Living at Odds With One’s Country - Common Reader
How do we stay plugged into a society that is fast losing any moral compass—and keep our own?| Common Reader
How do we stay plugged into a society that is fast losing any moral compass—and keep our own?| Common Reader
I am not sure which would appall my mother more: “dip chiller” to name her receptacle for delicate, extravagant shrimp, or me asking an artificial intelligence to remind me what she taught me.| Common Reader
“Say something. Come on. Make it sound thoughtful, deep, but not too strong or too long.” This is the voice in my head every time I sit in a group discussion. While others bounce ideas around like beach balls, messy, loud, full of laughter, I sit there, rehearsing my opening line like a diplomat, making […] The post The Asian Erasure Trap, or How Being the “Model Minority” Makes Everyone Feel Safer appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Author’s note: As I begin my work this year as a Heartland Journalism Fellow, this is the kind of story I want to tell. Stories that do not begin and end with the struggle of migrant life, but that linger on the acts of resistance, care, and joy that happen in between the cracks. Stories […] The post Fugitive Kindness and the Joy of the Migrants appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Once upon a time, more than twenty-five years ago, the Canadian author Naomi Klein enjoyed a few years of progressive coffee table fame with the 1999 publication of her book No Logo. The book was an overlong, i.e., more than 450 pages, lambast at various tenacles of capitalism, all of which […] The post Why We Surrender to Logos appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Imagine yourself in ancient Rome, visiting a pal’s marble-slicked townhouse. You will either step directly into the airy, skylit atrium or walk down a narrow hallway to reach it. You will then wait in the atrium for the paterfamilias, because there are rules of decorum as well as decor. In How to Make […] The post Hire Vitrivius to Do Your Interior Design appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Years ago, struggling to write fiction, I asked a literary friend how to make a character likeable. He shot me a look of pure disdain. “Why would you want to?” “Not every character,” I stammered, “but I want the main character to at least be somebody people want to spend time with.” This […] The post Do You Have to Like the Main Character? appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their bedrooms or, better yet, dorm rooms. In case you have not […] The post How Dorm Rooms Chart the Dimensions of Maturity appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
At least you two still believe in democracy—defined here as giving people and things the chance to work together for new strengths in combination. I have had your shakshuka. The key, as in all things, is balance. Roasting different vegetables on a shared baking sheet, for example, requires some sensitivity and planning. […] The post Recipes for Rascals in Michigan appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
To me, the Bible has always seemed a single, neatly bound entity. Allowances made for various translations and historical context, but still, stuck together from the start, a sacred and deliberate book on which we swear our oaths. Every chapter of Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible […] The post Dare We Say It? The Bible Is a Messy Book appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should mean comedy, became not tragedy, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning.| Common Reader
Discover The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University that offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction.| Common Reader
A spiritual pilgrimage we never expected.| Common Reader
Living freely and intentionally is hard work. Every little decision winds up visible in the mosaic.| Common Reader
After a string of near-disasters, Hamlet emerges unscathed.| Common Reader
Try to imagine Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or either of the George Bushes making a clenched fist their symbol. You cannot.| Common Reader
Gaucha Berlin's photography is more than beautiful. It is gentle and honest and shows you the tiniest bits of beauty on the planet in ways you have never troubled to see them.| Common Reader
“I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” announced the formidable Gertrude Stein, though her own sentences would defy the art.| Common Reader
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked.“Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”| Common Reader
We have all figured out what supercells, the dew point, and a wintry mix are, we have made our peace with El Niño, and La Niña, and we have flat-out given up trying to understand Arctic oscillations. Give us forecasts that tie what is inside us to what is around us.| Common Reader
Aquinas thought women easily corrupted: “When a soul is vehemently moved to wickedness, as occurs mostly in little old women…” He had paved the way for witch-burning. Plus he spent an awfully long time figuring out how male and female demons had sex.| Common Reader
“Thinking about what aging means for the trans child,” Miranda July jotted in a writing notebook. “…. And how the physical changes of middle age/old age out anyone who is living as more feminine than they were born.”| Common Reader
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) opened by asking the audience the most rhetorical question possible: “Do you believe that God has a plan for America?”| Common Reader
Enheduanna, a Sumerian princess, is believed by many to be the earliest named writer in world history. What man would have compared his creative process to childbirth? What man could have written what might be the first #MeToo account of sexual exploitation?| Common Reader
In ten seconds at Etsy, you can find decks that are Gothic, Art Nouveau, or Impressionist; Aleister Crowley’s sexy, mystical Thoth deck; Botanica Oculta cards that look like vintage seed packets; the gorgeous black and gold Azazoth deck inspired by H.P. Lovecraft; the Abusua Pa The Tazama African Tarot; the Punjabi-influenced Marigold Tarot; a Luna Somnia deck that layers in astrology; and a deck that uses haunted cats.| Common Reader
Our tastes are being changed for us, homogenized by algorithms that force clicks of approval into spirals of popularity.| Common Reader
The tensions that wire our lives do not go dead. Every time I try to look away, they crop up again, disguised or insidious. But Sylvia Plimack Mangold fixed her gaze and stared them down.| Common Reader
