Ben, Author at Common Reader

This Is Not About Chat GPT3

Maybe this is better. The human element is being removed. We no longer need a partner or best friend to say, “You look stressed, why not take a break?” Exes have less room to demonize one another, because their communications have been muted and massaged. Nobody can accuse the AI of being on the other person’s side, which has got to be the worst part of doing couples counseling. But I sense a flattening, as we lose some of the messiest, most instructive interactions and automate wisdom, negotiation, health, self-expression.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

By Fanny Trollope

“The prospect of passing a night in the back woods of Indiana was by no means agreeable, but I screwed my courage to the proper pitch, and set forth determined to see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears, what a camp-meeting really was.”

Essays

King of the Road

By Jeannette Cooperman

After putting the IBWA and the Hobo College system in place, James Eads How started a monthly magazine, the “Hobo News,” printed in St. Louis and later in Cincinnati. A forerunner of the now familiar street papers, it was bankrolled by his inheritance but written “by the hoboes, for the hoboes, of the hoboes.”

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Turn Every Page

By Jeannette Cooperman

Watching “Turn Every Page,” you realize that Gottlieb managed to be editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker without screens. Caro managed to write “The Power Broker” and four volumes of a brilliant and definitive biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson without screens, and he is working on the fifth without a screen.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

The Rule of Four

By Jeannette Cooperman

Halfway through this book, I find out that last summer, our own university library acquired the third print edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. There it waits, just through the glass doors I enter weekly.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Undivinable Eruptions and the Automatic Earth

By Jeannette Cooperman

Volcanoes can destroy our cities, burn away our flesh, suffocate us with toxic gases, crush us with flying boulders. Most volcanologists keep a safe distance from their subject. But they still emerge rapt.

Essays

How Nineteenth-Century French-American Literature Tackled Race and Slavery

By M. Lynn Weiss

Favorites of the Gods is a solid collection of short fiction from Louisiana’s Creoles of color written during the most chaotic and perilous decades of the nineteenth century. This collection gives contemporary readers access to these short stories for the first time in English.

Reviews

Kennedy the Stylist Versus Nixon the Grinder

By Lana Stein

To Irwin F. Gellman, Nixon deserved higher marks for the operation and substance of his campaign. He sees Kennedy as more expedient as well as superficially more attractive. However, somehow, this volume does not capture the excitement of a very close contest nor how each candidate tried to increase his support.

Reviews

Kurt Vonnegut Was Disgusted with Civilization (but Not Indiana)

By John Griswold

A “Year of Vonnegut” was declared in Indy in 2007, but that was deflated by his death that year. Given the centenary, it seemed as if there should be more going on, and that got me thinking about legacy from the start.

Essays

As Good as “Dead”?

By Jeannette Cooperman

Euphemisms let us dart away, pretend, avoid that absence the way we pull back from touching someone who frightens us or might be contagious. We are good at distancing death.

Uncategorized | Dispatches