thomas, often I accidentally make a normal atom instead of a reagent/atom, something to check (it causes the behavior you describe).

yes. not a good idea that many reagent tutorials use :refer [atom] instead of advocating r/atom

this is something that will bite every reagent user at some point

Are the names of events which I can listen to documented anywhere? For example, I want to attach a handler to a "keyup" event on an <input> element, what would be the key to use in the attributes table of that input element that refers to the "keyup" event?

Guess this answers it https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/events.html#supported-events