...telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button.

Inside every man there is a poet who died young.

Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions.

The catalogue of miseries seems to cry out for commercial spots and a station break: the stuff of noonday soap opera.

There's something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.

...telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button.

Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life.