With the increasing ubiquity of streaming media and those platforms’ strategies for cross-promotion, it becomes easier and easier to make new discoveries of old films and shows. That is how I recently discovered Sasquatch, a documentary series released on Hulu in 2021. Sasquatch follows a journalist as he follows the trail of […]
Someone told me once that I lived a monkish life. She meant something vaguely Buddhist rather than vaguely Catholic, I think, but when pressed she said only that I was bald, lived quietly, read books and wrote a lot, and liked to walk and cook as if they were meditative activities. I […]
It was about six months after the death of my mother that I finally mustered the courage to organize all the boxed and scattered family photos she left behind. Walking into a boutique, upscale stationery store, I spotted an embossed leather photo album hand-crafted in Italy. Its price shot way over my […]
The Good Book has gained so much critical mass as a required read in U.S. public schools—most notably in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana—that we could almost mistake it for a Marvel Movie franchise if not for its age. One of the first symptoms of texts as old as the Bible is […]
I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, […]
English poetry is rife with metaphors concerning fire, if for the chief reason that language makes fire safe while adding dimension to its fascination. It is redundant to remind ourselves that the ancients considered fire one of four crucial elements but also useful. Fire is the great destroyer but also a […]
My gal pal has a type. Not a type she prefers, but rather a type that prefers her. Her appeal to this type of guy is so reliable that when she sees a man of this type—most often, these days, in a grocery store—she begins to prepare herself for the eventual approach. […]
The December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by alleged gunman Luigi Mangione on the streets of New York City had all the hallmarks of a bold revolutionary act, broadly spelled out in three words inscribed on cartridge cases found at the murder scene: “Delay,” “Deny,” “Depose.” For revolutionaries in waiting, […]
It was a good day for The Common Reader on December 10, 2024, when the inaugural Gerald Early Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Dwight McBride, was installed in a ceremony on campus at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the […]
Hobby drones used in warfare have provided something new: a way to track, observe, hary, kill, and record another person being killed, all in one device. Coupled with distribution by social media, videos of these activities are very much like FPS (first-person shooter) games brought into the real world as FPV (first-person […]
