Common Reader
Discover The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University that offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction.| Common Reader
Discover The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University that offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction.| Common Reader
Reading bumper stickers on interstate highways is one of the more entertaining aspects of long car trips, and this summer I was treated to an exceptional number of flash reading opportunities. The most memorable was a large, hand-written scrawl attached to an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck. It read: “Artificial intelligence automation is increasing at […] The post The Economic Paradox That (We Hope!) Might Save Us All from AI Devastation appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Carl Linnaeus organized nature for us. Sweden’s chief royal physician, he became the “father of modern taxonomy,” traveling the world classifying and naming its plants and animals. The man was famously logical, methodical, orderly, rational. And he was desperate for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to organize a hunt for mermaids. Was […] The post And Why Not Look for Mermaids? appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Brilliant, he admits to an “almost delusional level of self-confidence.” Will we pay for his recklessness?| Common Reader
In a 1994 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) starts dating a guy named Carl (David James Elliott), who works as a mover. Elaine enthuses about him to Jerry, claiming, “I’m in looovve!” “And what is his stand on abortion?” Seinfeld says. Elaine is putting on lipstick and distractedly […] The post Tiptoeing Around Our Stories appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Higher education in the United States spends massive amounts of time, using an abundance of federal dollars, to research cures for cancer and other chronic illnesses. And still millions of Americans—almost half our population, in fact—believe the role and mission of colleges and universities stand in opposition to “mainstream values.” A […] The post The Art and Science of Hold Music’s Best Soundtracks appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
“Do you know the Gymnopédies?” I had no idea what he was talking about. I was twenty, and just falling in love with classical music—because I was falling in love with him. He could hear the first few bars of any symphony and tell me in what year (he was sometimes off by […] The post “Play Like Satie” appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Mary Poppins' umbrella was all about Sufi mysticism, and a Bulgarian umbrella will kill you.| Common Reader
Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is celebrated for showing how easily a kingdom can be persuaded, by the power of authority, of ludicrous claims, even when there is no empirical evidence to back them. Hear something often enough, say something often enough, and falsehood becomes truth […] The post The Slow, But Powerful, Erosion of Flattery appeared first on Common Reader.| Common Reader
Want to grow old gracefully? Less striving, more love.| Common Reader
In May and July I wrote about the decades-long legal fight by local environmental groups to protect the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. On Thursday, September 4, a federal judge at the US District Court in East St. Louis held a discovery hearing on a request for a preliminary injunction against […] The post Update from the Shawnee National Forest appeared first on Common Reader.| 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
A spiritual pilgrimage we never expected.| 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
