What’s Good for General Motors Was…
…maybe not so great for you. I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit…
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Rumpus Articles
BITCHCRAFT: Thinking by Numbers
At my knitting group, I sit next to a woman who is doing something so complicated that it makes my eyes and brain and soul hurt just to look at…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Zack Snyder
The interviewer first met Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen, in 1977 as 11-year-olds at a summer camp in Maine.
Eric Blair, National Treasure?
Julian Barnes weighs in on three collections of George Orwell’s work— Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, compiled and with an introduction by George Packer; All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays,…
Beautiful Booze Hags
In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life.…
The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running…
The Shorty Q & A with Larry Smith
Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine keyed into the popularity and resonance of short, pithy bios even before “tweet” made its way firmly into the vernacular.
The Garden of Eden
Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older…
Once the Shore: The Rumpus Review
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first…
How Not to Lie
Alexei Tsvetkov calls Prague “a place where you wait for something to happen.” It’s from there he wrote this dispatch on the occasion of his recent (somewhat permanent) departure. It’s…
The Rumpus Interview with Jason Kottke
“The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby… so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into something I could live off of… The…
Ben Tolman’s Microscopic Surrealism
Wandering through Ben Tolman’s online gallery of pen and ink drawings can quickly turn into a search for what’s buried among the ornate camouflage. Like looking through a microscope onto…