Our Annual Best: “Chuck Berry’s Blues”
The Common Reader’s annual print round-up.
August 29, 2019
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At the Intersection of Faith, Certainty, and Pain
I did not understand how this faith community could have such unshaken “certainty” about the world. Especially a certainty that does not make sense to me. I felt curious about it.
Visiting the Farm of the Rainmaker on a Hot Day
I had come to understand St. Louis through its divisions, through the Delmar Divide and the strange geography of abundance and deprivation that I had stumbled into on that bus ride years earlier. But food made the division feel different.
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.