It’s Alive!

Merry Christmas … or the Wish for Something Like It

By The Common Reader

Season's readings, and a 2020 roundup, for a year that could never end too soon.

College Interrupted, Part Two

By The Common Reader

Washington University students contemplate activism, the forces of the pandemic, and their futures as they return to school and working life.

Summoning Seneca

By The Common Reader

Jungle Warfare in the Western Hemisphere and Big Stick Foreign Policy

By John Griswold

Back when I attended the original Jungle Operations Training Center, in the spring of 1984, it was run entirely by US Army cadre, and the Russians were the bad guys. We were told a Russian trawler offshore was monitoring and trying to disrupt our radio communications on field exercises, and the outlined figures on paper targets at army rifle ranges wore Warsaw Pact helmets. “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” as the first industrial-colonial power in Panama says. But the rigors of the Panamanian landscape and its climate have proved difficult for all foreign comers for 525 years.

The Price of the Athlete and the Roar of the Crowd

By Tolu Daniel

Sport, like the university, like any institution, is a human construction. It reflects the fears and desires of those who manage it. To demand that it remain apolitical is to demand that it remain unexamined. What would it mean to refuse that demand consistently?

A Visit to the Jesuits’ Lakota Museum

By G. F. Fuller

Harold Compton tries, in the expansive sense of the words time and history, to focus himself on the present. Because that word history, he says, can overwhelm you.But his job is one rooted in the past. Of his people. And not of his people. Of the Jesuits, too.

Recipes for Rascals

By John Griswold

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.