Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Bottled Bull
As a man who likes his water like he likes his beer (from a tap), I’ve always found it funny that the popular bottled water brand Evian is “naive” spelled backwards. Of course this is only a coincidence (the name…
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Identity Theft
“You’re a different person when you’re at work, at home, out with your friends. Over the course of your life, your sense of self and where you belong in the world changes. In my case, it was fairly radical. I…
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The Rumpus Shorty Q & A with Jeffrey Lewis
So why does Eric Clapton sell a lot more records than Daniel Johnston?
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Lost Covers
Let’s admit it – we judge books by their covers. The old adage that we shouldn’t may invariably prove correct, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it anyway. As with any commodity, those last five crucial inches of space…
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Where Walsh Writes
“Following David Markson, I write in the library where my recall is perfect and my thoughts organized. The library is the best quiet place to work through third drafts. “Like Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, and Dorothy Parker, I’ve written in…
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Gidget On the Couch
“The thing to remember is that, since 1957, surfing as something you buy has overshadowed surfing as something you do.” An exclusive excerpt on the origins of surfing from the best of the Believer essays, Read Hard.
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Morning Coffee
Howard Hughes’ un-flyable plane makes for a pretty great boat. One bank is letting people with good credit deposit checks by phone. Ohio is a piano for some reason. Trying to photograph Raymond Chandler’s LA. New Scientist on bomb-throwing deep…
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Leibovitz Schadenfreude
Bill Wyman, formerly the arts editor of NPR and Salon.com, these days writes a blog called Hitsville. The other day he made a post that traced Annie Leibovitz’s trajectory from artist-journalist to celebrity suck-up, and basically says — after setting Leibovitz’s personal…
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I Wish I Was Anne Carson
Of the many professors of literature I had at Santa Cruz, none captured my imagination or gained my admiration so much as the Classics professors did. Not that I was a Classics major by any stretch but I did happen…
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An Unknown Master Of Horror
“Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling…
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Books Under Lock and Key
“The objection was reviewed by a panel, in keeping with the library’s policy. It determined the book no longer belonged on the open stacks, but rather should be tucked away in the Hunt Collection, which are kept in a vault-like…