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
The Restorative Noise of Doing It Yourself at The Sinkhole
Located on Broadway in St. Louis’s historic Carondelet neighborhood, the venue has become something of a billowing steam vent in the city’s punk, hardcore, and metal scenes. A bastion to the do-it-yourself ethos long embraced by the subcultures of underground music, The Sinkhole boasts a single room, one bar, and a ceiling as low as its overhead.
A Spiritual Palimpsest’s Stacked Stories
What I had known was that I was living next to a church for the past five years of my life. What I had not known was that, for all these years, I was in the midst of a “Spiritual Urgent Care Center,” the appellative Reverend Fannie S. Johnson opts for to remind her congregation of the purpose of their gathering at Bracy every Sunday.
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.”
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Caitlin Clark Has Just Entered the Building
Two books published in the summer of 2025 address the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. The higher profile belongs to Christine Brennan, a national sports columnist at “USA Today,” whose “On Her Game,” narrates Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA with vigor and detail. Howard Megdal’s “Becoming Caitlin Clark,” by contrast, assesses Clark’s rise from manifold perspectives, explaining its controversies with sensitivity and insight.
When Right Makes Might
If you want to understand the details of these ideologies and how their adherents have translated ideas into policy, you would do well to read independent scholar Laura Field’s book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.”
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.”
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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.