Ben, Author at Common Reader

St. Louis’s Native Past Comes Alive

“The U.S. Constitution was derived from the Iroquois [Haudenosaunee] Confederacy,” he points out, and surreptitiously, I jot a note. How did I not know that?

Society & Culture | Uncategorized | Dispatches

Thomas Sowell Is at It Again

By Gerald Early

If Amiri Baraka was the godfather of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, Sowell is the godfather of Black conservatism. And Black conservatism is as important to African American Studies as the Black Arts Movement no matter how disagreeable many of us in the field may find many of Black conservatism’s assumptions to be.

Reviews

Socialism 2023 Was the Sound of Grievances, but No Solutions

By John Griswold

Attendees of Socialism 2023, a four-day conference in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, wanted freedom from the existing system but admitted its dominion (the “dom” in “freedom”) and the movement’s current lack of large-scale agency in it.

Essays

Making Merry Adventure from Sophisticated French History

By Steven C. Hause

France: An Adventure History remains, from cover to cover, a truly different history. It is long and densely packed with knowledge, just not told in a traditional narrative.

Reviews

Clifford Thompson Big Man and the Little Men

The Trumpian Miasma in Words and Pictures

By Shreyas R. Krishnan

Big Man and the Little Men is less about the destination of the election result and more about the journey—what we can learn about people’s relationships, motivations, opinions, and beliefs.

Reviews

Naked beneath Our Clothes

By Jeannette Cooperman

Nothing is new, shocking, revelatory. All the lumps and bumps, moles and birthmarks, scars and stretch marks are on display, and the need to conceal your own drops away. Nakedness, done right, has no ego.

Essays

The Magical Metropolis of Our Dreams Becomes a Real Ghost Town

By Ben Fulton

Given several decades, money, and a certain angle on history perhaps planned cities can and do work on some level, and for certain people. The problem with politicians’ well-laid plans is that they rarely work for anyone but the well-off.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

When Advertising Gloms on to Disaster

By John Griswold

Whatever you might think about advertising as an engine of the market economy, it is often juxtaposed with death in the media, nowhere more than online, and it is a symptom. It is a relief to lie in my bed at night and read the print issue, which I got as if by the publisher’s afterthought in a discount deal for my online subscription.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

What Do Women Want? Ask Colleen Hoover

By Jeannette Cooperman

The success of Hoover’s books reminds me how prissy and bourgeois I am. Hoover’s fans say her work leaves them speechless, in tears, happy wrecks.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Evil Finds Horror in the Everyday—Then Laughs at It

By Jeannette Cooperman

The show’s first stroke of genius is the team’s camaraderie. In a time when we dare not even hint at our beliefs to a stranger, “Evil” gives us three people with entirely different world views who—here is the miracle—respect one another’s points of view.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches