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  • BAD MOMMY BLOG: Six Reasons Why The Bad Mommy Will Never Be A Good Socialite

    1. Saturday night party/silent auction for a school. Daniel Kim was there, looking around. My husband goes, “Hey, are you lost?” 2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this…

  • FUNNY AMERICA: Bye American

    Can we stop with the waving of the sharp instruments for a minute and speak rationally to this whole ugly recession mess we find ourselves currently mired in? C’mon. You know what recession mess I’m talking about. You’re packing a…

  • BAD MOMMY BLOG: Why Can’t Men Say, “Ow?”

    “Ow. That hurts. I’m in pain.” These are a few things Andy (the husband) will never say. After a snowboarding mishap he blacked out, woke and noticed it hurt when his friend kept jabbing him in the stomach. He googled his…

  • What’s Good for General Motors Was…

    …maybe not so great for you. I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s:

  • BITCHCRAFT: Thinking by Numbers

    At my knitting group, I sit next to a woman who is doing something so complicated that it makes my eyes and brain and soul hurt just to look at it. She appears to be knitting a spider’s web, using…

  • Beautiful Booze Hags

    In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life. Three waitresses at the restaurant where the man ate every…

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    The Rumpus Interview with Jason Kottke

    “The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby… so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into something I could live off of… The bigger challenge was how to balance taking the site seriously…

  • Words Before the Doors Close

    For a certain segment of the American Mennonite population, a segment whose ancestors passed through and lived in Germany, the language of the old country was low German. Low German’s Jewish counterpart is Yiddish–and it even sometimes sounds like it.…

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    But What Do We Really Want?

    If you haven’t read Daniel Bergner’s recent article in The New York Times Magazine, “What Do Women Want?” or better yet, his book, The Other Side of Desire,  you should, if only to prepare for The Rumpus’s imminent interview with…

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    THE EYEBALL: Brazil

    Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Here it is. –Ryan…

  • Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears

    I guess it just took a little time for the poetry blogs to realize that David Orr had been in the NYTBR smack-talking about the lack of greatness in poetry today, because this week, there were lots of responses, from…

  • Poems for an Economic Collapse

    Poems for an Economic Collapse

    Katy Lederer’s poems are both romantic and political in nature. With their attention to formal and lyrical concerns, these poems tackle the problems of desire when it coincides with money and passion.