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Rumpus Articles
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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…
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Green Poetry
Identity Theory‘s Editor-in-Chief, Matt Borondy, has reopened the site to poetry submissions despite their current lack of a poetry editor. (Interested in the volunteer position? You can apply here.) The catch? All poems submitted must be about cheese, scrilla, bread,…
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Random Media Notes
Seattle’s only newspaper re-familiarizes itself with a nearly forgotten word: profit. Ben Stein loses his New York Times column. “Why Neoconservative Pundits Love Jon Stewart.” David Carr examines Rupert Murdoch’s call for paid online content. Behind a billionaire’s interest in…
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“Indie Won” (and Thus Is Dead?)
“You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly…
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Bob Sommer: The Last Book I Loved, You or Someone Like You
The last book I loved was You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr. A wife and mother living the Beverly Hills good life, Anne leads book groups for directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors. It’s not that she planned to…
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Left as Rain is Right as Rain
Maybe you’re like me: someone who loves music but is at a loss at keeping up with the frenzied pace of all this awesome new music being hurled at you. If so, do what I do and defer to those…
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In the Eye of the Hurricane
The Louisiana Skip Horack creates is both generative and broken, salvific and ruined, marked in ways large and small by Hurricane Katrina.
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My Favorite Clause: Ruminations on Stuart Dybek’s Penis
“Sauerkraut Soup” from Stuart Dybek’s 1986 debut collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins with a narrator waxing philosophical on the cathartic nature of bodily purge. “Puking felt like crying,” he tells us. “At first I almost enjoyed it the way…
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Written on the Body
I’ve been in love with people who’ve had excerpts from Lord Jim scrolling up their arms, and Faunia Farley tattooed on their chest with an arrow going through a heart. It’s like you can’t escape these literary tattoos. But it…