Body Inheritance
I needed my beauty to be invisible, either accidental or not at all.
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Posts Tagged: disease
If Love Were Water
Can I be blamed for my relief? My anger?
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You Can Never Escape the Jersey Shore
To watch Jersey Shore is to watch my fantasy, only it’s an imperfect recreation.
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What Did You Expect, Though?
The immune system, meant to protect a body from foreign invaders, works too assiduously, sees danger where there is none, turns on itself. Such conditions lend themselves to metaphor.
...moreWhat Condition Is Your Condition In?
What are the possible causes of my symptoms or condition. What tests do you recommend for the heartache of loving both those boys later on–in different years, for different years– for thinking you’d loved with a love that was more than any love anybody had ever loved, for knowing now, thirty-five years later, maybe you […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, Guernica has a new story from author and veteran Odie Lindsey, whose debut story collection about soldiers coming home from war, We Come to Our Senses, will be published by W.W. Norton later this month. Included in the collection, “Bird (on back)” picks up in the middle of a disintegrating relationship between an […]
...moreCatch My (Trendy) Disease
Pale skin, thin waists, sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, red lips—all trademarks of 19th century English beauty trends, and all symptoms of the tuberculosis epidemic that ran rampant until the advent of germ theory in the early 20th century. Emily Mullin writes for Smithsonian on the new connections discovered between 19th century fashion and the aesthetic impact […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Displeasure of the Table
What strange hurts hide in the lettuce, the strawberries, the chicken, the melon, the spinach? What dark poisons may turn the eating violent?
...moreWeekly Geekery
Examining continuity on screen and in our minds. How to constantly work without actually working. Buzzfeed is not so special after all. (So says the Atlantic.) Algorithms are to creativity in the 21st century as Gutenberg’s press was to creativity in the 15th century. A history of something under your skin.
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The Rumpus Interview with Laura van den Berg
Author Laura van den Berg talks to the Rumpus about why she thinks America is obsessed with dystopias, the intersection of surrealism and realism in her work, and choosing an ambiguous ending for her new novel, Find Me.
...moreWomen Dying from Being Women
Anne Boyer writes about the history of breast cancer for The New Inquiry. There is no disease more calamitous to women’s intellectual history than breast cancer: this is because there is no disease more distinctly calamitous to women. There is also no disease more voluminous in its agonies, agonies not only about the disease itself, […]
...moreLike Writer, Like Character
Sometimes writers end up diagnosed with the very same disease they’ve inflicted on their characters. Natalie Serber knows firsthand—she received a breast cancer diagnosis halfway through creating Mona Brown, a character in her latest novel. Over at Beyond the Margins, Serber writes about sharing a diseases with Mona: First I had to survive. I had […]
...moreThe Syphilis Code
A deep meditation on whatever it was that plagued James Joyce. For some, the uncertainty surrounding Joyce’s condition has turned the issue into his most captivating puzzle. Erik Schneider, an independent scholar, became particularly fascinated. Schneider had dropped out of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972 and spent years educating himself at the school’s […]
...moreTweet for Public Health
Social media is breaking new ground—it is now a tool that aids in the tracking down of public health crises. Researchers can use twitter to follow the spread of disease, at a much more efficient speed than formerly used surveillance methods. Not only can researchers track the location of a trending disease, they can find […]
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