ISIS
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R.I.P.: The Museum of Death
What strikes me is not the necrophilia or the fetal pigs or the spoon designed for scooping out human brain matter, but rather the mundane.
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) The new French Scrabble Champion doesn’t speak French. Scientists condemn the journal Science Careers for reinforcing stereotypes. Japanese activists are fighting ISIS…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
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Examining Culture
Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its…
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Weekly Geekery
Portrait of a lady serial killer. Can Silicon Valley save our schools? Talking to women on the Internet is hard work. The Apple of Prisons? And that isn’t even the weird part. NPR is becoming Pandora. Battling extremism on the…
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Fragility of Antiquity
Adam Flemming Petty writes over on Electric Literature about the literature of ruins: This perception of antiquities as fragile rather than permanent, and all the more affecting for their fragility, is common in literature. Writers have often found their imaginations…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire returns with a powerful take on fascism and violence and postmodernism.
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The Rumpus Interview with Luke B. Goebel
Luke B. Goebel talks about his experimental novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, his dark days in San Francisco, hands as blood-bags, and literary Ouija boards.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gina Nahai
Gina Nahai talks about her fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., Iran and Los Angeles, and the possibility of a long-sought-after peace in the Middle East.
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Excavated Heartbreaking Interview with David Foster Wallace
I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. The sadness isn’t in…
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ISIS: A Rumpus Roundup
The Islamic State of Iraq in Syria, known better as ISIS, has operated in Syria and Iraq since 2003 as an offshoot of al-Qaeda—at least until al-Qaeda disavowed any connection. The military organization is neither a political party nor religious…