Our Annual Best: “Chuck Berry’s Blues”
The Common Reader’s annual print round-up.
August 29, 2019
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Merry Christmas … or the Wish for Something Like It
Season's readings, and a 2020 roundup, for a year that could never end too soon.
College Interrupted, Part Two
Washington University students contemplate activism, the forces of the pandemic, and their futures as they return to school and working life.
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Bo Gritz, America’s Special Operations Problem, and the Tragedy of Pulp Masculinity
Having retired and returned to civilian life, what did Bo Gritz try to teach or communicate to us? Unlike, say, John McCain, he never modeled reconciliation with former enemies. He did not go to Vietnam after 1995 with veteran groups for humanitarian purposes. He did not preach against violence, or for peacefulness, responsibility, or inclusion. Mostly, he seemed interested in anti-social things: radical individualism, extreme autonomy, distrust of people, and the assumption of his own power, by violence if necessary.
The Culture of Animals, Why They Are Not Us, but Why We Need Them as Our Co-Creators of Reality
Language has allowed us to be bound together by codes of law; to move easily between past and present and future; to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe. But while scholars were busy defending our species’ superiority, biologists were uncovering mysteries of animal communication that shot down one “special” human capacity after another.
The Biography of a Library
I have always loved my library. I have kept it with me, growing with me, since adolescence, through marriages and divorces, through changes in occupation from student to steelworker, from truck driver to college professor, and moved it from San Diego to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Cincinnati, and finally to New York City.