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1 week ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/04/20250406-144646.mp3Weird, that this global-trade-war market-crash thing feels a lot like five years ago. The cause is entirely different, yet I am feeling exactly the same disorientation and stomach-clenching fear I felt with the spread of COVID-19. And, given the abruptness, magnitude, and destructive power of the change, the same vertigo.
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1 week ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
A journalist friend emails: “I’m not sure what to make of Pamela Paul’s decision (assuming she wasn’t forced out).” I stare at the message for a second, thinking only: who is Pamela Paul? A New York Times columnist, it turns out—and I subscribe. But lazily. I write back, saying that after skimming Paul’s goodbye column, I think I would have enjoyed her work.
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2 weeks ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/04/poodles.mp3This is not the story of a sweet, smart, oft-maligned breed of dog, the sort of dog you would expect to find curled at the feet of an expat in 1930s Paris. A dog with a sometimes wry, sometimes goofy sense of humor; a dog who would rather do tricks than hunt rats, but will do just about anything to be with you. No, this is the story of haircuts. Consider: poodles did fine until the twentieth century.
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3 weeks ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/04/uncertainty.mp3Last week, I was on a panel. This, for me, is the equivalent of a tax audit, triggering raw, unwarranted terror. I did my usual stupid thing: wrote out all my answers to the posed questions and tried to memorize them. Then the organizer encouraged us to ad lib, go off script, respond freely to one another and turn it into a conversation. My stomach dropped.
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3 weeks ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/04/shopping-malls.mp3I came of age walking around Northwest Plaza, a then-novel “outdoor mall” with a pebbly version of cobblestones and several courtyard fountains so hypnotic I had their shapes memorized. By “came of age,” I mean that I became a person who made her own choices.
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4 weeks ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/03/chapel.mp3Finally, I was honest. Forty years of trying not to be, and all it took was a glass of wine and friends I hoped would understand. They were asking what I thought of the new building fondly known as The Cheese Grater, aka The Pineapple.
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1 month ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/03/20250318-195755.mp3A loud curse from upstairs, vibrating the air like a tolled bell. The dog looks at me, alarmed. “Oh, don’t worry,” I say. “That’s just Daddy.” Punching a hole through his cuff buttonhole with a pen because it is Monday morning, he is about to be late to teach a class, and everyday objects are defying him. My husband suffers neither fools nor small frustrations. I have a duck’s pre-oiled feathers; the world slides off easily.
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1 month ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/03/20250310-173615.mp3After fussing with his back leg, the dog turned to look at me, eyes wide with panic. I bent to check and found a bright yellow plastic fish with four wicked-sharp hooks dangling, three of them now hopelessly tangled in Willie’s coat. Somebody must have dropped it in the alley. I begged him to stay and stay still, then ran to bang on somebody’s door.
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1 month ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/03/20250312-221708.mp3Elon Musk’s fourteenth child was born last month. The names of the previous thirteen are deliberately unusual words charged with personal significance for their papa. The fourteenth’s name is Seldon Lycurgus. Seldon, for Hari Seldon, a mathematician in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction Foundations series. First Minister of the Empire, he develops a new science, psychohistory, that predicts the future. And Lycurgus?
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1 month ago | 
commonreader.wustl.edu | Jeannette Cooperman
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/03/guts.mp3Say you are learning English, and you are trying to figure out what “gut” means. Ah, a beer belly. But who would equate a beer belly with courage? Then your doctor talks about your gut, which is hardly distended, or brave; he seems to refer to coiled innards. Yet a bratty bully yells at your kid at school, “I hate your guts!” He hates his intestines? His beer belly? His courage?
