taxes

  • Trump Dads: A Confession

    Mine wears short shorts while he jogs, with a baseball cap over his baldness, and no shirt. His comes home from work and changes into a full gray sweatsuit, then sits at the head of the kitchen table to relax…

  • More Money, More Problems

    What happens when writers suddenly face a windfall? Bad things. That’s why the Whiting Awards include a financial planning workshop for winners. Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards each received $50,000. For authors who are struggling as freelancers or adjunct…

  • Feel Less Dumb

    Debut novelist Adrienne Celt (The Daughters, 2015) has some advice for you. Not writing advice, of course. No, Celt would like to help you with your taxes: I think it’s nice when people stand up and say “I HAVE BEEN THERE.…

  • Tax Advice from David Foster Wallace

    “Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and the consent of the governed built in,” Wallace wrote in an email to his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen,…

  • How the IRS Defines Art

    In an essay on Narrative.ly, Alison Gerber recounts the rather harrowing IRS audit of Minneapolis artist Venus DeMars: Sometimes the line between professional and amateur is a clear, bright one. But in the United States artists are, for the most…

  • EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT STEVE ALMOND’S TAXES

    “Further questions should be referred to my accountant, the aforementioned Marty, who is no longer employed by H&R Block and who was, last time I checked, living in a small cardboard domicile outside Davis Square.” In response to Mitt Romney’s…

  • Throwaways on the Radio

    Listen in as Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn reads from her excellent essay “The Throwaways” on American Public Media’s Marketplace. “If we are saying “I value you” when we pay our taxes, what are the people and corporations who don’t pay…

  • The Throwaways

    I grew up poor. Not too poor. My relatives in the Philippines would certainly not consider my youth as poor. But poor like I thought vacuum cleaners were luxury items. I used to sweep the carpet.