Ben, Author at Common Reader

The Adventures and Misadventures of Samuel Clemens

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.

Arts & Letters | Essays

How Black Americans Became Imposters of Blackness

By Gerald Early

The Affirmative Action Myth is, in essence, a defense of a golden age of Black bourgeois culture, Black bourgeois morality, Black bourgeois striving, indeed, Black bourgeois reality. And being bourgeois here is not about a class, but an aspiration. Riley’s book is an account of how Black people made themselves American. And why not? America is the land of self-invention.

Reviews

A Memo on My Idea of America

By John Griswold

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.

Essays

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Varieties of Rebellion

By Ben Fulton

Was Randle Patrick McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Recipes for Rascals in Distant Cities: Greens

By John Griswold

I would suggest using an iron skillet, the kind they made before inferior castings. Do I need to say the old ways are often best? Heat it up for five minutes at medium-high as you prep your ingredients.

People & Places | Dispatches

Not Doing Yoga at Montauk with Roy Scheider’s Wife

By Chris King

The 50th anniversary of ‘Jaws’ will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the film’s police chief, and wanting to commit these memories of the great actor to the public record.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Totality of Trees

By Ben Fulton

We had no idea how much we would miss them in the wake of St. Louis’s May 16 tornado. At least, I did not.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Rich in Proportion to the Number of Things Let Alone

By John Griswold

Crap transference is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

How Much Mariano Rivera Did Not Want to Talk to Me

By Chris King

I thought I would take this slow moment to tell a baseball story—at a time when the names of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and (the most perishable of these names) Scott Brosius are not yet lost to common memory.

Sports | Dispatches

When Words Become Sounds

By Ben Fulton

Words need the company of other words, preferably lots of them, else they fall into a strange pit of meaningless, yet mind-altering sound. Like us, words are social when mingling in tantalizing combinations, and perilously, curiously lonely, but still attractive, by themselves.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches