The Democracy of Trauma, the Parliament of Pain
Trauma culture might be the last prank of late-stage capitalism. We have branded our own pain.
Current Issue
Explore the latest essays and dispatches
Roald Dahl, Hidden Auteur for ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” is by turns charming, troubling, funny, dark, romantic, nonsensical, and weird. More than many other movies, it continues to inspire questions about its layers of inventiveness, even though its premise—that specific inputs cannot explain magical output—is in the news every morning now.
A Spiritual Palimpsest’s Stacked Stories
What I had known was that I was living next to a church for the past five years of my life. What I had not known was that, for all these years, I was in the midst of a “Spiritual Urgent Care Center,” the appellative Reverend Fannie S. Johnson opts for to remind her congregation of the purpose of their gathering at Bracy every Sunday.
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.
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.
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.
Caitlin Clark Has Just Entered the Building
Two books published in the summer of 2025 address the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. The higher profile belongs to Christine Brennan, a national sports columnist at “USA Today,” whose “On Her Game,” narrates Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA with vigor and detail. Howard Megdal’s “Becoming Caitlin Clark,” by contrast, assesses Clark’s rise from manifold perspectives, explaining its controversies with sensitivity and insight.
When Right Makes Might
If you want to understand the details of these ideologies and how their adherents have translated ideas into policy, you would do well to read independent scholar Laura Field’s book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.”
Board Games and Human Nature
Like comic books and animation, board games became more artful, more expensive, more interesting to adults. For millennia, games had been folk culture, passed down for generations, the play communal. Now they are a craft, sometimes even an art, designed and authored, often with a deliberately niche appeal.
Winning and Losing at the Great Game of Intimacy
What to call this Anton Chekhov, whom I first encountered in 1988? The Master, perhaps—of vision, decency, modesty, and industry, and, one might hope, in the old game of love.
Once Every Seventeen Years
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.
Searching for Luck in Las Vegas Playing the Same Game on Two Different Floors
At the slot machine that night, I also had no control. I even lost my money. I did not feel so anxious. But at the trade show, I kept worrying more, trying harder, all the effort to feel in control, but did the odds change a lot? Maybe not.
The Difference Between Making Promises and Keeping Them
The man asking if I am a Christian is a Puerto Rican chef living in Dallas, someone I met in the strange expanse of the internet, specifically within a Chinese gaming platform called Age of Origins.
Father and Child Reunion
In the process of traveling with my youngest daughter to five races, I learned that my crude assumptions about the nature of Formula 1 drivers were wrong and that my daughter was an F1 authority to be reckoned with.
Līlā
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.
The Woodson Boys
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.
Editor’s Picks
Critical perspectives on the books, culture, and ideas that shape our world
The Very Modern Fatalism of “You Can See Everything”
Audiences might ask, what do those three hours “do”? The answer may be: to portray the helpless, confused feeling of disbelief at our not-knowing in a world where enormous, supra-state power is wielded by gangsters, weirdos, grifters, criminals, and haters, whose choices weaken our societies and make our lives worse.
Reviews
Unpacking the ideas behind today’s most compelling works
The Lessons America Has Taught Me
Fox News Channel’s political anchor Bret Baier’s new book, “The Case for America,” is just in time for the 250th anniversary season. It feels a bit hasty in its composition, which gives a reader the sense that it was a book aimed at a ready market: people who want a book that is positive about the United States at this particularly divisive juncture, when many think the country is on the verge of its third political divorce.
The Elected King of Black America or the Black King of Progressivism
“A Dream Deferred” is a thoughtful book, especially for those who lived through and remember Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs. Abby Phillip gives us Jackson warts and all, the maddening egotism and opportunism, and the rumors of infidelity. Informed, highly readable, and even exciting at times as she recounts the thrills of the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
Maverick or Misfit, a Senator Seeks the Center of Things
You might say, as the youngsters do, that Fetterman did his party “a solid” simply by winning, especially as that seemed not so assured during the campaign. The problems Fetterman encountered during his Senate campaign are mostly what “Unfettered“ is about.
Past Issues
A look back at the ideas that shaped previous editions
Winter 2024
Black History Month 2024
Essays, reviews, and reflections that celebrate African American life and legacies
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Society & Culture
Insights into the cultural shifts and societal changes shaping our time
Why We Scream
Every October, our neighborhood turns into the grounds of a nineteenth-century asylum, strange creatures waving or menacing, taped recordings with bloodcurdling screams (or maybe that was me). Screams register sudden terror—but are themselves unnerving. They should not be; they are our first sound. Our first bit of self-expression, our…
The Democracy of Trauma, the Parliament of Pain
Trauma culture might be the last prank of late-stage capitalism. We have branded our own pain.
Why Smugness Is Insufferable (and Dangerous)
The common denominator in all smug characters is that they are closed. Closed to new ideas, to a more flexible way of thinking, to vulnerability and humility, to wonder and curiosity. They live in their own tight world, safe from challenge, always correct.
The Comfort of Jackets
More than most clothing, jackets last for years, so their most important quality, the accretion of stories, has a chance to build modestly, privately.
Science & Nature
Essays on science, technology, and the natural world
Nothing Common About It
The virus has latched on to receptors on the cells lining my respiratory tract, and it clings there, reproducing rapidly. I know this because my throat feels scorched, and though I continue bravely on with my day, it is punctuated by violent sneezes that explode without warning.
Arts & Letters
Insights on creativity and the creative process
The Very Modern Fatalism of “You Can See Everything”
Audiences might ask, what do those three hours “do”? The answer may be: to portray the helpless, confused feeling of disbelief at our not-knowing in a world where enormous, supra-state power is wielded by gangsters, weirdos, grifters, criminals, and haters, whose choices weaken our societies and make our lives worse.
People & Places
Stories of the people and places that shape our world
“Loser Back Home” is Having a Good Trip
Loser Back Home (LBH), who prefers to remain pseudonymous, is traveling through China right now. He has made some 31 social media videos—which began with the series title, “Day [9, 11, 18, 28, 62, etc.] of Not Understanding Anything in China”—as he has passed through, eg, Ganzhou, Ningming, Wuhan, Yueyang, Shaoshan, Chongqing, Chengdu, the Three Gorges area, Zhang Zhou, and other places, including non-Chinese cities Bangkok and Vientiane.
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.
About The Common Reader
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time.
