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Join NOW!Anyone following the fall-out over Charles Pellegrino’s Last Train From Hiroshima—here’s the definitive New York Times story—would do well to read Philip Meyer’s “Accountability When Books Make News,” first published in the Media Studies Journal in 1997. (You can read it right here.) A terse tour de force, Meyer’s essay starts by outlining what keeps the mainstream media […]
...moreI’m not sure why Malcolm Gladwell‘s fourth book, What the Dog Saw, which collects 19 of his New Yorker essays, has been the one to incite a riot of review-essays. Were the first three books not successful enough? Was something in Gladwell’s methodology not previously clear? Were his best and worst traits not yet delineated?
...moreOn Friday night, and in preparation for Where the Wild Things Are, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovitch. What struck me was not the film’s final childlike shots or how Christopher Walken and those expensive, “absurdly heavy” monster suits are anticipated by its puppet shows, but something else–namely how goddamn much John Cusack looked […]
...moreI tried to show some restraint. But it is now 11:59pm Eastern time, and The Rumpus, an ostensibly bookish website, still has not marked, observed, or otherwise commented on today’s release of The Lost Symbol, the new book by Dan Brown. This deserves a post simply as a cultural phenomenon, and it appears that I’ll have to be […]
...moreReading Jeremy’s post on Andrew Keen and starving artists, I couldn’t help but think of Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow was a poet, one of the Connecticut Wits, to be precise, so my mental leap probably owes more to the fact that I was reading Barlow right before I clicked over to The Rumpus than to […]
...more“An ideal, awesome job,”—that’s how Sam Anderson, at several points in our conversation, describes his position as book critic for New York Magazine.
...moreThe latest issue of the Oxford American includes their annual “Best of the South” package, but it’s also got an essay on the struggles of freelancing, a subject that knows no geographical bounds. For almost 20 years, Thomas Swick edited his newspaper’s travel section, freelancing a couple of books along the way. After getting laid […]
...moreThe tale of a long-lost account of one of America’s most notorious criminals, a struggling ad man, and the contributing editor at Playboy who brought the story to light.
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