I received a link last week to a 60-page PDF booklet called “Wear Good Shoes: Advice from Magnum Photographers.” It is worth a look. Magnum is the photographers cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour. Their identity as a group was meant to be the […]
The Common Reader has a sliver of a budget, so to keep much of our content free, we spend that sliver on sporadic boosts that at least let a few more people find us on social media. Lately, though, many of those attempted boosts are being rejected for no apparent reason. They […]
I had a piece to write, about the Mississippi. Flat shining basins, filled with river water made to slow its roll, lay on the other shore. I chose to write it because that stretch of river made me uneasy. Facing it, you know. I would write my way forward into whatever my deal […]
My high school uniform was a navy drop-waist pleated jumper with a pilgrim-collar white blouse. It pains me even to type that sentence. We flipped the blouse around and wore it backward so we could unbutton some buttons, and we took the baggy jumper in at the side seams, cutting deep to make […]
In the celebrity culture that dazzled us for a while, the talented, beautiful, or outrageous among us gathered fame like snowballs rolling downhill. Everybody knew their name, and they trailed that glory everywhere they went. Now, many of the hottest influencers are avatars online—real people using a pseudonym or virtual avatars that […]
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade. In the sociopolitical realm, there is of course “wokeness,” stripped of its many inflections. We have acquired “birthers” (questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship) and “truthers,” a sad choice of labels for people […]
Over wine, my book club raved about the quiet spell Hamnet cast, the grace and tenderness of its language. We read aloud our favorite Maggie O’Farrell’s lines: “The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were…” “Time runs only one way.” “Every […]
I spent the first decades of my life staring in a mirror. Now I have shattered it. People used to tell little girls they were beautiful no matter what. My mother continued the tradition, but when I learned the dangerous trick of comparison (surely our original sin) the truth dawned. I concentrated on […]
“Here we are in Lake Charles, feeling like we are living out the book of Job in the Bible,” a Facebook friend wrote this week. “God has smitten us again.” “Who else is tired of Survivor Lake Charles?” someone else wrote. After a year with two hurricanes (Laura, August 2020, and Delta, October […]
It is always a mystery, that reverence can come out of murder. Young Robert Ridgway used to mix up a batch of gunpowder in his father’s pharmacy. He packed it into a rusted rifle recovered from the sunken wreck of a river steamer, and he and his father went […]