Blogging the 2024 DNC
The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.
August 29, 2024
More by John Griswold
Recipe Stories: Monkey Meat
Bargoers said aloud by rote, cynically but accurately, “That ain’t no Jimmy Dean,” because whatever the meat was, it was not pork sausage. Everybody called it monkey meat, or mystery meat, which did not diminish patrons’ appetites and in fact sold more skewers due to its mystery.
Different Styles in Business Management
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
The Class System Needs Redefined
What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?
Explore more Essays
The Woodson Boys
To become good at chess is to master skills that would allow one to succeed in a perfect world. And to lose sight of that world, to forget to dream of how things could be, is to lose a great deal, even if it is in this world that we will always be mired.
Līlā
Defending a liberal arts education is equivalent to celebrating līlā/ play. Enabling and encouraging līlā is more than just desirable, it is necessary. My thesis is thus līlā/ play is the intellectual disposition that enables epistemic humility, which in turn is the central goal of a liberal arts education.
Once Every Seventeen Years
The game here took place on several dimensions. It was, on one hand, a game with time—in the right place at the right moment—and on the other, with fish and bugs, in that moment. Once every seventeen years, maybe this might happen. But it has also become a game with memory, and with writing—and now, with technology.