There are pieces of furniture that serve their purpose admirably but temporarily. Then there are pieces of furniture that, over time, appreciate in value so well you think nothing of mistaking them for a family member. Such was the beloved status of my late, great, golden-brown, Danish sofa, consecrated in the […]
I remember well my first father-son conversation about girlfriends because it soon devolved into an argument about slang. “Why limit yourself to girls you only think at first glance are foxy?” he asked, substituting my straightforward description of “good looking.” “Foxy girls are not the be-all-end-all,” he continued, substituting another of […]
For all the press that men get in the chronicles of history and myth, some women stand out. The prehistoric, limestone figurine Venus of Willendorf is routinely invoked as the mother of all revered female figures. Discovered in an archaeological dig in northeast Austria, her corpulent form made her an icon of fertility […]
The distinction between the words “movie” and “film” is also a distinction between those who go to the movies for fun and those who watch films to deliver aesthetic edicts, the film critics. Both of these camps seem to agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a great […]
Reading bumper stickers on interstate highways is one of the more entertaining aspects of long car trips, and this summer I was treated to an exceptional number of flash reading opportunities. The most memorable was a large, hand-written scrawl attached to an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck. It read: “Artificial intelligence automation is increasing at […]
Higher education in the United States spends massive amounts of time, using an abundance of federal dollars, to research cures for cancer and other chronic illnesses. And still millions of Americans—almost half our population, in fact—believe the role and mission of colleges and universities stand in opposition to “mainstream values.” A […]
Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is celebrated for showing how easily a kingdom can be persuaded, by the power of authority, of ludicrous claims, even when there is no empirical evidence to back them. Hear something often enough, say something often enough, and falsehood becomes truth […]
Film is the most persuasive of modern media, but also somehow the easiest to dismiss. Nothing can match its ability to create verisimilitude. Yet still, and perhaps when film is most effective at disturbing us, we dismiss all that as “just movies.” For reasons that provide therapists with endless paychecks, the […]
Once upon a time, more than twenty-five years ago, the Canadian author Naomi Klein enjoyed a few years of progressive coffee table fame with the 1999 publication of her book No Logo. The book was an overlong, i.e., more than 450 pages, lambast at various tenacles of capitalism, all of which […]
People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their bedrooms or, better yet, dorm rooms. In case you have not […]
The easiest social trends to validate are the ones that originate with our own individual and family experiences. The panic over adolescent development and screen time is obvious because what parent has recently had a conversation with their teen lasting more than ten minutes? The panic over anthropomorphic climate change—relatively speaking, […]
If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise. Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic events—“Please rise for our national anthem!”—even […]
When the 2014 television series The Knick made it through two seasons on HBO-owned Cinemax, directed by Steven Soderbergh, it was either dismissed as “period cable-TV drama” too eager to embrace its period, or was hesitantly embraced as a lukewarm hospital drama good enough for your weekend TV break, but not much […]
The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window. Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the United States was clearly out of […]
The lobbies of mass-produced hotel chains strive to make us feel that we belong there, if only for the fifteen minutes it takes to make small talk with the clerk, transact a credit card, and secure a room key. After that, these anonymous way stations for weary travelers take an ax […]
Travel by car across the Midwest is a slow-motion kaleidoscope of scenery that, paradoxically, moves fast. After a while, the curious blend of these sensations can induce a hypnotic effect. The rude odors of highway rest stops and gas stations, replete with food and snack offerings better off banned by the […]
This is the year everyone is celebrating, or at least talking about, the fiftieth anniversary of the first screening of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, Jaws. And sure, why not? This summertime shark saga is probably the ultimate film portrait of communal fear. Composer John Williams’s throbbing soundtrack of lurking, lumbering, low strings is probably more […]
Early in our childhood, and thanks mostly to the iconic Fred Rogers, adults taught us that people make a neighborhood. Midway through the journey of a natural disaster, however, we learn the hard lesson that it is a neighborhood’s trees we commune with in a deeper sense. The cast and angle of light on your […]
The hazards of communicating by email are well known: the precision of word choice matters when the tone of voice is absent. This is why the emojis that accompany phone texts are so vital. Emojis crown our messages with a tone marked by whatever yellow-headed expression we choose. But for true understanding […]
There is a strange panic that sets in when you discover, to your abject horror, that someone you disapprove of likes—even adores—an artist or work of art dear to your heart. Perhaps we could compare it to the disgust of seeing your worst enemy date or marry someone you just broke up […]
Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.
