Culture
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Singing History, Speaking Liberation: BlackStar Film Festival at 15
What does it mean to claim and maintain liberatory independence in a cultural landscape cloaked in the murk of careening fascisms and punitive censorship?
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Heaven, Hell, and Nowhere: Gregg Araki’s Changing Los Angeles
Lights pulse in nightclubs, shadows expand in the middle of the night, and beautiful young people dream and experiment, seeking transcendence through drugs, alcohol, sex. Where his earlier films make cheap motels and marginal spaces feel charged with possibility, I…
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Why Widow’s Bay Is Truly Peak Television
Like David Lynch and Mark Frost’s masterpiece, Widow’s Bay gives us a look at the chilling darkness of small-town life, the rot on the inside of the white picket fence.
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Who Gets to Decide What Liberation Looks Like?
I don’t want us replacing one set of commandments for women with another set stamped LIBERATION across the top. I don’t want either of us telling women that sleeping with a guy is feminist or not sleeping with a guy…
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Seven Days in August
There was grief everywhere: in my drinking water, in my toothbrush, in the whisk I used to beat egg whites for a meringue. Eating a pastrami sandwich could turn me inside out, because it was his favorite; listening to his…
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The September Rumpus Book Club Selection: “The Odyssey” with Emily Wilson
Written in iambic pentameter verse, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is a lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop” and brings an ancient epic to new life. The New York Times named Wilson’s translation as one of its 100 notable books…
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15 of the Best Book Covers of August 2026
Plus Rodrigo Corral on designing Life of M and branding Rachel Cusk’s books
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Girl on Girl (Week Three): Lust Without Equity Is Desperation, Regardless of the Story We Tell Ourselves
When a woman identifies with a man’s needs over her own, she has enabled her own abandonment.
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In Praise of Rewatching
My baseball-loving dad may be long gone, but my Blu-ray of Field of Dreams remains at the ready. And if I play it, he will come.
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The August Rumpus Book Club Selection: “Audition” by Katie Kitamura
Our third installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* will be on August 25 at 2pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with Katie Kitamura about her multi-award winning novel Audition. Audition was a finalist for the Pulitzer…
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Girl on Girl (Week Two): Can a Woman Belong to Herself While Still Loving Men Deeply?
For the first time in my life, I’m not evaluating whether someone would make a good husband or life partner. I’m asking a different question: What pulls me toward another human being?
