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

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.

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.