A member of the St. Louis Media Hall of Fame, Jeannette Cooperman was the staff writer at St. Louis Magazine for twelve years. Her work was cited as Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and Best American Essays 2023; she received the Writer of the Year award at the 2019 City & Regional Magazine Awards; and she was named to the 2017 FOLIO: 100 list of “the best and brightest” in the magazine industry nationwide. Cooperman spent a decade doing investigative reporting for Riverfront Times, where her work was recognized by the National Education Writers Association, the National Mental Health Association, the National Black Journalists Association, the National Gay and Lesbian Journalism Association, and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She holds degrees in philosophy and communication and a Ph.D. in American studies, and she has written eight books—seven nonfiction, biography or cultural history, and a murder mystery. She and her husband, a historian, live with Willie, a goofy but sweet standard poodle, in a century-old farmhouse in Waterloo, Illinois.
I came upon a word the other day, and when I learned its definition, my whole being ached. What I was reading had been written long ago. Was this word even possible anymore? In a studied sense, of course. But as I wanted it to mean?
The word…
When I read an art critic’s cavalier description of the colored tiles in Spencer Finch’s Memory Landscape as “backsplash,” I winced for him. The work is so much more than that. Even the concept is lovely: fill seventy feet of one of the walls at the Obama Presidential Center…
When I read that not forcing kids to hug their relatives is a new trend, I have to smile. My mother never forced a hug. When my bombastic uncle insisted on a kiss on the lips, a big ol’ smackeroo, I turned my cheek. Even at age five, and…
We want human consciousness, one of life’s last great mysteries, to be special. To be a spark of divine fire, or at the very least a set of proprietary neurons born of our brain’s majestic complexity. Descartes was so sure that only humans were conscious, he dissected bunnies and…
Is Charm Offensive?
The pad Thai was meh, and the fortune cookies a great disappointment. One just said “Behind a successful man is always.” And my husband’s said he would “win over others with his charm.”
I snorted. “That’s so not you.”
Our friends were aghast,…
This is our newest parlor game: talking with AI chatbots as though we are talking to another person. These conversations can be amusing, terrifying, instructive, or blandly predictable. They have addicted many of us, and the chatbots are responding in kind, using the first-person pronoun and developing whatever persona…
One can, of course, judge a work of art on its own terms, carefully setting aside the life of its creator, with its cascading influences of love, pain, or situation. But for me, there is something rich and compelling about imagining what WashU Libraries just showed us: “James…
I have lived in the Midwest all my life, drooping and dragging my way through July and August, yet I never thought much about why. This summer, though, the gap between temperature and RealFeel is yawning wide. I am more miserable than ever, even when the actual temperature does…
Surely the most delightful of our monsters is Nessie. Nothing jarring or subliminally weird in her backstory, no hopeless crushes on miniature mortals, no wreaking of harm or sucking of blood or heedless toppling of skyscrapers. Just a friendly, long necked, improbably ancient creature who surfaces now and again,…
Gloppy paint, a velvet couch, the ridges meant to cool a coffee cup to the touch, a lid that when spun emits a hollow sound of increasingly lower pitches as it empties, like a bottle whistle….
The old apothecaries were far more efficient, and far kinder, than our streamlined mail order and national chains.
Why has clothing gotten less practical, less sustainable, and less comfortable?