FUNNY AMERICA: Bye American
Can we stop with the waving of the sharp instruments for a minute and speak rationally to this whole ugly recession mess we find ourselves currently mired in? C’mon. You…
Blogs
5701 posts
The Last Book I Loved: The Wordy Shipmates
I fall in love pretty easily, so for me right now it’s Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which is her take on John Winthrop, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson of…
BAD MOMMY BLOG: Why Can’t Men Say, “Ow?”
“Ow. That hurts. I’m in pain.” These are a few things Andy (the husband) will never say. After a snowboarding mishap he blacked out, woke and noticed it hurt when his…
A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Blog: Battling Against Castro
“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994…
BITCHCRAFT: Thinking by Numbers
At my knitting group, I sit next to a woman who is doing something so complicated that it makes my eyes and brain and soul hurt just to look at…
Is the Internet Ruining Our Lives?
We’re distracted, our attention is shot, we are under surveillance, and we don’t care! We like being linked and friended by strangers who may or may not be who they say they are.
THE EYEBALL: Brazil
Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship…
Swinging Modern Sounds #7: On Repetition
The intractable problem of the moment in the arts—in music, in books, in movies, in almost every area of contemporary culture—is the problem of inattention.
BAD MOMMY BLOG: Princesses, part II
I have a few more things to say about the princess posse. I didn’t say it all in one post because I have a short attention span and figure you…
THE EYEBALL: Gran Torino
Port Townsend, Washington has two superb theaters, one called The Rose, the other The Uptown. By superb I mean they’re in old buildings, they don’t show commercials, the popcorn is…
Swinging Modern Sounds #6: The Transcendental Signifier
Note: to the readers of this intermittent bulletin, I recognize in what follows that I am violating the compact I made a couple of months ago, to cover only unsigned,…
A FAN’S NOTES— The New Rumpus Literary Sports Blog
Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in…