Other
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Vive Le Hashtag!
The French Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme has spoken: from now on, France’s government will not use the word “hashtag.” Instead, official government documents will substitute in the term “mot-dièse” (“sharp word”), so called because the hash mark…
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Notable San Francisco 1/28-2/1
This week in San Francisco, rejoice, for many staples of the literary city have returned for their first shows of 2013 Monday 1/28: Lit Slam,the monthly, live performance-based poetry anthology showcasing the best art at “the intersection of page and stage,”…
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Nick Cave Monday #20: “Henry Lee”
Today we learn a valuable lesson. If you have a girlfriend, but you are in love with another girl and you tell your girlfriend that this other girl is way hotter than she is, do not stick around when she…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Need to catch up on Rumpus features from this weekend? We’ve got you covered. “I evaded capture and the result became six month’s worth of daily mail: false reports, found objects, collages, poetic rants and obscenity-laden letters that I mailed…
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The Science of Silent Reading
In a New Yorker piece about how women became readers, Joan Acocella describes the moment St. Augustine saw “his mentor, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading without moving his lips”: “His heart searched out the sense,” [Augustine wrote,] “but his voice…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Important question: what do astronauts eat? Furthermore, what do they listen to to pump them up in the morning? As long as we are talking about space, the weather on mars is bad ass and terrifying. And what of the…
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A trip to The Wilde West
When Oscar Wilde visited America, he met with writers like Walt Whitman and Henry James. But during his trip, his playful quips that many of us have come to love, actually seemed to annoy many Americans more than delight them.…
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Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf!
Few writers made greater contributions to literature in the 20th century than Virginia Woolf. Woolf always brought fresh style and perspective to her work, such as the stream of consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway, the gender-bending cross-dressing epic Orlando: A Biography, or…
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Books and Kickstarter
Thinking about launching your book on Kickstarter? Writer Seth Godin has chronicled his experience with his own book project on Kickstarter and calls it an “experiment in publishing.” Godin says: Kickstarter seems custom made to solve the 10,000 copy problem.…
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Launch Party for Nick Flynn’s The Reenactments
Come join us tonight (Friday, January 25), at St. Cyprian’s Center to help Nick Flynn launch his new book, The Reenactments! There’ll be a reading, a conversation with Rebecca Solnit, and musical performances by Penelope Houston and Cass McCombs—plus lots of…
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Thou Art More Lovely and More Efficient
As the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data. Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more efficient—than hard drives: DNA itself.…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
And you may ask yourself, what do birds know about fractal geometry? And you may ask yourself, what do dung beetles understand about the Milky Way? And you may say to yourself, oh good maybe there is a future for…