The Common Reader

07/19/2025

Do not miss Professor Gerald Early, editor of ‘The Common Reader,’ reading on July 22, 7 pm, from his new book “Play Harder: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America” at the St. Louis County Library’s Clark Family Branch, 1640 S Lindbergh Blvd. This event is free! Doors open at 6 pm!
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An authoritative exploration of how Black Americans have shaped baseball from its emergence after the Civil War to the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier, up to today’s...

07/17/2025

It has taken a few more years, after the expiration of the order, for the logging to start up again, but the Forest Service has again marked 70 acres of trees to be cut in the steep hills of the Shawnee Forest.

07/11/2025

You know how disconnected we have become when it takes a craze to remind us to go barefoot and feel the earth.

07/08/2025

A spiritual pilgrimage we never expected.

07/08/2025

It was an astonishing moment for me, who never felt settled in what he knew.

07/08/2025

Qusay died this week.

Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari gives advice regularly: so much was so hard for him, and he knows how to make it easier for other people. “Whatever you are going through, say, ‘Everything has an ending.’ We have a date to die, our food expires, a building will one day collapse. So whatever situation y...

07/03/2025

“Tech is taking all the things you already disliked—triviality, noise, rudeness, interruption—and delivering them in a format you don’t have any control over.”

"Tech is taking all the things you already disliked—triviality, noise, rudeness, interruption—and delivering them in a format you don’t have any control over."

07/03/2025

History grows us up. And literature? It complicates the world for us. This is why we must kill the humanities.

07/03/2025

Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be in relation to their country, and their expectations for treatment by the government and fellow citizens. If enough people talk about their overlapping models, you might get political parties, widespread patriotism, rebellion, nationalism, or talk of a zeitgeist.

Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be....

07/03/2025

Seneca said we each dwell in two communities: the place of our birth, and the community that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” I would far rather be a citizen of the world than, by accident of birth, an American. I feel disloyal writing this.

Seneca said we each dwell in two communities: the place of our birth, and the community that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” I would far rather be a citizen of the world than, by accident...

07/02/2025

Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.

Everything about Mark Twain, Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at....

06/25/2025

The U.S. invented the national park—and ours hold mysteries of nature, of human eccentricity, of the past, of science and the supernatural....

The U.S. invented the national park--and ours hold mysteries of nature, of human eccentricity, of the past, of science and the supernatural....