Ben, Author at Common Reader

The Displacement of Stories: TCR at Sea

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

Blues for a Blue World

By Christopher Schaberg

The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.

Reviews

Aground: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

We headed up the Pungo and quickly ran into the line of thunderstorms we had been trying to beat. Visibility was zero, and the wind high enough that we had to retreat from the river to wait it out.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Choose Your Trip: TCR at Sea

By John Griswold

Chris paid a lot of money for the boat. It was the trip he wanted to take, a way of life. So far, over several weeks of hard work, first high and dry in a boatyard in a Florida summer, then on this “shakedown cruise,” he has gotten everything coming to him.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches