Ben, Author at Common Reader

A Memo on My Idea of America

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

Every Path Has Multiple Meanings

By John Griswold

I could not tell if the old-timer meant that if I walked fast enough I would not be bitten by bugs, or that he wanted me to get the hell away from him.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Hiking with the Lorax of Shawnee National Forest

By John Griswold

Sam Stearns is a rascal who has seen lively times. Some of those have been while working with other environmentalists—for almost four decades without pay and at significant personal risk—in defense of southeastern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, which they hope will become a National Park and the world’s first climate preserve.

Essays