and they're the author of the introduction and the editor of the anthology. It's a well worn angle by now: the fact
- [Quitting Time?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01191001/) - I make a New Year's resolution each year, even though it's an arbitrary thing to do and I never succeed at making the change anyway. This year, I'm turning 30 and I really do want to make a change in my life (to quit my job). So if I say that's my New Year's resolution, am I
- [Revolutionary Roads](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01191002/) - In the first years of the 19th century, Napoleon decided he'd had enough of the Haitian patriot, freedom fighter, and self-proclaimed defender of the French Revolution, Toussaint Louverture. Louverture had organized slave revolts in Haiti and defeated armies sent by the Spanish, English, and the French. A man of the Enlightenment, he took the
- [Ball to the Wall](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01151001/) - When the Soviets finally released the autopsy report on Hitler’s corpse in 1968, it contained the startling datum that the Führer was one testicle short. The body found outside the Berlin bunker had been burned with gasoline and had to be identified by its dental records (Hitler had terrible teeth, with metal implants for
- [Seed Money](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01151003/) - The Pennsylvania Farm Show is always pointing out that it's the largest indoor agricultural event in the country, so maybe it makes sense to start with the buildings. The Farm Show is held just outside Harrisburg at the Farm Show Complex & Expo Center — a space, as its name suggests, dedicated to the Farm
- [There Is No Try](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01151002/) - The X-wing fighter has sunk, and only the tip of its nose shows above the lake's surface. LUKE: Oh, no. We'll never get it out now. Yoda stamps his foot in irritation. YODA: So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say? Luke looks uncertainly out at
- [Flaking Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01131001/) - Wilson Alwyn Bentley was a snowflake man. So much so that he came to be known as "Snowflake." Bentley was a Vermont man; it’s easy to understand his fascination with snow. I was just in Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, last weekend. Driving down Route 2 at night with the high beams on as the
- [Passing the Bar](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01111001/) - IncrEdibles thankfully didn't last long, but their blip of an existence makes a point: if a food product as extremely stupid as this can make it to market, that says a lot about our, well, stomach for convenience foods. Basically, we eat a lot of them. And while one might hope that the belt-tightening from
- [Searching for Michelangelo](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12111301/) - Michelangelo’s David is a large sculpture. He’s close to 17 feet tall. Since 1873, David has stood on a large pedestal at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. The pedestal makes him seem even taller than his 17 feet. It is strange, really, that David should be so tall. As everybody knows, Goliath was the giant,
- [Don't Trust the Painting](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11061301/) - Have you ever felt odd? Perhaps an odd feeling came upon you one morning at the market. You saw the piles of vegetables and the cuts of meats covered in clear plastic. You noticed, with particular attention, the little signs above the individual fruits giving their names and prices. Suddenly, it seemed unaccountably odd that any
- [City Views](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11211302/) - Poor Fernand Léger. He is a man trapped in sociology. His paintings aren’t looked at for their own sake anymore but for what they show us about city life in the early 20th century. "Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis." Through January 5, 2014. Philadelphia Museum of Art. You can see why Léger’s art is
- [A SINKing Feeling](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01071002/) - I ought to be past the stage of being a SINK. Instead, in part thanks to the economy, in part due to changing mores, I'm still stuck as a SINK (Single Income No Kids). I just wish that the word didn't strike me as being so forlorn, evoking someone having a sardine sandwich for
- [The Last Inuit of Quebec](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01071001/) - Three summers ago, looking for adventure, I left New York City and drove to California for a newspaper job. One evening while jogging, I noticed a glowing rock high on a hill. A few weeks later, I pitched my tent beside it. After work, I’d trudge up my hill in the moonlight and sit for
- [Context and Crucifixes](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09301301/) - You don’t normally expect to find Jesus Christ at The Jewish Museum in New York City. But there he is. Jesus is hanging on the cross, or floating in the sky all over the second floor of the museum. This is all because of Marc Chagall. "Chagall: Love, War, and Exile" The Jewish Museum, New
- [Paper or Plastic?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01071003/) - I just bought a Kindle. I am surprised at myself for doing so. Despite its cute retro name, the Kindle is mostly bought by people who are techno-centric, which I am not. It’s true that I now live with a large flat-screen television — but that wasn’t my idea. I also happen to have five
- [Filet of Soul](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01061001/) - In the past year I've reviewed books on what I thought were diverse topics: the philosophy of time, neurobiology, writing, happiness, mental illness. It turns out they were all about the same subject: how to live. Many of the books thought they had it all figured out. The problem is cell phones! No, wait, it's
- [The Painter in Chief](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04291301/) - George W. Bush has finally found WMDs. That's what a commenter on the website Gawker recently noted. But these WMDs are Watercolors Mostly of Dogs. George W. Bush, you see, has taken up painting. His favorite subject is dogs. It is said that he has already painted over 50 paintings of dogs. He also paints
- [Party Like It's 2009](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01051001/) - There's been a lot of griping, of late, about the decade just passed. That seems appropriate for a decade that began in terrorism and war, and ended in economic turmoil (never having gotten the terrorism and war out of its system along the way). It was crap. TIME magazine, a reasonably polite rag most
- [You Say You Want a Resolution](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01041001/) - Do you have any advice on how to stick to New Year’s resolutions? How do poets do it? — Carl My impulse is to say that if a poet breaks a New Year’s Resolution, she reflects on it, maybe writing a few lines of verse in private, and then realizes that it never should have
- [Sweeping Smooth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01311401/) - The Winter Olympics are, in essence, about putting things on your feet. This is a function of the weather. You cannot go barefoot into the snow and ice. In the summer, you can run around with nothing on at all. That’s what the ancient Greeks used to do when they had their Olympic games. You
- [How To Remain Human](https://www.thesmartset.com/how-to-remain-human-d-a-levy-cleveland/) - A young poet killed himself in Cleveland on November 24, 1968. He did it with a .22 caliber rifle he’d owned since childhood. In the years leading up to his death, the poet often demonstrated to friends how he could operate the gun with his feet and put the muzzle against his forehead, right at
- [Under Our Skin](https://www.thesmartset.com/under-our-skin/) - James Kaplan’s Sinatra: The Chairman completes his two-volume biography (Frank: The Voice was volume one) of the man widely regarded as the great interpreter of American popular song. While Sinatra has already inspired a library of books, no one else has succeeded as well as Kaplan in teasing out the complicated relationship between the singer’s
- [The Best Book on American Poetry Ever](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-best-book-on-american-poetry-ever/) - The best book ever written about American poetry is American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, published in 1971 by the poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). Rexroth is remembered today chiefly as a member of the post-World War II San Francisco counterculture, a mentor to the Beats and the author of numerous translations or recreations
- [The Age of Identity Wars](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-age-of-identity-wars/) - We live in an era of identity wars. On both sides of the Atlantic, old partisan loyalties are being reshuffled as a new national populist right battles over immigration with an open-borders, multicultural left. Beyond the West, the most dynamic leaders are seeking to root their legitimacy in historic national and religious traditions — Russian
- [Still a Monster](https://www.thesmartset.com/still-a-monster/) - A. David Moody recently completed his magisterial three-volume biography of Ezra Pound, and after roughly 2000 pages, it’s perhaps understandable that Stockholm syndrome might be playing a part in his judgements. It’s the most charitable explanation for the sheer persistent drumbeat of exculpatory lies he tells about his subject all throughout the 600 pages of
- [Seeing Things](https://www.thesmartset.com/seeing-things/) - Because I know the author, when I read Find Me by Laura van den Berg I pictured Laura as the protagonist. It’s not an autobiographical novel, and the character, Joy, is not especially like Laura in her physical description. Joy says: “My hair falls past my shoulders in dark waves, lush and healthy-looking. No bangs,
- [On Getting a Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/on-getting-a-life/) - If you're in the midst of a career change, I've got some advice: dress for the job you want. So, do you want to be a D.C. reporter? Or a punk rocker? (Lapham's Quarterly, The Smart Set) Once you've landed the job (no doubt due, in part, to your stunning wardrobe choices), celebrate your newfound success with
- [Made Up, Watered Down, and Missing Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/made-up-watered-down-and-missing-out/) - People — women in particular — have been making themselves up for centuries, often despite fear of public derision and threats to personal health. Makeup has been used as art and artifice, for subjugation and empowerment. Read about how it has changed through the years and how it looks today, as seen in the mirror of
- [He Said She Said](https://www.thesmartset.com/he-said-she-said/) - Aspiring writers must navigate the legions of advice from the legends who came before — not a simple task in a world that idolizes both Faulkner and Hemmingway. Read about teachers who advise their students against the use of the word “said,” and graduate programs that reject the use of anything but. (The Wall Street Journal,
- [Branching Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/branching-out/) - Did it ever strike you as a strange thing to drag a living tree once a year into your home and set it up to worship? If you are old enough, you may have seen decorating fashions come and go: fir cones painted in gold, cardboard adornments — preferably in red or green — artfully
- [A Keatsian Christmas](https://www.thesmartset.com/a-keatsian-christmas/) - Even if the only poetry you’ve ever read was in high school when the teacher made you do so — blasted adults — you likely intuited that there was something rather different, scope-wise, about the verse of winter from the verse of the warmer seasons. The latter often enough featured the imagery of green fields
- [5 Questions with Orhan Pamuk](https://www.thesmartset.com/5-questions-with-orhan-pamuk/) - Orhan Pamuk is one of the world’s best-known novelists. The Nobel Prize-winning author's fictions often focus on the lives, times, and people of his native Istanbul. His latest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, was six years in the writing and tells of the life of one street vendor in the city. TSS editor Richard Abowitz
- [5 Questions with Kelly Cherry](https://www.thesmartset.com/5-questions-with-kelly-cherry/) - Kelly Cherry is an award-winning poet and novelist, and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. Her latest book, Twelve Women in a Country Called America, is a collection of short stories. TSS assistant editor Maren Larsen reached Cherry by phone at her home in Virginia. 1.I recently read your collection Twelve Women in a Country
- [Why I Am Not A Radical](https://www.thesmartset.com/why-i-am-not-a-radical/) - In politics, at different times in my life, I have been on the center-right and the center-left and the center. But in spite of having co-authored a book entitled “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics,” I have never really been a radical of any kind. I understood why recently when I read, for
- [When In Rome](https://www.thesmartset.com/when-in-rome/) - Mary Beard is a classics professor at University of Cambridge. Her books have covered everything from ancient art to Roman laughter. Her honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a public intellectual in the old-school sense of narrating BBC specials, as well as adding a contemporary twist with an active Twitter account
- [What the Walls Taught Me](https://www.thesmartset.com/what-the-walls-taught-me-street-art-valparaiso-chile/) - We had climbed halfway up the staircase of a Valparaiso sidewalk when Salvador Dalí appeared. He was stenciled to the landing above, waiting for us with his perked up handlebar mustache. For a closer look, my fiancée Melanie and I stepped around another stray dog, his long body blocking almost the whole width of the concrete
- [The Novelist as Anglerfish](https://www.thesmartset.com/marilynne-robinson-the-novelist-as-anglerfish/) - When I was a child I read poorly written Sunday-school books. They happened to be Catholic books because I read them in a Catholic Sunday school. My mother was a Congregationalist and she would have preferred I be reared to that austere faith, but she lacked the strength to battle the passionate alcoholics and living
- [The Many Minds of Sherlock Holmes](https://www.thesmartset.com/sherlock-mindfulness-the-many-minds-of-sherlock-holmes/) - Through mindfulness and neuroscience, can we really learn to think like Sherlock?
- [Picking Pomegranates](https://www.thesmartset.com/picking-pomegranates/) - We expect fruit to not make it too difficult for us to have access to its inner parts. Many varieties fulfill this expectation, while some put up a fight. Quinces, for example, have to be cooked before eating because otherwise their flesh is too hard. Beneath the tough skin of the pomegranate hides a complex
- [On Friday, Fears, and Franzen](https://www.thesmartset.com/on-friday-fears-and-franzen/) - Happy Friday the 13th to all the friggatriskaidekaphiles out there! Those who flout the superstition around this day would fit in well among the members (13, of course) of the Thirteen Club, who celebrated occasions such as these by walking under ladders, spilling salt, eating morbid food, and actively trying to beget terrible luck whenever
- [Moncrieff Relief](https://www.thesmartset.com/moncrieff-relief/) - William Carter, in the first volume of his epic ongoing Proust edition for Yale University Press, characterizes Proust’s seven-volume series À la recherche du temps perdu as “considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.” The series — Du cote de chez Swanni (Swann’s Way), A
- [Minor Threat](https://www.thesmartset.com/minor-threat/) - Higher education has been making the headlines a lot lately, but not because praise is being heaped upon it for the value it is bringing to the current generation of millennial students. Rather, headlines are loudly proclaiming that higher education is in danger, dying, or already dead. Take, for example, the cover of the September
- [Live and Let Die](https://www.thesmartset.com/live-and-let-die/) - What do you do when a bizarre combination of birthright and computer convention means that much of the digitized world doesn’t believe in your existence? (Wired) You can’t choose your death like an item off the lunch menu. But what if you could? Do you know what you would order? (Wilson Quarterly) Imagine the dialogue
- [Investigating the Investigator, Marking the Margins, and Selecting a Statement](https://www.thesmartset.com/investigating-the-investigator-marking-the-margins-and-selecting-a-statement/) - The world’s most famous consulting detective seems to be on everyone’s minds of late. Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey, Jr., Ian McKellan, and Jonny Lee Miller have all taken on the role of Sherlock Holmes in the last five years, and audiences keep coming. Read Paula Marantz Cohen on the character’s sustained appeal and Fred J. Abbate
- [How Not to Be a Gentleman](https://www.thesmartset.com/how-not-to-be-a-gentleman/) - Long after the days of Downtown Abbey and personal servants, Chris Moss argues that the best way to be an upstanding modern day (hu)man is definitely not by following Country Life’s tips for being a “modern gentleman.” (Telegraph) Through endless practice of beauty and perfection, dancers break their bodies — and often their minds. After
- [“In this house all the walls have my mouth”](https://www.thesmartset.com/jose-eduardo-agualusa-general-theory-oblivion/) - This is one weird book — but in a good way. In fact, in a wonderful way. The author, José Eduardo Agualusa, a much-praised Angolan writer, has published 24 books of short and long fiction and poetry, including one young adult novel. Five of these books have been translated into English by Daniel Hahn. Agualusa
- [Your Personal Demons, Candy Cons, and a Calculated Zombie Defense](https://www.thesmartset.com/your-personal-demons-candy-cons-and-a-calculated-zombie-defense/) - While haunted house goers in the U.S. evade hordes of murderous chainsaw-wielding zombie mental patients, those in Japan take a more personal approach to inducing sheer terror. (Slate) Some popular Halloween sweets may be more trick than treat … watch out for these killer confections. (Atlas Obscura) You should probably add a calculus textbook to
- [World Books](https://www.thesmartset.com/world-books/) - Can world literature exist? It depends on what is meant by world literature. The phrase Weltliteratur was coined by Goethe. The German polymath told his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in 1827: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at times to hundreds and hundreds
- [Vegetaballs](https://www.thesmartset.com/vegetaballs/) - If you've lately been thinking about becoming a vegetarian, today might be just the day to make the switch. It's World Vegetarian Day! In case you need just a bit more reason to give up bacon and steak, we brought back Stefany Anne Golberg's piece on brutal vegetarianism. I offer an outline for an Eating
- [The TV Works, the Ads Don't, and More ...](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-tv-works-the-ads-dont-and-more/) - From Mad Men and White Collar to Dirty Jobs and Grey’s Anatomy, TV may tell us a lot about how we view our work — and, moreover, how we should. For some, it’s just a job, but for others, it’s a life calling. Maybe we can learn more about our professions by staying on the
- [The Shape of Things to Come](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-shape-of-things-to-come/) - The Shape of Things to Come is the name of the H.G. Wells science fiction novel of 1933 which inspired Alexander Korda’s 1936 movie, Things to Come. Is there a shape of things to come? Does history have a shape as a whole? For some ancient Greeks and Romans, history was a downhill slide. In
- [The Girl From Krakow](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-girl-from-krakow/) - The Girl From Krakow is Rita Feuerstahl, a Jew who speaks both Polish and German. She is twenty, tall, blond, and blue-eyed — “almost beautiful,” in our author's words — and very smart. She wraps herself in a trench coat. Because she is Jewish and there are quotas for Jews, she audits some classes offered
- [The Anti-Hell House, Historical Holograms, and a Halloween Read](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-anti-hell-house-historical-holograms-and-a-halloween-read/) - Two Toronto-based artists have opened KillJoy Kastle, a lesbian feminist haunted house, in West Hollywood. The art installation is in response to the“Hell Houses” put on by some Christian groups during the Halloween season, whose hellish rooms dramatize real-life situations with the aim of scaring sinners into penitence. (laist.com and Vice) As some heritage sites around
- [The Aging Face](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-aging-face/) - In the very last volume of Proust’s very long novel, the narrator attends an afternoon party where everyone seems to be wearing a mask. He can recognize the voices of his long-ago friends and acquaintances, but their words issue from faces that are all strangely slackened and faded, or hardened and rigidified. They seem to
- [The "A" Word](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-a-word/) - While I was pregnant I hoped for a child who, once born, would leave me alone. Sure, we could stand up on stools and sift flour into a mixing bowl together, or run out into the yard to blow bubbles, and I definitely wanted to spend time with my nose buried in some baby hair,
- [Sizzling Bacon, a Presidential Grilling, and Roasting Peanuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/sizzling-bacon-a-presidential-grilling-and-roasting-peanuts/) - First thing’s first: If you heard yesterday that bacon is just as likely to give you cancer as smoking cigarettes, you heard wrong. Take a deep breath and get the whole story. (Wired) The tables were turned on one of the most interviewed people of the past seven years. This time, Barack Obama was asking
- [Primate Instincts](https://www.thesmartset.com/primate-instincts/) - On this day in 2007, Barry Neild wrote about his fear of a real-life Planet of the Apes. Two years later, Andrea Calabretta told the story of how her love for cute primates led to an unfortunate encounter with and subsequent wariness of the furry creatures. It seems as though we have a history of
- [Loserville](https://www.thesmartset.com/loserville/) - When you’re young all this stuff happens for who knows what reasons and then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what it means. – Gary Indiana, Resentment: A Comedy You may not know the work of writer Gary Indiana (a pen name for the visual artist and writer Gary Hoisington,
- [Leaf-ing for the Weekend](https://www.thesmartset.com/leaf-ing-for-the-weekend/) - Today, the damp wind outside the Smart Set office has a not-so-summery edge. It's got us all talking about fall food and fashions (soups and sweaters, respectively) and looking forward to October days with a little less rain and a little more sunshine. To best take advantage of those days, let Jesse Smith be your guide
- [Jonathan Franzen is Worse Than Prison](https://www.thesmartset.com/jonathan-franzen-is-worse-than-prison/) - If you were stuck in 23-hour daily lockdown in a federal prison, you might think a book would be a most welcome companion. You might think it would take a lot to make you despise that book. But Barrett Brown begs: “Stop sending me Jonathan Franzen novels.” (The Intercept) Imagine Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis.
