From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
...more
Posts Tagged: dna
Belonging Is Everything: Talking with Georgina Lawton
Georgina Lawton discusses her debut memoir, RACELESS.
...more
Community Destroyed, Memories Reconstructed: A Conversation with Vivian Gibson
Vivian Gibson discusses her debut memoir, THE LAST CHILDREN OF MILL CREEK.
...more
Fool Me Once
The first time I had my breasts removed was hard. The second time, less so.
...more
Queen of That Universe
The realm of sound yields to me, sits at my feet. I can switch on. Or not.
...more
You Can Never Escape the Jersey Shore
To watch Jersey Shore is to watch my fantasy, only it’s an imperfect recreation.
...more
Inheritance
I married a man who is related to me. I started dating him when I was seventeen and of course, my mother immediately liked him. He grew up in my parents’ hometown.
...more
On Grief and Inheritance: A Conversation with Brionne Janae
The poet Brionne Janae discusses her debut poetry collection After Jubilee, intergenerational trauma, and writing her way into historical personae.
...more
TORCH: Blood Trauma
But still: A pattern. The trauma had been diluted by time. But, it was still present, still discernible, in my blood.
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Weyes Blood’s Mysterious Kris
To this day no one really knows where my kris came from or whether or not it’s a significant part of my family history, if it’s a random object or an heirloom with an untold story.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Red Whole
I’ve become an abridged version of myself—made half-done and meager. Made hungry for answers.
...more
Our Secret Family Legacy
When I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
...moreWeekly Geekery
If Klingon is a living language then Latin sure as hell isn’t dead. “I think therefore I am,” but for animals. Solving history’s mysteries with poop. The Internet is ruining the planet in more ways than you think.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results
There were chains. History books always describe the chains.
...more
What They Never Told Me, What I Never Asked: Reflecting on Roots and Writing
[T]he questions pile up, never to be answered.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Making a Murderer and “Bad” Families
There were “good” families and “bad” families, and even I, an outsider, was quickly apprised of which was which.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Trauma haunts your DNA. Robots at CVS. Erik Larson’s favorite gadgets. Drones do good? Shrooms, science, and Beatrix Potter.
...moreA New Tool Based On Old Racialism
While concerns over the accuracy and invasiveness of the technology are important, the primary fear I have is that the technology available today masks a form of gender and racial stereotyping with the scientific authority of genetics. Heather Dewey-Hagborg considers the implications of a new law enforcement tool called “Forensic DNA Phenotyping” in an essay over […]
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) The murder she never committed. Our parents’ patriotism. The Father, Son and Holy Surfboard. DNA science is not absolute. The synecdoche falls down first.
...moreThou Art More Lovely and More Efficient
As the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data. Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more efficient—than hard drives: DNA itself. The first thing they encoded on a double helix of nucleotides? A text file containing […]
...moreScience Saturday
The Large Hadron Collider has started up again. The collisions aren’t supposed to begin until January, which is ahead of schedule. Perhaps that’s why there hasn’t been a big-budget disaster flick about it–still time to get something on the SyFy Original Movie front. Next time you go for sushi, you might wonder if that’s really […]
...more