FIfty shades of Shakespeare | New Republic →

In a new memoir, an obsession with the Bard and spanking transforms what it means to live a sensual life.

Put your head on your lover’s chest and you will hear ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. It’s a heartbeat, but it’s also a very specific rhythm—it’s iambic pentameter, the metrical foot made famous by William Shakespeare. Even if you don’t know your trochee from your spondee, you know an iamb. You can’t not know it; iambs are the poetry of your lover’s blood, your mother’s blood, and of your own.

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Bernie Sanders Was Just Another Hippie Rummaging Through My Mom’s Fridge | New Republic

6/10/2015: "Bernie Sanders Was Just Another Hippie Rummaging Through My Mom’s Fridge"

One hot night in July 1972, I walked into my family’s kitchen to see my mother brandishing a broom at a skinny man who had his head stuck deep inside our refrigerator.

“You get out!” my mom yelled, hitting the man on his skinny ass. “Out, out!” Under her tan skin, my mother’s face was red with indignation. We didn’t have much in our fridge, but my mom would fiercely defend it. The man pulled his head out of the fridge, dropping the food on the shelf. His hair was curly; a cherub’s full-bodied curls framed his startled face. Chagrined, he loped off to the other apartment housed in my family’s converted two-room schoolhouse in Huntington, Vermont, the site of a late-night mock-up session for The Vermont Freeman, the alt-weekly my parents published. Years later, I’d find out that man was Bernie Sanders. (Read more)