Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Eula Biss
Paid Phones | Daniel Kolitz
I used to ghostwrite SEO-optimized promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Each morning, people I’d never met, flacks for various midsize B2B tech startups, would put in their orders. A Forbes editorial on improving business practices “during times of economic uncertainty.” A press release for a high-performance modular battery solution. A LinkedIn post, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, about the challenges faced by black women in STEM.
Avoir et se faire avoir de Eula Biss
Sur ce que le capitalisme nous fait et fait de nous, un tour de force, une interrogation radicale autour des notions de travail, d'argent, de loisirs, de propriété, de riches et de pauvres... Eula Biss explore et rend concrète toutes les manières dont nous internalisons les exigences du capitalisme. A la fois ludique et vertigineux, son livre est aussi et surtout une tentative de dessiner une façon de vivre une vie éthique dans (ou tout à côté de) et malgré ce système.
Exploring the Power and Controversy of On Immunity
Chapter 1 What’s On Immunity by Eula Biss “On Immunity: An Inoculation” by Eula Biss is a book that explores the concept of immunity, both in the biological and metaphorical sense. The book delves into the history and science of immunization, exploring topics such as the development of vaccines, public health policies, and the controversy surrounding vaccinations.
Recommended Labor Day Reading, Viewing, and Listening
In between the Labor Day picnics and parties, you might be looking for inspiration for the fights ahead for a more equitable world. Our Institute for Policy Studies inequality team put together a list of some of our favorite books, podcasts, and videos.
The Theft of the Commons
From my backward-facing seat, I saw a long stone wall on the crest of a cliff. “The Wall,” John Berger writes, “is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War.” Walls, fences, hedges, and ditches were all used to mark the boundaries of enclosed land, so that sheep could be kept there, or some other profit could be pursued. Enclosure is how nearly all the agricultural land in Britain came to be owned by less than one per cent of the population.
'It's Important to Know That People Live': An Interview with Harriet Alida Lye
In the spring of 2002, Harriet Alida Lye came down with what she describes as “a bad cold that never properly went away.” A few visits to the doctor’s office turned into a trip to the emergency room turned into an extended stay in SickKids hospital as Harriet, then only fifteen, was diagnosed with a form of leukemia referred to as “natural killer.” It was a cancer with an average survival time of fifty-eight days, with no known survivors.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Vaccination (feat. Eula Biss)
Are the unvaccinated entitled, deprived, or just misunderstood? What would be a more effective way of controlling the COVID pandemic—shame or providing healthcare for all? (Or both?) I talked with Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, for this week’s Racket podcast. We went deep into the long history of debates over inoculation (debates that started even before the first vaccine was invented!), the power of conversation, and our own experiences vaccinating our respective kids.
Having and Being Had
Praise for Having and Being Had "A sensational book . . . Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she's accomplished rests on the labor of others." – Associated Press "Sharp and snappy. . . .
📩 Letter #35: Settle down
Hi readers! For those who are new, welcome to Letters from Home & Away. For nearly a year, Ali and I (two buddies) have been writing letters back and forth to each other, recommending books and thinking through our choices, our commitments, and what it means to live “the good life.” Scroll to the bottom to check out some of the work we write for other publications like The New Republic and Austin Monthly.
Eula Biss on How Motherhood Radicalized Adrienne Rich
“You’re a life worker,” my child recently said to me. We were jogging along a sidewalk when he said this, out for the hour of exercise that became our daily routine after the Covid-19 pandemic closed his elementary school. I asked what he meant and he said, “You make food for me and you go outside with me and you take care of my life.
“The Mark of the Beast”: Victorian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement
Illustration of the cow-poxed, ox-faced boy, an example of some proclaimed bovine side effects of the smallpox vaccine, as featured in Dr William Rowley's Cow-Pox Inoculation (1805) — Source. The ox-faced boy who stared out from the opening page of Dr William Rowley’s pamphlet possessed strangely elongated eyes, one bloodshot and one healthy.
“The Mark of the Beast”: Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement
Illustration of the cow-poxed, ox-faced boy, an example of some proclaimed bovine side effects of the smallpox vaccine, as featured in Dr William Rowley's Cow-Pox Inoculation (1805) — Source. The ox-faced boy who stared out from the opening page of Dr William Rowley’s pamphlet possessed strangely elongated eyes, one bloodshot and one healthy.
Vaccinarsi è una questione di coscienza
26 aprile 2021 12:44 Questo testo è un estratto del libro “Immunità. Vaccini, virus e altre paure” (Luiss University Press 2021). Un tempo, in difesa della vaccinazione forzata, quando c’erano epidemie ci si appellava al concetto di chiaro e imminente pericolo. E il termine obiettore di coscienza, ora associato anzitutto al servizio militare, si riferiva a coloro che rifiutavano di farsi vaccinare.
