Editor’s NoteThe Common Reader looks at the different ways we think about money.

With enormous potential, and once heralded as a new global superpower, Brazil proves time and time again to be a house of cards. Just as the country seems to find its way, something shakes, and the whole darned thing comes tumbling down.

I now think about my mother every day. I did not do this before she came to St. Louis to live. There was, in fact, a stretch of years when I did not think about her much at all …

Theories of mistakes in jazz scholarship helps us understand the ways in which mistakes in jazz performance are valued by audiences and performers—and the ways in which they are not.