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 seven books—six 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.
Fragmented sleep might not be restful, but I love it, because I can finally remember what I dreamt. The stories play like movies, colors saturated, plots full of twists. Some are spun from trivia; others are Hitchcockian, suspenseful and complex. Who writes these scripts? Who does that weird and sometimes…
Journalism has a new genre: bemoaning the pathos and danger of humans falling prey to the illusion of a relationship with an AI. But few articles explore what we humans did, or did not do, to make a machine more appealing. Why did we let our relationships get so perfunctory…
Language has allowed us to be bound together by codes of law; to move easily between past and present and future; to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe. But while scholars were busy defending our species’ superiority, biologists were uncovering mysteries of animal communication that shot down one “special” human capacity after another.
When you walk into the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new exhibit—Ancient Splendor: Rome in the Time of Trajan—the emperor himself greets you. His right hand is raised, index finger lifted: he is about to speak. The commanding air comes naturally to him; he rose through the army, suffering hardship alongside…
In Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes’s character falls platonically in love with one of his teachers, a woman whose clarity and intelligence become his lodestar. After her death, he vows to overcome his habitual procrastination and research a historical figure he suspects she wanted him to write about. “To please the…
Something dark and sharp must live deep inside me, because when I read “There Are No Psychopaths,” I am disappointed. Psychopaths explain so much. The twisted little smile that crosses someone’s face, quickly hidden, after they cause pain. The impulse, spreading fast these days, to watch the world burn.
When I asked for a curator at the Saint Louis Zoo who would educate me about animal communication, I was hoping for chatty, irreverent primates or soulful, wise elephants. Instead, I was sent to Dr. Ed Spevak, the zoo’s acclaimed curator of invertebrates. Brilliant, fired with enthusiasm for his subject…
A meeting on Zoom sounds like a relief until I remember I hate it. Texting keeps me in touch with friends so swiftly and constantly, I forget how much I miss them.
Some of us need to be in a certain place, or with certain kinds of people, or in a certain emotional climate....
Last week, I read a delightful story on a friend’s Facebook page, full of specific details about a farmer who realized that someone was taking eggs and potatoes from his farm stand without plunking any money into the honor jar. She was hungry and broke—times were increasingly hard—and too proud…
The masochism of it never sat well with me. Watch, on a screen, your nightmares acted out? Fix your eyes on that screen while your heart pounds faster and faster, your breathing shallows, your guts clench, and the worst possible things happen? It sounded like a mad scientist’s torture experiment.
Today’s influencers, panicked by AI and its ability to mimic or replace us altogether, preach a new vitalism. Often masculine, sometimes misogynist, this energy is wild and brave and noble, a birthright that cannot be replaced.