Courtesy Corey Coyle, CC 3.0 Unported For a time, back in the Reagan-Bush era, I was a teen employee in a Hardee’s in coal country. By incompetence I had failed upward, away from the fry station and off the backline, to work the front counter, and then that…
Courtesy Piqsels, CC0 1.0 When you speak with someone on the street, you usually know relatively quickly when they are self-interested, when they do not have answers, when they are delusional, stalling, or wandering off topic. That is, when they are full of it. Similarly, corporate communication is…
Photo of similar setup courtesy Acabashi, CC 4.0 A visitor last week to a major Hollywood film production was treated to a view of the food that gets an army of extras through 12 to 16-hour work days. One hears self-referential stories and jokes in movies and on TV…
‘Ekaterina II’ in Sevastopol, 1902, public domain Travel—and here I do not mean tourism or flight from danger—is often no escape. If anything–if it is being done well–it makes obvious how we are individual bodies at the mercy of time and the world. Your library card is a…
When I got out of the army I spoke with a heavy southern accent I had picked up from my roommate and another friend, who were both from north Florida. A cold caller once said to me in surprise [say this in the heaviest accent you can…
Courtesy Fortepan, CC 3.0 Driving through the piney woods of the Georgia Piedmont this week, I was sure I knew where I was going so I turned off Maps. I was wrong, and by the time I discovered my mistake I was nearly out of gas. There was…
Tiger Lilies, by George Cummings, Wikimedia Commons When we say “dull,” it is often the result of over-familiarity or insufficient study. Those Tiger Lilies were charming yesterday, you said. What changed? Boredom is the collapse of the concrete into idealism. If my city is bustling but tiresome, then…
Still from the interview sponsored by SLCL and HeEC Media. For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Common Reader Editor Gerald Early interviewed Anna Malaika Tubbs on her recent book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation…
Market data on display at Taiwan Stock Exchange, by Wang Yu Ching, Office of the President, courtesy CC 2.0 The highs. The lows. The toast breaks. It has been a dizzying day of being a capitalist. My younger son, aware that my elder son has an interest in…
Still from ‘The Boys in Red Hats,’ Shark Dog Films The Boys in Red Hats (2021) is about the 2019 encounter between field-tripping students from an all-boys Catholic school and a small Native American group on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The film is worth a…
Photo courtesy Bibliothek Wissenschaftspark Albert Einstein, Wikimedia Commons Another swing around the sun, so I will try again to define what I have tried before: Let’s say you have good health and time. A clean little space, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a bed…
Military deep-sea divers like to play the world’s fools, even though most are supremely competent and a little piratical. They know what their real work is and find ways to play between bouts of it. This is not “blowing off steam.” It is one answer to the problem of being in the sea and to that of being immersed in any purpose—medicine, management, even writing.