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Rumpus Articles
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Over Our Heads
Regardless of how you feel about advice columns, something interesting came out of online magazine Slate‘s “Dear Prudence” chat/forum yesterday. A graduate student in mathematics wrote in to ask what to say to strangers or acquaintances who seem to boast…
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The Rumpus Interview with Dave Hill
It’s kind of hard not to fall a little bit in love with someone who, immediately upon meeting up for a mid-afternoon interview, asks if it’s cool to stop at the liquor store first to buy a big bottle of…
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The Brandon Book Crisis
First Dan Baum’s Twitter missives and now this: The Brandon Book Crisis, a paperback “thriller” about book design featuring 140+ pages of unedited Gmail chats, text messages, voicemails, and emails between Brandon Scott Gorrell, Tao Lin, and others.
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The Last Book I Loved: First Love and Other Stories
Falling in love with a book is as much about the book itself as reading it at the right time. I picked up First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev (Oxford Press) at a used bookstore in South Bend…
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2009 Woolf and the City Preview
On the heels of BEA comes the 2009 Woolf and the City conference, an event of modern proportion, which will be bringing fans of Virginia Woolf to the campus of Fordham University in New York from June 4-7. Keeping things…
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Six Word Memoirsts Rock the Highline
Couldn’t make it to the Rumpus/McSweeey’s/SMITH Mag BEA event at the Highline Ballroom? Here’s a taste.
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FUNNY AMERICA: Sonia From The Block
The President revealed his nominee for the Supreme Court, selecting a 54 year- old daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants who had been elevated to The Second District Court by George H W Bush. And what a genius political move it…
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“Accident, Mass. Ave.” by Jill McDonough
I grew up on Mass Ave. in John Leary House, a low-income apartment building for former homeless families run by The Catholic Worker. I remember the street as dirty, exciting and loud… this was the 1980s, before the Boston neighborhood…
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Coffee and Cigarettes
One unexpected Wayback Machine trip produced by Google Books: it appears that all of New York magazine is available in full text, something that produces such charming finds as this pre-Starbucks cover story from June 27, 1977:
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The Lightness of Sidney Wade
Her lightness is not merely pointing out the details of the world but showing us that without the glory of the everyday, the parsnip, for instance, there can be no weight lifted.
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Morning Coffee
It’s nice when green design actually look pretty cool, such as this Mexico City stackable solar powered park. On the other hand you have these bus shelters, which leave something to be desired. Actually, it turns out the answer to…