November 2012
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“Stand in the rubble of your life and wait”
“The fact that a marathon was still going to be held on this borough, when we were still finding bodies in the marshes surrounding the area where the marathon would begin – it solidified everything that Staten Island felt about…
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Eleven
We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing…
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Writers: Victims of a Dying Industry or Myopic Whiners?
“Writers have always been whiners,” begins Stephen Marche’s essay in the latest issue of Esquire. Fighting words! Brandish your swords! Then he describes the proliferation of excellent writing (both fiction and nonfiction), the increased access to the marketplace technology has…
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Give the Gift of Rumpus!
A lovely poster made up of quotes from everyone’s favorite advice columnist, Sugar.
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Turning Points #2: Cary Grant in Father Goose
To be accepted, to be relevant, he would need to become someone else. He would spend the next half-century creating that person and then, at age 60, decide that it was time to reveal his true self, in Father Goose.
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The Literary Community Presents: Let’s Make a Movie!
Co-sponsored by The Millions, HTMLGIANT, Bomb Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gigantic, and The New Inquiry. Tonight! November 29th, 8pm at Public Assembly (70 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY) A Kickstarter party for Happy Baby, the first feature film from The Rumpus! Sliding…
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Videos from the SF Happy Baby kickstarter party
We would like to thank everyone who came out for the “Let’s Make a Movie” Happy Baby Kickstarter party! For those of you beyond the Bay Area and anyone who couldn’t make the show, you’re in luck. Below are the “Let’s Make…
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“The Yellow Birds,” by Kevin Powers
The innocuous title of Kevin Powers’ debut novel The Yellow Birds is a reference to a military marching cadence. In its lyrics, as anyone who served in the military in recent decades might know, a peaceful bird is lured into a room…
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The King of the Word Nerds
Via 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…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Important morning news: Saturn is rad! Scandals in the OED! Yes, the US wanted to nuke the moon. Congratulations Eastern Hellbender for being born in captivity and on being both gross and cute. Perhaps the secrets lie in immortal jellyfish.
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Osiris
My Korean mother leaves me on a fall day in the 1980s. I don’t know the year, only that it is cold, and she—who peels red apples in one unbroken skin, massages my calves when they’ve fallen asleep from sitting…
