In spite of all the paper issues, commercial activity grew more and more spasmodic.

FORBES: Get Your Popcorn Ready To Watch The Coming Keynesian Self-Destruction

In infants and very young children, pertussis causes violent, spasmodic coughing that repeats over and over.

FORBES: Why Do We Need To "Recontrol" Whooping Cough?

The movie is nonsense, but it does achieve a brazenly chic high style black-on-black, airborne, spasmodic.

NEWYORKER: The Matrix

He continued to live comfortably in downtown Jakarta, suffering periodic bouts of serious illness that correlated, suspiciously, with spasmodic attempts to prosecute him.

ECONOMIST: An end to the ex-dictator��s deathbed saga

The violence here is spasmodic, the passions more schematic than unchained.

WSJ: Film Reviews: 'Stoker': Fuel but No Fire

Therefore our strategy should be to permit this decline to go forward without erupting into one last spasmodic effort to restore their fortunes by seizing the Gulf, or striking Western Europe, or even launching a first strike against the United States.

NEWYORKER: Politics and Prose

Nothing more is required, but the movie, as it nears its spasmodic finale, insists on giving us everything we feared, and more: prolonged sexual indignity, gunshots to the stomach, and closeups of men and women alike being punched so hard that their faces fracture.

NEWYORKER: Home Turf