Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Part Shovel, Part Man, All Awesome
After learning about the KGB orchestrated birth of the theremin and the beginning of electronic music as we now know it, I began to fear that all of humanity’s greatest moments of musical ingenuity may already be behind us. At…
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Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
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Gladwell on Finch
“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and…
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Random Media Notes
“Facebook Buys FriendFeed in $50M Deal” (via Mediabistro) Print media’s decline is hurting photojournalists. Financial Times’ Niall Ferguson writes a truly offensive lede. A preview of the World’s first Twitter Opera. Shock jock Don Imus to join Fox Business network?
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Chasing J.X. Williams: The Rumpus Interview With Noel Lawrence
J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long. Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos,…
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Shane Jones: The Last Book I Loved, Jakob Von Gunten
When it comes to books, I believe in love at first sentence. Or maybe first paragraph, but something triggers inside me after reading an opening in a book that really hits home and soon, too soon, I’m falling in love.
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Morning Coffee
I’m filling in for Dan this week while he’s away. I hope he’s having fun and remembering to think of me. I’m certainly thinking about him. Comics legend Al Columbia has gotten himself into trouble. I’ll bet Dan is much…
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The Eyeball #27: Apocalypse Now Redux
“The purpose of war is to kill as many of the enemy’s civilians as you can until they surrender.” –Col. John Harbert John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
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The Web is the New Phone
“We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone… In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, the sociologist Claude S. Fischer argues that our customary mode of…
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Romantic Poets and Scientists
“A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process…