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Rumpus Articles
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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.…
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Roald Dahl, Man of Letters
I have read Kafka’s letters and Flaubert’s letters and Jane Austen’s letters. These authors are a part of my “adult” life. But I haven’t read the letters of authors who made the distinction between childhood and adulthood. There is a…
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The Rumpus Gets Smart: The Definitive Essay on Dudeness
“If you were a man, a real man, you’d slap me.” – ‘Young Hussy’ in the wrestling screenplay of Barton Fink. If the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre might be described as an extended frolic through the archives of film history, it…
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Rumpus Film Review: Voices from El-Sayed
It’s a shame the documentary Voices from El-Sayed isn’t as interesting as its premise.
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Nicholson Baker Tries Kindle, Finds it Wanting
If you know anything about Nicholson Baker, you know that he has an unparalleled talent for describing the small and ordinary things in everyday life, their textures and surfaces and the way they heft in the hand; and more than…
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Women’s Growing Love of Porn Is Changing the Market
“When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don’t have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.” So writes author and…