Rumpus Originals
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Albums of Our Lives: Whitney Houston and Whitney
I didn’t know Whitney Houston, and yet there I was, weeping. I’d read the Tweets, watched the videos, and re-posted a video of her singing “I’m Changing” live from when she was very young and so pretty that it remains…
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Not Just A Review, My Life and The Fallback Plan
I thought I’d managed to sidestep the purgatorial phase between college and adulthood. Immediately after graduation, a friend hooked me up with a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica. I’d lined up an (unpaid) internship at Ms. Magazine and a hostessing…
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What We Hunger For
I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong.
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Broad As the Mouth of the Hudson
In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book about religion in America, Sweet Heaven When I Die, “religion” is something protean and heterodox.
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas Thwaites
Toast is hardly a starting point for a theory of late-day capitalism and consumption. Unless that toast is in the hands of Thomas Thwaites, that is. A British conceptual designer with a degree in macroeconomics, he has turned toast into…
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The Rumpus Interview with Travis Mathews
Travis Mathews is a San Francisco based filmmaker whose movies focus on the emotional and intimate lives of gay men. With both a masters in Counseling Psychology and a background in documentary film work, his films take a humanistic and…
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Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser
There’s an enormous subculture of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics for seducing women. Within the last half-decade or so, these underground “pickup artists” have burst into the popular consciousness,
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Envy Never Sleeps
As if to heed Hecate’s rebuke, to show the dire glory of her art, Szporluk’s poems speak with a voice unhinged by an unyielding despair. Teeming with submerged violence and opaque anger, they swirl, futile, in the face of our…
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The Rumpus Interview with Todd Snider
While the electric guitar marks a departure from Todd Snider’s last few records, Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables falls squarely into the groove he hit after 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. A laid back traditionalist whose wry lyrics belie his stoner…
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Rebekkah Dilts, The Last City I Loved #2: Paris, France
I have to drive a lot these days. More than I ever thought I would, and with it comes the challenge of what to do with all that time.
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Anxiety Bombs
In her debut novel, Threats, Amelia Gray is coy about plot in deference to the beauty and urgency of people’s thoughts.