Editor Gerald Early on RAF-STL
Listen as Early explains The Common Reader to radio host Kathy Lawton Brown
By Gerald Early
September 14, 2015
More by Gerald Early
Baseball, Battlefields, and the Beginnings of Cold War America
In “Warm Summers and Cold Winters,” Steven P. Gietschier tells the story of Charley and Bill DeWitt, owners of the perennial American League losers, the St. Louis Browns, who, in 1950, decided to hire a psychologist and hypnotist named Dr. David Tracy to help some of the players get over their “inferiority complex.”
The Making of a Black Role Model
I am the same age as Jayne Kennedy, and her memoir does a wonderful job of recreating how exciting a time it was if—to paraphrase singer and pianist Nina Simone—one were young, ambitious, and Black.
Once Every Seventeen Years
The game here took place on several dimensions. It was, on one hand, a game with time—in the right place at the right moment—and on the other, with fish and bugs, in that moment. Once every seventeen years, maybe this might happen. But it has also become a game with memory, and with writing—and now, with technology.
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Baseball, Battlefields, and the Beginnings of Cold War America
In “Warm Summers and Cold Winters,” Steven P. Gietschier tells the story of Charley and Bill DeWitt, owners of the perennial American League losers, the St. Louis Browns, who, in 1950, decided to hire a psychologist and hypnotist named Dr. David Tracy to help some of the players get over their “inferiority complex.”
The Revolution Will Be Televised as a Baseball Game in New York
A.M. Gittlitz’s “Metropolitans” tells an alternative history of the New York Mets through the lens of class struggle. Extensive and educational, entertaining and exasperating, it employs the team as a vehicle of left-wing politics, while prodding at the cultural conservatism associated with the national pastime.
How Super Is “Supergirl”?
The online haters celebrating what they gleefully consider its downfall simplify the matter in the way such misogynists always do: “Supergirl” 2026, in their view, is simply a bad film. The problem with this perspective is that “Supergirl” 2026 is not a bad film.
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The Speculative Value of a Stolen Literary Bust
By the time it was gone, the change was subtle but unmistakable: one corner left without its figure, one pedestal left bare. But to understand why that absence matters, it helps to understand who Kate Chopin was and the stories she wrote.
Recipes for Rascals
The ginger nut (and by association other cookies of its type, such as those made with black peppercorns) has an aggressive presence but offers scant sustenance. It is meant to aid digestion of other things, to have a warming effect in winter, to relieve boredom, and perhaps to remind us we are alive in the sometimes dry, husky business of life.
Standing at the Edge of Two Worlds
Having lived in the United States for a few years, I have either struggled to understand democracy in practice or struggled to keep up with it.