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Rumpus Articles
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The Long Ride
Everyone loves a good bike ride. But Slovenian soldier and cyclist Jure Robic doesn’t just go for bike rides, he competes in ultra marathon bicycle races like RAAM. Jure also doesn’t just love cycling, it actually makes him insane. ‘‘During…
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Sam J. Miller’s 25-Word Movie Reviews #1
Let the Right One In (the movie) (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) Somehow makes vampires feel fresh. Fascinating aesthetic: colorless cinematography, minimal dialogue, affectless acting. Touching, scary, tender. An astonishing little girl. Also? Swedes are freaky-looking.
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A Special Case of Plagiarism
Earlier today Chris blogged about a guy who’s translating Moby-Dick into emoji. Which reminded me of something. Recently one of our favorite writers, Damion Searls, was pondering a 2007 abridgment of Moby-Dick called Moby-Dick in Half the Time. The New…
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Proofs of Concept for Legal Pot Packaging
Print Magazine, anticipating the legalization of pot in the US within 15 years or so, asked four design firms to come up with commercial packaging for marijuana cigarettes. Strømme Throndsen designed an attractive box that holds 16, with an optional…
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VW’s 2010 Hybrid: Takeoff on a 1993 Sculpture?
Yesterday the Wheels Blog at the New York Times wrote up the new Volkswagen L1 — a prototype for a tiny single-seater that they claim will be the most efficient car in the world, getting 158 miles per gallon of…
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Kronos Quartet: The Rumpus Interview with David Harrington
I think, like it or not, that everything we do as citizens, as human beings, is a statement about how we want the world to be.
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Morning Coffee
The swedes have us beat on totally bad ass bank robberies. More Russian book jackets. The city of Sydney was engulfed in red dust yesterday. Here are some pictures. I’m sure you’ve already heard about this, but sometimes these things…
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Alleged Artists Allegedly Using the Allegedly-Stolen Pencils
You remember how Damien Hirst sued a 17-year-old kid, Cartrain, for having used an image of “For The Love of God” in a work, and in revenge, Cartrain pinched some pencils from Hirst’s installation “Pharmacy”? Cartrain was arrested and is…
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Your Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know what to do with. Often in what I write, there’s …
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Poets Misbehaving In New York
At The Morning News, Daniel Nester reminisces about his former life as a New York poet. More than that, though, he talks about his abdication from the world of poetry. “I remember some night when I am eating a Mexican…