With two “Notable Essays” selected for inclusion in this year’s Best American Essays anthology, plus landings in top Internet aggregators such as Longreads, 2023 was a banner year for The Common Reader. Here our staff goes one field further, naming five personal favorites published by the journal this year, along with five favorite cultural moments from the wider world of books, film, documentary works, podcasts, and food.
We face the same dilemma with gender that we face with race. Science has shown that neither is an essential category, just a convenient construct we imposed upon infinite variations. But because that construct allowed centuries of injustice, we have to keep using its labels in order to repair the damage they have done.
Nothing is new, shocking, revelatory. All the lumps and bumps, moles and birthmarks, scars and stretch marks are on display, and the need to conceal your own drops away. Nakedness, done right, has no ego.
Riding coach on Amtrak today is more like taking a nice bus. No doubt I will arrive weary, disillusioned and, as the Victorians put it, “travel-stained.”
The desolation that troubled T.S. Eliot comes from a soulless industrial greed that has yet to explode into wanton consumerism. He is mourning spiritual and intellectual decay. I am mourning the trash we then generated to fill that emptiness.
Dave Barger ran JetBlue for seventeen years, leaving in 2015. Today, that little startup is merging with Spirit to become the fifth-biggest airline in the nation.
Page Barrera got her first job as a flight attendant eight years ago, and she says she just might keep it until she retires.
Duane Huelsmann opened federal screening operations at two JFK terminals and one at Raleigh-Durham, then came home to St. Louis to do the same here. As deputy security director for the TSA, he now oversees screening operations across the state of Missouri.
When we kiss, the world drops away. We are warm lips and darting tongues, soft cheeks or stubble, arched necks, wrapped arms, tingling pressure, tenderness and hunger. We drown in a good kiss, suffocate and come up gasping for air and do not care, because such a kiss insists that we are loved and wanted. Our breath intermingles. For the time it takes a cloud to pass the sun, our souls join.
Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.