- [Hitting Rockwell Bottom, Killing Copycats, and the Four-Dimensional You](https://www.thesmartset.com/hitting-rockwell-bottom-killing-copycats-and-the-four-dimensional-you/) - Norman Rockwell’s depiction of a bustling small-town journalism office (a nearly extinct species) is being sold by its owner, the National Press Club. More than half a century after the painting was donated by the artist, the organization has decided to sell it in order to fund future endeavors. Oh, the irony. (Washington Post) In the
- [Getting to the Bridge](https://www.thesmartset.com/getting-to-the-bridge/) - If Christmas is the great holiday for sounds — think of all of the masterworks and the centuries of carols — then surely Halloween is the bushel holiday harvest for sights. The very plumage of the landscape itself morphs from pastel verdure to vermillion explosions of the sorts of colors that we think of as
- [Fair Game](https://www.thesmartset.com/fair-game-india-skin-bleach-fair-and-lovely/) - When Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America in 2014, she was the first Indian American in the pageant’s history to win. But she wasn’t America’s – or even India’s – favorite. Tweets such as “I swear I’m not racist, but this is America” and even “9/11 was four days ago and she gets Miss America?”
- [Face the Music](https://www.thesmartset.com/face-the-music/) - Few things get music scholars more nervous than cross-cultural comparisons. The field of ethnomusicology, which was invented to inquire into this very subject, has grown increasingly uneasy with this part of its mission. The ethnomusicologist, in the words of Bruno Nettl, does not seek out such comparisons, but rather serves as “the debunker of generalizations.”
- [Desire is Complicated](https://www.thesmartset.com/desire-is-complicated-chekhov-hamlet-character/) - The truth is, almost all of us want more than just one thing. The child who wants water also wants to share it with his mother. The mother wants her child to have water and also food. Take a look at Chekhov’s stories. Maybe you already have and are already acquainted with his distinctively realistic stories.
- [Boy Toys](https://www.thesmartset.com/boy-toys-youtube/) - One of the small corners of YouTube not dominated by cat videos belongs to the downright oddest and most dismaying cultural oddities of the 21st century: the YouTube boy-celebrity. They aren't real celebrities; you've never heard of them, the entirety of their careers to date has begun, escalated, and flourished without touching your life in
- [All Work and No Playboy](https://www.thesmartset.com/all-work-and-no-playboy/) - Playboy announced yesterday that it will be covering up a bit after over 60 years of publication. In response the surge of nude and pornographic content available for free online, the magazine that took sex to the front page will not feature nude women beginning next March. Maybe now people really will just read it
- [Abolish the Walls](https://www.thesmartset.com/abolish-the-walls/) - Michael Lind’s call for the abolition of the social sciences and his vision of a future university in which the humanities and sciences are housed in separate facilities that turn their backs on each other is a sad indictment of the state of American education. That such a proposition could even be entertained demonstrates the failures
- [When I Told Them Where Mecca Is](https://www.thesmartset.com/where-mecca-is-living-istanbul-turkey-expat/) - I approach this city with a spiraling movement, whose beginning and end I can’t determine. I conquer the town on foot, often on the move for so long that I feel nothing but muscle, bone, and heartbeat. Once I am past a certain stage, I am no longer thirsty, let alone hungry. Heat like this
- [Total Recall](https://www.thesmartset.com/total-recall-volkswagen/) - In the midst of Volkswagen’s latest scandal, we take a look back on the love bug’s long drive from a Nazi creation to a children’s television character, and how Hitler’s dream of “The People’s Car” was realized in an unexpected way over 70 years later — in India. It was Hitler who said “the people”
- [The Art of Noises](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-art-of-noises/) - I am not interested in writing about the deafening kind of noise that causes irreversible damage to the human ear. Nor in the wide range of sounds that you can hear outdoors, like the roar of surf, birdsong, or wind. What interests me far more is that elusive category in-between. Ranked highest among the sounds
- [Ridley Scott on Mars, Higher Ed on Trigger Warnings, and Authors on Their First Novels](https://www.thesmartset.com/ridley-scott-on-mars-higher-ed-on-trigger-warnings-and-authors-on-their-first-novels/) - In the news this weekend: Space is awesome. From the Super Blood Moon to water on Mars, there’s plenty going on up there. But the possibility for life on the red planet was no surprise to Ridley Scott, director of The Martian, an upcoming movie about a stranded astronaut. (The Guardian) In the era of
- [Pretty Nice](https://www.thesmartset.com/pretty-nice-cats-debbie-harry-cate-blanchett/) - I love the word pretty. A theory: “Pretty” has gone out of favor because we are greedy, and want the merely pretty to be fully beautiful, and so we go around calling things beautiful that are pretty. There’s something self-flattering about it — describing a thing as beautiful makes the speaker appear more sensitive to
- [Popedelphia](https://www.thesmartset.com/popedelphia/) - The Pope is in the house. As the Smart Set closes its doors for his visit to our fair city, we leave you with beers, dogs, and traffic schedules all influenced by the Holy Father’s visit, along with a history of the less pope-ular Vicars of Jesus Christ. Fellow priests put one of the first
- [Pony Pedigree](https://www.thesmartset.com/pony-pedigree/) - Ralph Lauren is dismounting the Polo Pony and handing over the reigns to new CEO Stefan Larsson. One of the United States’ largest fashion empires has grown over the past half century from a few ties being sold out of a drawer in the Empire State Building to a brand with a logo that can
- [Papal Work](https://www.thesmartset.com/pope-up-francis-philadelphia-2015-money-john-paul-ii/) - It’s 1979, and it's Pope John Paul II’s visit to Philadelphia, and I’m standing next to Alexander Calder’s river god fountain at Logan Circle, next to the male figure grasping a bow. Buried in my backpack are hundreds of freshly minted coins. My father, who owns a company that makes commemorative medals, struck them earlier
- [Painting an Inch Thick](https://www.thesmartset.com/painting-an-inch-thick/) - It is commonly agreed that, since the debut of The Sopranos in 1999, television has gotten really good. There is now a lot of well-written, absorbing, idiosyncratic stuff to watch, and I have, helped by my insomnia, watched a lot of it. I am a particular fan of sustained narrative series like Boardwalk Empire, Mad
- [Our Silver Age of Natural Science](https://www.thesmartset.com/our-silver-age-of-natural-science/) - Astronomers have discovered nearly 6,000 planets in the last 20 years. And Neanderthals had red hair and freckles. We are living in a great age of natural science. In “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” John Keats described the wonder he felt on reading the translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey published in 1616
- [Jobs Increase, Things Disappear, and Photography Develops](https://www.thesmartset.com/jobs-increase-things-disappear-and-photography-develops/) - There’s a Steve Jobs movie coming out — yes, another. Here’s a review. And in case you missed them, here’s a list of (most of) the artistic depictions of the iCon. Fans of JK Rowling rejoice! Humanity is getting closer to a scalable invisibility cloak, according to a study published in the journal Science. In
- [Happy Happy Birthday, Fat Hamlet, and Humanity Lost](https://www.thesmartset.com/happy-happy-birthday-fat-hamlet-and-humanity-lost/) - It’s a happy day for “Happy Birthday.” A judge has ruled that the companies that have been collecting royalties on the song do not hold copyright claims to the popular tune. (LATimes) A small but passionate group of Shakespeare scholars is asking the weighty question: Is Hamlet fat? The answer is turning out to be
- [Gender Grammar, Wheat Waste, and Future Findings](https://www.thesmartset.com/gender-grammar-wheat-waste-and-future-findings/) - Transparent raked in the Emmys, Caitlyn Jenner continues to makes headlines, and it’s a big time for visibility in the trans community. The discussion of gender identity and neutral pronouns has left professor and author Melvin Jules Bukiet wondering how new pronouns will fit in with existing English grammar and social structure. (The Chronicle of
- [Everybody Wants More than Just One Thing](https://www.thesmartset.com/everyone-wants-more-than-just-one-thing/) - It is standard advice to state that the main character or characters should want something. That it is wanting — desire — that motivates characters to act and action that creates the story, novel, perhaps even the persona in a persona poem. It's not bad advice; genre fiction can get a lot of mileage from
- [Drug Dealings](https://www.thesmartset.com/drug-dealings/) - A former hedge fund manager’s recent decision to increase the price of a pill from $18 to $750 has sparked interest in prescription drug pricing and sales. This drug isn’t optional: It’s the standard treatment for taxoplasmosis, an illness that mainly affects those with compromised immune systems due to HIV or cancer. But when it
- [Doing it Wrong](https://www.thesmartset.com/doing-it-wrong/) - In How to Do Things with Pornography, feminist philosopher Nancy Bauer refers to a specific idea of pornography: the inherently harmful boogey creature that anti-pornography feminists have railed against since the 70s. A significant portion of her book is spent discussing the flaws in the anti-porn rhetoric of both Catharine MacKinnon and Rae Langton. All
- [Caffeine Celebration](https://www.thesmartset.com/caffeine-celebration/) - Happy National Coffee Day! If you haven't had your coffee yet, it's time to grab some (check out these places for a free cup) and sit down to read the Smart Set. To pair with your espresso: An article about the Italian origins of Starbucks and why there are none in Italy. The invention of Mr.
- [@Snowden Storm, Musical Muse, and Forgetting Faces](https://www.thesmartset.com/snowden-storm-musical-muse-and-forgetting-faces/) - Edward Snowden joined Twitter yesterday (as @Snowden, of course). He followed the NSA, had a conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and accumulated almost over 1 million followers in less than 24 hours. Check out our Storify summary of his first interactions. Some writers require a soundtrack to their work. Music may propel words onto the page or
- [Immaterial Worlds](https://www.thesmartset.com/immaterial-worlds/) - Exhibition labels – those little placards on the walls beside the thing part of the art – are no longer optional to conscientious looking. In the imagined past, we might have taken in a landscape and breathed, “Isn't that lovely? Just look at those brushstrokes!” But the priorities of contemporary art have foreclosed on this
- [Face Value](https://www.thesmartset.com/face-value/) - Every few months there’s another finger-wagging piece about models in the fashion industry. Generally, the topic is weight: the epidemic of anorexia; the efforts underway to mandate a minimum weight; praise for more robust models (more robust meaning a few pounds above malnourishment). The other topic that crops up is age. It was recently reported
- [Liberal Views](https://www.thesmartset.com/liberal-views/) - Our habit of discussing political philosophies in terms of a spectrum from right to left ignores the actual variety of views lumped together under the labels “conservative” or “progressive.” So-called conservatives include free-market libertarians who want total separation of church and state, “theoconservatives” who insist that America is a Judeo-Christian nation that should be governed
- [This Is Coffeeland](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04031401/) - The first thing Azeb wanted to know about me was if I was on Facebook. After that she got to the less important stuff: Where I was from, if I was married, had kids, believed in God — and what was I doing in southern Ethiopia? Azeb, a 25-year-old business student with big glowing eyes
- ["There is No One Path"](https://www.thesmartset.com/frank-bruni-interview-there-is-no-one-path/) - In April, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni sat down with Paula Marantz Cohen, dean of the Pennoni Honors College, to discuss, among other things, higher education and his most recent book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. P: I’d like to discuss your life and
- [Uncertain Terms](https://www.thesmartset.com/uncertain-terms/) - In How Not to Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg uses a John Ashbery line as a guiding principle for those making claims or predictions based on probabilistic mathematical models (or any models, really): “For this is action, this not being sure.” Ellenberg calls it “the greatest summation I know of the way uncertainty and revelation
- [An Affair, Remembered](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04071401/) - I picked up the cordless in Andrzej’s room to telephone my husband that I would not be coming home this night. We’d both had affairs. Brutal honesty seemed like the only way to go forward. “I’m sleeping at Andrzej’s,” I told him. “You’re what?” But I wasn’t honest. Andrzej and I had planned to go
- [Singsong Kidspeak](https://www.thesmartset.com/singsong-kidspeak/) - At the turn of the 20th century, a well-made American story was one delivered in a straightforward style. O. Henry and Stephen Crane relied on suspense and tight construction to propel the reader along the story's length. This method backgrounds the writer, foregrounds the tale. By the second half of the century all this had
- [Seeking Mrs. Stahl's](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04081401/) - Laura Silver is a woman on a mission. When her favorite knish bakery, Mrs. Stahl’s, closed, she embarked on a round-the-world quest for the origins and modern-day manifestations of the knish that would take her from Brighton Beach to Jersey and across three continents. Her forthcoming book about her journey, Knish: In Search of the
- [Leaving the Mound](https://www.thesmartset.com/leaving-the-mound/) - Baseball has almost always centered on one thing, which sounds reductionist, but isn’t terribly uncommon for a sport. Hockey, for instance, is all about time and space. If you are an offensive player, you wish to create time and space; if you are a defensive player, your goal is to limit both. Baseball has long
- [A Report from the Bayou](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04111401/) - Down in the bayou, spring comes around mid-March, but no one takes it seriously. Within a couple of weeks, the temperatures are so hot that everyone has forgotten spring. It is like a ghost, barely there when it is there, and barely remembered when it goes. The season that came before spring is hard, by
- ["Only Some of This is True"](https://www.thesmartset.com/deborah-levy-only-some-of-this-is-true/) - A review of Black Vodka by Deborah Levy
- [The Swimsuit Issue](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04151401/) - It was headline news a couple months ago. Barbie, the doll, was featured in this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, part of a tribute for the fifty-year anniversary celebration of the magazine’s most popular annual issue. The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and the Washington Post covered the story; dozens more articles appeared in online
- [Change of Hart](https://www.thesmartset.com/change-of-hart/) - Grant Hart is a songwriter and musician best known as a former member of the 80s hardcore punk band Hüsker Dü. Hart’s most recent album The Argument is an extended musical reworking of John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. This interview was conducted by students in the Honors course "Writing About Rock Music" at Drexel University
- [Sitting it Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04171401/) - Ah, spring is here and sidewalk cafés are again blooming across America! Some of my friends are thrilled at this seasonal turn. I am not. My memories of outdoor dining skew toward the mildly traumatic. Such excursions often begin with companions who all but squeal “Let’s sit outside!” Confronted with such enthusiasm, it’s hard to
- [When Hitler Was Curator](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04211401/) - Hitler loved art. His taste tended toward classicism. The Greek ideal of beauty was his general standard in aesthetics. He once wrote the following memorandum about how he guaranteed that he would get “good” art for the Munich Museum. “I have inexorably adhered to the following principle,” Hitler wrote. "Degenerate Art:The Attack on Modern Art
- [Let's Abolish Social Science](https://www.thesmartset.com/lets-abolish-social-science/) - In my old age, I hope to found a new university, called rather unimaginatively the New University, with funding from one or another imprudent billionaire (a prudent billionaire would turn me down). In contemporary universities and colleges there is often a division among the natural sciences, social science and humanities. In my New University, there
- [Nelson Shanks (1937-2015)](https://www.thesmartset.com/nelson-shanks-1937-2015/) - Nelson Shanks, acclaimed American realist painter of celebrities and officials ranging from Pope John Paul II and Princess Diana to Bill Clinton and the first four female U.S. Supreme Court justices, died late last week. Shanks studied art and architecture throughout the country and world, before eventually founding Studio Incamminati School for Contemporary Realist Art
- [Everything is Leaf](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04231401/) - Gloom rains down during early April days in the north. The sky is heavy and stuffed with shadows. A goldfinch at the bird feeder looks ridiculous; his molting winter feathers are a wreck. Everything about his half-golden face says hope, the uncombed horror of hope. This is the time we look for anything that reminds
- [The Ghost Shift](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-ghost-shift/) - It is not difficult to imagine Sherlock Holmes, that great eschewer of the supernatural, firing his clay pipe into the fireplace at 221B were he made aware of the cottage literary movement birthed by his adventures. People tend to forget that the detective and his dogged, Boswellian biographer Doctor Watson, investigated through the first quarter
- [Let Me Entremet You](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04251401/) - For me, entremets are the food history equivalent of Gozer the Gozerian. You know, Gozer – the lace-body-suit demon lady from Ghostbusters? Venkman tells everyone not to think of a form for it to take, and Ray immediately thinks of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s that classic brain gaffe – if someone tells you to
- [This Product Will Change Your Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/this-product-will-changeyour-life/) - Cultural critics generally place themselves at a distance from material culture. They may critique the world, but they don’t seem to inhabit it. But why shouldn’t those of us who parse culture also celebrate it — acknowledge that we make choices all the time about the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the furniture
- [Taking Liberties](https://www.thesmartset.com/taking-liberties-with-libertarianism-captialism/) - Can capitalism be defended from the libertarian right? The hostility of libertarians to the modern state is well known. Less well known are the objections that many libertarians have to modern capitalism. The modern capitalist economy rests largely on two major government-created privileges bestowed on private firms and individuals: limited liability and intellectual property rights,
- [The Transformation of the World](https://www.thesmartset.com/jurgen-osterhammel-the-transformation-of-the-world-19th-century-history/) - When German historian's Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World was published in Germany four years ago, reviewers of the major newspapers were in complete agreement: this voluminous book of history would do more than change the way we looked at the 19th century. They saw a new kind of history at work here, not
- [A Cosmic Centennial](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04291401/) - In the Egyptian section of the Penn Museum stands a man. He is next to a 12-ton sphinx and is wearing a multicolored dreamcoat. His beret shimmers; a red cape hangs about his shoulders. “Planet Earth can’t even be sufficient without the rain, it doesn’t produce rain, you know,” he tells the camera. “Sunshine…it doesn’t
- [Monsters and Men](https://www.thesmartset.com/mary-ellen-mark-monsters-and-men/) - In a photograph titled "Ward 81", a woman sits on a bed. She is young, a teenager. She sits cross-legged and wears her clothes and hair like a teenager would. The wall behind this teenage girl is covered in pictures. The pictures, magazine cutouts, are taped to the wall and some of the edges have
- [Afternoon Reading: Pluto (of course), Steadman's birds, rereading with Nabokov](https://www.thesmartset.com/afternoon-reading-pluto-of-course-steadmans-birds-rereading-with-nabokov/) - If you haven't seen the photos of Pluto, go look at them. If you have, go look again. The NYT has packaged them beautifully. Also: how Pluto changed how we saw the solar system, and why we’ve never lost our enthusiasm for space travel. Collector’s Weekly on the existential conundrum (and history) of the American
- [A Splash of Cold Water](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03021401/) - What if happiness is impossible? What if “men are always discontented because they are always unhappy?” What if, in their hearts, “they feel and they are well aware that they are unhappy, that they suffer, that they do not find enjoyment, and in that they are not wrong?” What if this unhappiness is increased by