Nathalie Léger’s Hall of Mirrors
A woman plays a role she wrote herself, in a film she directed, a film that is based on the life of a woman she does not know, in whom she recognizes herself. Watching this film, a generation after it was made, another woman writes a book about the director of the film and the woman she plays, in whom the author recognizes both her mother and herself.
Le battaglie vinte contro i virus
21 aprile 2021 La vaccinazione di una famiglia contro vaiolo e tifo a Visalia, in California, Stati Uniti, 1939. (Bettmann/Getty Images) 21 aprile 2021 15:09 Questo testo è un estratto del libro “Immunità. Vaccini, virus e altre paure” (Luiss University Press 2021). Mio padre ha una cicatrice sul braccio sinistro provocata dalla vaccinazione antivaiolosa di oltre mezzo secolo fa.
Nasciamo tutti già inquinati
15 aprile 2021 Francesco Carta, Getty Images 15 aprile 2021 16:52 Questo testo è un estratto del libro “Immunità. Vaccini, virus e altre paure” (Luiss 2021). È difficile riuscire a leggere un qualsiasi resoconto storico sul vaiolo senza imbattersi nella parola sporco. Nel diciannovesimo secolo, il vaiolo era in larga misura considerato una malattia favorita dalla sporcizia, ragion per cui si supponeva che fosse perlopiù una malattia dei poveri.
The Paris Review - The Resistance
James McNellis, Wikimedia Commons The problem of resistance was humming in my mind when I passed through an iron gate in France that read Nécropole de la Résistance. Here were the graves of men and boys who had lost their lives fighting the Nazi occupation of their country. This cemetery of the resistance was on a plateau above Grenoble, positioned so that an enormous mountain stood beyond the graves like a monument.
On Vampire Capitalism and the Fear of Inoculation
“Capital,” Marx wrote, “is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Vampires sucked the blood of the sleeping in Ancient Greece and spread plague in Medieval Europe, but after the industrial revolution, novels began to feature a new kind of monster, the well-dressed gentleman vampire who would become an enduring mascot for capitalism.
The Prosperity Hoax
No one denies that a large number of people worldwide live in drudgerous poverty. But it would appear that we are in the midst of a historic transformation. In recent years, a spate of articles in the anglophone press and academia have suggested that global poverty has entered terminal decline—all thanks to capitalism.
Waking up from the American Dream
Is it still possible to improve your lot in life?? Was it ever? Essayist Eula Biss (Having and Being Had), cultural historian Imani Perry (Breathe: A Letter to My Sons), journalist Ada Calhoun (Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis), and economist Stephanie Kelton (The Deficit Myth) discuss who is and isn’t able to prosper, what class feels like today, and how the answers to these questions are built into the very structure of our economy.
Washington Independent Review of Books
An occasionally uncomfortable — and long overdue — exploration of power and privilege. Eula Biss is a master of vivid imagery. In her first book, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, a telephone pole transforms from a nuisance and a symbol of communication to the chosen stage for the horrific lynching of African Americans across the country.
THE VANISHING AMERICAN DREAM
A work focuses on a symposium devoted to diagnosing and curing the socioeconomic ailments that plague the lower and middle classes in America. According to Ludwig, the editor of this volume and the organizer of the discussions at Yale Law School it documents, the lower and middle classes in the United States are desperately falling behind.
WHO GETS IN AND WHY
A veteran higher education reporter pries open the gates to the college admissions process and distills his findings in a book sure to help students and parents navigate their search. During the 2018-2019 school year, Selingo accompanied admissions officials at Emory University, Davidson College, and the University of Washington as they read thousands of applications, sorted them into admit and reject piles, and then made the painful final cuts.
Mortgage-backed Insecurities
From Having and Being Had, a book of non-fiction, which was published last month by Riverhead Books. Every year, financial advisers come to campus to meet with faculty, but I haven’t met with one until now. He’s looking over the details of my retirement account with concern. Is there a reason, he asks me, why none of it has been invested in the stock market for the past decade?
Is It Too Scary?
Photo: © kentannenbaum46 / Adobe Stock. I’ve been waiting all this time on the wrong platform and the train just sped by in the wrong direction. The first drops of rain are falling now and I see a taxi idling under the tracks. The driver is an older man in a baby-blue suit and he wants to talk. What do you think, he asks me, of art painted by elephants?
Book review: 'Having and Being Had' an 'enthralling' look at capitalism
By Ann Levin , The Associated Press When it comes to capitalism, Eula Biss is a skeptic. And yet, as a university professor and homeowner, she's invested in the system. Out of those contradictions, she's written a sensational new book, "Having and Being Had," which tries to figure out whether it's possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society.
