The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
There’s a reason everyone you know is tweeting links to the New Yorker story about a master pickpocket, and that reason is: it’s amazing.
You can’t help but love the feats of thievery it describes—nabbing the sunglasses off someone’s face without them noticing, impressing a skeptical Penn Jillette to the point of profanity.
...moreHow many love affairs have you had with novels that ended abruptly, poorly, without cause or the “proper” resolution?
You finish the last word, your arms hang limp, the novel collapses into your lap, and you mutter: seriously?
In Joan Acocella’s New Yorker article “On Bad Endings,” Acocella explores some classic novels that left us feeling cheated, and why writing a “great” ending is so difficult and rare.
...moreVia Longform.org, a must-read ten-year-old New Yorker piece on the rarefied world of elite crossword-puzzle solvers.
Warning: unless you are mentioned by name in the article, you will probably have to face some hard truths about how your own crossword-puzzle prowess is not as impressive as you thought.
...moreThe New Yorker‘s James Guida comments on Transworld Skateboarding‘s 30th anniversary interviews with skating legends from across skateboarding’s long history.
Guida sees the project as a kind of oral history, one that chronicles skaters of all walks and ages and illuminates skateboarding as an evolving culture and sport often at odds with mainstream culture.
...moreNobel prize winning economist and NYT‘s columnist, Paul Krugman expresses his love for sci-fi and fantasy in an interview for Wired magazine.
Krugman cites Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation as his inspiration for becoming an economist, a damned responsible one at that: “‘I read [Isaac Asimov's] Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and I said ‘I want to be one of those guys.’ And economics was as close as I could get.’”
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In Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of short stories, Before the End, After the Beginning, we see people in transitional phases―neither flying nor drowing, but floating.Nicholas Schmidle’s article in the New Yorker delves into the details of the night in Abottabad when Osama Bin Laden was killed.
The band of 23 Navy SEALs concealed within two Black Hawks, modified to fly undetected into Pakistani territory. This article reveals the leading up to and execution of the plan, a fascinating, detailed chronicle of events that links together the politics and planning that were in the works since 2008, when Obama was still a senator–definitely the best, thorough reporting on bin Laden’s death.
...moreSheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, is profiled in the New Yorker. The gender-divided executive culture in Silicon Valley is manifested in the seriously unbalanced ratio of women and men executives. This essay discusses Sandberg’s history and theorizes about the reasons for this gender divide.
...moreA recent New Yorker article brings you the history of online dating, in all of its splendor.
Nicholas Paumgarten traces back online dating to its roots at the World’s Fair in Queens in the fall of 1964, when it began with the romantic title, “Technical Automated Compatibility Testing.” Fast-forward to this anthropological assessment of contemporary twenty-year olds: “For many people in their twenties, Internet dating is no less natural a way to meet than the night-club-bathroom line.” Find out about all the stuff that happened in between!
...moreThe New Yorker’s history of expletive usage and pioneering is recounted by the Awl in list-form. Times have changed, along with the editors at the New Yorker and this in turn, has changed how often profanity appears in the magazine.
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This week in New York Rumpus Women take over!, New Yorker writer’s 20 Under 40 share their stories, Jonathan Ames and Justin Taylor are among writers who read from A Christmas Carol, J.D. Durkin pleads Stephen Colbert: Hire Me!, this month’s Soundtrack Series, and Tiny Furniture is this week’s Saturday Movie Pick.
Dinaw Mengestu’s name may be hard to pronounce (dih-NOW men-GUESS-too), but you’ll soon be hearing it a lot more. Earlier this year, the Ethiopian-born author was named to The New Yorker’s list of the top 20 fiction writers under age 40, and his second novel, How to Read the Air, was published last week.
A special Rumpus lamentation with possible added pep talk.
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So last week the New Yorker published their once-a-decade Fiction Issue, in which they printed eight stories, along with their list of 20 Writers Under 40.
...moreEustace Tilley appeared on the first New Yorker cover, in 1925, and has returned for nearly every anniversary issue since. For the third year in a row, the New Yorker is inviting readers to create their own versions of Eustace.
...moreTweet of the day, Sasha Frere Jones: “Holy crap! Washington Mutual in East Village just got robbed.”
“Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit.” So wrote New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl six months ago in a review that’ll likely prove seminal.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
TRANSITIONING by Hendrik Hertzberg
You can always count on Hendrick Hertzberg to tell you what your new political stance is; more than that, he makes your already liberal opinions smarter and better focused. Since it’s Inauguration Week (or any week at all), all talk turns to Obama, the guy who “can do anything.
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The Millions breaks down a year’s worth of New Yorker short stories, including brief synopses and a list of favorites.
“If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on The Joy of Sex, you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations.”
Erotic, bleak, anonymous. A Marlene Dumas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (more here). But is the New Yorker right, even in a complimentary way, to call Dumas paintings “heavy,” “unpretty,” and “insouciantly ugly?”
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