- [Artful Artlessness](https://www.thesmartset.com/artful-artlessness-michael-lind-response/) - “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. She was referring to the effects on culture of the controversial exhibition, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” organized by her friend and fellow modernist, Roger Fry. Woolf’s statement gives some credence to the argument made by Michael Lind in this journal in which he describes
- [The Sound of Difference](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03041401/) - People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure, which is said to be especially complex. Perhaps you’ve seen the much-shared video featuring characters like a Bavarian in traditional costume who says a series of German words – but instead of pronouncing
- [On Style...](https://www.thesmartset.com/of-style-hemingway-fitzgerald-henry-james/) - Almost the first thing a reader notices about a piece of writing is its style — unless the style is transparent. Transparent prose is prose that lets you see the object before you. It has often been referred to as a window, for the window in no way obstructs your view. Indeed, it serves the
- [The Arranged Marriage](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03051401/) - “That point doesn’t count,” Andy shouted as I jumped around the ping-pong table doing my victory dance. “You leaned over the table to hit the smash and that’s an illegal move. We have to redo the point.” I looked up at him making my puppy dog eyes, knowing they would work as usual. “You know
- [The Other Dream Team](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03101402/) - Sports are full of clichés. Play one game at a time. Leave it all out on the field. There’s no “I” in team. Clichés allow fans to make sense of the unpredictable nature of athletic competition. Without them, how else would we be able to explain results that don’t make sense? How else did the
- [Strange Attractor](https://www.thesmartset.com/strange-attractor/) - The story of my 28-year friendship with James Merrill begins in April 1967 at the University of Wisconsin. Merrill was in Madison to teach a creative writing course in poetry. I had entered Wisconsin’s Ph.D. program the previous fall as a Teaching Assistant, bringing with me a bachelor’s degree (majors in English and philosophy, minor
- [Name that Team!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03131402/) - No sports event in this country engages as many people over an extended period of time as the NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. This year, 68 teams of enthusiastic college kids have a shot at the championship. Fewer than half of the teams have a realistic shot, which creates the possibility of
- [Cookies from the Crypt](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03131401/) - Oh, how many of us yearn for a simpler time and place? A time before cell phones, when people couldn’t always reach us. A time before the Internet, when we didn’t accidentally read Game of Thrones spoilers on our Twitter feeds (I’m still bitter about the red wedding). A time before Nicki Minaj, when all
- [...And How To Get It](https://www.thesmartset.com/and-how-to-get-it/) - And now, to examine an entirely different style, consider this line from Ben Marcus's experimental and lovely first novel, The Age of Wire and String, published in 1995. The author's postmodern premise is that when we look at an object, our desire destroys it. It opens thus: This book is a catalog of the life
- [The Two Souls](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03151401/) - The curious career of Maximilian Schell ended last month when he died at the age of 83. Maximilian Schell was most famous for playing Nazis. But he spent the other half of his career playing Jews. After the Second World War, there was no shortage of film and television roles for German-speaking actors. An actor
- [The Clash of the Three Moralities](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-clash-of-the-three-moralities/) - The passion surrounding the so-called “social issues” in American politics, from reproductive rights to gay marriage, is exacerbated by the fact that to some degree “the issue is not the issue,” as the Sixties slogan held. In other words, what is really at stake is not merely the nominal subject of the debate, but also
- [The Face of the Earth](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-face-of-the-earth/) - On the day we went to see the Great Serpent Mound, the rain plunged from the sky. Lightning shot down to the cornfields and made the cornfields roar. Everything was dark. Guides recommend that you come to the Serpent early or late in the day, when shadows alongside it are deep and the winding shape
- [Tricks in the Book](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03181401/) - Your heart is racing and your breath feels constricted. You’ve started to sweat around your hairline. You’re not sure if you should call 911, lay down, open a window, or…put down the book. Have you ever read a book and found yourself at a loss as to what to think and feel? Yeah. Me neither.
- [Living with Girls](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03241401/) - Max Watman's new memoir Harvest: Field Notes from a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food, depicts the author's quest for real food and real farm life – minus the farm. This excerpt is his cautionary tale of raising chickens – "The Girls" – in his Hudson Valley backyard. Harvest is available now from W.W. Norton and
- [The Spirit of Youth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03251401/) - My wife, the over-observant Shuffy, noticed a group of children playing with geometric shapes cut from pieces of black paper. The children were arranging these shapes on larger sheets of construction paper. The construction paper was lying on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum and the Guggenheim Museum was in the midst of its exhibit
- [Where Have All the Fairies Gone?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03281401/) - The Victorians were apparently much plagued by fairies. Accounts suggest that these little creatures flitted around the margins of mid and late 19th century life, all skittish and shy and showing up when one least expected them. Painters such as Richard Dadd made a career of depicting these beings of “a middle nature between man
- [From the Ashes](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03311401/) - Sometime during the late summer, or perhaps the early fall, of the year 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted near Naples. The result was instant death for the people, plants, and animals in the Roman town of Pompeii, which is about five miles from Mount Vesuvius. A Volcanologist named Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo recently (2010) published a definitive
- [The Sound of Despair](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03311402/) - Nearly 20 years after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, I found myself watching this performance once again, Nirvana’s rendition of Lead Belly’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” The television played this MTV Unplugged in New York performance on a loop as I sat on the floor at a friends’ apartment in the East Village the
- [Greek to Me](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02031401/) - For the past few weeks, I’ve been enjoying red wines made from the indigenous grapes of Greece. I’ve tasted mostly xinomavro from Naoussa, in the northern Greek region of Macedonia, and agiorgitiko from Nemea in the Peloponnese, but also little-known varieties such as limniona, mavrotragano, and mavrodaphne. While you can certainly find bottles of xinomavro
- [Light and Shadow](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02041401/) - Among the displays of assault rifles at the Mikhail Kalashnikov Museum in Izhevsk is a small lawnmower Kalashnikov designed to push about the grounds of his summer cottage. It is said that Mikhail Kalashnikov loved to care for his grass. Kalashnikov gave the lawnmower the same sensible qualities he gave the gun that bears his
- [Human Habitrail](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02061401/) - Cars are the primary predators of the modern urban ecosystem. They roam at will, and kill some 400,000 pedestrians worldwide every year — about 4,500 annually in the United States. Faced with evolutionary pressure, pedestrians will do what other species have done over many millennia: evolve and adapt, such that the fittest will survive. This
- [Git It!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02101401/) - Exactly twice in my life have I heard a work of music and thought, Wait, what? You can do that? That’s allowed? These internal queries tend to occur when we’re younger and possessed of a capacity for wonder that, alas, tends to lessen as we get older and pleasing puzzlement gives way to concerns of how best
- [The Chocolate Cure](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02111401/) - Any women’s health magazine worth its low-sodium salt substitute can tell you about three things: How to flatten your abs, how to please your man (yoga helps, ladies!!!!!!), and how to scientifically justify eating chocolate. Fitness Magazine lists “Four Reasons to Eat Chocolate on a Diet,” citing chocolate’s cough-fighting and tooth-strengthening theobromine, anti-diarrheal antioxidants, and
- [Vermeer and the Threshold](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02131401/) - They are among the most mysterious paintings. But it is very hard to say why. Nothing much happens in the paintings. People engage in simple tasks. A man and a woman sit at a table and speak. A woman smiles. A woman reads a letter. A girl looks at us over her left shoulder. A
- [Tripping](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02171401/) - Fifty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg published The Yage Letters, a book largely consisting of the correspondence between the two on their separate treks through the Peruvian rainforest. Although their travels were a decade apart, both went in search of yagé — an entheogenic drug better known as ayahuasca. Burroughs’ quest for what he would wind
- [Those Winter Nights...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02181401/) - We were like Thisbe and Pyramus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, saying goodbye through a chink in the wall, only this was an ever narrowing door that was closing between us, neither one of us having the heart to turn around. Ahem had asked me to ride in the university’s van with him to the airport
- [A Story of the Present](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02241401/) - “If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness,” Loren Eiseley warned, “do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a
- [Step by Step](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02251401/) - “I don’t hear birdsongs in the morning, like I did when I was a kid,” said Jim Stone, executive director at Walk San Diego. “They’re slowly going away. Things in our lives change, but because they change in slow increments over a long period of time, we become accustomed to what’s new.” Stone and I
- [Pours from the Past](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02271401/) - Sometime between 7,000 and 5,600 BC, along the banks of the Yellow River, an early inhabitant of modern-day China left behind a jug that was once filled with the earliest known example of a fermented grain beverage. With no written recipe or recorded history of the Neolithic concoction, the contents of the vessel were left
- [Hair Today...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01021401/) - Baldness can be sexy, but let’s be frank, only in certain cases. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Kingsley, or fashion model Tyson Beckford are positive examples. Perceptions may vary, of course, but for the most part a bald head makes a man less attractive, especially if he’s overweight or stocky. And men know it.
- [Health Nuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01061401/) - It’s January, which means that all across America, people are resolving to eat better. And that means that they’re also resolving to smugly tell you about it. But the next time your newly gluten-free, sugar-free, and dairy-free co-worker insists that you need to jump on the kale-acai smoothie express, just be thankful that this isn’t
- [10,000 Steps](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01091401/) - Ten thousand is a likable number. It’s rotund and cheerful, both aspirational and accessible. Ten thousand is like the serious but fun kid who sat near you in high school chemistry — not as goofy as 3,850 in the back row, or as aloof and vain as 100,000 up front. Ten thousand is also how
- [Jerk Reaction](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01131401/) - It is hard to write a biography about a person who hides. Walter Benjamin really hid. The great critic and philosopher hid, often enough, right there in his writings. They are often elusive texts that can take years of reading, over and over again, before the mists begin to clear. What, for instance, is Benjamin
- [All Made Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01151401/) - The following is an excerpt from the newly released Getting Dressed: Confession, Criticism, Cultural History, by Paula Marantz Cohen. Read on below and buy Getting Dressed today from Smart Set Press. Getting Dressed: Confession, Criticism, Cultural History by Paula Marantz Cohen. Smart Set Press. $0.99. As a teenager, I had acne. Not the acute kind that
- [Apocalypse Now](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01211401/) - Harold Camping expected a spectacular death. He thought he would see horses and towering flames. Instead Harold Camping fell down at home last month at the age of 92 and never got up again. Judgment Day is upon us, the radio evangelist proclaimed a few years ago, setting May 21, 2011 as the date. All
- [A Brush with Evil](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01241401/) - The Coen Brothers are no help and never will be. Go ahead and ask them. Fresh Air’s Terry Gross recently tried. She asked them how they write their films. “It’s mostly napping,” Ethan Coen answered. The Coen Brothers have been evading answers for about 30 years now, since Blood Simple came out in 1984. Asked
- [Don’t Let Harlan Ellison Hear This](https://www.thesmartset.com/article01271401/) - I get emails, very occasionally, from acquaintances. They’re very short, these letters, as the subject header says it all: NEW ELLISON. Sometimes the sender betrays a faux intimacy with the author, and writes NEW HARLAN instead. Harlan Ellison. Remember the best episode of Star Trek, the one where Captain Kirk lets Joan Collins die? Or
- [Burning Down the House](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08021101/) - Exploring the more than 150 works in the retrospective of Spanish artist Joan Miró at the Tate Modern, I was reminded of the series of 11 lithographs of a bull that Miró’s friend Pablo Picasso produced in the winter of 1945. In that series, the realistic image of the massive animal slowly progresses to the
- [Most Likely to Reflect](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08031101/) - I recently attended my 40th high school reunion. 40 years out of high school is a long time: If you’re not exactly old, you are quickly approaching being so. It’s a case where you find yourself repeating in cretinish fashion, “I can’t believe I’m going to my 40th high school reunion!” expecting that by repeating
- [Design-speak](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08051102/) - Not many people know what designers do. Designers themselves often have trouble explaining their work. Designers design, of course. But what does that mean? How is designing different from inventing, or making, or some other sort of doing? "Talk to Me." Through November 7. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bruce Archer, the influential Professor
- [Paperback Politics](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08051101/) - If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.” And
- [What's in a Word?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08151101/) - “Feminism is not dead.” If this is the sentence Sylvia Walby was forced to use to open her book The Future of Feminism, it casts doubt that the argument that follows will be persuasive. It carries the tone of defensiveness, of exasperation, of stomping your foot. Of “You guys.” The Future of Feminism by Sylvia Walby.
- [Tiny Dancer](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08171101/) - In May of 1894, a young anarchist named Emile Henry travelled from his small apartment in Montmartre to the fashionable boulevards near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Unemployed and angry, he entered the elegant Café Terminus with a bomb under his coat. Inside, he lit the fuse and threw the explosive into the middle of
- [Running the Numbers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08191101/) - Not that which is in the mind, but in which the mind is. (Written in Greek on the dedication page of Everything and More by David Foster Wallace, translated by Morgan Meis) In 1965, while waiting in a cafe, Roman Opalka decided to paint time. He didn’t paint the counters of time — clocks and
- [Oh My God](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08221101/) - Frans Hals is often described as a "loose" painter. You can see what that means in one of Hals' great paintings currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is called "The Smoker," from 1625. You wouldn't be surprised, though, if someone told you it was painted 250 years later than that.
- [Make Song of Them](https://www.thesmartset.com/make-song-of-them/) - Charles E. Merrill, founder (with his friend Edmund C. Lynch) of the famous brokerage firm, probably never read this comment by President John Adams: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation,
- [What Tribute She Could Bear](https://www.thesmartset.com/what-tribute-she-could-bear/) - When James Merrill served as Guest Editor of the December 1979 issue of Poetry Pilot, the newsletter of the American Academy of Poets, his task was a pleasant one: to present a selection of several of his favorite poems, introduced by a brief commentary. Such selections by prominent poets had been a regular feature of
- [Work It](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08301101/) - Steve Jobs, who died from pancreatic cancer on Wednesday at the age of 56, leaves a legacy behind him that literally fills millions of hard drives. Jobs created an industry with the Apple II and reshaped another with the iPod. He made cyberspace tactile and dimensional with Macintosh and its graphical interface. Over the course
- [Conversations In the Village](https://www.thesmartset.com/conversations-in-the-village/) - Elizabeth Bishop’s friend, fellow poet, and favorite critic Randall Jarrell often centered a favorable review on a list the poems he most admired from that poet’s work. Many an anthologist has borrowed liberally from these carefully chosen Jarrellian lists. Jarrell, perhaps the most demanding and certainly the most prescient critic of his age, liked Bishop’s
- [Old Boys Club](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08311101/) - There is outright sexism in the arts, and then there is that hidden, sneaky, unconscious sexism that squirms when you try to pin it in place. When Lee Krasner was in art school in 1929, the outright sexism was easiest to identify and also protest against. Under the heading of obvious sexism was the National
- [Being Oskar Matzerath](https://www.thesmartset.com/being-oskar-matzerath/) - When Günter Grass died earlier this year, it brought back memories of 1991, my first year in New York City. I sometimes think of this period in New York as its last dangerous days, when the city still had that anxious, patched-together sensibility, which is just another way of saying that once I lived in
- [A Matter of Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/a-matter-of-time/) - This fascinating book traces a debate about the nature of time. The debate begins on April 6, 1922, in Paris, at a meeting of the French Philosophical Society. The opinions expressed will persist and permutate into the 21st century. The first and primary debaters are Albert Einstein, a strikingly good-looking and ambitious young man, and
- [Artless](https://www.thesmartset.com/artless/) - The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact. As recently as the late 20th century, well-educated people were expected to be able to bluff their way through a dinner party with at least some knowledge of “the fine arts”
- [Art/Not](https://www.thesmartset.com/art-or-not-richard-tuttle-both-and/) - Hilton Kramer, longtime chief art critic for the New York Times, was never a shy man, at least in print. He thought of art criticism as a battle. There was a war, as Kramer saw it, between good art and bad art or – maybe more crucially – between art and non-art. Kramer saw himself
- [Biblio Cheval](https://www.thesmartset.com/biblio-cheval/) - I was disappointed not to go to the town of Limbe with Clement. In Haiti, Clement Benoit II is to books what Paul Farmer is to medicine. He waited for me in the open air lobby of La Plaza Hotel in Port-au-Prince while I tried to make up my mind. This was the second year
- [Joshua Cohen's numbers, rest in peace James Salter, and more](https://www.thesmartset.com/joshua-cohens-numbers-rest-in-peace-james-salter-and-more/) - Novelist Joshua Cohen is interviewed at Bomb. In the interview conducted by Dan Duray, Cohen discusses some of the numbers behind Book of Numbers: So let me just state for the record: There are an even number of paragraphs in every section of the book. There are an even number of sentences in every paragraph.
