New York Times
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Fringe Benefits
A pervasive, and frustrating, myth is that dancing pays enough for us to stop complaining—that we get paid enough to be cool with however we’re treated. But that’s not true. For the Times, Rumpus friend and contributor Antonia Crane details the…
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What Could Have Been
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter explores how Truman Capote and Harper Lee’s childhood friendship influenced their work, and wonders if the famous duo’s careers would have developed differently if their relationship wasn’t “strained by bitterness and rivalry.”
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Seuss, Serendipity, (and a Secret)
The publication of Dr. Seuss’s What Pet Should I Get? is a welcome surprise for kids of all ages. But the question of why the book was not published during Seuss’s lifetime remains unanswered. Was it lost in the shuffle?…
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All of Wikipedia, In Print
We all know the rise of Wikipedia and its always-accessible treasure trove of information was the decisive nail-in-the-coffin for those dusty, hardcover encyclopedia sets. But for the people behind Print Wikipedia, there’s the desire to collect all of Wikipedia (at…
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The Language of Community
The dream of a global literary community is not new. But as globalization has not meant greater political or economic equality, cultural cosmopolitanism has not been guaranteed by instant communication and inexpensive travel. These do, however, present significant new opportunities…
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The Moral of the Story
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach: Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but…
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The Art of the Matter
Language is a shape-shifting thing. For some, it is purely the written word, and for others, it is movement, color, texture, light. In its art-themed Sunday Book Review, the New York Times explores how five artists react to five different…
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Roxane Gay on Forgiveness
In a powerful New York Times op-ed, Roxane Gay explains why she does not forgive the Charleston shooter: Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative…
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Claudia Rankine and #BlackLivesMatter
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality…
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The Right Balance
New Common Core standards adopted by over forty states require member schools to begin teaching more nonfiction in English class. The Times looks into the pros and cons of pairing literature with legal documents: “We do so much nonfiction,” Karma…
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Like Peeping Over the Edge of the World
“It’s like peeping over the edge of the world while remembering you’ve left your spectacles on the kitchen table,” she writes of her cruelly paradoxical situation: knowing that death is on its way without knowing when exactly it will arrive.…
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Getting Write With Yourself
Do you need to be right with yourself in order to write best? Is it a matter of ego or an issue of the industry? Two views on the relevance of self-loathing to writing creatively in the New York Times.