Failed Algorithm: Beautiful Women Aren’t Funny
Tom Sales recently wrote an article for the Washington Post about the female cast members of Saturday Night Live. He says things like:
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Rumpus Articles
The Rumpus Review of We Live in Public
Sizing up history is a tricky business: You can generally recognize that something is significant long before you can really say why or how. So it is with the Internet…
Birds on the Wires
From Jarbas Agnelli: “Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact…
Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #3: Weather Channel
Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995. Weather Channel Al Jiminy, two doors down in 13, is an addict. Day and night his TV beams feeds of…
Morning Coffee
Twelve things left on the moon. Grace Kim’s Love Hotel series takes you inside pay-by-the-hour hotels. Wikipedia has a list of inventors killed by their own inventions. A new twist…
Raymond Carver: Vicarious Slumming for the WSJ
It’s Raymond Carver night at the Rumpus! Moments after I wrote and scheduled the preceding post, I saw this tweet from the Library of America: “WSJ on Raymond Carver: ‘There…
David Ulin on the LOA’s Raymond Carver
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is stunningly desolate, a group of stories so laconic they almost perfectly reflect the resignation of characters struggling with alcoholism, infidelity…
Little Old Riding Hood
Speaking of evolution, it turns out that many common fairy tales are older than originally thought. Dr Jamie Tehrani has studied “35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood” and has…
Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
The Evolution of On the Origin of Species
Science is fluid. Like everything else it progresses and evolves. Even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species transformed over the course of several editions. For example, “the phrase ‘survival of…
Animals That Do Exist
I like how one of these incredible animals that actually do exist is just a really huge cat. Some other animals that DO exist? More cats! But the real payoff…