Ben, Author at Common Reader

How Marginalized Voices Break Barriers

On Thursday, October 12, The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity will welcome Latine poets Roy Guzmán, Yesenia Montilla, and Matt Sedillo to Washington University in St. Louis for a panel discussion in celebration of Latine Heritage Month. The evening will focus on the poets’ use of poetry to fuel social change and how their work addresses race and identity. Ahead of the event, we were delighted to speak with two of the featured guests, Yesenia Montilla and Matt Sedillo, to learn more about their relationship with poetry.

Essays

I Wish I Had the Discipline to Fast

By Jeannette Cooperman

Fasting has been accorded such power, and it has taken so many forms, there must be something to it. Denying oneself can be salutary. It is fun, now and again, to stay up all night.

Belief | Dispatches

Pumpkin Spice Sums Up What Ails This Nation

By Jeannette Cooperman

The suite of pumpkin spice stuff comes out earlier each year, weakening the magnetic pull of scarcity that originally made it exciting.

People & Places | Dispatches

How a Millais Painting Wages Elegant Battle against Climate Change

By Ben Fulton

A painting cannot give us back days of fall lost. But if we gaze at a painting capable of imparting its own unique sensations, we can at least travel to a different place of mind, a consciousness that might move us forward or even shake us to action.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Miles Davis Showed Us How Taking Risks Was Cool

By John Griswold

It takes self-assurance to throw yourself or your plans away in the belief there is no wrong path, only other opportunities to exercise mastery. It is not a game without risk.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Why the Clothes of My Past Stay Closeted

By Jeannette Cooperman

The idea of resurrecting clothes of my youth half a century later, redeeming the hot sting of embarrassment with carefully chosen accessories, intrigued me. Until I remembered what I would be resurrecting.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Burying Carbon Dioxide Sounds Clever But….

By Jeannette Cooperman

New carbon capture technologies may be “a dangerous distraction” from the real reforms needed to wean us off fossil fuels altogether.

Science & Nature | Dispatches

How I Was Told That Joseph Stalin Was a Mass Murderer Because He Was Abused by His Mother

By Ben Fulton

I heard my most memorable account of Joseph Stalin while sitting in the pews of a Presbyterian church. I was near late adolescence, young enough to be bored by a church service but old enough to take intermittent interest.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

The Fragile Pleasures of a Road Trip

By John Griswold

For better and worse, travel has an emotional component. We see better when we do it, until fatigue and familiarity roll in like fog.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

How Did an Estonian Violinist End up in St. Louis’s Concordia Cemetery?

By Jeannette Cooperman

Her early life was a blur, with all those moves—fleeing to safety, getting bombed, getting evacuated, being forced to Berlin, touring, Paris, New York. Her music was the home she carried with her.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches