Loyal sports fans follow their teams through peaks and valleys, but in no other city have fans experienced the highs and lows of Chicagoans in the past generation. This collection of Ted Cox’s greatest hits writing "The Sports Section" for the Chicago Reader from 1983 to 2008 constitutes an intimate history of Chicago teams during these years. From the triumphs—the six titles won by the Bulls, the Super Bowl champion 1985 Bears, and the White Sox winning the World Series in 2005—to the regularly occurring collapses of the Cubs, Cox puts his audience on the scene. He evokes the fan’s experience with a level of vivid detail now nearly extinct from sports journalism. Cox writes like an ordinary observer who just happens to have excellent seats and easy access to the players and coaches. 1,001 Days in the Bleachers stands not only as a chronicle of Chicago’s teams but also as a portrait of the evolution of professional sports and their place in the life of the city.

To commemorate the journal’s quarter-century, this double issue consists of foundational pieces arranged in conversation with one another. Common Knowledge has opened lines of communication among schools of thought in the academy, as well as between the academy and the community of thoughtful people outside its walls, and the pages of the journal challenge the ways we think about scholarship and its relevance to humanity. Contributors to the issue include former presidents, prime ministers, and archbishops, along with winners of the Nobel Prize, Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, MacArthur Fellowship, International Balzan Prize, and Holberg International Prize.

Contributors. M. H. Abrams, Edward Albee, Barry Allen, Wayne Andersen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Marianna Birnbaum, Sir John Boardman, G. W. Bowersock, Aldo Buzzi, Caroline Walker Bynum, Anne Carson, William M. Chace, J. M. Coetzee, Cornelius Castoriadis, Stanley Cavell, Stuart Clark, Inga Clendinnen, Francis X. Clooney, Christopher Coker, Maria Conterno, Michael Cook, Lorraine Daston, Lydia Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Thibault De Meyer, Gunter Eich, Sir John H. Elliott, Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Epstein, Péter Esterházy, Roger Cardinal Etchegaray, Fang Lizhi, Paul Feyerabend, Michael Fried, Joseph Frank, Manfred Frank, Luis Garcia, Clifford Geertz, Carlo Ginzburg, Philip Gossett, Stephen Greenblatt, Thom Gunn, Jürgen Habermas, Ian Hacking, Václav Havel, Sir Edward Heath, Albert O. Hirschman, David Hollinger, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Miroslav Holub, Maya Jasanoff, Albert R. Jonsen, Stanley N. Katz, Hugh Kenner, Sir Anthony Kenny, Sir Frank Kermode, Jee Leong Koh, Joseph Leo Koerner, Yusef Komunyakaa, György Konrád, Bruce Krajewski, László Krasznahorkai, Anton O. Kris, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Ewa Lipska, Greil Marcus, Steven Marcus, Samuel Menashe, Adam Michnik, Jack Miles, Alexander Nehamas, Reviel Netz, Sari Nusseibeh, Jeffrey M. Perl, Marjorie Perloff, J. G. A. Pocock, W. V. Quine, Belle Randall, Nadja Reissland, Colin Richmond, Richard Rorty, Ingrid Rowland, Hanna Segal, Amartya Sen, Quentin Skinner, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, A. L. Snijders, Timothy Snyder, Susan Sontag, Isabelle Stengers, Wis?awa Szymborska, Miguel Tamen, G. Thomas Tanselle, Sir Keith Thomas, Stephen Toulmin, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Michiko Urita, Bas van Fraassen, Marina Vanzolini, Gianni Vattimo, Helen Vendler, Charlie Samua Veric, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Sir Bernard Williams, Lord (Rowan) Williams, H. R. Woudhuysen, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Santiago Zabala

Chuck Eddy is one of the most entertaining, idiosyncratic, influential, and prolific music critics of the past three decades. His byline has appeared everywhere from the Village Voice and Rolling Stone to Creem, Spin, and Vibe. Eddy is a consistently incisive journalist, unafraid to explore and defend genres that other critics look down on or ignore. His interviews with subjects ranging from the Beastie Boys, the Pet Shop Boys, Robert Plant, and Teena Marie to the Flaming Lips, AC/DC, and Eminem’s grandmother are unforgettable. His review of a 1985 Aerosmith album reportedly inspired the producer Rick Rubin to pair the rockers with Run DMC. In the eighties, Eddy was one of the first critics to widely cover indie rock, and he has since brought his signature hyper-caffeinated, hyper-hyphenated style to bear on heavy metal, hip-hop, country—you name it. Rock and Roll Always Forgets features the best, most provocative reviews, interviews, columns, and essays written by this singular critic. Essential reading for music scholars and fans, it may well be the definitive time-capsule comment on pop music at the turn of the twenty-first century.