The world knows Howard Nemerov as twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence at Washington University for twenty-one years—and a bit of an enigma. A stylist impatient with literary pretension; a deep thinker who held up wit and irony […]
Recently on a trip I picked up a copy of The Southern, the regional newspaper for Southern Illinois, where I grew up. The paper is physically smaller than it used to be, but the fact that it is still printed is remarkable. The Pew Research Center said, a couple of years ago, […]
WashU’s Center for the Humanities hosted an event last week titled Fragment, by Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov. To be honest, I did not know beforehand what I was going to see. The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I had hopes it would be […]
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 […]
I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, […]
It was a good day for The Common Reader on December 10, 2024, when the inaugural Gerald Early Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Dwight McBride, was installed in a ceremony on campus at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the […]
Rory came over again from the old place. His wife had been gone three weeks this time, and he would drive to the airport to get her after we ate pork nachos. We have known each other for twenty-five years. To kill time, we talked about writing for a platform on […]
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; […]
Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]
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 […]
