Ben, Author at Common Reader

That Wild Creature Neko Case

On January of this year Neko Case posted to Instagram an unglamour shot of herself with the note, “This is me all hagged-out drained of life essence.” Even the red had bled out of her hair.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Often we think that the paths we choose are straight—northerly from Florida to Maryland, in the case of the transit of my friend’s boat, Castaway—but in reality our lives are made of arcs, loops, and retracings.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Killers: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

Fred could not pilot his own boat during the inspection. Fred had never done vital maintenance; the generator alone was a rusted hulk with rotting hoses. Fred was an aging guy who owned a chain of carpet stores, or some such, and was dowdy. A real Rotarian.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Displacement of Stories: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

As the mechanics got back to tackling an electrical problem they had identified and draining water and crud from a diesel tank, B asked me, “Have you heard the stories about me? Do you know who I am?”

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Hold Fire: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

I had never heard of an American warship blowing away an American yacht in a heavily-used American waterway, but I felt relieved there had not been an incident.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Our Insidious Fuels: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

Chris continued to worry about why the boat would not come up on plane. He was willing to have her pulled from the water for inspection, but that could not happen before Monday, and we could not know how long she would need service. He had begun to suspect the fuel—either contaminated fuel at the last slow fill-up, or that the dregs at the bottoms of the tanks were stirred up in the grounding or the prop strike and had clogged the filters.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Welcome to the Plug-in California

By Chris King

In the spectrum between the Dude too cool for the Eagles and the cabbie riding to Bill Szymczyk’s final mixes from Studio C, Lij Shaw was riding shotgun and saying: Turn it up!

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Patty Hearst and the Myth of Fingerprints

By Jeannette Cooperman

Patty Hearst was a rich man’s lost daughter, a damsel tied to the railroad tracks. Two months later, she was Helen of Troy. For young people, she became a transgressive idol, a young woman with the courage to break away from privilege and propriety. For nervous parents, she was a warning siren. For the FBI, she was a likely traitor and a pain in the ass. This was the nation’s first political kidnapping, and the simultaneous celebrity and nonentity, radical symbolism and girlish innocence, fascinated people.

Essays

US Navy’s Collection Management Facility near Richmond

The US Navy’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and Their Warehouse Adventures

By John Griswold

We tend to think of the armed services for their main mission: ‘warfighting’ (and preparing for it). On the face of it, remembering seems to come more slowly. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) serves as the Navy’s institutional memory by preserving, acquiring, producing, and disseminating history and heritage products. Its vast warehouses testify to just how rich the history of the US Navy is.

Essays

The Transfiguration of Cori Bush

By Gerald Early

The Forerunner is one of the more important autobiographies written by a St. Louisan. It ought to be read by Democrats, Republicans, and all third-party members. It takes a bit of skill to merge leftist politics, old-time Black evangelical Protestantism, and the supporting craft of nursing into something coherent.

Reviews