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Rumpus Articles
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Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to…
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The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of…
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The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it to bed at night—slip it under your pillow or shove…
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BAD MOMMY BLOG: Six Reasons Why The Bad Mommy Will Never Be A Good Socialite
1. Saturday night party/silent auction for a school. Daniel Kim was there, looking around. My husband goes, “Hey, are you lost?” 2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this…
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Let Them Eat Clicks
I have a piece in Friday’s Slate about Amazon.com’s seemingly nonexistent corporate philanthropy — and more importantly, whether that should matter. But I hid the real barb in the tail of the piece:
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I Want More Jesus: Noise Pop from Here to America
Too much revelation at your indie fest? Too much Jesus? Shut up, naysayer. I want more.
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New York Times Word Frequency Visualizations
A Flickr set with visualizations of word frequency. The word “crisis” has surpassed “hope” on only a handful of occasions — one of them is right now. Trends also show a general increase in the mention of superheros over time.…
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The Art of Lost Words
For the Art of Lost Words exhibit, artist Mark A. Webber chose the word “Dehisce: (biology) release of material by splitting open of an organ or tissue; the natural bursting open at maturity of a fruit or other reproductive body…
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A Man Named Pearl
I was pretty sure, based on the ridiculous soundtrack alone, that the story of topiary artist Pearl Fryar was a mockumentary. And a good one. Living in rural South Carolina, Fryar decided one day to be, according to the New…
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The Rumpus Interview with Catherine Brady
“I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does… There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.”
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The Last Book I Loved: Atmospheric Disturbances
Galchen keeps us wound tight with anxiety, desperately waiting for some ray of hope for a man with a badly damaged mind and heart.
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Interesting conversation going on about a piece in the latest Poetry. Start here at Samizdat, then find further discussion at A Compulsive Reader, Exoskeleton (multiple posts–click around), and back to Samizdat. And since it started over an article written by…