2009
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Let There Be Light
Did you know that for 800 million years after the Big Bang there was darkness — until the re-ionization of the gas throughout the universe enabled the first rays of starlight to shine? It’s true! Until recently, we hadn’t been…
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Travel with Wells Tower, or Why Magazines Should Hire More Fiction Writers s
Travel writing is mostly bad. It’s partly the fault of the form; contemporary travel magazines are filled with 10 Best New Hotels/Bars/Spas on Yet Another Tony Exclusive Island or How to Eat Fabulously in This Most Glorious Setting You Will…
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Sigrid Nunez Remembers Susan Sontag
Here’s some weekend reading: Sigrid Nunez has written a beautiful memoir of Susan Sontag in the latest issue of Tin House. (The text is not available online, but I highly recommend you pick up this issue of Tin House: it’s…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Romantic Dogs
I always blanch when someone tells me—and always so assuredly, it seems—“ I just don’t really like poetry.” It’s more people, more otherwise avid readers than I would like to think.
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Monofonus Givawaytacular
Monofonus, the Austin-based press that puts out the fantastic and spectacular IF Series, is giving its readers/viewers/listeners a chance to win a set of the entire IF Series catalogue, with its Givawaytacular.
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FUNNY WOMEN #6: Finally! A Job That Requires My Skill Set
Please only apply if you are a proven insomniac who would not think of getting into an office before noon.
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if:book
The Institute for the Future of the Book “investigates the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.” As you may have noticed, here at the Rumpus, we’re pretty interested in that too. We, though,…
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One Tongue?
In John McWhorter’s World Affairs article “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English,” he asks if it would be “inherently evil if there were not 6,000 languages spoken but one?”