Other
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The Golden Gate Bridge = The George Washington Bridge?
Want to leave NYC but fear too much about abandoning your beloved Red Hook/Boreum Hill/Washington Heights/Harlem/Upper West Side…? Check out The Morning News’s list of counterpart neighborhoods throughout the US and abroad. Rumpus pal Alexander Chee recommends Portland, Maine’s Vinalhaven…
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Guantanamo’s Library
Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage is one of the few journalistic voices speaking out on Guantanamo Bay. He’s also the only one to compile a Tumblr of the prison’s library. There are apparently 3,500 books on “pre-approved topics,” which, according to…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
The BBC has the only space infographic you’ll need (today). Don’t worry, Canada has new bills too. Very important beard science. News update: Hong Kong’s towers are intense. And now a couple of early 20th century lantern slides of Norway.
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Posthumous Oversharing from F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Fell in love on the 7th … Quarrel. Silence. Zelda sick … Discovery that Zelda’s class voted her prettiest & most attractive.” You can’t follow F. Scott Fitzgerald on Twitter, but if you want to know what his tweets might…
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Rejection Sucks and Then You Die: How to Take a Dear Sad Sack Letter (and Shove it)
In what job other than writing must you seek out frequent and concrete rejection? Okay, fine, but go get your own self-pitying rant.
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Computer Poets Not Half Bad
Using “Markov chains” and “pulling text from Project Gutenberg,” Paul Thompson wrote (er, “wrote”) computer-generated “snowball” poems in which each word is one letter longer than the last. Others joined in, and now there’s even a Twitter bot spinning verse out of 0s…
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Is the Internet A Modern-Day “Dunciad”?
And so it proved, as music website after music website soon reported on the Gordon-Moore breakup in exactly those sort of exclamatory tones, completely ignoring the fact that the article focused on Gordon as a modern feminist hero rather than…
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Authors Deface Own Books for Charity
Literary organization English PEN has chosen an interesting way to raise funds: ask authors to annotate first editions of their books, and then auction them off. J. K. Rowling is the prize catch in terms of predicted auction money, but…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Someone please go to Paris’s newly resurrected Louxor Palais du Cinema so I can live vicariously through you. Monkey and whale cultures are the best cultures. Here is today. Let’s all enjoy 50 years of Dutch safety posters. Also, Soviet…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #180
ALPHABET SOUP ★★★★★ (3 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing alphabet soup.
