Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex #9: Brian Sousa
Every once in a great long while, you encounter a student whose devotion to reading and writing, to the language itself, leaves you humbled and speechless. Brian Sousa was not that student.
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Posts by: Steve Almond
The Rumpus Interview with Chris Castellani
Novelist Chris Castellani talks about avoiding sentimentality around the immigrant experience, letting go of the people and characters you love, and how he wrote three books while also running the writing center Grub Street.
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Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto
Because I’ve devoted perhaps eighty percent of my adult waking hours to thinking about sex, and it seems dishonest to pretend otherwise in my work.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #19: The Pressure of the Real
I was in a Starbuck’s in central Connecticut trying to think about the election
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Week in Greed #18: They Were Careless People
I remember that it was late at night and I was returning to my dorm, having just watched Ronald Reagan win re-election with an unprecedented 60 percent of the popular vote. Down the hall I could see a familiar figure lurch drunkenly.
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Week in Greed #17: Conservatives Storm the Week in Greed!
I felt it was important for Rumpus readers to hear what conservatives have to say for themselves. So I spent the past month interviewing a bunch.
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The Week in Greed #16: How to Take a Salesman to the Woodshed
Voters at home, the ones still open to voting for him, need Obama to take the fight to Romney, to speak with urgency and moral force. He needs to have lines of attack prepared for particular topics, and those attacks need to tell a larger story.
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The Week in Greed #15: Seven Unpopular Truths About Last Night’s Great Debate
1. Mitt Romney convincingly portrayed a sympathetic human being.
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The Week in Greed #14: My Job Is Not to Worry About Those People
I remember that it was a sunny day in El Paso, as it almost always was, and I was upstairs with my girlfriend in our dusty apartment when we heard someone calling to her through the window.
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The Week in Greed #13: The Speech Obama Didn’t Give
Steve Almond imagines the speech he wishes President Obama would give at the Democratic National Convention:
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The Week in Greed #12: Who Let the Dog Whistles Out?
The goal isn’t just to rile white voters up, but to make them feel that their own racist impulses are merely reasonable responses to a culture stacked against them.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #11: The Ayn Rand Program
I know I’m supposed to write about Paul Ryan, because he’s the new media brand, but I’m having trouble getting the guys in the Give-A-Shit Department on board.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #10: GOP Nominee Faces Agony of Deceit
Pattern of habitual lying poses challenges for Romney campaign.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #9: Triumph of the Ill
Ten years ago, in the midst of a lengthy depression, I found a lump in my lower forty and decided, with the help of my depression, that I had cancer.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #8: Explaining Taxes to a Five Year Old
One nice thing about small children is that they aren’t scared to ask questions. They haven’t completely absorbed the idea that ignorance is shameful.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chloe Caldwell
I first saw Chloe Caldwell do her thing a year ago. She read an essay about an orgy she’d participated in and how much she’d enjoyed the orgy, and the particular moments she’d enjoyed,
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THE WEEK IN GREED #7: The Money Shot
When I was five years old, my grandfather Irving Rosenthal, who lived in the Bronx, came out to California to visit us. One morning I asked him for a dollar.
...moreTHE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like the Fallen World
I remember we were standing around in the breezeway before fifth period social studies and this kid Jim walked up to a girl named Tammy and began saying a bunch of sexual stuff to her.
THE WEEK IN GREED #5: The Willy Loman Vote
A few weeks ago I was in an airport and I did that dumb thing I so often do in airports, which is to retrieve a stray section of USA Today out of a fancy airport trashcan.
THE WEEK IN GREED #4: Risk-Free Ratfucking
Dirty tricks work in politics because it is human nature to see the worst of ourselves in others, particularly in those we feel are more powerful than we are.
THE WEEK IN GREED #3: What We Remember of the Old Country
Let’s say you work at the Renaissance Esmeralda in Indian Wells, just down the road from Palm Springs. You do maintenance stuff: irrigation, pool filters, plumbing.
THE WEEK IN GREED #2: Soprano Defeats Romney!
A quick pop quiz for the upwardly mobile couch potato: what theme unites virtually all our marquee cable television shows?
THE WEEK IN GREED #1: The Quality of Owning
Occupy Your Conscience: A Rumpus Exaltation
When I was four or five years old, my mom and dad called me and my brothers into the living room.
...moreThe Decade of Magical Thinking
A Rumpus Lamentation on What We Lost
Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you’d see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that day.
...moreSuper Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex #7: The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Close
I met Jennifer Close in a basement classroom that stunk of chicken fingers. This was many years ago, in the thick of George W. Bush.
The Rumpus Interview with William Giraldi
In a few days, Norton will publish Busy Monsters, the debut novel by William Giraldi. The book has received three starred reviews and a blurb from Harold Bloom.
To Gaze Upon a Weiner: A Rumpus Lamentation with Sad Sexual Parts
Anthony Weiner, the brash congressman from New York City, resigned this past Thursday, after it was revealed that he sent photos of himself, and sexually yearning text messages, to several women.