All the threads | ROROTOKO

A close-up

October 12, 2026

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

James William Coleman

Cataract surgery that should have been routine, a detached retina, five more operations, and three weeks of being ordered to keep his head face down all night and eight hours a day. Sitting cross-legged with his forehead on the desk, awash in fear, he went through his catalogue of meditation practices and landed on a figure he barely knew — and then something happened that he still cannot explain.

The wide angle

October 12, 2026

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

James William Coleman

Three mythic figures carry the story. The Goddess of our earliest ancestors, rooted in the body and an enchanted world where rocks and streams were sentient. Then the Great Hero, hyper-masculine, subjecting instinct and nature to the rational ego — and never quite winning. And then a third possibility: the same transcendence, but leaning forward, ready to leap to anyone who is suffering.

In a nutshell

October 12, 2026

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

James William Coleman

Poisoned air, land and water, tens of thousands of species gone a year, unprecedented wealth and mounting anger — and a shelf of political and economic theories that only add to the confusion because they ignore the spiritual roots. A synthesis drawing on history, archaeology, sociology, Jungian psychology, mythology and religious thought, plus practices simple enough to actually try.

In a nutshell

October 11, 2026

Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos

Seven Rasmussen

The seven-variable equation that supposedly tells us how many civilizations we could be talking to right now — and a case for why we can’t answer it, only learn from trying. Written by someone who left traditional academia because it was hard to concentrate on other planets while this one burns, and who refuses to pretend that neutrality is a virtue. Fragile as a flower and more resilient than mountain ranges, all at once.

In a nutshell

October 10, 2026

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

Murray Forman

We know how to picture an aging blues or jazz musician — stalwart, gravitas, late style. We have no such image for a seventy-year-old B-boy, even though the culture is past fifty and its pioneers were teenagers when they built it. Drawing on interviews with Grandmaster Caz, Sha-Rock, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa and Yo-Yo, an argument that hip-hop's ageism runs inward, generation against generation, and always has.

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October 9, 2026

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

Darren Hudson Hick

It opens with a board game being unboxed — a genre of video weirdly beloved by collectors — and the surprisingly rewarding act of narrating that ritual 700 words deep. From one small, deliberate activity comes the book's real invitation: find something you love doing, then figure out what, exactly, you love about it.

In a nutshell

October 8, 2026

Bicycle Thieves

Robert S. C. Gordon

A stone-cold classic that has quietly slipped out of the critical conversation, respectfully cited and no longer really studied. Look again and it is still teeming — a film everyone believes they know backwards, whose famous simplicity turns out to be a sleight of hand covering something far more complicated about postwar Europe, deprivation and care.

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October 7, 2026

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

Benoît Loiseau

The opening scene of a 1996 documentary: a woman pacing a forested estate, palms turned to the sky, humming of sorrow, while a man seems to relearn how to walk. Behind them stands the château of an experimental psychiatric clinic, where patients are staging an absurdist play about aristocrats terrified of being exposed as common.

The wide angle

October 7, 2026

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

Benoît Loiseau

A nod to Foucault's birth of the clinic, answered with its death. The aim is a history of social and community-led medicine that is patient-centred, queer, personal and anecdotal: every human quality modern medicine tried to exclude in the name of objective empiricism.

In a nutshell

October 7, 2026

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

Benoît Loiseau

A book of literary nonfiction, written as a letter to a late mother, that travels through a century of radical clinics: Weimar Berlin, interwar London, postwar France, 1970s Geneva, and New York at the height of the AIDS crisis. What joined them was a horizontal, anti-hierarchical way of caring, drawn from anarchism and organicism alike.

A close-up

October 7, 2026

Testament

Tarik O'Regan

What would it be like to watch somebody you knew had died walk out of a tomb? The answer might not be joy. It might be horror.

