Flying Home

Anatomy of Influence

By The Common Reader staff and contributors

The delight and danger of swaying others

The Tie That Binds

By The Common Reader staff and contributors

What keeps us together, and what tears us apart.

The Matter of First Ladies and Why First Ladies Matter

By The Common Reader staff and contributors

The Woodson Boys

By Clifford Thompson

To become good at chess is to master skills that would allow one to succeed in a perfect world. And to lose sight of that world, to forget to dream of how things could be, is to lose a great deal, even if it is in this world that we will always be mired.

Līlā

By Deepak Sarma

Defending a liberal arts education is equivalent to celebrating līlā/ play. Enabling and encouraging līlā is more than just desirable, it is necessary. My thesis is thus līlā/ play is the intellectual disposition that enables epistemic humility, which in turn is the central goal of a liberal arts education.

Once Every Seventeen Years

By Christopher Schaberg

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.