A giant white speech balloon is tethered at the foot of the grand limestone steps of the St. Louis Central Library. Passersby pause, some thinking of comic strips, some of texts. One guy misses the little tail pointing out at the bottom of the bubble and reads it as a…
Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness was the same book in the 1980s, when I first read it, as it was on publication in 1961. In the 25-year interval forces had changed the Amazon, but their effects were not as apparent as they have…
“I’m not watching,” my husband announced at the start of Game Five. I twisted on the sofa to stare at him. Andrew has been a staunch, unabashed Nationals fan since 2005, and the last time Washington won the World Series was as the Senators in 1924. “Every time I watch,…
Coyote Mick Tomi leads the audience in the Black Snake Dance, part of the Indigenous Pipeline Council Presentation. The video seems legit, with its corporate-sounding platitudes and scenes of pretty families. “Everyone deserves energy,” it begins. “Energy fuels our favorite moments. But lately, the pathway to prosperity has been blocked.
We start something new, or should, by defining our terms. “Wait, does this mean we’re not seeing other people?” “Did the doctor mean no dairy, not even yogurt?” So when I joined the staff of The Common Reader, I went a little clammy at the realization that I was not…
I remember being young and alone in a dark room, with “The Exorcist” suddenly on TV after an innocent turn of a dial. In an instant the girl’s head spun around, her mad face and deep voice full of the devil, and I felt like I might pass out.
The first season of the new streaming comedy Living with Yourself just dropped on Netflix. Each of the eight episodes is under 30 minutes, so the entire season can be binged in a night. It is worth a watch. Paul Rudd (most recently, Ant-Man) plays the starring (dual) role. Irish-born…
How will our alien overlords memorialize us, one day? Which single item will be on display in their Museum of the Milky Way to represent the former human race? Never mind your Space Shuttle, your iPad, your book, rubber tire, ink pen, or corkscrew. It will be something ingenious, wasteful,…
My son was the only young person in the physical-therapy facility almost in Texas. The elderly were being led back and forth by cables rolling over pulleys. They stepped up and down on machines that went nowhere, turned circles with their feet but did not move. I was having ghost…
It is not a great time in the United States to say you believe in writing, reading, and books, but let me be a brave little culture warrior and proclaim that, along with having…