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October 6, 2026

The Stepford Wives

Paul Moody

She picks up a kitchen knife and stabs her best friend in the abdomen, and the wound does not bleed. Where the blade goes in, what the novelist wrote to the director to make sure no blood appeared, and whose arm you are actually watching on screen — one brief, gruesome scene holds the whole argument about the film, plus one more hidden replacement of a woman.

The wide angle

October 5, 2026

Testament

Tarik O'Regan

Opera has a different problem. The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present. Rather than trying to reproduce the book’s interiority, we could make memory physically happen around Mary.

The wide angle

October 5, 2026

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

Ethan Warren

Sometimes a director doesn't need dialogue to make a point — just the right famous face walking into the room. This is about star personas as narrative shorthand, from a shadowy folk-club cameo that spells doom for a fictional singer to what we're really watching when a fraying legend takes the stage.

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October 4, 2026

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

Stephen Wade

Chicago, 1892: a Polish Jewish girl newly arrived from a shtetl is invited to a Christmas party at Hull-House and says she cannot go, because she might be killed. She goes anyway, without telling her mother. What she wrote about that night — the candles, the carols, children from all corners of the earth, most of them underfed, none of them afraid of each other — is one answer to what a common life might mean.

The wide angle

October 4, 2026

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

Stephen Wade

Folklore lived and folklore studied — this is mostly about how the music gets learned and handed on. "I can't teach you, but I can show you," said one veteran barn-dance performer, and that is the whole pedagogy. Even the cover painting turns out to hold two real people, a schoolteacher and his daughter, whose lives trace the same arc from enclave to wider world and back.

In a nutshell

October 4, 2026

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

Stephen Wade

Musicians born at either end of the turn of the twentieth century, showing how tradition can be constant and supple at once, guided not by rules but by observing, doing and venturing. Sid Harkreader, Ola Belle Reed, Bill Monroe, Joe and Odell Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon and many more. As one of them put it: "It's AWYC. Any Way You Can."

In a nutshell

October 3, 2026

Testament

Tarik O'Regan

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that.

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October 3, 2026

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

Robert M. Peck

In 1984 an ornithological team in southwestern Ecuador learned that the Shuar, convinced they were prospecting for gold, had ordered them killed rather than let them leave with what they had found. Weeks under siege, camp moved daily, and an exit that nearly cost two lives. And still worth it, for the birds — many of them now vanishing fast.

The wide angle

October 3, 2026

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

Robert M. Peck

Three new frogs in the Andes, new fish in the Orinoco, swarming locusts charted across Africa, seven expeditions to Mongolia and a camel caravan across the Gobi. Also house arrest in China, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a pope's last audience, and Hemingway's grandsons in Cuba. A behind-the-scenes account of what expeditionary travel is actually like.

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October 2, 2026

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Erin Giannini

The chapter that best captures the whole project is, oddly, the one about a famous 1990 flop. Watching that failed experiment closely complicates the tidy story of television's "golden ages" arriving in discrete periods. The same year gave us Twin Peaks — and the failures turn out to be part of the same expansion.

The wide angle

October 2, 2026

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Erin Giannini

From NBC Opera Theater and Great Performances to Schmigadoon, by way of end-credit product placement on 1990s WB dramas. Individual pieces of this have been studied — MTV, theme songs, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan — but rarely the whole arc. Including the unglamorous question of why some musical episodes work and others simply don't.

In a nutshell

October 2, 2026

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Erin Giannini

Music and television is a pairing so obvious it has gone almost entirely unexamined. Not just the musical episodes and specials and series, but soundtracks, synergistic network deals, and the programs that once carried music to viewers who had no other way of hearing it.

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October 1, 2026

The Language of Bees

James C. Nieh

Inside a dark, crowded hive, one bee butts her head against a dancer and makes a short, sharp beep. That easily missed detail opens a much larger idea: that a society needs brakes as much as it needs signals, and that communication is often about restraint. A close look at how colonies weigh danger, doubt, and competing information.

The wide angle

September 30, 2026