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Rumpus Articles
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Binnie Kirshenbaum: The Last Book I Loved, A High Wind in Jamaica
Stories about pirates and orphans were my childhood favorites. Pirates, orphans, and those ever-so-enviable children–Madeline and Eloise–who lucked out with distant, absent, or dead parents: Pippi Longstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and Peter Pan, were winners for featuring distant parents and pirates.
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Morning Coffee
Start your day off right with a little Japanese library design porn. “Man is not to end his days on Earth,” Gyula Kosice’s space architecture is on display in Houston. It took people 60 years to figure out that Raymond…
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Dogfishing
Those of you with long memories may recall the Monkeyfishing hoax of 2001 in Slate. This was a piece by Jay Forman which revealed the existence of a illicit sport on an island of former medical research monkeys in the…
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Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994
When my son Josh was thirteen he got braces on his teeth. His orthodontist’s office was in the same building as the Preterm clinic where John Salvi shot and killed Lee Ann Nichols on the morning of Friday, December 30,…
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Working, as Adapted by Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar, the only famous comic-book creator who isn’t an artist himself, last month released a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working with The New Press. Dave Gilson summarizes it on Mother Jones as not “the most far-fetched attempt to…
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Yiyun Li’s “A Soldier Home”
Late last night I sat in the Labor & Delivery waiting room in the hospital where my brother and sister-in-law were preparing for the birth of their first child. They had checked in early that morning, but the baby still…
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North of the Border
A group of Mexican teenagers encounters a bizarre America in Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel.
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Terra Naomi
Terra Naomi, a friend of The Rumpus, just released a new song, Vicodin, online for free. Professionally trained in opera at the University of Michigan, the Internet propelled Terra to fame. Three years ago, Naomi’s YouTube music videos went viral…
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SMALL POTATOES:
Everyone Knows How You Should Live Your Life, 1 (of who knows how many)angrylittlepotatoes.com …
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Infinite Summer
Infinite Summer is a Web site presenting the world with the following challenge/life-better-maker: “Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week.” Plus endnotes. The…
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Morning Coffee
It’s Monday, how about a new Rumpus Survey! Looking for the latest in ex-stalking technology? Look no further. Boy chosen by Dalai Lama as a reincarnated guru turns his back on the Tibetian order, bemoans “the misery of a youth…