9/11
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Did you enjoy your weekend? Revisit it with a look at our weekend Rumpus features. Didn’t enjoy your weekend? We have just the thing to cheer you up: weekend Rumpus features.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lynda Barry
There is a quality that certain historic figures are said to share, a nearly indescribable feeling—not that these figures embody, but that they bring out in whoever they meet.
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On Civil Society
“It’s as though the great New York-centric moment of openness after 9/11, when we were ready to reexamine our basic assumptions and look each other in the eye, has returned, and this time it’s not confined to New York City,…
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The Decade of Magical Thinking
A Rumpus Lamentation on What We Lost Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you’d see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that…
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“Missing” Then and Now
After 9/11 the abundant “Missing” posters that hung around Manhattan were part of the fabric of post-9/11 of the city. A lot of them weren’t as much “Missing” signs as they were obituaries and rememberances of loved ones. It’s been…
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The Shortcomings of Words
Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Yorker piece, “Speechless” eloquently identifies the difficulty of finding words amidst an indescribable nightmare while remembering 9/11. “Dozens of phone calls home were placed from the towers between the moment that the first plane hit and…
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Salman’s Story
Certified E.M.T. and former NYPD cadet, Salman went missing after helping save lives on September 11th, ten years ago. Instead of spurring “Missing” fliers, his face was brandished across “Wanted” fliers, urging people to contact the terrorist task force. His…
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Alex Shakar in the Observer
The New York Observer provides context for Alex Shakar’s Luminiarium, this month’s Rumpus Book Club selection. The article discusses the contemporaneous crafting of Luminarium with his spiritual evolution, the ups and downs he experienced with The Savage Girl, his last…
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Georgia Bottoms
In Mark Childress’s latest novel, Georgia Bottoms, his eponymous heroine is a mash-up of Southern women from popular culture, but that is no reason not to read it.
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He, the People
A legal scholar warns of presidential power-mongering and calls for a national Day of Deliberation.
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The Man Who Guarded the Bomb
Gregory Orfalea’s collection of linked stories demonstrates that conventions are there for a reason—and it’s often harder to follow the rules than to break them.
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Just Because You’re Paranoid…
David Aaronnovitch’s survey of global conspiracy theories ably debunks chestnuts old and new, but avoids closer analysis of what inspires them in the first place.