America
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Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
“You can’t hold on to the past,” Elif once told me. “You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can.”
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tinfoil Astronaut
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark…
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From the Editors: Election 2016
This election is critical. We are code-red. We might elect our first woman president, or we might elect a man who is at best dangerous and unqualified and at worst the end of democracy as we know it today.
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Color at the Mercy of the Light
What if I said: while people still believe they are white in America, that delusion, and the dream upon which it is founded, needs to be seriously examined.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
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Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn
Tonight my loneliness is infinite and I could eat dinner or dance with my limbs wild because there is no gravity keeping me grounded.
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Driving While Black in America
At The Toast, Katrina Otuonye discusses the inner pain and conflict of being unjustly stopped by the police as a black woman: My rule-abiding politeness, my inner drive to keep the peace, my outwardly even temper, none of these things…
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Who’s the Leader of the Club?
Nearing his 90th year, Mickey has not only outlived his adversaries, he has conquered them. Emerson famously advised his readers that if they built a better mousetrap, people would beat a path to their doors. Walt Disney wisely ignored his…
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Guildtalk #4: The Rumpus Interview with Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones talks about his forthcoming memoir How Men Fight For Their Lives, his new fellowship program at BuzzFeed, and making peace with the phantom.