Few processes are more tedious to observe yet more consequential in outcome than lawsuits. If you work in higher education, the pillars of which the Trump administration has threatened to topple by way of grant and funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), two […]
T.S. Eliot is literary modernism’s most famous poet. So we can all be forgiven for thinking him merely ironic when he opened his most famous poem by intoning that, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire… ” By the time Eliot gets past winter, […]
Maybe it sat on the sill of your mother’s kitchen window near the sink. Or perhaps it lodged in an old tin coffee can on your back porch. Wherever it resided, this pale-colored solid, speckled with bits of meat floating below a film of watered residue, was the leftover that would […]
Anyone fortunate enough to have an education in classical rhetoric knows by heart the four forms of discourse: argumentation, exposition, description, and narration. Aristotle taught us not only that language was the chief tool of persuasion, but also how to persuade. Centuries later, writers and novelists such as Jane Austen and […]
Born 1940 in Los Angeles, Roy Ayers never orbited the approximate longitude of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and Detroit that formed the connecting lines between Black gospel music, blues, and soul and rhythm and blues that would merge in Detroit to form the cultural phenomenon of Motown. A true fan might […]
Every political moment has its tropes. Our current political moment has at least two. The first, used to describe any dizzying scale of change across time, stems from a reminder by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis ) though it is commonly attributed to a paraphrase by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin): “There are decades where […]
Edvard Munch’s The Scream qualifies as an iconic image only for people who have never seen it. Its power to transfix, its ineluctable pull on the eye, is such that it qualifies as iconic before we even define the word. For everyone else who has seen it recycled and repurposed from The Simpsons […]
“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde taught us. But in our current crisis of egg prices, have we learned anything? Chickens and eggs have been on the menu of civilizations worldwide so long they have transcended their long-held status of dietary […]
Latent and overt violence at public sporting events is catnip for sociologists, who see competitive sports as violence condensed to a more manageable form. Historians are drawn to violence in sports as well, fascinated by its gradations—from life-or-death struggles in Roman coliseums and battlefields to docile, but no less ruthless, chess […]
This year’s Super Bowl was two big rivalries for the price of less than one, given how handily the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 and how deftly Kendrick Lamar used the biggest stage in the nation—the N.F.L. halftime show—to score another round against his hip-hop rival, Drake. The […]
Between my late teens and early twenties, when at last the finite nature of time and the seemingly infinite number of “Best Of” lists pressed on my mind, I relied on the book John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies (1988) to find a way through the yet undiscovered terrain of great […]
It was about six months after the death of my mother that I finally mustered the courage to organize all the boxed and scattered family photos she left behind. Walking into a boutique, upscale stationery store, I spotted an embossed leather photo album hand-crafted in Italy. Its price shot way over my […]
The Good Book has gained so much critical mass as a required read in U.S. public schools—most notably in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana—that we could almost mistake it for a Marvel Movie franchise if not for its age. One of the first symptoms of texts as old as the Bible is […]
English poetry is rife with metaphors concerning fire, if for the chief reason that language makes fire safe while adding dimension to its fascination. It is redundant to remind ourselves that the ancients considered fire one of four crucial elements but also useful. Fire is the great destroyer but also a […]
The December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by alleged gunman Luigi Mangione on the streets of New York City had all the hallmarks of a bold revolutionary act, broadly spelled out in three words inscribed on cartridge cases found at the murder scene: “Delay,” “Deny,” “Depose.” For revolutionaries in waiting, […]
Long before Tom Brokaw christened his “Greatest Generation,” Baby Boomers inaugurated the trend of iconizing the 1960s that was their generational crucible. The peace sign, long hair, and incense-soaked head shops pretending to sell “tobacco products” softened the blow of news that a friend was killed or injured in Vietnam. To belong […]
Capitalizing on Christmas lost its shame so long ago that we often feel almost duty-bound to return the holiday to its Christian roots in search of what we nebulously acknowledge as meaning. This narrow pursuit denies Christmas’s celebrants in two ways: first, by blinding us to the holiday’s pagan origins and customs; […]
Readers old enough to remember the golden age of magazine and newspaper columns can hold their heads in despair, or they can pick up the latest collection of works by Calvin Trillin, a Missouri native (Kansas City, to be exact) and a master of the form.
