Getting Everyone All Better
If you only read one article on health care this year, consider making it the same one as everyone else: Atul Gawande’s “The Cost Conundrum.” Gawande is great on paradoxes,…
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
Typing Fast and Sitting Still
Blogging and stillness seem to be contradictory activities: I, along with many others, think of blogging as the relentless and hasty documentation of modern life on the go, news-in-brief for…
Santa Muerte, aka La Flaca
Since death is a hot topic at the Rumpus lately, let me share some more quotes from David Lida’s fantastic book about Mexico City, these about Mexico’s newest saint: Saint…
Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff
A special comment by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes The Khomeinist regime in Iran is in terminal trouble; but that doesn’t…
Doyenne of the Death Mask
Silencieux is the mute heroine of The Worshipper of the Image, Richard La Galliene’s little known fairy-tale from 1900. She has no body, only a serene face, and as the…
90 Miles from Home
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s stories about refugees from the Mariel Boatlift present the conflicts and loneliness of exile.
This Month in Music: A Roundup of Shit You May Have Missed
This Month in Music is exactly what it sounds like, only by this month I really mean a subjective span of recent time, and by music, I mean music I…
The Sound of Passion
Yet another reason to park your child in front of classical music appreciation videos: she’ll be first responder for your next baby! The Sound of Passion.
Reading Lists on Serious Topics From the Back Pages of the Newspaper
Our view of the world is so often sculpted by front page and home page, so here is a look at some long-ongoing crises of self-determination that only occasionally surface…
John Keats, Sleep
John Keats’s tribute to sleep—called, fittingly, “To Sleep”—equates it, winsomely, with death. The poem is an invocation of that state which can be elusive, particularly to those with overactive or…
Zak Smith in Conversation with Gordon Terry
“…Beauty is often considered suspect based on the lingering premise that it is radically conservative and reactionary, and that the strategies of visual appeal used by the mass media can…