• Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

    It’s entirely remarkable that we survived the Cold War. Just a reminder that Gaudi’s Basilica is almost actually finished. Let’s all take a look inside the edible sex toy industry. Today’s nightmare revelation is that sometimes toes just fall off.…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Bill Clegg

    The Rumpus Interview with Bill Clegg

    Author and agent Bill Clegg talks about his new novel, Did You Ever Have A Family, grief in fiction and in life, and why there is no finish line except the final finish line.

  • Nobler in Modern Language than the Mind

    Earlier this month, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned thirty-six playwrights to “translate” Shakespearean plays into modern English. Not everyone is happy about this. However, Sheila T. Cavanagh over at The New Republic argues there is nothing wrong with modernizing Shakespeare. While updated…

  • It’s Real Dangerous

    …the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power. In an excerpt from his new book published in the New Yorker, Dennis Lim analyzes what…

  • This Week in Posivibes: The Chills

    New Zealand’s The Chills just released their first album since 1996, and it’s brilliant. Coming up alongside The Clean and The Bats, The Chills are the kind of band that is incredible, important, and not as well-known as they deserve to be.…

  • Fresh Comics #6: Abortion, Comics Style

    Fresh Comics #6: Abortion, Comics Style

    Comics is a great medium for communicating complex or divisive topics, and so it makes sense that embedded within comics history we can find stories of abortion. Insane as it is that in 2015—forty-two years since Roe v. Wade—politicos are still arguing…

  • Cutting a Long Story Short

    November is here, and with it #NaNoWriMo returns! But if you don’t feel like writing 50,000 words in thirty days, over at The Millions Michael Bourne has another option for you, #NaGrafWriMo: …we would like to propose a kinder, gentler alternative to NaNoWriMo,…

  • David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Old Friends Or Lovers

    David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Old Friends Or Lovers

    I was becoming awed by the wide horizon of the speech that arose out of an individual life lived in a single era and generation. I was becoming attracted to the writer’s creativity.

  • Retracing Steps

    Like so many silenced publications before them, Esquire has gone the way of the ear with a new Classics podcast that unearths articles from the magazine’s illustrious eighty-year history. In their latest installment, Rumpus friend and contributor Nick Flynn discusses…

  • Weekly Geekery

    The technological reinvention of the NYPL. The morality of Uber. All those times science took the supernatural seriously. The parables of Pavlov.

  • Consider the Ellipsis

    In the latest installment of Lexicon Valley over at Slate, Katy Waldman considers how to use an ellipsis with the aid of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.