The future is written faster than we can read it, but that does not mean we cannot try, even if all there is to see or read are backs turned toward us, or eyes looking away. One trick of being a capable parent is not overplaying your hand or pressing your argument. Just do your best to see what your child sees.
One of the glaring aspects of our modern world is that we talk faster than we shop by an order of magnitude. Sure, it has always been true that we communicate faster than we acquire goods and services. But never before have we been able to talk to so many people […]
In the 2024 presidential race run-up, Kamala Harris supporters took solace in the prediction of Allan Lichtman and his famous election forecasting system built around thirteen “keys” to the White House. A historian and professor emeritus at American University, Lichtman had correctly predicted all but one presidential race since 1984. Lichtman […]
The occasional validation of clichés and other well-worn phrases by scientific studies is one of life’s unsung oddities if not glories. No one conveys an idea without words to hold them. In the curious case of pain, however, words do some impressive heavy lifting. Clichés about pain are—and, sorry, this cannot be […]
Many of us are old enough to remember the 1970s and its endless debates, battles, and even “war of the sexes,” when feminism emerged from its nascent forms and became a seismic force. How many of us, by contrast, cringe at the seemingly endless debate of what it means to “be […]
If you are one of more than 200 million Amazon Prime members worldwide, you probably have sitting on your kitchen table what has sat on mine for the past week or so: the Amazon Holiday Gift Book, Unwrap Joy, printed in robust paper stock. If you did not receive your copy, […]
Horror film connoisseurs are not born. They are made. They are made after watching endless iterations of the jump scare, after several trips to the kitchen or bathroom while basic plot points mount into ratcheting tension, and after nerves and stomach are steeled against dry heaves while viewing mind-bending scenes of […]
Truckloads of paintings and artworks attempt to depict or advocate political and historical events and eras. The Romans constructed arches to commemorate military victories for the foundation and building of empire. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) rings a collective bell inside our national head every time we see it. […]
A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car stereos booming out bass-heavy hip-hop. Both […]
The invention and evolution of insurance make for fascinating stories. According to historians, the first insured were not people but merchant shipments out of, and into, ancient India, Greece, or Babylon. Should your precious cargo disappear at sea due to bad weather, or on land thanks to banditry, and be covered in […]
When Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I glanced at Homer’s lliad, piled onto my kitchen table with other books in a tower of procrastination, with grudging respect. When Hamas reignited the mostly dormant Israel-Palestine conflict on October 7 of last year, I grabbed the Illiad by the spine to […]
Nothing sorts extraordinary drives from ordinary ones quite like the selection of music to accompany the journey. That is especially true when the drive is long. A vacation drive has its own curious logistics of pre-planning. Water bottles must be cleaned out, snacks must be chosen for purchase, the endless worry of a […]
Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships. Established by WashU and the River City Journalism Fund, the Heartland Journalism Fellowships support development of aspiring minority and underrepresented writers. During their yearlong residency, which […]
Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a good cup of coffee. Yes, there are myriad other […]
When news of Daniel Kahneman’s March 27 death at the age of ninety hit my first thought was to hang my head in sadness at the passing of a great mind. My second thought soon afterward was that I had to read, for a second time, the Princeton psychologist’s best-selling (and rightly […]
April is not “the cruelest month.” It is, with March, the windiest month. As such, these months are the best of the year to find or build a kite, find a grass-filled open space, and feel the delicious tug of wind stretch down from the sky, down the twine or wire suspending your […]
The orchestral arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s great piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) is a staple of youth symphonies all over the United States. Or, at least it was when I was young enough to play in the Utah Youth Symphony. A smorgasbord of orchestral colors spread across an index of […]
The recent brouhaha—an insufficiently flippant term—over the criminal case recently dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, accusing three men of stealing handwritten pages of lyrics by the Eagles has it all. Ever since it was filed in 2022 this case has been shoved into the headlines by boring egos and sloppy […]
The march of great voices through time and fashion is arguably as revealing about our culture as what we consider great art and architecture. But while art and architecture are so often shared communally in museums and public places, an abiding passion for certain voices has the unique quality of being both […]
Except for childhood asthma no doubt exacerbated by smoking as an adult and a series of rocky marriages, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) led a mostly idyllic life. The child of a wealthy bank president, he grew up on California’s sunny Pacific Coast. He traveled Europe as a teen, then attended a string of Ivy League […]
When people talk about large-scale social crisis in the United States the topic eventually gravitates straight toward marriage. Or more precisely, the current lack of it. If children are in crisis it is because marriage is in crisis. If loneliness is epidemic it is because marriage is in decline. And if people are poor […]
Of all the works currently on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum we can be surest that Anselm Kiefer’s Burning Rods will never be printed for postcards in the museum’s gift shops. A massive painting that stands about 11 feet high and stretches just beyond 18 feet wide, this dark […]
Released five years after the surrender of imperial Japan in World War Two, but at least two decades before Americans would start loathing Japan’s prowess in mass-producing fuel-efficient compact cars, Rashomon had the immediate disadvantage of provoking xenophobic reactions. Even in the early nineties, as a college student attempting to bond with […]
Andy Warhol once said he loved Coca-Cola because regardless of who bought a bottle, it remained the same product for everyone. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are […]
Nostalgia travels at the speed of sound. This is the obvious conclusion after watching four, five or—why the hell not?—twenty-five old MTV-era music videos archived in YouTube’s vast URL indices. The age of a person’s cultural tastes, on the other hand, travels far faster. So fast that if you search for […]
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” is easily the most famous film-script shorthand, if not legerdemain, for what we mean when we say that fiction has outrun or beaten reality at its own game. Film fans everywhere know it as the most famous line from the 1962 John Ford […]
St. Louis’s Cherokee Street district is where you are most likely to find a late-night bowl of vegan chili or a stroll through neighborhoods on the cutting edge of gentrification. What you least expect is an impromptu exploration of mental health through brain scan imaging recast as visual art. Neuro Blooms, an […]
Everyone who knows Christmas, whether they celebrate it or not, knows A Christmas Carol (1843). The Gospel of Luke is, of course, the holiday’s founding text. Just try adapting it for the screen and stage and see what happens. At the risk of sacrilege, but in terms of story itself, it […]
Substitute teaching is one of the most important, underrated jobs of all. Thrust into an unfamiliar environment, in front of an audience that tends toward the hostile, these unfortunate people bridge a canyon of lessons from one ledge to the other until the full-time instructor returns. I had these substitute teachers […]
Most of the time we have the freedom to choose what music we listen to, and when we listen to it. Then there is the Christmas season, when most of the music we hear is chosen for us by the tastes of previous generations, and anyone else eager to enter a […]
Ever since the rise of “prestige television” there has been a corresponding rise in the number of documentary films and documentary series. The choice is bewildering to the point of being intimidating: celebrities and athletes dead and alive, every murder solved or unsolved, sommeliers and sushi chefs. All make […]
There are any number of life rituals parents notice as pivotal maturations of their child(ren)’s development. Among the perennials: the first sleep-over without parents, driving lessons, the first good cry over a desperately sad movie. They all have their place. For now, my own is watching my daughter evolve her own […]
Centuries before we turned to wristwatches and cell phone screens it was sundials and the ancient obelisks of Greece and Rome that told us the time of day. There was no electricity to mediate the day, hour, or minute. Light did it all. If we want to discuss metaphors light, perhaps […]
Before misinformation, disinformation, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco, and “deep fakes” it is hard to remember the time when the internet was a (largely) uncorrupted landscape of novel, good-hearted fun. From cat videos to laughing babies, everyone had their favorites when the internet was still young. The slow-moving genre loosely known as […]
If necessity is the mother of invention, convenience is the father of a strange brand of privileged indifference. The advent of indoor plumbing in the mid-nineteenth century improved daily life and public health by such exponential leaps and bounds that we shudder to think of life without an indoor toilet or […]
Two score and some odd years ago, when my second-grade friends and I tumbled out the doors of Missoula’s Lewis and Clark Elementary, Wacky Packages were for months on end our sole reason for a trip to the nearby Circle K convenience store. Clutching our spare change so hard that the […]