In Capitalism’s Clutch, and Exploring Its Contradictions
Nonfiction “I ask the economist I meet in the bar if he can tell me what capitalism is,” Eula Biss writes in her new book. “First he wants to know if I’m serious.” Sept. 3, 2020, 4:53 p.m. ET HAVING AND BEING HAD By Eula Biss On the front of my laptop, I have a sticker that reads “NEVER WORK.” Unfortunately, it’s not big enough to obscure the Apple logo entirely.
The Landlord’s Game: Eula Biss on the Anticapitalist Origins of Monopoly
I’ve been playing Monopoly with J every evening for a week and I haven’t won a single game. J plays with abandon, buys indiscriminately, and wins repeatedly. Tonight he’s thrown a suspicious number of doubles, so I accuse him of cheating. He’s not cheating, he explains to me happily, he’s just a lucky person. The Landlord’s Game, the game that became Monopoly, was designed in the early 1900s to expose the problems with an economic system in which property owners “win” by impoverishing renters.
Having and Being Had
Praise for Having and Being Had "A sensational book . . . Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she's accomplished rests on the labor of others." -- Associated Press "Sharp and snappy. . . .
A House Is Not a Home
What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but can’t find anything worth buying? We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last. I think there are limits, I say, to what mass production can produce. We just bought a house but we don’t have furniture yet. We’ve been eating on our back stoop for three months.
On Immunity: An Inoculation
On Immunity (Paperback) An Inoculation By Eula Biss Graywolf Press, 9781555977207, 224pp. Publication Date: September 15, 2015 Other Editions of This Title: Digital Audiobook (9/29/2014) CD-Audio (9/30/2014) Hardcover (9/30/2014) List Price: 16.00* * Individual store prices may vary. October 2014 Indie Next List “Biss' essays about the immunization debate range from the personal to the body politic and back again.
THE UNINFORMED VOTER
A political work warns readers about the costs of an uninformed electorate. As a prolific author, physician, and clinical professor at Yale University, Levine has produced scholarship mostly centered on aging and health care reform. In this book, he offers a cautionary tale about a rising tide of a “general lack of knowledge of how government works” and “tribalism,” which he considers fundamental threats to America’s democratic tradition.
Germes, vacinas e outros medos eBook: Biss, Eula, Soares, Pedro Maia: Amazon.com.br: Loja Kindle
Essa jornalista apresenta a ciência e o universo da imunidade de forma envolvente. Recomendo esse livro a todos, principalmente, mães/paÃs e profissionais da infância. Como ela aborda em seu texto, precisamos nos distanciar do conceito de rebanho (a maioria do gado imune, imuniza os demais) e abraçar o conceito de colmeia (uma abelha doente contamina todo o enxame). Aborda questões filosóficas sobre saúde, polÃticas públicas, individualidade, coletividade...
Vampires and Vaccines
In the first few weeks after my son was born a March wind blew off the lake and through our apartment, where I sat for hours each night in a stiff wooden rocking chair, rocking my restless baby and staring at the windows through which I could barely see the shadows of tree limbs flailing in the wind. The chair creaked and the wind moaned and I heard a tapping at the glass and a flapping around the sill and I knew a vampire was there, trying to get in.
Are Anti-vaxxers Conscientious Objectors?
When it comes to public health, there’s a duty to make moral decisions communally. Eula BissMavis Biss Jul 29, 2019 Lindsey Wasson / Reuters By April, 2019 was already a bad year for measles. Outbreaks were occurring all over the world, including in Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Sudan, Thailand, and Ukraine. In the Philippines, more than 200 people, most of them children, had died from measles in January and February. By the end of February, 13 deaths had been reported in Europe.
Eula Biss: “A book I can’t defend, a book I can’t renounce.”
It’s been ten years this month since my essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land was published. The book was never finished, it seems to me now, or maybe I was never finished with it. Still, I distinctly remember feeling that I had exhausted my abilities in those essays and could take them no further.
Writing and Research — TIFFANY GIBERT
All research conducted as part of an MSc in Biodiversity, Wildlife, and Ecosystem Health, University of Edinburgh, 2018–2021
A Conflict of Interest
The first-person experiences described in this essay are drawn from Maryann Bylander’s life and research. The essay was collaboratively written with Eula Biss, who contributed to her thinking. I was once told that if I wanted to make a good investment, I should put my money into Cambodian microcredit. The man who told me this had all of his savings in microcredit.
Eula Biss: Grappling with Whiteness in Two Iowa Towns
Each of us has certain clichés, I suspect, to which we are particularly vulnerable, certain songs we are compelled to play over and over again, certain words that undo us with their simple syllables.
