Rumpus Originals
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Please Stop Yelling: An Openly Subjective Review of The Lifespan of a Fact
Essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal co-wrote a book called The Lifespan of a Fact. I have read every review about the book since. It seems that Lifespan isn’t being reviewed, but instead a status quo is being swiftly and aggressively defended.
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FUNNY WOMEN #77: Penal Codes
Following the trend of female lawmakers submitting bills to regulate men’s health, we decided to do the same. We are three straight, gay, single, married, white, Cuban, non-practicing Jewish women, which we think pretty much qualifies us to legislate what all…
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Cold-Blooded and Bothered
Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
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DIFFERENT RACISMS: On Jeremy Lin and How the Rules of Racism are Different for Asian Americans
My senior year in Chapel Hill, I finally got up the courage to take a course in Asian American literature. Stupidly, I treated it as a little experiment. As an adoptee, I had grown up with white parents in a…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #128
THE FOXTROT ★★★★★ (4 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the foxtrot.
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The Alienable Rights of Women
We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate.
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The New Gilded Class
Christina Alger’s debut The Darlings follows the Darling family headed by a billionaire financier through the financial crisis. Luckily, these rich people are really screwed up.
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LONELY VOICE #18: Kafka the Dad (Part Three of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
In an essay called “The I Without a Self,” W.H. Auden tells us about a rumor “which if true might have occurred in a Kafka story.” That is that Kafka, without knowing it, fathered a child.
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The Comics Journal: Is That All There Is?
Is That All There Is (Joost Swarte) Fantagraphics $35; 144 pages Reviewed by Matt Seneca The title’s the joke: yes, folks, this rather slim, elegantly designed hardcover contains (nearly) every published comic by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte. The book feels both…
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All Over Coffee #576
Click image to enlarge: … All Over Coffee, by Paul Madonna, is published in the Sunday Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle, on SFGate.com, and in two book collections by City Lights Press. A free interactive APP of the…
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Friendship Addiction
“Friends? Who needs them?” said a Korean friend of mine. “I don’t make friends. I have a wife and a child, that’s enough social life for me.” I was surprised by his attitude but the more we talked about it,…