The Nation explains how the GOP is resegregating the South with its infuriating redistricting campaign.

“The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.”

(Via Feministing)

Today, Letters In The Mail got double the love from The New York Times and NY Daily News. Thanks to you both!

A new transnational, Spanish-language, radio program seeks to share human stories throughout Latin America and the U.S. In the last year, Radio Ambulante has built a production network throughout the Americas and begun production on the first three episodes. To propel the project to the next stage, donations are being accepted through Kickstarter.

COMIQUES:
Get Yerself Organized

Another fantastic Rumpus Comic from Anne Emond!

No? Why not?

We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.

Email to: Marie AT therumpus.net

A quick pop quiz for the upwardly mobile couch potato: what theme unites virtually all our marquee cable television shows? Read the rest of this entry »

The big day approaches. Sugar’s Coming Out Party is on Tuesday, February 14th (Valentine’s Day) at The Verdi Club in San Francisco (2424 Mariposa Street), 7pm.

Come out to meet Sugar live and in person as he/she reveals his/her secret identity!

Music by Pocket Full of Rye and The Yellow Dress. And comedy by the amazing Janine Brito!

Plus fantastic deals on Sugar mugs and posters, chances to win great prizes in our monthly porn raffle, and many other rad surprises.

$10, cheap! You can’t afford not to go!

Click here to purchase (we highly recommend purchasing tickets in advance).

Update: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reversed its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood.

I doubt the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation had any idea what sort of blowback they were going to get when Planned Parenthood announced that Komen had decided to stop funding some of Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer work. After all, the Susan G. Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood have been, in some ways, mirror images of each other in recent years, at least as far as public perception is concerned. The Komen Foundation is pink ribbons and races for the cure and corporate tie-ins and–until this week–maybe the safest corporate donation a company could make, whereas Planned Parenthood has been demonized by right-wing activists and politicians alike as a pro-abortion, pro-child sexual abuse haven of sin and degradation.

But the blowback has been fierce and swift, and most importantly, deserved. People who work with nonprofits have complained about the Komen Foundation for years, from their abusive trademark strategy (where they threaten to sue anyone who uses the phrase “for the cure” or “to the cure” or a pink ribbon) to the way their size makes it harder for smaller nonprofits to raise money, to the salaries of their top executives, to the way breast cancer has become, in some ways, the only women’s disease which matters. Read the rest of this entry »

TRUTH SERUM:
Colors (Part 3)

Another fantastic Rumpus Comic from Jon Adams.

These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. Read the rest of this entry »

“Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry…”

Bloody lullabies soothe the centuries.
Can’t see the cradles for the tops of trees
but you know the rest: you can’t rest, poor babies. Read the rest of this entry »

Just an update that there was a problem with our subscriber service for Letters In The Mail this morning. If you signed up for letters on the first day (about 200 of you did) you received a note saying we had been unable to process your subscription. You probably got another note after that saying we had been able to process your subscription after all. There is nothing to worry about here. It was a glitch. We are now un-glitched.

The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus. Bangs died young, and Marcus has drifted off into a phase where his muscles, at least to this reader, are more academic than hortatory. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to your new home,  Planet GJ 667Cc (it’s been an exciting week in space).

Richard Branson’s lemurs and other assisted migrations.

This is what a mouse’s brain activity looks like.

Perhaps you’d like to see some rad train photography.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, like, for real, yo.

Go behind the fact-checking scenes with this email exchange between Believer fact-checker and writer.

Last summer, Sugar wrote about taking on the Dear Sugar endeavor back in 2010 and how her approach has differed immensely from her original intent for the column. Creative Nonfiction brought the essay online in honor of our imminent unveiling. Sugarland in Sugar’s words:

“It’s a world where people dare to be genuine in their vulnerabilities, where they risk love rather than sit coolly back, where sincerity wins out over snark every time. I didn’t build it myself. It’s constructed of the unvarnished letters people write to me and the unvarnished letters I write back to them; of all the readers who sit alone gazing into the screens of their computers or phones each week and those who take the discussion further in the comments section of the column, often offering kind words to each other and to those whose letters were published.”

It’s just that damn, every month feels like black history month. Black people get everything. Why is it wrong to feel white pride? Black people also get their own TV station–they have BET while white people only have ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the CW, and the hundreds of other television networks. It’s ridiculous that we’re going to have to hear about black people for a whole 29 days of the shortest month of the year. That doesn’t seem fair, man. It just doesn’t.

I mean, we like black people, mostly, but we don’t want to have to think about them or anything, not for a whole month, that is just too much. Also, it’s pretty obvious that white people accomplish far more and greater things so, you know…. Can you imagine the “fits” black people would throw if white people had a history month other than January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December?

Also, black people have a president and they are no longer slaves. Are they ever satisfied? When you think about it, it is rather racist that black people get a history month and Hispanic people get a history month while white people only get a white history year, every single year, since beginning of time. It doesn’t matter that history as a cultural concept has historically been synonymous with white history. The word “year” has fewer letters than “month” so it is just is not fair at all.

But we are not racist, okay? WE ARE NOT RACIST. Just sayin’.

So yes, this  lament over the lack of a white history month is really a thing.

“Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can’t reach otherwise.”

Joan Didion’s conversation with Sheila Heti is now available in its entirety at The Believer.

Maine-born, Brookyln-based musician Luke Rathborne is still in his early 20s, but he is already off to a promising start.  Rathborne has opened for the Strokes and played with Devendra Banhart, among other accolades. Read the rest of this entry »

Making a Pie  (Instructions for Pie and Life)

1.  The act of reading poetry is a fine thing to incorporate.    Begin, say, with Cornelius Eady’s “Gratitude” and take it from there. Read the rest of this entry »

“Just like they did last year, The Rumpus shares some of the stories of the players participating in the Super Bowl in a way that isn’t as syrupy as Bob Costas.”

Over at Internet-powerhouse kottke.org Jason gives some love to J. Ryan Stradal’s “A Super Bowl Preview For People Who Don’t Know Football,” which we ran yesterday. Thanks Jason, we love you back!

Update: If you haven’t checked out the piece yet yourself, we highly recommend you do.

“Wislawa Szymborska, a gentle and reclusive Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.”

Learn more about Szymborska’s life and achievements here.

Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane. Read the rest of this entry »

The orb-web spider will go to great lengths to avoid rough sex.

Flavorwire has a handy write-up of the most beautiful bookstores in the world.

Space tugboat is absolutely the phrase of the day.

The high cost of bad handwriting.

These are the sounds of mind reading.

A few months ago my wife and I spent a day on Isla Colon—one of Panama’s Bocas del Toro islands in the Caribbean—where three different men asked if I wanted marijuana. When I told them no, they’d ask the obvious follow-up question: coke? Read the rest of this entry »

Wherever he went, the man of God carried his shotgun…

Christopher Goffard’s You Will See Fire is a tense and harrowing look at the life and mysterious death – of a brave, at times, recklessly so – American priest living and working in Kenya. Read the rest of this entry »

Well would you look at that, our pals over at McSweeney’s have a snazzy new (online) store.

Letters In The Mail got some love from the London Guardian today. We love you back!