Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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How Judges Think
When it comes to trying to understand people, Richard Posner is an American Sigmund Freud.
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Private Sector Detention
Last week Pennsylvania judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. plead guilty to illegally prosecuting minors, in order to get kickbacks from privately-run juvenile detention centers. Children were sentenced to three months incarceration for making fun of their teachers on MySpace. The judge had…
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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”
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The Artful Crosswalk
These artful pedestrian crosswalks are street art of a different stripe. Their most notable creator is Peter Gibson (aka Roadsworth), a street artist who got his start as a frustrated cyclist in Montreal. Having “found little encouragement in breathing car…
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Rumpus Interviews Since 1/20
Lisandro Alonso Susannah Breslin Margaret Cho T Cooper Ron English James Frey Jaclyn Friedman Malcolm Gladwell Danny Goldberg Andrew Sean Greer Van Jones General Lawrence Nkunda Jack Pendarvis Princess Superstar Mary Roach Bucky Sinister Steven Soderbergh Tristan Taormino Dean Wareham…
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Appropriation of Fear—A Review of Friday the 13th
The Friday the 13th teenagers, including those in the franchise reboot that opens this week, are a superior breed of dumb. The kind of dumb that makes someone who knows a killer is on the loose say, “I’m not afraid!”…
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Random Brilliant Ephemera
“I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything,” says Luc Sante, introducing his blog, Pinakothek. “Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.” Sante…
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The Rumpus Interview with Don Waters
“That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive.”
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Fiction by La Farge
The long short-story is not a particularly popular form, but Paul La Farge packs life into exactly that bag. It’s a bag Kafka and Chekov used with gusto–think of the Metamorphosis or The Duel. In Bleak College Days, La Farge…
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The Shorty Q & A with T Cooper
T Cooper is has been labeled a transgender writer, but to boil it down to a phrase so simple and limiting is an insult. After two critically acclaimed novels, Some of the Parts and Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes,…
