A member of the St. Louis Media Hall of Fame, Jeannette Cooperman was the staff writer at St. Louis Magazine for twelve years. Her work was cited as Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and Best American Essays 2023; she received the Writer of the Year award at the 2019 City & Regional Magazine Awards; and she was named to the 2017 FOLIO: 100 list of “the best and brightest” in the magazine industry nationwide. Cooperman spent a decade doing investigative reporting for Riverfront Times, where her work was recognized by the National Education Writers Association, the National Mental Health Association, the National Black Journalists Association, the National Gay and Lesbian Journalism Association, and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She holds degrees in philosophy and communication and a Ph.D. in American studies, and she has written eight books—seven nonfiction, biography or cultural history, and a murder mystery. She and her husband, a historian, live with Willie, a goofy but sweet standard poodle, in a century-old farmhouse in Waterloo, Illinois.
One can, of course, judge a work of art on its own terms, carefully setting aside the life of its creator, with its cascading influences of love, pain, or situation. But for me, there is something rich and compelling about imagining what WashU Libraries just showed us: “James…
I have lived in the Midwest all my life, drooping and dragging my way through July and August, yet I never thought much about why. This summer, though, the gap between temperature and RealFeel is yawning wide. I am more miserable than ever, even when the actual temperature does…
Surely the most delightful of our monsters is Nessie. Nothing jarring or subliminally weird in her backstory, no hopeless crushes on miniature mortals, no wreaking of harm or sucking of blood or heedless toppling of skyscrapers. Just a friendly, long necked, improbably ancient creature who surfaces now and again,…
Gloppy paint, a velvet couch, the ridges meant to cool a coffee cup to the touch, a lid that when spun emits a hollow sound of increasingly lower pitches as it empties, like a bottle whistle….
The old apothecaries were far more efficient, and far kinder, than our streamlined mail order and national chains.
Why has clothing gotten less practical, less sustainable, and less comfortable?
Like comic books and animation, board games became more artful, more expensive, more interesting to adults. For millennia, games had been folk culture, passed down for generations, the play communal. Now they are a craft, sometimes even an art, designed and authored, often with a deliberately niche appeal.
My poor friend. She sent me this nice article from the BBC about how travelers to the World Cup “are discovering little-known slices of Americana away from the host cities.” The word “triggered” would be apt. I had already seen the social media reels and posts—and in my…
I took a Flix bus to Chicago, determined to be there for the Juneteenth opening of the Obama Presidential Center.
“You took a what?” friends said, bemused that I did not fly, drive, or even take the train. But I love buses. I love the way everybody shows…
One foot on a tangle of tree root, I looked down at my beloved Merrell hiking boots and noticed big, frayed holes on both sides. Time to spring for a new pair. To be loyal, I went—in the flesh—to REI, but they had only waterproof hiking boots. “Tariffs,” muttered…
“Those poor brutish Epicureans that have nothing but the meer husks of fleshly pleasure to feed themselves with.” ~John Smith, 1660
How did we get Epicurus so wrong? Foodie websites, luxury magazines, gourmet shops…he would be aghast. His goal was to remove pain and fear, not pile up…
We have given ourselves two more years, ample time to continue spreading out in this friendly, comfy, century-old house. Two more years, my mother’s daughter whispers, to keep weeding, scrubbing, repainting the wrought-iron fence…. By the time we leave, we will be thoroughly ready for a smaller, more practical,…