Tennis, Anyone? Or Is It Too Late? - Common Reader
The answer is grief's own riddle.| Common Reader
A friend of mine is a little witchy, a little woowoo. She gets “feelings” before something happens. Me, I roll my eyes. Something is always going to happen. The claim is too easy. Deep down, though, I am jealous. Trapped inside my head since, oh, third grade, I have no gut feelings. No […] The post Dig Out Your Crystal Ball appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
“Of course you have to take the phone to the bathroom with you when you shower,” a friend told me. “In case something happens.” “What?” I said. Until my younger son went away to college two years ago, I had never lived alone except for a year in college. Even then, I […] The post Of Living Alone appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
I remember well my first father-son conversation about girlfriends because it soon devolved into an argument about slang. “Why limit yourself to girls you only think at first glance are foxy?” he asked, substituting my straightforward description of “good looking.” “Foxy girls are not the be-all-end-all,” he continued, substituting another of […] The post The “Six-seven!” Phenomenon Taunts Slang to Make Sense appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
A friend texts me a video of pianist Julian Cohen. A kid asks him to play a certain song, then startles everyone in the restaurant with his gorgeous voice. A sucker for any spontaneous musical performance or revelation of young talent, I ignore all the other directions my fingertips should be flying on […] The post Are Flash Mobs Over or Just Ruined? appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
You have probably walked into the Saint Louis Art Museum’s grand Sculpture Hall before. But you have never walked in and seen it like this. Five new works by Anselm Kiefer, each the height of a three-story building, surround you. They glow dark, gold leaf vibrating against rich blacks and a shimmering sea […] The post Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
The new documentary John Candy: I Like Me has an odd non-texture. It is not that it is slow or insignificant; it moves through events that one might expect to find in the biography of a movie star. But there is a haze, a blankness, in the documentary that seems to stem, purposely […] The post John Candy, Lost Son appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
For all the press that men get in the chronicles of history and myth, some women stand out. The prehistoric, limestone figurine Venus of Willendorf is routinely invoked as the mother of all revered female figures. Discovered in an archaeological dig in northeast Austria, her corpulent form made her an icon of fertility […] The post The Rich Ambiguity of “Antifa Founder’s Girlfriend” appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Spring, 2019. I am bending over my mother, who is in our guest room, on hospice. I am doing some medical task for her. “This is not the kind of nursing you like, darling,” she says ruefully, and oh, is she right. I have no idea what simple, amateur nursing task I was […] The post I Was Not Cut Out for Caregiving appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
The distinction between the words “movie” and “film” is also a distinction between those who go to the movies for fun and those who watch films to deliver aesthetic edicts, the film critics. Both of these camps seem to agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a great […] The post The World of Left-Wing Terrorist Films Is Bigger Than You Think appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
However you interpreted the American dream, it was all that held us together.| Common Reader
Discover The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University that offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction.| Common Reader
Brilliant, he admits to an “almost delusional level of self-confidence.” Will we pay for his recklessness?| Common Reader
Mary Poppins' umbrella was all about Sufi mysticism, and a Bulgarian umbrella will kill you.| Common Reader
Want to grow old gracefully? Less striving, more love.| Common Reader
Do these people not know that now is now is now is NOW?| Common Reader
The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.| 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
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
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
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