- [Better Red](https://www.thesmartset.com/better-red-defense-of-blushing/) - In some cases, the sufferer’s cheeks, ears, or neck grow red. Other people’s entire faces burn, or the heat washes over their head like a wave. A person who blushes feels stripped bare, even when fully clothed. A blush can be triggered by shame, guilt, joy, excitement, or irritation, and can strike when we are
- [Classics, Catholics, and Patsy Cline](https://www.thesmartset.com/classics-catholics-crime-and-patsy-cline/) - First Tupac, then Michael Jackson, and now… Patsy Cline? Country music gets its first holographic performer. (BBC) Michael Lind recently lamented the disappearance of the classics from modern American culture. Now, a fascinating and wide-ranging argument for “classics for the people” – or, more specifically, greater access to ancient Greek studies in British schools: The
- [Aphorisms Are Essays](https://www.thesmartset.com/aphorisms-as-essays/) - Etymology has become an overused avenue into semantics. It’s a cliché to begin an essay or meta-essay with a reminder of the original meaning of essay, to try. Still, recently, I wondered after the etymology of aphorism. Since it’s often paraphrased as “truism,” I wondered if the roots involved truth. And was it one root
- [Blue Bloods](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07071101/) - By 11:40 a.m., the sun is blazing and the Smurfs are being urged into a pen. A man in a seersucker suit is hollering into a megaphone. Everyone get your blue makeup on! he cries. Get it on! He’s been there since morning, but he is no Smurf expert, he confides to me. He is
- [Southern Cross](https://www.thesmartset.com/southern-cross-confederate-flag-music/) - I made a kite once for an oversized Australian sound engineer. White paper on crossed dowels, with a painting of a kangaroo and a raccoon dancing under the Big Dipper (Northern hemisphere) and the Southern Cross (Southern hemisphere). Inter-hemispherical friendship and harmony! That was the message of the kite. I still miss that kite. The
- [Without the South](https://www.thesmartset.com/without-the-south/) - Would the United States be better off without the South? It is a question that is often asked by white progressives and centrists in other parts of the country, now that the Democrats have become a largely-Northern party while the former Confederacy has become the heartland of what was once Lincoln’s party. If the Confederacy
- [A Life of "E"s](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07081101/) - In the early 1950s, Cy Twombly worked for the army as a cryptologist. That fact seems hugely significant since Twombly was one of the more elusive artists of his generation. That is what the conventional wisdom says, anyway. In this case, the conventional wisdom is probably correct. Cy Twombly's art first acquired its distinctively
- [Without the South, Part II](https://www.thesmartset.com/without-the-south-part-2/) - Would the United States be better off today, if the South had been allowed to secede, as many white Northern progressives wonder, sometimes as a joke, but sometimes in earnest? Counterfactual history is a game, but it can be an instructive game. In my previous essay for this magazine, I argued that the secession of
- [Literary Darwinism, the real Mr. Darcy and Charlie Hebdo tempest](https://www.thesmartset.com/literary-darwinism-the-real-mr-darcy-and-charlie-hebdo-tempest/) - There is a must read profile of literary Darwinist and mixed martial artist Jonathan Gottschall in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Recounting how his academic career has stalled in the face of his controversial theories that English Departments and, indeed, literature can be saved by using evolution alone as the key to interpretation. Among his
- [Leaving, and Entering, and Leaving, and Entering Las Vegas](https://www.thesmartset.com/leaving-and-entering-and-leaving-and-entering-las-vegas/) - In 1952, a local salesman named Ted Rogich decided that Las Vegas needed a roadside sign that would welcome visitors to the city. In the postwar years of the American Southwest, highways plowed through long open stretches of sand. You could drive right past a town, even Las Vegas, and not know it. Las Vegas
- [The Sopranos](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07121101/) - I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz. Herr Engels and his wife were enjoying retirement with a cultural event every single night, whether that be
- [Updike Country](https://www.thesmartset.com/updike-country/) - On a very clear day, blue sky, bright, bright sunlight, you’ll spy an amazing cloud. It is structured like a column. It is dense and white and billows upward, touching the outer limits of the firmament, seemingly. Probably it goes up only a few hundred feet. But the verticality of the cloud is what makes
- [The Poetry Election, Bradbury, Sendak, <br/>and Sun Ra](https://www.thesmartset.com/poetry-election-bradbury-sendak-and-sun-ra/) - There are few positions more prestigious than being named Oxford Professor of Poetry. A new one will be elected next month and if you would like to be considered, apply here. The current holder of the position is the very eminent and very English poet Geoffrey Hill. Previously Matthew Arnold, Francis Turner Palgrave, A.C. Bradley
- [The Lost Frontier](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-lost-frontier/) - The setting of post-apocalyptic fiction, a venerable genre of science fiction, is a future in which today’s technological civilization has been destroyed by some global catastrophe — nuclear war, a plague, a meteor impact, a new Ice Age. The survivors of the disaster find themselves living in the conditions of a new medievalism, or perhaps
- [Creative Forces](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07141101/) - I don’t imagine that artist and writer Claude Cahun ever sat down to lunch with the young Alberto Giacometti, who arrived in Paris about the same time as Cahun in the early 1920s. But there they were, developing their ideas about Surrealism, haunting the same galleries and bookstores, all within the complex artistic milieu of
- [Ways of Looking](https://www.thesmartset.com/ways-of-looking/) - “Eye contact” is not as well-defined a concept as it seems. As a child, I had an idea that true eye contact required a perfect eye-to-eye lock: my right eye looking into the other’s left eye, my left eye looking into their right, and vice versa. This, of course, is impossible; you have to pick
- [22 Going on 50](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07181101/) - On November 11, 1961, readers of the New York Times were confronted with a huge advertisement for a novel, published the previous day, by a little-known writer named Joseph Heller. Running from the top to the bottom of the page and covering five of the paper’s eight columns, the ad showed an angular, panic-stricken figure,
- [Pete Townshend's last wish, The Bloom (Harold), and more](https://www.thesmartset.com/pete-townshends-last-wish-the-bloom-harold-and-more/) - Loose cannon Pete Townshend of The Who gives a fascinating interview to Rolling Stone. Supporting his group’s latest last tour, a marketing fiction the guitarist himself has a hard time taking seriously, Townshend talks about his Sixties contemporaries Robert Plant and Bob Dylan as well as offering this moving death bed fantasy: “I just hope
- [Go East](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07211101/) - “Ostalgia” is a dangerous art show. The name alone tells you that. It is troubling that a term such as “ostalgia” exists at all. The term first gained popularity in Berlin after the Wall came down in 1989. By the mid-1990s, some people were feeling nostalgic for the divided Berlin that had so suddenly passed
- [The Tower](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-tower/) - For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by skyscrapers. A poster with the skyline of Manhattan graced the wall of my childhood bedroom. And I belong to the slowly disappearing group of people who have gazed upon New York not only from the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center, but from
- [Classroom Wars](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07271101/) - History teachers love war. Our classes are filled with it. The Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War II, Vietnam War are musts. Others we shove into the second tier: 1812, Mexican, Spanish-American, World War I, Korea. To millions of students, U.S. history ends up being — to modify the oft-repeated dictum — the story of
- [Struggling Through](https://www.thesmartset.com/struggling-through/) - In an early scene of Eileen Chang’s 1956 novel Naked Earth (reissued this month by NYRB Classics), Liu Ch’uen – a young, enthusiastic new participant in Chairman Mao’s Land Reform movement – watches the “struggle session” of a local landlord’s wife. The woman has been brought into a courtyard to make a confession before the
- [Wild at Heart](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07281101/) - Once, somewhere in the middle-top of Nevada, I saw a mustang. It was once and never again. Wild horses are not an everyday sight in America even though, in every American’s ego, there’s a horse running wild and free. I was traveling north, alone, and would eventually travel east, and all around me was the
- [The Future of God](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-future-of-god/) - As religion declines in the West, will God-fearing Russians defend Christianity against decadent, godless American atheists?
- [On the Road Again](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07291101/) - A girl (or boy) travels to Europe to find herself. We know what happens next. In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss. 352 pages. Knopf. $27.95. On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej Stasiuk. 272 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $23. This is a storyline woven tightly into
- [Vanessa Place Vs. AWP, Woody Allen, and more](https://www.thesmartset.com/vanessa-place-vs-awp-woody-allen-and-more/) - Just as the controversy over PEN America’s award to Charlie Hebdo recedes into the distance a new issue has erupted over at AWP concerning the placement of Vanessa Place on a subcommittee. A petition at Change.org opens: “We find it inappropriate that Vanessa Place is among those who will decide which panels will take place
- [Still Alive](https://www.thesmartset.com/still-alive-theo-jansen-strandbeests/) - If you are lucky, and if you happen to be on the Dutch shore of the North Sea, and if it is a windy day (a not-unusual occurrence), you just might see a new sort of creature walking down the beach. This creature will be walking in fits and starts, activated by gusts of wind,
- [The Enduring <em>Empire</em>](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-enduring-empire/) - The stand-alone popularity amongst Star Wars films of The Empire Strikes Back has always put me in mind of that old line of eight out of 10 dentists preferring one type of toothpaste over another. Empire, which is marking the 35th anniversary of its national release on May 21, is routinely cited as the ne
- [The Club No One Wants to Join](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-club-no-one-wants-to-join/) - I love cold, dark mornings. I love stretching just past the warm spots in the sheets and feeling the icy air brush across my toes. I love the way the pillow pushed under my shoulder cradles my head in softness, and I love to roll over and wiggle the curve of my hip into my
- [The Case for Ecomodernism](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-case-for-ecomodernism/) - In recent years many scientists have come to use the term “the Anthropocene” for the geological era that started when human beings began to alter the earth’s environment in a major way — defined variously as the mass extinctions produced by Ice Age hunters, the transformation of landscapes by Neolithic farmers, or more recently, with
- [Title TK](https://www.thesmartset.com/title-tk-titling-books/) - My last two books have consisted entirely of poems with no individual titles. This felt like the right decision in each case; I want the poems in the manuscript I just finished, for example, to be read as a running internal monologue (the speaker, Judy, is a character I borrowed from a play). Titles would
- [In the Ground](https://www.thesmartset.com/in-the-ground/) - The writer R.K. Narayan was not prone to supernatural thoughts. He understood as well as anyone why The English Teacher — his 1944 novel about a grieving professor who learns to communicate with his recently deceased wife through trance writing — would inspire bewilderment in his readers, and even rage. In the first half of
- [Loopy Numerology](https://www.thesmartset.com/loopy-numerology/) - Philip Levine’s narrative poems rove widely through time and space. In “28,” a poem ostensibly about his twenty-eighth year, events and bits of information are by association linked to other times and places, much the way a short story or dramatic or comedic monologue proceeds from digression to digression. Although emotive power is generated by
- [Laughing Heathens](https://www.thesmartset.com/laughing-heathens/) - For a long time I assumed that atheists had to be angry. Growing up in Austin, Texas in the 1970s, I would listen to two broadcasts on Sunday night: one from an African-American church and one from Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who had made my hometown the center of her American Atheist Association. The cadences of
- [Guinea Pig](https://www.thesmartset.com/guinea-pig/) - A pig sits in the middle of the hall. But is it just a pig? Millions like it are raised and slaughtered each year in countries around the world. And yet this pig is different. First of all, she has a name: Donata. Photos usually show her from behind, since this angle reveals the flames
- [Much Hinges](https://www.thesmartset.com/much-hinges/) - There’s a delightful essay in the 90th anniversary issue of the New Yorker, in which longtime copy editor Mary Norris expounds on her craft, with particular attention to the comma, and defends, almost successfully, the magazine’s indefensibly arcane comma style in sentences like “When I was in high school, at Horace Mann, in the Bronx,
- [Buddy Up](https://www.thesmartset.com/buddy-up/) - The film The Interview starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, is the latest expression of a genre which, given the nature of its conventions, was bound to spark an “incident” eventually. Another example of this genre, where the fallout has been more horrific, is the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. What the film and the magazine have
- [The Naipaul Question](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-naipaul-question/) - In a typical brain-spasm of deep insight, James Wood once wrote that V.S. Naipaul “is a writer who has a conservative vision but radical eyesight.” This, in an essay for The New Yorker a few years ago. The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French had just
- [15-Minute Movies](https://www.thesmartset.com/15-minute-movies/) - I go to fewer and fewer big Hollywood blockbusters, because they are so predictable. The villains are too villainous and the heroes and heroines are too virtuous. The underdogs always defeat the overdogs. Would it kill Hollywood producers to make a movie or two in which the overdogs are the good guys? Over the years,
- [True Grit](https://www.thesmartset.com/true-grit/) - When did the Western become a joke? Did it happen in 1974, when Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles, an irreverent spoof that found something to laugh at in every possible cliché of the genre? Or did we reach the tipping point in 1971, when the Marlboro Man, the cowboy emblem of cigarette addiction, was pulled
- [Inside the Mind of Poetry](https://www.thesmartset.com/inside-the-mind-of-poetry/) - One must have a mind of winter. The greatest lines in poetry are infinitely quotable while having no definite meaning. What is a mind of winter, and why must one have one? It doesn’t matter. Wallace Stevens’ greatness lay in his ability to produce these kinds of anti-aphorisms, seemingly wise but ultimately ungraspable: Thought is
- [Who the @#$% is Proserpine?](https://www.thesmartset.com/who-the-is-proserpine/) - “Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.” Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in 1866 in “Hymn to Proserpine.” If he returned from the Elysian Fields today, he would see no reason to alter his
- [The Road to Jerusalem](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-road-to-jerusalem/) - The highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Highway 1, looks like any other highway in the world. This fact alone is disconcerting. The road to Jerusalem should be special. Somewhere deep down I suppose I wanted it to be a dirt road, a cobblestone road, anything but a normal highway. I even fantasized that the
- [Home Away](https://www.thesmartset.com/exile-tk/) - Israel, the ur-Homeland, is also a place of exile. When God comes to Abraham, and tells him to make a home in Canaan, the first thing Abraham must do is leave. Abraham packs up his stuff, rallies his family, and abandons his home in Mesopotamia for some “strange country” of promise. When God comes to
- [The Art of the Paragraph](https://www.thesmartset.com/paragraph-tk/) - In the past few months, scanning the new arrivals at my local library, I have picked up the same paperback novella several times. Drawn to its one-word title and desaturated blue and off-white spine, I never remember why I decided against it on previous occasions. Then I see the descriptive copy on the back cover,
- [Sad News from the World of Music](https://www.thesmartset.com/joni-mitchell-adrienne-rich-louie-louie-mumia/) - Link roundup
- [Chain Gang](https://www.thesmartset.com/chain-gang/) - The first time I wrote a collection of stories, the editor changed it to "three novellas" and then a second editor changed it to "a novel." The next time I wrote a book of stories, the publisher described it as "a novel in stories." Nobody in New York wanted to publish short stories, although two
- [Orson Welles' Horrorshow](https://www.thesmartset.com/orson-welles-horrorshow/) - The writing guru William Zinser once said words to the effect that if you wish to write long sentences, you best be a genius, the movie version equivalent of which is, probably, if you want to do long takes, be Orson Welles. There wasn’t a shot Welles thought he couldn’t get, and it didn’t matter
- [The Undiscovered Country](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03021501/) - First Bones died, then Scotty, now Spock. That is, DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. McCoy ("Bones") in the original Star Trek cast, died in 1999, then James Doohan, who played the ship's engineer with a Scottish brogue ("Scotty"), died in 2005. In 2008, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played many parts in various incarnations of Star Trek
- [Story, Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02021501/) - One day in the summer of 1896, Maxim Gorky’s mind was blown. Gorky was attending a Russian fair and had gone to visit an exhibit by a couple of Frenchmen known as the Lumiére Brothers. Sitting in a darkened room, Gorky saw what seemed to him a photograph of the streets of Paris projected onto
- [Lonely Teardrops](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02041501/) - “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” Robert Frost admonished. He was talking about the “clarification of life” that poetry brings, and you don’t see clearly through tears. Also, being a stoic New Englander, Frost was temperamentally disinclined to emotional display, even in the face of extreme tragedy, of which his poetry
- [After Joan](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02091501/) - I never thought I’d watch it after Joan was gone. I’m talking Fashion Police — a show on E! whose raison d’etre is to extol and goof on gowns at red carpet events — after the death of its presiding spirit, Joan Rivers. Truly, a profoundly shallow and frivolous entertainment, but one that I acknowledge
- [Picture Books](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02101501/) - “The Written Image” was an exhibit of German Expressionist art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But it was not the exhibit of German Expressionism you might expect to see — none of Ernst Kirchner’s lurid scenes of degenerated Berlin society smeared across the streets. It was a show, rather, of portfolios, periodicals,
- [White Trash Gothic](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02161501/) - When I learned that Harper Lee’s second novel is to be published, the first thought that came to my mind was: Will it be as biased against the white poor as To Kill a Mockingbird? Like millions of other American schoolchildren, I was forced in public elementary school to endure a reading of this best-selling,
- [The Cretan Paradox](https://www.thesmartset.com/the-cretan-paradox/) - El Greco is confusing. He is one of the few universally acknowledged great artists of history who does not fit into any of the established art movements or categories. Given his time period (late 16th – early 17th centuries), his art should fit into the early Baroque. But it does not. One characteristic of all
- [Deep Discounts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02181501/) - More than forty years ago, on the eighth floor of an auditorium in Dayton's department store in Minneapolis, the artist Red Grooms created a unique installation. He called it The Discount Store (1970). The work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, which was still in the process of building its now-famous permanent home in
- [Whistlin' Dixie](https://www.thesmartset.com/article02231501/) - Driving south from the North, we tried to spot exactly where the real South begins. We looked for the South in hand-scrawled signs on the roadside advertising ‘Boil Peanut’, in one-room corrugated tin Baptist churches that are little more than holy sheds, in the crumbling plantation homes with their rose gardens and secrets. In the
- [Sass Back](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06011101/) - I recently saw Courtney Love on the television. She was not looking great. There was something mildly embarrassing about seeing her on the screen, with the crazy still clinging tightly to her, and everyone in the room politely not mentioning all the ways she’s destroyed her face with plastic surgery. It was like watching your
- [Can Food Be Art?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12061201/) - You probably did not have to think about your answer for more than a moment: Whether yes or no, you likely responded to a gut feeling (if you’ll excuse the phrase). On the ground, most of us identify works of art with our own variations of the famous Supreme Court stance on obscenity —
- [The Art of Shame](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12041201/) - Marcel Duchamp was a Romantic artist. If this statement shocks you, you are not alone. When Duchamp turned a urinal upside down in 1917, signed it R. Mutt, and tried to display it in an art show, most people took it as a challenge to established norms of art in the name of what is
- [Old Men in New York](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06021101/) - I can’t get over the first two words of the poem: no sleep. No sleep. That's how Herman Melville began his poem, which is called "The House-top. A Night Piece." It was written in July of 1863. America was in the midst of the Civil War — really in the thick of it. In July
- [Flights of Fancy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06031101/) - Decatur, Illinois lies approximately 180 miles south of Chicago, but for any Decatur resident who gets an urge to visit Wrigley Field, Chicago is surprisingly accessible. That’s because Air Choice One, the carrier that serves Decatur Airport, is having a Spring Fever Special and the current round-trip fare to O’Hare Airport is $59.50, tax included,
- [That's All, Folk!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06061102/) - You can get very close to someone through his or her trash. Henry Darger — artist, writer, janitor, outsider — knew this. His life’s work was collecting the trash of Chicago residents and taking it home. With this trash, Darger designed a new world called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known
- [Poetic Therapy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06061101/) - My daughter is in a coma. She’s non-responsive. Her brain damage is extensive. Her doctors aren’t hopeful. Since you have relevant experience in this area, what do you think I should do to help her? What can I do to help myself, to keep thinking positive? — J Wow. From my experience, I think
- [The Naked Truth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06071101/) - You can practically smell the degradation: the scabby bottoms, the missing teeth, the scars, the saggy old breasts. This is post-Soviet Russia — one aspect of it at least. The photographs are by Boris Mikhailov, who has been photographing the people of Russia since it was the Soviet Union. Mikhailov has always been interested in the seedier
- [How Do U Say...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06131101/) - Embarrassed at how my Spanish had deteriorated over the years, I recently decided to download a few translator apps for iPad and iPod Touch before a trip to Spain. I browsed around the App Store, downloading English-Spanish editions of Google Translate, SpeechTrans and Jibbigo, three of the most popular apps. I briefly considered iLingual,
- [A Temporary Madness](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06141101/) - David John Thomas liked to drink alone. Author Paul Ferris illustrated the point in his biography Dylan Thomas with a portrait of David John alone in a corner table at his local Welsh pub, the Bush. He describes David John Thomas as “a clever, disappointed man”. A young colleague, wrote Ferris, remembered once buying a
- [Trunk Show](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06151101/) - I am interested in Anthony Weiner's wiener and so are you. Here's why: Anthony Weiner has been behaving in such a way as to undermine the public career that he is, quite obviously, in love with. Weiner is in love with politics, he is in love with power, he is in love with being a
- [Things Aren't Grrrrreat!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06161101/) - Unemployment remains high. Marijuana is legal in 16 states and Washington DC. Animal Planet broadcasts a mesmerizing cathode drip of cute kittens and killer crocodiles around the clock. The breakfast cereal industry couldn’t ask for conditions more conducive to selling Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, and yet, according to the market research firm SymphonyIRI,
- [That's Rich](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06171101/) - After watching three seasons of Damages straight through, I have become terrified of the wealthy. What started as a late-night, jet-lagged distraction turned into an obsession, as happens with the whole TV-on-DVD phenomenon. There’s always another episode right there, and you don’t have to really be anywhere for the next 44 minutes, so why not?
