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Rumpus Articles
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TRUTH SERUM:
Online DisconnectionTruth Serum books (big commitment). Truth Serum on Facebook (small commitment).
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Seven Thousand Skulls and a Tolerant Spouse
“How many people want to spend their entire day — their entire life, I guess, at this point — collecting heads from rotting marine mammals? Well, Ray does!” From Shelf Life, a 25-minute documentary you can watch here, about Ray…
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Lethem on the “Squandered Promise” of Science Fiction
“In 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the highest honor available in the field once known as “science fiction” — a term now mostly forgotten. “Sorry, just dreaming… [T]hough Gravity’s Rainbow really was nominated for the 1973…
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“Edmund Wilson Regrets That It Is Impossible For Him To:”
Writer and famed literary critic Edmund Wilson wasn’t a fan of giving interviews, doing any kind of editorial work, reading manuscripts, and a number of other things according to a printed response to “a student group asking him to do…
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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.