Rumpus Originals
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An Open Letter Concerning The Authors Guild vs. Google, Inc.
The lawyers will get $30 million—does that mean the authors are getting screwed?
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Ask a Male Comedian: Kyle Kinane
For our first installment of “Ask a Male Comedian” Kyle Kinane agreed to answer questions from Rumpus readers. Don’t like the questions? You have only yourselves to blame: Rumpus Reader: Why are female comedians so much funnier than male comedians?
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Funny Women
I have been thinking a lot about funny women. I’m going to tell you what’s good before I tell you what’s very, very bad.
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Real Choice in Afghan Election
A look at the upcoming presidential election in Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. I have this recurring nightmare in which my life has gone so wrong, I’ve become the…
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A Family Affair: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Cult Rock
Charles Manson is a bad man. I’ve never kidded myself to that fact, and I don’t glamorize his crimes or the crimes of his “family” one bit.
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TRUTH SERUM:
Online DisconnectionTruth Serum books (big commitment). Truth Serum on Facebook (small commitment).
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Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
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Chasing J.X. Williams: The Rumpus Interview With Noel Lawrence
J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long. Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos,…
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The Eyeball #27: Apocalypse Now Redux
“The purpose of war is to kill as many of the enemy’s civilians as you can until they surrender.” –Col. John Harbert John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
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In the Eye of the Hurricane
The Louisiana Skip Horack creates is both generative and broken, salvific and ruined, marked in ways large and small by Hurricane Katrina.
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My Favorite Clause: Ruminations on Stuart Dybek’s Penis
“Sauerkraut Soup” from Stuart Dybek’s 1986 debut collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins with a narrator waxing philosophical on the cathartic nature of bodily purge. “Puking felt like crying,” he tells us. “At first I almost enjoyed it the way…