airports
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
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TORCH: Growing Season
I ask Hussein if he’s proud of the work he’s doing. He says that he is. We stop talking. For a moment, the market feels like peace.
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We Brown Women
Our bodies will not be your banners. We are not yours to use and abuse, we are not yours to dupe. We see through your words, and we see your violence.
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This Week in Essays
Through her work with Doctors Without Borders, Caitlin L. Chandler offers us a glimpse of what life is like on the Syrian border for Guernica. For Real Life magazine, Christopher Schaberg examines the symbolism of airports as “fraught borderlands” perfect for a protest.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Mila Jaroniec
Mila Jaroniec talks about her debut novel Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover,” writing autofiction, the surprising similarity between selling sex toys and selling books, and the impact of having a baby on editing.
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Sunday Rumpus Poetry: Five Poems by Jan-Henry Gray
Dry-mouthed, standing shoulder to shoulder, / They watch the carousel spit out black bags / And mumble “not mine” over and over.
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Transportation Sobriety Assistance
Writing for The Awl, Kristi Coulter gives sound advice on how to avoid airport bars: Once you’ve left the multiplex, you can swing by the Puppy Zone, or curl up in a big armchair, or — for fearful flyers — have a drop-in hypnotherapy…
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Poems for Airports
In his relatable poem in Hunger Mountain, “Observations at the Security Checkpoint,” Joel Brouwer gently explores traveling life under our TSA overlords: Now our gestures grow both more hurried and more delicate, we stand on one foot to remove a…
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store. One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books. Some people actually like airport bookstores. A rural Virginia bookstore has become…
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On Writing “Chick Lit”
At the New York Times, Jennifer Weiner writes about her experience with the gendered devaluation of popular fiction: Somewhere between my birth and my novel’s publication, I’d gotten the message that there were books that mattered and books that did…

