Nov 1, 2025 · 1 hr 6 min · 19 segments
Adam Levin joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Backbone,” by David Foster Wallace, which was published in The New Yorker in 2011. Levin, a winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions…
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Deborah TreismanHostThis one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child's play.
After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf.
There's little to say about the original animus or motive cause of the boy's desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
He had been housebound one day with asthma on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father's promotional materials.
The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion.
The young boy thought at that point of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.
The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom's carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as he could manage.
Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot's outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips.
The boy's idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in children's cartoons toward a section of the foot's outside that he had marked with a bullseye of soluble ink.
He struggled to breathe against the dextro-rotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine.
The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom's door.
The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a month.
One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.
The father's chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms.
More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in flexion.
Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind.
This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child's play.
After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf.
There's little to say about the original animus or motive cause of the boy's desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
He had been housebound one day with asthma on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father's promotional materials.
The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion.
The young boy thought at that point of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.
The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom's carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as he could manage.
Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot's outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips.
The boy's idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in children's cartoons toward a section of the foot's outside that he had marked with a bullseye of soluble ink.
He struggled to breathe against the dextro-rotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine.
The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom's door.
The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a month.
One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.
The father's chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms.
More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in flexion.
Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind.
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