Rebecca is that weird person reading a book by herself in a restaurant. She’s a parent, an atheist in a very red state, an amateur pianist, a student of the German language, and curator of a joyfully bizarre music collection, with room for everything from grime-punk to metal to Bach cantatas. She is curious about so many things, but particularly cognitive science, music, language, parenting, the history of medicine, and psychology and mental health. Rebecca has degrees in English and Linguistics and has held a variety of writing jobs over the years, including grant writing for nonprofits, copy editing for a publishing company, and most recently, proposal writing. Email: brannicr [at] gmail.com
by Rebecca Baumgartner There’s a pervasive idea that there must be works of art and culture that contain “people who look like me,” where “looking like” is usually scanned as race, ethnicity, sex, or gender expression. This clique-ish attitude masquerades as liberalism and can twist your head in knots if you let it: rather than…
by Rebecca Baumgartner Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the Antarctic explorer who would become famous for documenting Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition in his book The Worst Journey in the World, wrote a letter in 1919 in which he cast doubt on the purity of the motives of one of the expedition members, Lieutenant Edward “Teddy” Evans: “There will…be…
by Rebecca Baumgartner In T.H. White’s masterpiece The Once and Future King, Merlyn’s recommendation for “see[ing] the world around you devastated by evil lunatics” is to learn something: “There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind…
by Rebecca Baumgartner In his book Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that “the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.” The most exciting promise of…