2011
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What Part Are You Now?
Harrison’s style is spare and evocative, more expressive than Hemingway but less misogynistic, more accessible than Thoreau. Honest.
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Albums of Our Lives: the Mountain Goats’ The Coroner’s Gambit
make me young again / make me well When I listen to the Mountain Goats I always hear traveling—a ceaseless forward momentum.
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A Bit More on Amazon
This week has seen a lot of Amazon talk around the Internet. After Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed on Amazon’s predatory practices, Farhad Manjoo responded at Slate, arguing against independent booksellers. Russo continued the conversation yesterday with an open…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
So tell me, what DO colorblind people see? Remembering the Automat. Coming soon to a touch screen near you: texture! This is potentially pretty huge: Ambien seems to be waking people up from vegetative states.
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On Race and Empathy
In the last few days there have been many thoughtful take-downs of the already infamous Forbes “If I were a poor black kid” column. Don’t miss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic response discussing “a muscular empathy” and confronting our own mediocrity. “If…
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Civil Liberties Roundup
Here’s a video about the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, which the President will not veto, includes a provision that allows the military to detain and imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial. WTF? And now…
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Sugar Love
Writer Logan Sachon included Sugar’s “The Truth that lives there” in her top five longreads of 2011. Hooray! “I’m a Sugar devotee; her columns have been such a help to me during a rough year. This one, in which five…
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RIP George Whitman, Legendary Bookseller
George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore, passed away yesterday. Of his 98 years of life, 60 were devoted to his bookstore (the sister shop to San Francisco’s City Lights) described as an “offbeat mix…
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More Year-End Love
Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti was listed by the The National Book Critics Circle blog as one of their Small Press Highlights of 2011. Of Ayiti they write “The title is the Haitian Creole name for Haiti and in…
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #92: Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone
That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it’s the wonder.