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Rumpus Articles
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Happy Birthday Herman
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” If he were alive, today, August 1st 2009, would be Herman Melville’s 190th birthday and on this occasion I’d like to take the opportunity to pay a small, humble tribute to…
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I Took My Wife’s Last Name
Not me, personally–that’s the title of this piece by Josiah Neufeld in the Globe and Mail. It’s an interesting piece, not so much because of what Neufeld did, but how his family reacted to it.
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Writing From Experience
Your experiences, and how you process them, are what make you unique as an individual. They are also the most valuable things we can offer readers. Last chance to sign up for Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott’s Writing From Experience class…
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Baseball and Steroids
I’m not the sports guy here at The Rumpus–that’s Brian Schwartz, who’s better at it than I could ever be. But I am a more than casual fan of baseball, and the story of steroid use is one that may…
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The Future of Journalism
The conventional wisdom is that journalism, particularly the newspaper business, is finished, a dead tree just waiting for a stiff breeze to knock it over. No small number of electrons have been expended in trying to figure out the next…
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Saturday Morning Links
Just in time for your next dinner party: mermaids are considered halal. In case you were wondering. Here’s a really cool museum idea: 80 years of patent models. The Wall Street Journal reminds us why R. L. Burnside matters. Didn’t…
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“Amazon.com is watching you.”
Amazon, we’re still mad at you. Last week, the company once again stirred waves of customer indignation when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindles. The Rumpus covered the story here and here.
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The Ex-Bank Robber
“I always knew that I was going to get caught, I mean it was inevitable. You know obvious if I had stopped after three, four, five, or six they probably would’ve thought that I had moved on somewhere else. But…
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Annals of Advertising, Puppy Surprise
“A somewhat disturbing 1992 commercial for the Puppy Surprise doll, which is a plush dog that kids can pull offspring from inside of…just like in real life.” More from the annals of advertising.
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Why We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th…
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I Want to Hold Your Hand
A same-sex hand holding relay was held in London as part of a three-day celebration that kicked off the countdown to the 2012 Olympic Games. Same-sex hand holding, or “sshh,” is used to promote “visibility for same-sex couples and quietly…
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Folded Paper I: Sipho Mabona
My six-year-old son is obsessed with paper airplanes. There’s a giant pile of them on our dining room table. He varies the design, or makes them huge or so tiny he can hardly fold them. But he’s on to something.…