How to Read Online and Still Understand Things
This New Yorker article sums up some recent thinking on the psychological effects of online reading. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily…
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Casey Dayan
98 posts
Casey Dayan is a Rumpus intern and musician. He is finishing up his undergraduate studies in literature and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he is working on a memoir and trying to one-up Jeff Buckley. Find his twitter here, @caseydayan. Find his band, “Moo,” here.
DFW and his Big Alanis Morissette Poster. (Also, Robots.)
We recently linked to a till-then undiscovered interview with David Foster Wallace. See here for something on the music he loved.
Feminism Today
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, editor and founder of Bookslut.com Jessa Crispin writes on feminism in its contemporary incarnation by way of two recent critiques of 50 Shades of…
A Harder Job to Imagine
It’s true, this job seemed hard to trump—but there’s worse out there. Before the strike, platinum miners in South Africa made approximately $94.00 per month. The strike itself took 44…
A Hard Job to Imagine
It’s sometimes hard to imagine the life of the road-tarer or the elephant waste remover. Here’s to an unsung hero the world wouldn’t be the same without. Point is, no…
A Parable in the Desert
McSweeney’s gives us another weighty parable, “We Can Argue about What Makes Mirages after We Get out of the Desert.” Apply to ISIS, Ukraine, or forehead. Tim, it’s not that I…
Rent-a-Man
Find here at the New Yorker a short history of Ted Peckham, an entrepreneur in the first half of the last century known for his male escort service, indicted for the…
Bee Killers Killing Bees
A week ago, we posted this, about shark proliferation. We also mentioned bees, which aren’t faring as well. Apparently, Wal Mart and Home Depot aren’t helping. See here for why.
Excavated Heartbreaking Interview with David Foster Wallace
I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat…
On the Particular Origins of Some Literary Cliches
The phrase “little did she/he/they know” has plenty of history. The question is, when did it start being used for cheap suspense? The inversion of subject and verb sounds stilted…
What a Relief, Still Tons of Sharks
If you take the bait, it’s pretty necessary that you imagine the Jaws theme while reading. Keep keeping an eye out for the bees—but sharks, it seems, may be doing…
Dear Son or Daughter
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids:…