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Who Are We

The Rumpus.net is an online magazine focused on culture, as opposed to “pop culture.” Pop culture can be hard to define and the term means different things to different people. Basically, we’re not opposed to things that are popular, but we have no interest in “art” created by marketing executives. And we have no interest in derivative art, like images of famous people made from shoelaces or Star Wars characters in funny wigs. (More on what we’re about here, here, and here.)

The Rumpus is not worried about being the first to break the news. We care about good writing, and we’ll publish essays just because the writing is good. And we won’t run a well crafted meditation alongside an actor’s opinion of the war in Iraq.

We’re focused on culture but not “People Magazine culture.” We want to introduce readers to things they might not have heard of yet. The Web was supposed to diversify content and so far it hasn’t. If anything, the Internet has amplified the echo chamber so all the big online magazines are focusing on the same stories. Nobody’s paying any attention, for example, to books that have been out for a couple of months and haven’t had some massive debut. We’re not going to worry about reviewing books the minute they’re released, or following the publisher’s lead on what we should or shouldn’t pay attention to. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, we are, because we like Malcolm Gladwell.

Often, our reviews will be written by authors inspired by a movie that’s already in theaters or an album they just heard. Maybe they didn’t originally think of writing a review of a book until they read it and then wanted to say something about it.

You can count on The Rumpus to update at least ten times every weekday, probably more. So come back the way Chicago votes, early and often.

Best,

Stephen Elliott

FAQs

What is Morning Coffee? Morning Coffee is a link list that appears every weekday morning. It’s basically cool stuff, often kind of dumb but funny, that we find over the course of the day. Stuff that we didn’t want to write a full paragraph about (sometimes we’re lazy) but that we thought you might be interested in. We try to gear these links to things you’ll be interested in early in the day so we stay away from heavier topics, usually.

What is a Rumpus Reprint? A Rumpus Reprint is a really good article that ran in a literary journal and is not available online. We don’t do a lot of these but some good examples would be Steve Almond’s appreciation of John Williams or Why I Must Give Up Writing by Merrill Joan Gerber.

Where did you get the name The Rumpus? It was Katie Crouch’s idea. It’s the name of the dog in her new novel. Since starting we’ve been informed there is also humor magazine at Yale called Rumpus Magazine. You can check them out here.

Why did you stop linking to me? Our “blogroll” is capped at 50 and shuffles randomly. We currently have more than 50 links on our ‘roll, so if you saw your site was linked to and now it seems like you’re not linked to, it’s not because we hate you. Quite the opposite. You just got shuffled out. Try refreshing the page. Refreshing is also a good way to see more taglines that appear next to Rumpy’s foot.

Who’s Rumpy? Rumpy is our mascot. He was drawn by Ian Huebert. When looking at Rumpy, think “rump” and “net.”

Do you run original fiction or poetry? No. But our long term plan is to have a separate, but affiliated, Rumpus fiction site and Rumpus poetry site. The only thing stopping us is our own laziness.

You don’t publish that much stuff on the weekends. That’s true.

What is your comments policy? Your first comment on the site is moderated. After that, comments are unmoderated. Sometimes we will delete a mean posting, but not always. Not if it’s well thought out and the poster is not anonymous. But if an anonymous poster leaves a mean comment we will delete it.

WRITER’S GUIDELINES

We’re always looking for good content at The Rumpus, but we’re focused on publishing good writing. Good writing and good ideas are not always the same thing. A topic for an essay might sound horrendous but if a writer is in love with the idea enough she’ll often render something beautiful. We try to maintain high standards even though we don’t have any money and can’t pay for writing.

We’re interested in seeing finished essays that intersect culture. We realize it’s a lot to ask for people to to write something without knowing if it will be published. On the other hand if you aren’t driven by the story so much that you have to write it then it’s probably not a good fit for The Rumpus.

It’s OK to pitch interviews, book reviews, and film reviews, otherwise we’re really only interested in finished pieces until we get to know you.

We’re not interested in anything about Obama. We love Obama but people come to The Rumpus (we hope) to read things they can’t read everywhere else. We’re also not interested in food writing. There’s a lot of really interesting food writing out there, it’s just not our thing. We don’t do political rants, even if we agree with you. The Huffington Post has that covered.

Please send book review inquiries only to Bekah Otto — books@therumpus.net.
Interview pitches to tips@therumpus.net.
Send music related articles or pitches to Katy Henriksen — katy@therumpus.net
Send art-related articles to Julie Greicius — julie@therumpus.net.
Send film-related articles to Anisse Gross — anisse@therumpus.net.
Send all other articles to — tips@therumpus.net.
Send Morning Coffee links to Dan Weiss — morningcoffee@therumpus.net
Send Funny Women submissions or suggestions to Elissa Bassist — funnywomen@therumpus.net

CONTACT US

Editor – Stephen Elliott: stephen@therumpus.net
Managing Editor – Isaac Fitzgerald: isaac@therumpus.net
Books – Bekah Otto: books@therumpus.net
Art - Julie Greicius: julie@therumpus.net
Poetry - Brian Spears: poetry@therumpus.net
Music – Katy Henriksen: katy@therumpus.net
Film – Anisse Gross: anisse@therumpus.net

Dear Sugar: sugar@therumpus.net

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