- [Clothes Make the Humanities Professor](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06201101/) - One of the great disappointments of my undergraduate years in college in the early 1980s was the number of classes taught by graduate students. To give them their due, these graduate students were good enough teachers. My complaint about them had little to do with the quality of their teaching. What I hated was
- [Reading Habits](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06201102/) - Something weird keeps happening to me. I order one book online, then I get all these email updates — “Maybe you’ll like this book…” These online marketing tactics generally work. I think, “Wow, I would like that book,” and so I order it, and I LOVE IT. So now I’m afraid that these marketing tools
- [Let's Put on an Air Disaster Drill!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06211101/) - Thursday, June 9 was an active night at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, as it was both Parmesan night at the airport’s Italian restaurant and the air disaster drill for the airport at large. The Arnold Palmer Regional Airport lies 40 miles east of Pittsburgh and more than 60 miles east of Pittsburgh
- [Eleven Steps Forward...](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06241101/) - David Foster Wallace's final book is boring. On that, everyone seems to agree. We understand, too, that Wallace intended it to be boring. In the years before he killed himself, David Foster Wallace was writing, after all, a long novel about the IRS. He hadn't finished the book when he died. So, we are left
- [The End](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06281101/) - I recently finished college and a competitive, labor-intensive internship. I’m going to be starting a new job in a couple of weeks, but instead of feeling proud or relieved to have completed my studies, I feel nervous. Why does The End seem so ominous? — Patrick E. Well, as the old adage goes, the
- [Take My Mistress](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06281102/) - There are mistresses, and there are homewreckers. We often believe that the only thing distinguishing one from the other is revelation. The mistress is the hidden, secret lover, but the homewrecker is the same woman splashed on every tabloid cover with her baby — his or not — suddenly labeled “love child” in alarmingly large
- [What Not to Wear](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06291101/) - A few minutes into “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” I suddenly realized what it reminded me of: a nineteenth-century side-show, the sort of collection of sensational curiosities that P.T. Barnum brought together in the earliest form of the American museum. It’s an interesting instance of the institution coming full circle. Ever since Thomas Hoving, the Met’s
- [The Small-Screen Wedding](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05021101/) - So the royal wedding has come and gone and I saw enough to give me fodder for a few musings. Yes, I am a sucker for the spectacle and back story, but even I was surfeited. At some point, as Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters blathered on with help from Tina Brown (who was taking
- [Comic Relief](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05031101/) - Whatever sort of emotional response I may have had on hearing the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces was immediately confused by everyone else’s response. I was angry at the pundits who were suggesting this was perhaps George W. Bush’s victory, and the Republican politicians who immediately tempered their praise
- [The Smile](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05041101/) - The scariest thing about Osama bin Laden was his quietness and his calm. He spoke softly. His face was soft, too. His gestures were never harsh or abrupt. He seemed to be a gentle man. Osama bin Laden was, of course, an extremely violent man. He was so obsessed with violence that, at times, it
- [Nebb' and Flow](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05051101/) - Rarely do you find the words “affordable” and “nebbiolo” in the same sentence. You probably don’t even see them very often in the same paragraph. For most of us, the idea of an affordable nebbiolo exists in some alternate realm where we all ride unicorns and no one ever goes bald or gray and the
- [Take Two Hookworms and Call Me in the Morning](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05061101/) - Public health messages usually sound easier said than done: you know, eat right, exercise regularly, stop smoking. But back in 1931, a key public health message was, in our modern view, truly simple: “wear good shoes.” According to an article in Alabama’s Florence Times-News, wearing shoes was exceedingly important — and apparently not all that
- [Fishing for the Truth](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12101201/) - Looking over a typical day’s selection at the fishmonger, you might notice that the light pink flesh of a fluke, $12 per pound, looks remarkably like that of the pricier sole, at $16 per pound, right beside it. In fact, the two fillets could be swapped for each other and no one would know
- [Artificial Paradise](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12121201/) - “I long for the return of dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion,” lamented Charles Baudelaire in his review of the annual art Salon in Paris in 1859. He added, “I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with
- [Family Ties](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05091101/) - Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum makes visitors feel vaguely uncomfortable. An enormous wall of human skulls greets you as you walk in, each with a note listing the name of the skull’s owner and the details of his death. Advertized as a museum of medical oddities, the Mütter freaks you out because medical oddities are, well, freaky.
- [Oyster Safari](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12141201/) - When Denmark realized a few years ago that it had an oyster invasion, it turned the problem into a tourism opportunity, inciting people to gather up the pests and eat them. It wasn’t too difficult: Danes and oyster-eating go way back, at least to the Stone Age, as evidenced by ancient heaps of discarded shells
- [The Secular Saint](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12171201/) - Why can't the old man retire in peace? He'll be 80 years old this coming March. He doesn’t want to work anymore. He will write no more novels. When he talks about his retirement, Roth sounds satisfied. He no longer wants to be Philip Roth, The Writer. He has written everything that he could
- [A Peace Process](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05101101/) - I’m depressed by how 2011 is going. It’s been one bad thing after another, starting with the car bomb at the Coptic Church in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve. Now there’s the war in Libya. Is world peace a happy delusion that we inscribe on greeting cards and nothing more? Can you help restore my
- [The Difficulty of Debussy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12181201-2/) - Debussy was the first composer I never learned to play. After more than ten years of piano lessons, I had moved through baroque Bach; classical Mozart; and romantic Chopin Nocturnes — all of which had systematic rules to follow. I thought I was ready to move on to the next big thing: The Impressionist Era.
- [Getting Pumped](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05111101/) - Gas prices, you’ve no doubt noticed, are hitting record levels again, and thus consumer irrationality is hitting record levels again, too. In a survey commissioned by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), 26 percent of respondents said they’d drive 10 minutes out of their way to save three cents per gallon. As the
- [How Now, Red Cow?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05131101/) - At some point in the early 20th century — maybe on a trip to Greece in 1906, maybe during the summer spent in Bavaria in 1908 — Franz Marc fell in love with animals. A few years later, he was dead, struck in the head by a shell fragment during the Battle of Verdun. Marc’s
- [Unfashionable](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05161101/) - In February, Vogue published a glowing profile of Asma al-Assad, the first lady of Syria. The article marveled at al-Assad’s long limbs, her fashion sense, her analytical mind. It gushed over the “democratic” running of her household, and mentioned several times her wish for peace. DV by Diana Vreeland. 208 pages. Ecco. $16.99. In
- [The Difficulty of Debussy](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12181201/) - Debussy was the first composer I never learned to play. After more than ten years of piano lessons, I had moved through baroque Bach; classical Mozart; and romantic Chopin Nocturnes — all of which had systematic rules to follow. I thought I was ready to move on to the next big thing: The Impressionist Era.
- [Wedded Bliss](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05191101/) - Is there a particular poem or collection of poetry you'd recommend for 2 bookish types, carefree in spirit but both simple and practical in their daily lives, who are getting married? I am also contributing to a Crate and Barrel gift card for them but I think marriage demands something a little more meaningful than
- [Looking to the Future](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12201201/) - Typically, I plan party food according to two basic rules: One, make it delicious, and two, present it in a discrete form that can be picked up and brandished in the course of energetic conversation without spraying crumbs or dip everywhere. But for New Year’s Eve, which I usually spend with a close cadre of
- [Can You See Me Now?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05231101/) - The 19th-century poet Laura Redden Searing, who happened to be Deaf, wrote a story about a lonely bird with crippled wings who comes upon the Realm of the Singing. This bird longs to sing like the birds living in the high branches of the Realm, but his crippled wings have also crippled his voice. The
- [I Have My Reasons](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05241102/) - Some believe that Yeats got into the magical occult group the Golden Dawn because of his obsessive love for a woman. It happens, sometimes. Sometimes we take up hiking because our lovers appear to be half mountain goat, or we find ourselves suddenly fascinated by the work of Fritz Lang or have a burning new
- [Skipping Steps](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12211201/) - Dumaine Street is one of the narrow, old streets lined with spalled buildings in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It’s rather beautiful. And I absolutely loathe it. Mostly, I loathe it for its obstinate refusal to arrange itself in proper chronological order. When I walk down Dumaine, I’m often trailed by a half-dozen
- [The Postmodern Phenomenon](https://www.thesmartset.com/article12211202/) - January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I’ve been reading P&P (as those of us on intimate terms with the work sometimes refer to it) for 40 years, a fifth of its life. This puts me in a position to say something about its rise in popularity
- [Industrial Comfort](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11051202/) - I was re-reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing recently while riding the 38 bus across London from Clapton Pond to Victoria Station. There is a seductive power to the Ways of Seeing, as strong today as it was when it was first published 40 years ago. The book conjures both the familiar and the new,
- [In Defense of Stink](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11051201/) - My grandmother, like an older bottle of wine, had a complex odor. She was heady. A mix of underarm odor, baby powder, sour milk, and vine ripe tomatoes. It was lovely. It was one of the things that made her memorable. My mother disagreed. I teach creative writing at a college where students can major
- [Freshly Minted](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11121201/) - Once, and only once, I saw a stranger behaving curiously in the toothpaste aisle. He was standing with his arms crossed and brow furrowed; his eyes seemed to scan everything from the top shelf to bottom, then back to the top again. I waited some time for him to move before I realized that
- [Camera Obscura](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11141201/) - Is it a painting or a photograph? It is a harbor. Ships sit on the beach at low tide. The clouds are puffy and white in the sky. A city can be seen in the background. Lovely cliffs rise up behind. Édouard Baldus, a Frenchman, created the image in 1855. It is a photograph, but
- [American or Artist?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11271201/) - What is so American about Edward Hopper? This is the question I pondered at this huge retrospective of his work in the heart of Paris. There seems to be a Hopper retrospective ever few years or so in the United States. His images have become so familiar, so iconic in their simple compositions and their
- [To Whit'](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05241101/) - American art is dying and being reborn. The death is happening on 75th Street in New York City and the birth is happening downtown in the same city, in what’s known as the Meatpacking District. The Whitney Museum is breaking ground on a new building that will be located between the High Line and the
- [Hunger Artist](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11291201/) - The usual obsessive lunchtime topics for a thousand adults in an Antarctic work camp are generally work, Antarctica, and other Antarctic workers. But during my years on the ice, the banter around the dining tables also often referenced the outsized stories of early Antarctic exploration. The heroic Pole-seeking starvation tales of Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon
- [France's Fathers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05261101/) - If you study the greeting cards in the Father’s Day section of your drugstore, you’ll see that they tend to exhibit a consistent iconography. There are the references to beer and golf, those conventional displacements for the marauding, nomadic male. There are the drab browns, greens, and ochres meant to contrast the prettiness of Mother’s
- [Hitchcock's B-sides](https://www.thesmartset.com/article11301201/) - Anyone who has ever really gotten into an artist, regardless of medium, spends a decent amount of time thinking about what everyone else is missing out on. You assume that if your writer of choice is, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that people have read The Great Gatsby or a classic short story or two, but
- [The Wine of Beers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04041101/) - Are there still wine people out there who won't give beer the time of day? Seriously? Sadly, it appears so. When I've mentioned to wine friends that I've started writing about beer, some act as though I'd told them I'll be writing about bromance comedies, Hooters' waitresses and fantasy hockey. I actually saw a
- [Spread Good Taste](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10261201/) - Grey Poupon’s new marketing campaign seems to be designed to keep out as many potential consumers as it invites in. Though one may browse the brand’s Facebook timeline and Pinterest page, you are not permitted to join the brand-approved Society of Good Taste until your own profile is subjected to an examination and found suitable.
- [Taking the Plunge](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04051101/) - For both believers and nonbelievers, the pageantry of religion can sometimes feel like a whole lot of extraneous fuss. The stained glass, the snakes, the evocation of languages long dead — up, down, up, down, up again, down again. Shouldn’t you just be able to close your eyes and stand alone on a mountaintop wearing
- [From Gossip to War Glamour](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10011201/) - In July of 1940 The New Yorker published a curious note about Cecil Beaton visiting Gertrude Stein on the eve of France’s entry into World War II: Miss Stein was at her villa in the south of France, when war was declared. Cecil Beaton was her house guest that week-end. At 11 p.m. a friend
- [One Looks at One](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10021201/) - “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” the poet Theodore Roethke says. For me, a moment of seeing occurred in the pale half light just before dawn one morning toward the end of July. Waiting for the carafe of the Mr. Coffee machine to fill with just enough coffee to banish the
- [Modern Times](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04061101/) - I'm scared of Arthur Rimbaud. Frightening lines like the following can be found in his last collection of poems, Illuminations, newly translated by the great American poet John Ashbery. Long after the days and the seasons, and the beings and the countries, The flag of bloody meat against the silk of arctic seas and flowers;
- [20th Century Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10091201/) - I studied briefly with Eric Hobsbawm, the English Marxist historian who died October 1st at the age of 94. I studied with him in the early 1990s at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Hobsbawm was just completing his book The Age of Extremes, the third in a trilogy that
- [Nice British Ladies](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04071101/) - We are here to claim our rights as women, not only to be free, but to fight for freedom. It is our privilege, as well as our pride and our joy, to take some part in this militant movement, which, as we believe, means the regeneration of all humanity. So said Christabel Pankhurst in a
- [Buyology](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10151201/) - “But it is pretty to see what money will do.” So says London diarist Samuel Pepys in his March 21 1666, entry. And he’s right. Money can “answereth all things” according to Ecclesiastes; it “doesn’t talk, it swears” according to Bob Dylan; it’s “good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life” according to
- [Let's Talk About Specs](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04081101/) - At a time when the average person would sooner donate money to a relief fund for investment bankers than pay full retail price for a CD, millions of Americans happily spend hundreds of dollars on a single pair of eyeglasses. A pair of Tiffany & Co. frames at LensCrafters retails for $410, lenses not included.