Christmas music resides along a spectrum wide enough to include light allegories about bullying a young reindeer (John David Mark’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” 1949) and masterpieces such as J.S. Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” (1734). Most of us would be hard-pressed to name Halloween music classics—although lists do exist, and there is […]
In our current polarized atmosphere, it helps to take a break from heated arguments and instead examine policy ideas that both sides of the aisle seem to agree are bad. In this case, that policy idea is the proposed building of a whole new slate of U.S. cities. This curious idea was proposed […]
The “living dead” are neither living nor dead, but they possess incredible longevity in our culture. But have we ever stopped to consider what the zombie apocalypse genre has done for us, if not to us? Prophesying scenarios about the end of the world is not new. According to scholars, zombies are […]
For anyone who adores the fall season, there is something of a child’s disappointment at Christmas delayed when, after months of brutal heat and humidity, the first week of October lands in temperatures near the high 80s. There are few if any, golden and amber-red leaves for nature to unwrap on […]
The historical facts regarding Soviet-Russian dictator and revolutionary Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler’s sadistic roommate in the twentieth-century house of horrors, fall like so many blows to the head. As with so many Russians and many things Russian, Stalin—although technically Georgian—is a figure whose reputation precedes him. His “kill rate,” so to speak, […]
Most of us remember well our first sight of a dead human body. Most often it is surrounded by the aura of silent respect, but also more than a little horror, as if catching sight of a ghost while singing a hymn in church. Roadkill, on the other hand, usually offers no […]
Songs and music give tangible form to the invisible by making the invisible audible, and therefore visible in our hearts and minds. Listening to music, we travel through the human soul. Hopefully, the following songs and music give ample space only to some of the best songs of all time.
Late Marriage is one of the few films concerning marriage bold enough to suggest that our modern insistence on personal fulfillment in romance is the double-edged sword that brings two people together but can also poison them with expectations that tear romance apart. And it is one of the more honest films about marriage in its open, forthright acknowledgment that the institution—and in this film, marriage is most certainly an institution—involves far more than the forces and desires of two people.
From David Bowie’s cousin to his childhood friends, his managers, musical collaborators, girlfriends, writers such as novelist Hanif Kureishi, and extraneous celebrities to the last word of the midwife present at Bowie’s birth, A Life leaves almost no stone unturned, no corner empty, and no speculation left unsaid.
Ghosts is a drama of many themes. At its core, though, is the idea of “sickness” as the inexorable tide we push for, or against. It is the one drama—dare it be said, the only?—wherein “sickness” becomes the widest possible metaphor not just for disease, but inherited social convention, accepted ideology, and the crucible of family without which we cannot survive, but in which we can also decay and die.
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” said Irish poet W.B. Yeats, “out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And it is out of the quarrel of presidential candidates that U.S. voters intuit their way closer toward Election Day.
Why our culture of law enforcement—and tensions between police and communities—is a lot more nuanced and interesting than you might think.
One measure of the extent to which we believe age influences political beliefs is the extent to which we know Churchill’s famous phrase, “If you’re not a socialist before you’re 25, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after 25, you have no head.” Or, at least, whether we believe we know it.
For a decade in which rock music was reaching its zenith as a profitable business, the 1970s, it is staggering to consider the sheer number of risks Bowie took, without any hint or appearance that he was risking anything at all.
In a world where entire stock market indices can be built on castles of sand, where war can break out any moment, or your child’s happiness can turn on a dime into dread despair, stores such as Whole Foods make us small masters of our own destiny.
The short, but dense, Something to Chew On serves up no-nonsense, stimulating fare over a range of food controversies, from GMOs to weight-loss and world hunger. Digest it if you dare.
The majesty, intelligence, pettiness and prowess of the film world’s famous boy genius and might-have-been is revealed—appetite and all—in the tape recorded pages of Henry Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson.
In The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley is that rare scribe deft enough to move from personal anecdote, to policy, case study, and back again.
Rose George drenches the reader in her ocean-wide chronicle of sea-faring commerce, past and present, but her book’s meandering passages warn you in advance to don a lifejacket.
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time.
The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.