The Smart Set

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]