- [The New Anti-Semitism](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10181201/) - The conference “Anti-Semitism in France: Past, Present, Future,” held at Yale University on October 5th, came at an opportune time. It followed the July apology by France’s president, Francois Hollande, for his country’s role in the deportation to the Nazi death camps of some 13,000 of its Jewish citizens during World War II, of
- [Riding an Elephant](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10191201/) - Perhaps it was because of “Seymour,” a pony I rode on the beach. I hadn’t wanted to ride him; he was too small. But the hectoring Thai guys hawking pony rides convinced me to take him out for an hour for 500 bhat, more than the cost of a good meal. I couldn’t resist
- [The Art of the Art Heist](https://www.thesmartset.com/article10221201/) - It is one of history's great art heists. This October 16th, thieves broke into the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, circumvented the high-tech security system and stole seven paintings during the wee hours before the museum opened on Tuesday morning. They got two paintings by Monet, a Picasso, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a Lucien Freud, and
- [Another Round](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04111101/) - Why do poets drink so much? Does it help them write better poems? – Nick S. I’m not so sure drinking and writing poetry go hand in hand these days as they used to. Most poets write at the top of the morning while their wits are sharpest, maybe while drinking coffee, which I’m
- [Our Oldest Self-Help Book](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09101201/) - I've often thought of America as a nation forged in loneliness. That pioneer spirit, that radical self-reliance that claims to need nothing but itself, is another way of talking about a people dislocated, living off the fragments of each other's traditions. Breaking ground in the rural wilds far from cities, settlers of the New World
- [We'll Always Have Germany](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04121101/) - It’s become fashionable in American beer-geek circles to talk about the dire state of beer in Germany. The story is usually based on this fact: Germans are drinking less beer, about 101 liters per capita last year, down from more than 130 liters in the mid-1990s. The story usually then leaps to questionable assumptions about
- [The Queen of Hearts](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04181101/) - The forthcoming royal wedding is a boon to the chronic insomniac. What better way to sooth the sleep-deprived psyche than with endless detail on the air-brushed lives of Kate Middleton and Prince William? Documentaries on the subject of this couple usually turn up in the small hours of the night on one of the more
- [Banished Words](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09171201/) - As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United
- [Coming to America](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09201201/) - It was my husband, Morgan who first noticed that we lost all of our Sri Lankans in Abu Dhabi. None of them, we realized, would be following us past the Middle East. We would be traveling to Paris alone, with French people, and some Americans. We must have traveled for 30 hours, sleeping and
- [The War Crimes Beat](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04191101/) - On May 11, 1960, the man who had been living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement was coming home from his job at the Mercedes-Benz plant when he was abducted by two Israeli operatives. “What’s your name?” they asked him. “Ricardo Klement,” he answered. The next time he was asked, he offered up the
- [The Best Sport You've Never Seen](https://www.thesmartset.com/article09281201/) - You are defending a netted goal nine meters long, the full width of a volleyball court, with the help of two teammates. Across from you the opposing team is gingerly passing a ball back and forth, trying to catch you off balance. The referee announces: “Quiet please. Play.” With a quick step, one of
- [A Room with a Point-of-View](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04201101/) - You may have noticed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains strange rooms. They are tucked away in the European Interiors section or back in the American Wing. These rooms do not display simply art or artifacts; they display other rooms. Or you could say that the rooms themselves are the
- [Cover Story](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04211101/) - In 2010, the Sony Corporation sold more than $70 million worth of eight-track cassette players, horse and buggy sales topped $70 million at General Motors, and Hair Club generated more than $70 million by peddling tiny patches of human hair to bald men. Preposterous, you say? Well, sure, especially that last one. But of course
- [Break a Sweat](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04221101/) - I’ve never been much of an exerciser but I’m trying shed some of my winter weight for the summer. I hate gyms with a passion. Could you please make me up a workout routine that doesn't involve going to the gym, preferably involving poetry? — Sara OK, but you should consult your doctor before
- [Fashion-Forward](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08071201/) - I recently realized that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, possibly the greatest museum in the world, has put clothes not only literally but figuratively on a pedestal. It's interesting to think that crowds that once exclaimed over artifacts exhumed from King Tut's tomb now gawk at dresses extracted from deceased socialite Nan Kempner's closet. "Schiaparelli
- [Poetry: A Defense?](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04251101/) - "This book is about modern poetry." That's how David Orr begins his introduction to Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. It is a fine way to begin a book. But it isn't true. Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr. 224 pages. Harper. $25.99 I, for one, like a
- [Some Enchanted Evenings](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08101201/) - The façades of gray stone buildings hover behind her. She stands arrow precise, wrapped in an oversized leather jacket, her one hand, large and fleshy and grasping at the label, reveals a long painted thumbnail. But it is her face — her gaze, composed and calm, floating underneath a bouffant that circles her head like
- [Double Trouble](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04271101/) - It’s still a question, whether Eng had to die that night. They had an agreement, he and Chang, and theirs was a bond that would not break easily. They were linked physically from birth; they depended on each other come what may. If Chang drank, Eng got drunk. If Chang loved, Eng found love, too.
- [Macho Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08161201/) - Robert Hughes was macho. It is hard to point to any one thing that proves this assertion. He was just macho. He knew how to project authority and swagger. He would say tough guy things like, "What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture." That is the primary reason he
- [The War Within](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04271102/) - David Hume turns 300 on May 7. It is fitting, I suppose, that a man so resolutely mortal should be enjoying such immortality. Most of Hume's contemporaries are long forgotten. Hume, somehow, endures. His old pal Adam Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations), relates that in Hume's dying days he told his friends, "I
- [Process Over Politics](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08221201/) - Newsroom and Veep are two new television series that tell us about the high-brow television landscape. Both are on HBO, the presumed bastion for quality television, and both have a political inflection, though they approach politics from different directions. Newsroom is a political show about journalism; Veep is a journalistic show about politics. Newsroom is the more respectable show. It is written
- [Taking Flight](https://www.thesmartset.com/article08221202/) - A novel is a bird. I learned this from Jonathan Franzen. It is the underlying message of his newest collection of essays, Farther Away. Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen. 336 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26. Franzen became a bird watcher many years ago. He is almost apologetic about that fact, realizing that — in
- [Animal Planet](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07101201/) - Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass In May, the New York Times featured an article about the monkeys of New Delhi. The monkeys, according to the article, have “overwhelmed” the
- [Face Time](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07131201/) - Ralph Eugene Meatyard is a marginal figure in the history of post-World War II photography. He took up the practice in the early 1950s, maturing his creative vision until his untimely death in 1972 at the age of 47. This marginal status is due in part to the kind of photographs he made, which are
- [Leave James Joyce Alone!](https://www.thesmartset.com/article07201201/) - On my way to the cafe here in Trieste, I walk past the Scala Dublina, the Dublin stairs. It’s number 12 on the official James Joyce tour of the city, and the rest of the walk will take you to a cafe he liked, a restaurant where he ate, the shore where he went swimming
- [Alive with Pleasure](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04281102/) - My name is Erica, and I was once addicted to menthol. Specifically, I was hooked on Halls mentholated cough drops. When I was in high school and college, it was not unusual for me to go through a bag of cough drops a day. I didn't think of it as addiction at the time. In
- [The Female Body](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04281101/) - A scene in the “new hit series” The Killing seemed déjà-vu familiar, until I realized it’s a standard moment in crime dramas. The victim’s parents are in the police station to answer some questions, and they accidentally come across the crime scene photos. The warm body of the daughter they knew and loved has become
- [Murder Charges](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06041201/) - The discussion about the murder had been going strongly, until I offered up a roadblock. “What exactly was going on in that house?” I asked my students. Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell by Elaine Forman Crane. 256 pages. Cornell University Press. $60.95. Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris by
- [Life Stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03021102/) - Saint Teresa of Avila is best known in her ecstatic state, as captured in marble by the sculptor Gian Bernini — her arched back, her body caught in an orgasmic wave, the moan from her parted lips almost audible. She felt the presence of God as an erotic power, the connection between the divine and
- [A Simple Story of Motion](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06081201/) - Professor Butts walks in his sleep, strolls through a cactus field in his bare feet, and screams out an idea for a self-operating napkin. The "Self-Operating Napkin" is activated when soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after
- [Queen of the Highlands](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03021101/) - The innkeeper at the Tradita Hotel set down his tea regretfully. “You want to see castle or bridge?” A mutual friend had asked him to take good care of me, but clearly he didn’t relish the role. A few minutes later, four of us climbed into a dark sedan and lurched into the crowded
- [Meet the New Barnes](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06191201/) - Philadelphia was blazing hot a few weeks ago as I stood at the entrance of the Museum of Art, looking down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The museum’s south entrance rises above the Parkway atop a hill of 72 steps. From here, the city stretches itself in a horizontal plane, its gray stone buildings increasingly overshadowed
- [Psyched Out](https://www.thesmartset.com/article06221201/) - Margaret Fuller looked around her Cambridge social circle and found her suitors lacking. The gentlemen of Cambridge looked at Margaret Fuller and found her lacking as well. This was, of course, late in the 19th century. She was not what you would call traditional marriage material. She was willful, brilliant. She loved conversation about philosophy,
- [A Story About Toys](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03041102/) - I collect thumb toys. Few people know thumb toys by name, but most everybody has seen one. Thumb toys are those small figures that stand atop a little pedestal that fits in the palm of your hand. Push a button under the pedestal and tension is released from strings within the figure; it falls. Let
- [Go to Hell](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05031201/) - It’s been 450 years since Pieter Breugel the Elder painted the famous “Dulle Griet,” and still no one can agree what the painting is about. In the center of the mad surreal Boschian landscape is Dulle Griet — in English, “Mad Meg” — a homely peasant woman from Flemish folklore, wearing the armor of a
- [Canon vs. Creator](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03041101/) - When we think of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the first thing that comes to mind is his masterful Journey to the End of the Night. After that, we maybe remember he was a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite. Hunger by Knut Hamsun. 240 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16. Ernst Jünger, the German writer, remembered in his journal the typical
- [Sherman's March](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05111201/) - “Nothing an artist could do was thought of really offensive anymore,” critic Robert Hughes declared of art in the 1970s, “because there was always the chance it might be converted into capital.” He added, “everywhere there was instant art for instant people.” Hughes’ critiques were part of his eight-part television series on modern art, The
- [Artist Unknown](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03081101/) - We know him not at all, and yet completely. That has always been the paradox of William Shakespeare. The characters he created in his plays have worked their way into the collective DNA of the English-speaking world, of Western culture broadly considered, and of world culture through Western culture. The language of Shakespeare -- that
- [Final Rap](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05141201/) - The Beastie Boys were a trio, a threesome. Musically, this presents certain difficulties. You could call it a theological problem. How do you unify a trinity? How do you balance the three individual voices without ending up in cacophony? The fact that the Beastie Boys were rappers made it all the more difficult. Rappers
- [End of the Road](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03091101/) - The station wagon is dead — again — and like the many demises it has already suffered in its long fruitful life, this one comes with an asterisk. The reason for the asterisk is that there are still dozens of vehicles on the market that answer to the name “station wagon.” The reason for the
- [Walk Like a Man](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05161201/) - Would you be the same person if you were a different gender? Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities by Ken Corbett. 288 pages. Yale University Press. $26. The Metaphysics of Gender by Charlotte Witt. 168 pages. Oxford University Press. $24.95. Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform
- [You Can Take It with You](https://www.thesmartset.com/article05231201/) - Everywhere you travel, there are backpackers. You can see them herding at train platforms in Italy, or wandering past dusty tea stalls in India. They always have that look: something between yearning and exhaustion. It’s been more than half a century now that backpacking, for many young Americans, has become a rite of passage,
- [Skin Problems](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04031201/) - As I walked along Charing Cross Road in London the other week, the skies were clear and the temperature felt more June than March. The crowds in Trafalgar Square were dressed for the weather, baring skin that hadn’t seen the sun in many months. I should have been relieved with the spring air. I should
- [Fifty Thousand and Counting](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04041201/) - La Muerte es un a vida vivida. La vida es un a muerte que viene. (Death is a life lived. Life is death on its way.) — Jorge Luis Borges A few days after the birthday of our seventh billion neighbor, in the season in which the Mexican “war” on drugs claimed (at
- [The Sound of Silence](https://www.thesmartset.com/article03101101/) - When I was fourteen, my guitar teacher asked me, “Why is the guitar a folk instrument and not a piano?” I'd never thought of that before, and the question blew my mind. Surely a piano could be a folk instrument. Couldn’t it? I was fourteen, anything could be anything. I was interested in the music
- [The Posthumous Star](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04111201/) - We know the story. Van Gogh died having only sold one painting during his lifetime. He was a mad creative genius — our favorite kind — cutting off his ear and giving it to a prostitute. Then, tragically, a suicide, perhaps bereft at the cold reception his work received, so that he never knew how
- [Fade to Black](https://www.thesmartset.com/article04121201/) - I was surprised to read that Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light," had died at age 54. It seems only yesterday I was in the Thomas Kinkade Gallery at the Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas, ambling through fantastically homey landscapes in pink and blue pastels. Quaint brick houses with sloping straw rooftops and fresh green

## Pages

- [About Us](https://www.thesmartset.com/about-us/) - After 17 years, we sadly announce that The Smart Set has had to cease operations under the leadership of Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University due to significant budgetary constraints. The Smart SetDrexel University3301 Arch StreetBentley Hall AnnexPhiladelphia, PA 19104smartsetmag@drexel.edu
- [Submissions](https://www.thesmartset.com/submissions/) - Thank you for your interest in contributing to The Smart Set. Unfortunately, due to significant budgetary constraints, The Smart Set has had to cease operations, at least under the leadership of Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. We understand this may come as disappointing news and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience it may cause. We are grateful for
- [Privacy Policy](https://www.thesmartset.com/privacy-policy/) - Who we are The Smart Set is published by the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. Our website address is: https://www.thesmartset.com. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and
- [Columns New](https://www.thesmartset.com/columns-new/)
- [Columns](https://www.thesmartset.com/columns/)
- [Features](https://www.thesmartset.com/features/)
- [Advertise](https://www.thesmartset.com/advertise/) - Vinyl Helvetica tote bag photo booth. Forage authentic keffiyeh, twee hashtag Blue Bottle flannel Banksy whatever 90's. Four loko heirloom actually, Blue Bottle vegan Helvetica drinking vinegar tilde sustainable. Fashion axe tattooed cred, vegan mixtape Banksy fixie Thundercats Tumblr Godard. Fanny pack direct trade lumbersexual, wolf freegan Marfa literally whatever Wes Anderson pickled meditation Shoreditch
- [Blog](https://www.thesmartset.com/blog/)

## Lists

- [summer](https://www.thesmartset.com/list/summer/)
- [walking](https://www.thesmartset.com/list/walking/)

## Categories

- [Uncategorized](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/uncategorized/)
- [Features](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/features/)
- [Blog](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/blog/)
- [Idle Chatter](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/idle-chatter/) - Field notes on arts, culture, and everything else from our critic-at-large.
- [Pop Studies](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/pop-studies/) - Commentary on the worlds of entertainment, style, and media.
- [Lost & Found](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/lost-found/) - Peeking into the cracks and crevices of culture.
- [Ideas](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/ideas/) - Tales, trivia, and tidbits from now and then.
- [Pertinent & Impertinent](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/pertinent-impertinent/) - The big ideas on the small, the not-so-small, and the everyday.
- [First Person](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/first-person/) - From your point of view.
- [Life Science](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/life-science/) - Investigations into the intersection of science and humanity.
- [On Shopping](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/on-shopping/) - To praise shopping is to breach the last taboo of academic culture.
- [The Naturalist](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/the-naturalist/) - Communications with the living world.
- [Journeys](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/journeys/) - Around the world by highways, byways, and waterways.
- [Visual Studies](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/visual-studies/) - Dispatches from exhibitions around the world.
- [Consumer Confidence](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/consumer-confidence/) - Notes on what we buy, why we buy it, and how companies get us to keep buying more.
- [The Look of Things](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/the-look-of-things/) - Notes on design.
- [Noncanonical](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/noncanonical/) - Notes from a barbarian at the gates of culture.
- [Bookslut](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/bookslut/) - A regular column from a very promiscuous reader.
- [Used Books](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/used-books/) - Revisiting older books in light of new events.
- [Ask a Poet](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/ask-a-poet/) - Everything you wanted to know about life, poets, and the poet’s life.
- [Second Acts](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/second-acts/) - Dispatches from a woman of a certain age.
- [Questionable Tastes](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/questionable-tastes/) - Journeys through the world of food and drink.
- [The Walking Tour](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/the-walking-tour/) - A guide of unconventional places and ideas.
- [Foodstuffs](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/foodstuffs/) - Notes and commentary from the table.
- [Tony's Secret Cabinet](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/tonys-secret-cabinet/) - Stories from the institutions that preserve and interpret our history and culture.
- [Cause & Effect](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/cause-effect/) - Aristotle says every human action is due to one of seven causes. I now have seven legitimate excuses for my behavior.
- [Emily's World](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/emilys-world/) - In which our heroine writes a column.
- [The Sporting Life](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/the-sporting-life/) - On the wide world of sports.
- [My Writers Workshop](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/my-writers-workshop/) - Looking back on the dalliances of my MFA program.
- [Object](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/object/) - Looking at a single obscure object from museums around the world.
- [Keeping Score](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/keeping-score/) - Notes on music from around the world and throughout history.
- [Archive](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/archive/)
- [Off Center](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/off-center/) - Michael Lind at the intersection of politics, culture, economics, and history.
- [Beyond Words](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/beyond-words/) - On the act of writing.
- [From The Wire](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/daily-wire/) - Links from around the web.
- [Reviews](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/reviews/) - For and against our better judgement.
- [Conversations](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/conversations/) - Witty banter with persons of note.
- [Life & Death](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/life-death/) - In memoriam.
- [Best of the Smart Set](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/best-of-the-smart-set/)
- [Schooled](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/schooled/) - You say you want an education.
- [The Panelist](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/the-panelist/) - Taking comics seriously.
- [Americana](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/americana/) - [Insert John Mellencamp here.]
- [Set List](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/set-list/) - Music to your ears.
- [Books](https://www.thesmartset.com/category/books/)

## Tags

- [death](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/death/)
- [sci-fi](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sci-fi/)
- [tv](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tv/)
- [archive](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/archive/)
- [Homepage Featured](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/homepage-featured/)
- [books](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/books/)
- [travel writing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/travel-writing/)
- [naipaul](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/naipaul/)
- [jerks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jerks/)
- [conrad](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/conrad/)
- [comedy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/comedy/)
- [satire](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/satire/)
- [the interview](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-interview/)
- [buddy comedies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/buddy-comedies/)
- [star trek](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/star-trek/)
- [leonard nimoy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/leonard-nimoy/)
- [obituaries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/obituaries/)
- [politics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/politics/)
- [movies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/movies/)
- [underdog](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/underdog/)
- [archetypes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/archetypes/)
- [rants](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rants/)
- [westerns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/westerns/)
- [cormac mccarthy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cormac-mccarthy/)
- [poetry](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/poetry/)
- [what is...](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/what-is/)
- [israel](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/israel/)
- [architecture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/architecture/)
- [bauhaus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bauhaus/)
- [memorials](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/memorials/)
- [travel](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/travel/)
- [jerusalem](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jerusalem/)
- [tel aviv](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tel-aviv/)
- [exile](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/exile/)
- [classics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/classics/)
- [greece](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/greece/)
- [rome](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rome/)
- [culture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/culture/)
- [grammar](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/grammar/)
- [paragraphs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/paragraphs/)
- [writing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/writing/)
- [S.Y. Agnon](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/s-y-agnon/)
- [Mahmoud Darwish](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mahmoud-darwish/)
- [art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/art/)
- [el greco](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/el-greco/)
- [spain](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spain/)
- [crete](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/crete/)
- [india](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/india/)
- [animals](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/animals/)
- [tattoos](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tattoos/)
- [germany](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/germany/)
- [contemporary art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/contemporary-art/)
- [pigs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pigs/)
- [atheism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/atheism/)
- [philosophy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/philosophy/)
- [santayana](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/santayana/)
- [democritius](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/democritius/)
- [phillip levine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/phillip-levine/)
- [age](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/age/)
- [r.k. narayan](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/r-k-narayan/)
- [grief](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/grief/)
- [spiritualism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spiritualism/)
- [the south](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-south/)
- [w.j. cash](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/w-j-cash/)
- [pop art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pop-art/)
- [target](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/target/)
- [danto](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/danto/)
- [red grooms](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/red-grooms/)
- [installation art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/installation-art/)
- [beauty](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/beauty/)
- [consumerism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/consumerism/)
- [to kill a mockingbird](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/to-kill-a-mockingbird/)
- [harper lee](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harper-lee/)
- [class](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/class/)
- [printmaking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/printmaking/)
- [woodcuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/woodcuts/)
- [expressionism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/expressionism/)
- [frans masereel](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/frans-masereel/)
- [events](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/events/)
- [news](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/news/)
- [music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/music/)
- [short stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/short-stories/)
- [dante](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dante/)
- [orson welles](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/orson-welles/)
- [macbeth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/macbeth/)
- [shakespeare](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/shakespeare/)
- [anniversaries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/anniversaries/)
- [centenaries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/centenaries/)
- [horror](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/horror/)
- [English departments](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/english-departments/)
- [PEN American](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pen-american/)
- [literature](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/literature/)
- [las vegas](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/las-vegas/)
- [signs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/signs/)
- [graphic design](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/graphic-design/)
- [betty willis](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/betty-willis/)
- [updike](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/updike/)
- [highways](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/highways/)
- [pennsylvania](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pennsylvania/)
- [suburbs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/suburbs/)
- [science fiction](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/science-fiction/)
- [comics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/comics/)
- [ray bradbury](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ray-bradbury/)
- [game of thrones](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/game-of-thrones/)
- [space travel](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/space-travel/)
- [fantasy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fantasy/)
- [the end of...](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-end-of/)
- [failures](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/failures/)
- [eyes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/eyes/)
- [susan sontag](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/susan-sontag/)
- [human behavior](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/human-behavior/)
- [antal szerb](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/antal-szerb/)
- [motherhood](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/motherhood/)
- [rebecca west](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rebecca-west/)
- [dorothy thompson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dorothy-thompson/)
- [Harold Bloom](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harold-bloom/)
- [Pete Townshend](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pete-townshend/)
- [switzerland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/switzerland/)
- [thomas mann](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/thomas-mann/)
- [janet jackson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/janet-jackson/)
- [joan rivers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/joan-rivers/)
- [eileen chang](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/eileen-chang/)
- [mao](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mao/)
- [china](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/china/)
- [elisa gabbert](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/elisa-gabbert/)
- [punctuation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/punctuation/)
- [mary norris](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mary-norris/)
- [james salter](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/james-salter/)
- [tears](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tears/)
- [emotion](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/emotion/)
- [pathos](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pathos/)
- [stephen akey](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/stephen-akey/)
- [feelings](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/feelings/)
- [michael lind](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/michael-lind/)
- [religion](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/religion/)
- [russia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/russia/)
- [religious patterns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/religious-patterns/)
- [boyhood](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/boyhood/)
- [cinema](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cinema/)
- [maxim gorky](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/maxim-gorky/)
- [morgan meis](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/morgan-meis/)
- [early film](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/early-film/)
- [discourse](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/discourse/)
- [journalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/journalism/)
- [commenting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/commenting/)
- [stefany anne goldberg](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/stefany-anne-goldberg/)
- [snow](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/snow/)
- [winter](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/winter/)
- [paula marantz cohen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/paula-marantz-cohen/)
- [etching](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/etching/)
- [engraving](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/engraving/)
- [Vanessa Place](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vanessa-place/)
- [AWP](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/awp/)
- [performance](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/performance/)
- [sculpture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sculpture/)
- [global warming](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/global-warming/)
- [holland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/holland/)
- [photography](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/photography/)
- [theo jansen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/theo-jansen/)
- [life](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/life/)
- [free speech](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/free-speech/)
- [controversy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/controversy/)
- [publishing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/publishing/)
- [top stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/top-stories-sidebar/) - Show story in Top Stories sidebar. Functional only, does not display in tag list.
- [star wars](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/star-wars/)
- [marriage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/marriage/)
- [beach](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/beach/)
- [summer](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/summer/)
- [fashion](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fashion/)
- [first person](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/first-person/)
- [atlantic city](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/atlantic-city/)
- [beauty standards](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/beauty-standards/)
- [food](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/food/)
- [malthus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/malthus/)
- [environmentalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/environmentalism/)
- [agriculture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/agriculture/)
- [cities](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cities/)
- [artistry](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/artistry/)
- [larry sultan](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/larry-sultan/)
- [west coast](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/west-coast/)
- [landscape](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/landscape/)
- [home](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/home/)
- [cyril connolly](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cyril-connolly/)
- [the unquiet grave](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-unquiet-grave/)
- [failure](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/failure/)
- [titles](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/titles/)
- [jane eyre](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jane-eyre/)
- [mary jo bang](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mary-jo-bang/)
- [reviews](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/reviews/)
- [biographies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/biographies/)
- [james merrill](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/james-merrill/)
- [elizabeth bishop](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/elizabeth-bishop/)
- [mentorship](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mentorship/)
- [20th century](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/20th-century/)
- [gunter grass](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gunter-grass/)
- [the tin drum](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-tin-drum/)
- [new york](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/new-york/)
- [haiti](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/haiti/)
- [literacy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/literacy/)
- [libraries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/libraries/)
- [einstein](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/einstein/)
- [science](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/science/)
- [henri bergson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/henri-bergson/)
- [millenials](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/millenials/)
- [minimalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/minimalism/)
- [richard tuttle](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/richard-tuttle/)
- [criticism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/criticism/)
- [fabric workshop](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fabric-workshop/)
- [canada](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/canada/)
- [millennials](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/millennials/)
- [Book of Numbers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/book-of-numbers/)
- [book news](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/book-news/)
- [blushing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/blushing/)
- [emotions](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/emotions/)
- [history](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/history/)
- [shame](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/shame/)
- [society](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/society/)
- [aphorisms](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/aphorisms/)
- [sayings](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sayings/)
- [rock](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rock/)
- [confederate flag](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/confederate-flag/)
- [billy idol](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/billy-idol/)
- [lynyrd skynyrd](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lynyrd-skynyrd/)
- [pop culture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pop-culture/)
- [without the south](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/without-the-south/)
- [ghosts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ghosts/)
- [mysteries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mysteries/)
- [pulp](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pulp/)
- [england](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/england/)
- [edwardian](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/edwardian/)
- [shopping](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/shopping/)
- [skin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/skin/)
- [consumer culture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/consumer-culture/)
- [business](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/business/)
- [libertarianism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/libertarianism/)
- [19th century](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/19th-century/)
- [interviews](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/interviews/)
- [frankenstein](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/frankenstein/)
- [mary ellen mark](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mary-ellen-mark/)
- [in slideshow](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/in-slideshow/)
- [cleveland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cleveland/)
- [american poets](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/american-poets/)
- [the beats](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-beats/)
- [michelangelo lovelace](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/michelangelo-lovelace/)
- [d.a. levy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/d-a-levy/)
- [zines](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/zines/)
- [museums](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/museums/)
- [space](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/space/)
- [pluto](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pluto/)
- [nabokov](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nabokov/)
- [ralph steadman](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ralph-steadman/)
- [birds](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/birds/)
- [illustration](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/illustration/)
- [collectons](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/collectons/)
- [trash](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/trash/)
- [clothing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/clothing/)
- [nasa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nasa/)
- [education](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/education/)
- [memoir](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/memoir/)
- [morality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/morality/)
- [aristotle](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/aristotle/)
- [hume](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hume/)
- [burke](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/burke/)
- [native americans](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/native-americans/)
- [mound builders](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mound-builders/)
- [great serpent mound](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/great-serpent-mound/)
- [spiral jetty](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spiral-jetty/)
- [robert smithson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/robert-smithson/)
- [commentary](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/commentary/)
- [nyt](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nyt/)
- [rbf](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rbf/)
- [models](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/models/)
- [aesthetics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/aesthetics/)
- [faces](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/faces/)
- [liberalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/liberalism/)
- [left](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/left/)
- [right](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/right/)
- [america](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/america/)
- [political parties](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/political-parties/)
- [marxism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/marxism/)
- [capitalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/capitalism/)
- [frank bruni](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/frank-bruni/)
- [higher ed](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/higher-ed/)
- [restaurants](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/restaurants/)
- [media](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/media/)
- [essays](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/essays/)
- [ambiguity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ambiguity/)
- [style](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/style/)
- [flannery o'connor](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/flannery-oconnor/)
- [ben marcus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ben-marcus/)
- [modernism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/modernism/)
- [contemporary writing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/contemporary-writing/)
- [baseball](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/baseball/)
- [babe ruth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/babe-ruth/)
- [1920s](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/1920s/)
- [sports](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sports/)
- [deborah levy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/deborah-levy/)
- [80s](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/80s/)
- [husker du](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/husker-du/)
- [paradise lost](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/paradise-lost/)
- [john milton](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/john-milton/)
- [1980s](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/1980s/)
- [social science](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/social-science/)
- [sociology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sociology/)
- [economics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/economics/)
- [futurism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/futurism/)
- [noise](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/noise/)
- [sound](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sound/)
- [proust](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/proust/)
- [cows](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cows/)
- [advice](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/advice/)
- [hamlet](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hamlet/)
- [conflict](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/conflict/)
- [wanting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wanting/)
- [realism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/realism/)
- [contradiction](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/contradiction/)
- [pretty](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pretty/)
- [words](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/words/)
- [cute](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cute/)
- [cats](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cats/)
- [debbie harry](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/debbie-harry/)
- [alice bolin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/alice-bolin/)
- [sianne ngai](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sianne-ngai/)
- [blue jasmine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/blue-jasmine/)
- [cate blanchett](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cate-blanchett/)
- [describing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/describing/)
- [feminism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/feminism/)
- [jl austin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jl-austin/)
- [pope](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pope/)
- [john paul II](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/john-paul-ii/)
- [fathers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fathers/)
- [philadelphia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/philadelphia/)
- [steve jobs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/steve-jobs/)
- [film](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/film/)
- [invisibility](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/invisibility/)
- [jk rowling](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jk-rowling/)
- [technology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/technology/)
- [istanbul](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/istanbul/)
- [turkey](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/turkey/)
- [middle east](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/middle-east/)
- [expat stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/expat-stories/)
- [transgender](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/transgender/)
- [gender](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gender/)
- [waste](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/waste/)
- [future](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/future/)
- [vatican](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vatican/)
- [pharmaceuticals](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pharmaceuticals/)
- [drugs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/drugs/)
- [AIDS](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/aids/)
- [cancer](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cancer/)
- [advertising](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/advertising/)
- [ads](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ads/)
- [television](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/television/)
- [moon](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/moon/)
- [mars](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mars/)
- [ridley scott](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ridley-scott/)
- [trigger warning](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/trigger-warning/)
- [higher education](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/higher-education/)
- [authors](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/authors/)
- [happy birthday](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/happy-birthday/)
- [copyright](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/copyright/)
- [ISIS](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/isis/)
- [palmyra](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/palmyra/)
- [syria](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/syria/)
- [volkswagen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/volkswagen/)
- [hitler](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hitler/)
- [scandal](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/scandal/)
- [the good wife](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-good-wife/)
- [makeup](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/makeup/)
- [women](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/women/)
- [coffee](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/coffee/)
- [starbucks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/starbucks/)
- [italy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/italy/)
- [espresso](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/espresso/)
- [national coffee day](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/national-coffee-day/)
- [dalai lama](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dalai-lama/)
- [buddhism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/buddhism/)
- [children](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/children/)
- [castrati](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/castrati/)
- [opera](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/opera/)
- [sex](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sex/)
- [secret cabinets](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/secret-cabinets/)
- [community service](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/community-service/)
- [crime](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/crime/)
- [public transit](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/public-transit/)
- [thrift stores](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/thrift-stores/)
- [secondhand stores](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/secondhand-stores/)
- [volunteering](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/volunteering/)
- [heidegger](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/heidegger/)
- [chatter](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/chatter/)
- [small talk](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/small-talk/)
- [language](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/language/)
- [emerson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/emerson/)
- [pop music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pop-music/)
- [rihanna](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rihanna/)
- [the cranberries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-cranberries/)
- [richard rorty](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/richard-rorty/)
- [epitaph](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/epitaph/)
- [obituary](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/obituary/)
- [nazis](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nazis/)
- [soviet union](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/soviet-union/)
- [truth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/truth/)
- [poland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/poland/)
- [kapuscinski](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kapuscinski/)
- [monkeys](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/monkeys/)
- [john muir](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/john-muir/)
- [consciousness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/consciousness/)
- [dogs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dogs/)
- [animal rights](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/animal-rights/)
- [centenarians](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/centenarians/)
- [sardinia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sardinia/)
- [longevity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/longevity/)
- [okinawa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/okinawa/)
- [diet](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/diet/)
- [lifestyle](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lifestyle/)
- [genetics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/genetics/)
- [edward snowden](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/edward-snowden/)
- [facial recognition](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/facial-recognition/)
- [twitter](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/twitter/)
- [neil degrasse tyson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/neil-degrasse-tyson/)
- [NSA](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nsa/)
- [polo](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/polo/)
- [ralph lauren](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ralph-lauren/)
- [logos](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/logos/)
- [teens](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/teens/)
- [internet](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/internet/)
- [youtube](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/youtube/)
- [vegetarianism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vegetarianism/)
- [decadence](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/decadence/)
- [book review](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/book-review/)
- [mobile](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mobile/)
- [work](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/work/)
- [jobs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jobs/)
- [occupation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/occupation/)
- [college](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/college/)
- [pronouns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pronouns/)
- [fall](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fall/)
- [leaves](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/leaves/)
- [tourism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tourism/)
- [maps](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/maps/)
- [apes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/apes/)
- [primates](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/primates/)
- [october](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/october/)
- [world literature](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/world-literature/)
- [goethe](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/goethe/)
- [norman rockwell](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/norman-rockwell/)
- [painting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/painting/)
- [shooting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/shooting/)
- [guns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/guns/)
- [infamy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/infamy/)
- [space-time](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/space-time/)
- [sea](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sea/)
- [ocean](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ocean/)
- [exoticism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/exoticism/)
- [sailing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sailing/)
- [ethnocentrism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ethnocentrism/)
- [gauguin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gauguin/)
- [STEM](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/stem/)
- [arts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/arts/)
- [universities](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/universities/)
- [humanities](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/humanities/)
- [playboy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/playboy/)
- [nudity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nudity/)
- [christopher columbus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/christopher-columbus/)
- [indigenous americans](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/indigenous-americans/)
- [ugly](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ugly/)
- [chekhov](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/chekhov/)
- [russian literature](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/russian-literature/)
- [desire](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/desire/)
- [abortion](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/abortion/)
- [pro-life](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pro-life/)
- [pro-choice](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pro-choice/)
- [planned parenthood](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/planned-parenthood/)
- [protest](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/protest/)
- [terrorism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/terrorism/)
- [wrath of angels](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wrath-of-angels/)
- [population](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/population/)
- [apocalypse](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/apocalypse/)
- [overpopulation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/overpopulation/)
- [love](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/love/)
- [loneliness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/loneliness/)
- [breakups](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/breakups/)
- [relationships](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/relationships/)
- [getting old](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/getting-old/)
- [boxing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/boxing/)
- [baltimore](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/baltimore/)
- [muhammad ali](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/muhammad-ali/)
- [halloween](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/halloween/)
- [haunted houses](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/haunted-houses/)
- [historical sites](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/historical-sites/)
- [holograms](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/holograms/)
- [margaret atwood](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/margaret-atwood/)
- [gary indiana](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gary-indiana/)
- [losers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/losers/)
- [lonliness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lonliness/)
- [skin color](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/skin-color/)
- [miss america](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/miss-america/)
- [austism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/austism/)
- [parenting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/parenting/)
- [astronomy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/astronomy/)
- [keats](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/keats/)
- [DNA](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dna/)
- [dinosaurs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dinosaurs/)
- [nelson shanks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nelson-shanks/)
- [monica lewinsky](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/monica-lewinsky/)
- [bill clinton](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bill-clinton/)
- [the drexel interview](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-drexel-interview/)
- [modern art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/modern-art/)
- [reading](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/reading/)
- [hemmingway](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hemmingway/)
- [f scott fitzgerald](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/f-scott-fitzgerald/)
- [henry james](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/henry-james/)
- [windows](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/windows/)
- [united states](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/united-states/)
- [race](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/race/)
- [civil war](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/civil-war/)
- [confederacy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/confederacy/)
- [war](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/war/)
- [greek mythology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/greek-mythology/)
- [catholicism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/catholicism/)
- [criminal evidence](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/criminal-evidence/)
- [mountains](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mountains/)
- [wilderness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wilderness/)
- [civilization](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/civilization/)
- [nature](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nature/)
- [embarrassment](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/embarrassment/)
- [lydia davis](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lydia-davis/)
- [robert walser](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/robert-walser/)
- [italo calvino](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/italo-calvino/)
- [hershey](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hershey/)
- [farmland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/farmland/)
- [farming](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/farming/)
- [milk](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/milk/)
- [christmas](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/christmas/)
- [rudolph](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rudolph/)
- [theory](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/theory/)
- [incommesurability](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/incommesurability/)
- [universality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/universality/)
- [ethnomusicology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ethnomusicology/)
- [caps lock](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/caps-lock/)
- [emails](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/emails/)
- [bosses](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bosses/)
- [nicknames](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nicknames/)
- [animation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/animation/)
- [drawing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/drawing/)
- [microsoft](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/microsoft/)
- [kafka](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kafka/)
- [jonathan franzen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jonathan-franzen/)
- [prison](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/prison/)
- [unemployment](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/unemployment/)
- [djibouti](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/djibouti/)
- [africa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/africa/)
- [poverty](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/poverty/)
- [picasso](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/picasso/)
- [duchamp](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/duchamp/)
- [gertrude stein](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gertrude-stein/)
- [cubism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cubism/)
- [europe](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/europe/)
- [impressionism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/impressionism/)
- [william glackens](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/william-glackens/)
- [world war I](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/world-war-i/)
- [thanksgiving](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/thanksgiving/)
- [aging](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/aging/)
- [wrinkles](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wrinkles/)
- [plastic surgery](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/plastic-surgery/)
- [time](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/time/)
- [medicine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/medicine/)
- [guatemala](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/guatemala/)
- [antigua](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/antigua/)
- [longing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/longing/)
- [south america](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/south-america/)
- [nostalgia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nostalgia/)
- [berlin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/berlin/)
- [berlin wall](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/berlin-wall/)
- [communism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/communism/)
- [costa rica](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/costa-rica/)
- [driving](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/driving/)
- [cars](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cars/)
- [bacon](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bacon/)
- [meat](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/meat/)
- [peanuts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/peanuts/)
- [charlie brown](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/charlie-brown/)
- [barack obama](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/barack-obama/)
- [marilynne robinson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/marilynne-robinson/)
- [washington irving](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/washington-irving/)
- [scary stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/scary-stories/)
- [headless horseman](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/headless-horseman/)
- [ichabod crane](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ichabod-crane/)
- [autumn](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/autumn/)
- [world war II](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/world-war-ii/)
- [holocaust](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/holocaust/)
- [fire](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fire/)
- [sin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sin/)
- [smoking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/smoking/)
- [new york city](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/new-york-city/)
- [paul strand](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/paul-strand/)
- [garry winogrand](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/garry-winogrand/)
- [pictoralism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pictoralism/)
- [vision](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vision/)
- [fear](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fear/)
- [mencken](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mencken/)
- [candy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/candy/)
- [zombies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/zombies/)
- [calculus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/calculus/)
- [japan](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/japan/)
- [matisse](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/matisse/)
- [color](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/color/)
- [nobel prize](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nobel-prize/)
- [sartre](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sartre/)
- [existentialism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/existentialism/)
- [camus](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/camus/)
- [houses](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/houses/)
- [performance art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/performance-art/)
- [durational art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/durational-art/)
- [joseph cornell](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/joseph-cornell/)
- [collage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/collage/)
- [insects](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/insects/)
- [bugs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bugs/)
- [violence](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/violence/)
- [david lynch](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/david-lynch/)
- [poussin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/poussin/)
- [orhan pamuk](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/orhan-pamuk/)
- [names](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/names/)
- [london](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/london/)
- [naples](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/naples/)
- [freedom](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/freedom/)
- [theme parks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/theme-parks/)
- [construction](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/construction/)
- [childhood](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/childhood/)
- [toys](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/toys/)
- [pigeons](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pigeons/)
- [extinction](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/extinction/)
- [hunting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hunting/)
- [mythology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mythology/)
- [superstition](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/superstition/)
- [evolution](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/evolution/)
- [walking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/walking/)
- [health](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/health/)
- [beer](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/beer/)
- [hiking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hiking/)
- [wales](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wales/)
- [baltic wars](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/baltic-wars/)
- [tragedy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tragedy/)
- [busts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/busts/)
- [fruit](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fruit/)
- [recipes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/recipes/)
- [risotto](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/risotto/)
- [children's books](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/childrens-books/)
- [pronunciation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pronunciation/)
- [casinos](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/casinos/)
- [hotels](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hotels/)
- [gambling](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gambling/)
- [harry potter](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harry-potter/)
- [j.k. rowling](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/j-k-rowling/)
- [dickens](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dickens/)
- [pomegranates](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pomegranates/)
- [gentlemen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/gentlemen/)
- [manners](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/manners/)
- [dance](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dance/)
- [humanity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/humanity/)
- [ballet](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ballet/)
- [metaphor](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/metaphor/)
- [numbers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/numbers/)
- [panama canal](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/panama-canal/)
- [age of exploration](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/age-of-exploration/)
- [engineering](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/engineering/)
- [geography](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/geography/)
- [writers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/writers/)
- [psychology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/psychology/)
- [historical societies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/historical-societies/)
- [david foster wallace](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/david-foster-wallace/)
- [notes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/notes/)
- [sherlock holmes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sherlock-holmes/)
- [dreams](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dreams/)
- [conan doyle](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/conan-doyle/)
- [radio](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/radio/)
- [characters](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/characters/)
- [salman rushdie](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/salman-rushdie/)
- [the wizard of oz](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-wizard-of-oz/)
- [the odyssey](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-odyssey/)
- [punk](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/punk/)
- [online education](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/online-education/)
- [post-punk](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/post-punk/)
- [pasta](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pasta/)
- [cheating](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cheating/)
- [winning](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/winning/)
- [basketball](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/basketball/)
- [olympics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/olympics/)
- [paralympic](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/paralympic/)
- [disability](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/disability/)
- [disabled sports](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/disabled-sports/)
- [cookbooks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cookbooks/)
- [community](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/community/)
- [funerals](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/funerals/)
- [cookies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cookies/)
- [cooking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cooking/)
- [rarebit](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rarebit/)
- [nightmares](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nightmares/)
- [mysticism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mysticism/)
- [reality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/reality/)
- [kitchen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kitchen/)
- [kitchenware](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kitchenware/)
- [house](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/house/)
- [housewives](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/housewives/)
- [portraits](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/portraits/)
- [photorealism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/photorealism/)
- [mindfulness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mindfulness/)
- [neuroscience](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/neuroscience/)
- [computing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/computing/)
- [computers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/computers/)
- [accents](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/accents/)
- [birth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/birth/)
- [wine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wine/)
- [grapes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/grapes/)
- [viognier](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/viognier/)
- [visual arts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/visual-arts/)
- [silence](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/silence/)
- [nudism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nudism/)
- [sugar](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sugar/)
- [turkish delight](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/turkish-delight/)
- [addiction](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/addiction/)
- [cool](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cool/)
- [alcohol](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/alcohol/)
- [cigarettes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cigarettes/)
- [suicide](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/suicide/)
- [walt whitman](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/walt-whitman/)
- [lauren bacall](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lauren-bacall/)
- [lester young](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lester-young/)
- [maryanne amacher](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/maryanne-amacher/)
- [undewear](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/undewear/)
- [spacesuits](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spacesuits/)
- [astronauts](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/astronauts/)
- [fairytles](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fairytles/)
- [hans christian andersen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hans-christian-andersen/)
- [ugly duckling](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ugly-duckling/)
- [morals](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/morals/)
- [apples](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/apples/)
- [cezanne](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cezanne/)
- [still lifes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/still-lifes/)
- [transportation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/transportation/)
- [exercise](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/exercise/)
- [biking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/biking/)
- [renaissance](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/renaissance/)
- [middle ages](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/middle-ages/)
- [raphael](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/raphael/)
- [pre-raphaelites](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pre-raphaelites/)
- [football](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/football/)
- [soccer](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/soccer/)
- [world cup](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/world-cup/)
- [cameroon](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cameroon/)
- [hummingbirds](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hummingbirds/)
- [victorian era](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/victorian-era/)
- [sandwiches](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sandwiches/)
- [austria](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/austria/)
- [perfectionism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/perfectionism/)
- [veal](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/veal/)
- [wiener schnitzel](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/wiener-schnitzel/)
- [spoilers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spoilers/)
- [law](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/law/)
- [o.j. simpson](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/o-j-simpson/)
- [murder](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/murder/)
- [confessions](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/confessions/)
- [dublin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dublin/)
- [dubliners](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dubliners/)
- [james joyce](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/james-joyce/)
- [guides](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/guides/)
- [rainforest](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rainforest/)
- [environment](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/environment/)
- [zoos](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/zoos/)
- [mycroft holmes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mycroft-holmes/)
- [radicalism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/radicalism/)
- [marinetti](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/marinetti/)
- [humor](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/humor/)
- [dinner parties](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dinner-parties/)
- [speech](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/speech/)
- [german](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/german/)
- [faith](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/faith/)
- [calvinism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/calvinism/)
- [rembrandt](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rembrandt/)
- [friday the thirteenth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/friday-the-thirteenth/)
- [teeth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/teeth/)
- [design](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/design/)
- [translation](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/translation/)
- [portugal](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/portugal/)
- [cheap wine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cheap-wine/)
- [interview](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/interview/)
- [ancient rome](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ancient-rome/)
- [catiline](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/catiline/)
- [street art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/street-art/)
- [chile](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/chile/)
- [marginalia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/marginalia/)
- [recommendations](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/recommendations/)
- [carving](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/carving/)
- [vegetarian](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vegetarian/)
- [vegan](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vegan/)
- [tofu](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/tofu/)
- [turducken](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/turducken/)
- [crowds](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/crowds/)
- [crowd dynamics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/crowd-dynamics/)
- [communication](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/communication/)
- [goya](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/goya/)
- [mental illness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mental-illness/)
- [metropolitan museum of art](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/metropolitan-museum-of-art/)
- [monsters](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/monsters/)
- [mardin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mardin/)
- [mesopotamia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mesopotamia/)
- [brewers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/brewers/)
- [pilots](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pilots/)
- [seattle](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/seattle/)
- [sick's stadium](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sicks-stadium/)
- [regrets](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/regrets/)
- [jasper johns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jasper-johns/)
- [discovery](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/discovery/)
- [lucian freud](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lucian-freud/)
- [hillary rodham clinton](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hillary-rodham-clinton/)
- [ghostwriting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ghostwriting/)
- [celebrity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/celebrity/)
- [poltics](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/poltics/)
- [biography](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/biography/)
- [qvc](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/qvc/)
- [japanese tea ceremonies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/japanese-tea-ceremonies/)
- [sun ra](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sun-ra/)
- [spirituality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spirituality/)
- [african-american](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/african-american/)
- [jazz](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jazz/)
- [sleep](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sleep/)
- [entrees](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/entrees/)
- [french](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/french/)
- [entremets](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/entremets/)
- [spring](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/spring/)
- [april](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/april/)
- [nazism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nazism/)
- [cafes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cafes/)
- [sidewalk cafes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sidewalk-cafes/)
- [barbie](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/barbie/)
- [sports illustrated](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sports-illustrated/)
- [bayou](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bayou/)
- [louisiana](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/louisiana/)
- [god](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/god/)
- [seasons](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/seasons/)
- [weather](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/weather/)
- [affairs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/affairs/)
- [ethiopia](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ethiopia/)
- [nirvana](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nirvana/)
- [kurt cobain](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kurt-cobain/)
- [lead belly](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lead-belly/)
- [grunge](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/grunge/)
- [baking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/baking/)
- [knishes](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/knishes/)
- [brooklyn](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/brooklyn/)
- [pompeii](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pompeii/)
- [vesuvius](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vesuvius/)
- [ingrid bergman](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ingrid-bergman/)
- [movement](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/movement/)
- [fascism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fascism/)
- [fairies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fairies/)
- [faeries](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/faeries/)
- [fairy tales](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fairy-tales/)
- [stories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/stories/)
- [chickens](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/chickens/)
- [raccoons](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/raccoons/)
- [african literature](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/african-literature/)
- [place](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/place/)
- [setting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/setting/)
- [magical realism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/magical-realism/)
- [menthol](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/menthol/)
- [actors](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/actors/)
- [jews](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jews/)
- [march madness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/march-madness/)
- [mascots](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mascots/)
- [cliches](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/cliches/)
- [lithuania](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lithuania/)
- [friends](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/friends/)
- [arranged marriage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/arranged-marriage/)
- [islam](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/islam/)
- [happiness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/happiness/)
- [archaeology](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/archaeology/)
- [jaywalking](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jaywalking/)
- [pedestrians](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/pedestrians/)
- [laws](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/laws/)
- [jules verne](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jules-verne/)
- [infidelity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/infidelity/)
- [william s. burroughs](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/william-s-burroughs/)
- [allen ginsberg](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/allen-ginsberg/)
- [yage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/yage/)
- [ayahuasca](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ayahuasca/)
- [vermeer](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vermeer/)
- [light](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/light/)
- [chocolate](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/chocolate/)
- [the who](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/the-who/)
- [rock and roll](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rock-and-roll/)
- [live albums](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/live-albums/)
- [live music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/live-music/)
- [humans](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/humans/)
- [walkways](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/walkways/)
- [kenneth rexroth](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kenneth-rexroth/)
- [beat poetry](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/beat-poetry/)
- [san francisco](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/san-francisco/)
- [harlem renaissance](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harlem-renaissance/)
- [invention](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/invention/)
- [good](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/good/)
- [evil](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/evil/)
- [inventors](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/inventors/)
- [robert parker](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/robert-parker/)
- [red wine](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/red-wine/)
- [xinomavro](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/xinomavro/)
- [ice skating](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ice-skating/)
- [harlan ellison](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harlan-ellison/)
- [coen brothers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/coen-brothers/)
- [bob dylan](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bob-dylan/)
- [folk music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/folk-music/)
- [rapture](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rapture/)
- [judgment day](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/judgment-day/)
- [harold camping](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harold-camping/)
- [makeovers](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/makeovers/)
- [self-esteem](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/self-esteem/)
- [walter benjamin](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/walter-benjamin/)
- [fitness](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fitness/)
- [diets](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/diets/)
- [dieting](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dieting/)
- [recipies](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/recipies/)
- [hair](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/hair/)
- [instanbul](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/instanbul/)
- [facial hair](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/facial-hair/)
- [banks](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/banks/)
- [ancient greece](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ancient-greece/)
- [sylvia plath](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sylvia-plath/)
- [new years](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/new-years/)
- [kobayashi issa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kobayashi-issa/)
- [suffrage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/suffrage/)
- [iconoclasm](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/iconoclasm/)
- [harry hervey](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/harry-hervey/)
- [indochina](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/indochina/)
- [opium](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/opium/)
- [altruism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/altruism/)
- [jesus christ](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jesus-christ/)
- [charles dickens](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/charles-dickens/)
- [a christmas carol](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/a-christmas-carol/)
- [michelangelo](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/michelangelo/)
- [david and goliath](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/david-and-goliath/)
- [florence](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/florence/)
- [david](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/david/)
- [medici](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/medici/)
- [coca cola](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/coca-cola/)
- [coke](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/coke/)
- [unamuno](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/unamuno/)
- [vlad the impaler](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vlad-the-impaler/)
- [vampires](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/vampires/)
- [dracula](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dracula/)
- [dining](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dining/)
- [romanticism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/romanticism/)
- [john cage](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/john-cage/)
- [surrealism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/surrealism/)
- [magritte](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/magritte/)
- [jane austen](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/jane-austen/)
- [letters](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/letters/)
- [negative capability](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/negative-capability/)
- [presents](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/presents/)
- [siblings](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/siblings/)
- [memories](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/memories/)
- [images](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/images/)
- [myths](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/myths/)
- [santa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/santa/)
- [finland](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/finland/)
- [run dmc](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/run-dmc/)
- [rap](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/rap/)
- [christmas music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/christmas-music/)
- [holidays](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/holidays/)
- [christmas trees](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/christmas-trees/)
- [typing](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/typing/)
- [bangalore](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/bangalore/)
- [mona lisa](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mona-lisa/)
- [family](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/family/)
- [kelly cherry](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/kelly-cherry/)
- [doublethink](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/doublethink/)
- [nutidy](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/nutidy/)
- [sexuality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/sexuality/)
- [homosexuality](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/homosexuality/)
- [classical music](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/classical-music/)
- [benjamin britten](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/benjamin-britten/)
- [peter pears](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/peter-pears/)
- [fernand leger](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fernand-leger/)
- [urban spaces](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/urban-spaces/)
- [mining](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/mining/)
- [ghost towns](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ghost-towns/)
- [coal](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/coal/)
- [ezra pound](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/ezra-pound/)
- [treason](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/treason/)
- [trends](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/trends/)
- [fads](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/fads/)
- [reenactment](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/reenactment/)
- [american revolution](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/american-revolution/)
- [identity](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/identity/)
- [government](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/government/)
- [colonialism](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/colonialism/)
- [immigration](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/immigration/)
- [lord of the rings](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/lord-of-the-rings/)
- [dungeons and dragons](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/dungeons-and-dragons/)
- [alzheimer's](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/alzheimers/)
- [memory](https://www.thesmartset.com/tag/memory/)