A Change in the Air?
“Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized…
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
Yelling ‘Bout Yelp
The San Francisco-based website Yelp allows users to post reviews of businesses. The idea’s simple enough: trust consumers to tell you the truth about the kind of service you’ll get…
The Bin Laden Machine
Only a few genetic lines–the Hapsburgs, the Hans, the Roosevelts, for instance–have shaped geopolitics as much as the Bin Ladens. In his NYRB review of Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens,…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Bill Ayers
The Unrepentant Terrorist? Founder of the Weather Underground, and favorite whipping boy of the failed McCain campaign, Bill Ayers talks to The Rumpus about the ’60s, the present, and his…
The Best Word Book Ever, Then and Then
In 1991, the editors of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever made some key editorial changes in an effort to level the race, gender and religious biases of the original…
We’re Elite
Publishing is failing us, and it is failing. The lamentable irony is that its foundation rests upon satisfying readers by assuming we’d like to read whatever crap is one level…
A Day in the Life of the Real Mafia
Gomorrah is a self-conscious repudiation of gangster movies like Scarface; a reminder that the classy foot soldiers of The Godfather and the bumbling mafiosi of The Sopranos have very little…
No One Crafts a Soundtrack Like Wes
The funny thing about Wes Anderson is that it’s both hard to imagine yet simultaneously all too obvious why he is wildly popular in some milieus, hardly known in others,…
The Rumpus Interview with Carlos Serrano Azcona
“The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the…
Rediscovering the West
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.