Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Movies, Briefly: An Affair to Remember (1957)
Though its final act revolves around a thoroughly aggravating plot contrivance (“Just tell him Deborah Kerr! TELL HIM!”) and there’s two dopey musical numbers by children’s choirs for no reasons whatsoever, An Affair to Remember is, without question, one of…
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Guernica and Triple Canopy: Two Not to Miss
Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy. Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a…
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Not at SXSW?
While a lot of sites are covering the music, tech, film, and other happenings in Austin this week, only Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser of SMITHmag.net are capturing the essence of how many amazing t-shirts there are in Texas right…
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DoD vs. WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks, “the Internet service that offers whistleblowers an opportunity to publish documents that expose corruption and wrongdoing by state and private actors,” has drawn the ire of many corporations in the past, not to mention “North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, and…
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Crime Lit
“The best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader,…
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The Sun has Fallen into the Sack
Illustrations by Elzbieta Gaudasinska for The Sun has Fallen into the Sack by Jerzy Bieniecki (Poland, 1975). As you can see, the book was actually published in English translation — but only in Poland.
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Morning Coffee
Big Picture has a rad look at the buildings of the shanghai expo. US vs UK book covers, no-holds-barred cage match. I heart Japanese train station design. There is no good reason not to look at pictures of the Great…
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An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1
Brigitte Aiton, Age 44 New York, New York “How do you deal with the fact that the person you’re with might hate you?” It was the first summer we were together. We were twenty-three years old.
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The Heroic Return of the Baffler
After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned! I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine…
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Sensible Worries About the Internet
“These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the…