Danielle Lazarin Recommends 6 Must-Reads By Women, For Women
At the center of Whittaker’s book is an intense personal and professional relationship between two female animators, a till-death-do-you-part bond without marriage. There are so many reasons to read this book: because it features female artists reckoning with creative life, because it doesn’t shy from trauma or class or sexuality or how messy we can be. But most of all, The Animators asks what it means to tell our stories, not only in art, but to one another.
This is not a toy
SIGN IN to access Harper’s Magazine Need to create a login? Want to change your email address or password? Forgot your password? 1. Sign in to Customer Care using your account number or postal address. 2. Select Email/Password Information. 3. Enter your new information and click on Save My Changes. Subscribers can find additional help here. Not a subscriber? Subscribe today!
White Debt (Published 2015)
The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I'm newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that's one quality of debt that I've been pondering lately - how easy it can be. I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any.
The Believer - No-Man’s-Land
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Kansas, Bonnets, “A Great Many Colored People,” Copper Gutters, Martin Luther King Jr., People Who Know Nothing about Gangs, Scalping, South Africa, Unprovoked Stabbing Sprees, Alarming Mass Pathologies, Chicago, Haunted Hot Dog Factories, Gangrene, Creatures from the Black Lagoon, Tree Saws, Headless Torsos, Quilts, Cheerleaders, Pet Grooming Stores, God “What is it about water that always affects a person?” Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her 1894 diary.
10 Unusual Books Mark Zuckerberg Thinks You Should Read
In previous posts, I provided must-read suggestions from some of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
The Argonauts is at once deeply personal and incisively intellectual. Nelson's prose shines as she navigates the terrain of pregnancy, motherhood, and the fluidity of particular familial relationships. Recommended by , Powells.com Perhaps what I love most about Maggie Nelson's work is her ability to bring both other writers and the reader directly onto the page to converse with her, and she does this exceptionally well in The Argonauts.
Bill Gates picks his top beach reads
They are not exactly the breeziest books but Bill Gates eloquently explains his unusual choices:by Allie Brosh The book, based on Brosh's wildly popular website, consists of brief vignettes and comic drawings about her young life. The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. You will rip through it in three hours, tops.
50 Books of Literary Collage
|
We cowrote and coedited Life Is Short — Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. We're interested in brief prose (short-shorts and mini-essays), but we're also (and even more) devoted to book-length works of literary collage, built out of brief shards. Here are some of our favorite examples of such works. – David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman Speedboat by Renata Adler David learned how to write by reading this book until the spine broke. He typed the entire book twice.
By Melanie Thernstrom, Robert Gottlieb, David Shields, Renata Adler, Sarah Manguso, Arthur Schopenhauer, Eula Biss, Bernard Cooper, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean Stein, Kathryn Harrison, Art Spiegelman, Roland Barthes, Don Paterson, Richard Brautigan, Amy Fusselman, Simon Gray, Elizabeth Hardwick, Blaise Pascal, James Richardson, John D'Agata, Annie Dillard, Eduardo Galeano, Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson Verified, F Scott Fitzgerald, Alan Bennett, E M Forster, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Cyril Connolly, Joe Brainard, Joe Wenderoth, D J Waldie, Jean Toomer, Laurence Sterne, Fernando Pessoa, Leonard Michaels, Carole Maso, David Markson, Sven Lindqvist, Michael Lesy, Barry Hannah
|
Powell's Books Blog
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
On one level, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is about unfulfilled potential and heartbreaking loss, but more importantly it deals with the pressure we all feel to succeed and be happy in an increasingly competitive society. It is a beautiful eulogy to a friend and an accurate portrayal of what it means to be young, talented, and conflicted.Recommended by , Powells.com This could be a Hallmark-movie tearjerker of a book, but Hobbs is far too talented and self-aware for that.
‘The Folded Clock,’ by Heidi Julavits (Published 2015)
March 27, 2015 The self, a friend once informed me, is an illusion. We were 19 at the time, and he was reading Foucault, but that was 18 years ago, and now he doesn’t think he understood Foucault back then. “It’s real,” my friend says of the self, “but it’s made.” Whether or not the self is real or an illusion, made or found, we do know that the self we encounter in a book, even if that book is a diary, is a made thing. And not every keeper of a diary is capable of creating a self on the page.
Eula Biss: "On Immunity: An Inoculation"
ANNI actually had a very highly educated white upper middle class woman just like us say to me, I would rather 50 kids had died of the measles than this had happened to me. And I'm just shaking. I can't -- it's caused riff in my own family because I've said -- they're like, well, you know, we don't want to have happen to us what happened to you. I'm like, okay. You know, A. what's wrong with what happened to me and B. I cannot believe that you would put other children in your community at risk.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Eula
Contact Eula, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack