Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
An Oral History of Myself #5: Kevin
In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with. Because I left home at thirteen and spent four years in group homes, my social network was significantly wider than most people of that age. What’s most interesting about these…
-
How To Be Inappropriate: A BookExpo America Guide
The first step in the modification of any behavior—inappropriate or otherwise—is to define said behavior. The purpose of this monograph, then, is not to advocate nor caution against any behavior for participants and exhibitors at BookExpo America, “Where the World…
-
Morning Coffee
National Geographic has a slideshow on animals glowing in the name of science. Thank you Science. Brock Davis’ shattered art. Scientists in the Pacific Northwest have figured out how to grow plastic on trees, making the idea of independence from…
-
Book Expo Preview
While construction workers and stagehands were scurrying around the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City—which will play host to the BEA for the next four years—the CEO of the whole thing called a press conference preview, to break…
-
Occupational Hazards by Jonathan Segura: An Ex-Girlfriend’s Review
I feel as if I’ve earned the right to review Occupational Hazards. Jonny and I have already loved and hated each other.
-
Six Feet Under
The protagonist of Jim Krusoe’s new novel looks for his mother—in the afterlife, or in Cleveland.
-
Hersh Inaugurates Center for Investigative Reporting @ BU
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh presided over the inauguration of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University, a non-profit, university-based organization dedicated to training the next generation of investigative reporters.
-
Murdoch and Me by Jill Sobule
Last year, I was invited to play the All Things Digital conference. My opening act was… Rupert Murdoch—how many female singer-songwriters can say that? Now as most people know, I am a bit of a lefty—my record company is “Pinko…
-
The Life of Ferlinghetti
Chris Felver’s doc about Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a little rough around the edges, with jumpy editing and a tendency to wander away from the subject of the moment without adequate explanation, but it’s an engaging film all the same, featuring a wealth of archival footage, home…
-
“A Saucy Tattoo and A Condom Do Not A Revolution Make”
Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for thirty-two years and authored the bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl. She is now the subject of the biography Bad Girls Go Everywhere, written by Jennifer Scanlon, a professor…
-
Elle et Elle
“Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action. But the museum is avant-garde. It’s part of the Centre Pompidou culture to do things differently. And we like a lot of drama. This is going to be dramatic…
-
Elizabeth Wurtzel on the Mental Instability of the Founding Fathers
In “The Pop Culture Clause,” Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay in the new issue of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Wurtzel asserts that American culture has produced Elvis, blue jeans and the gold rush because the Framers of the Constitution…