At the New Yorker, Hannah Rosefield talks about how the author interview developed and why we, as a celebrity obsessed culture, care so much. “By Koval’s reckoning, we read or…
Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the…
The final key moment was when, suddenly, I was able to write the novel without feeling as though I needed the crutch of all the research and all of the…
In an elegant and bracing piece for the New Yorker, recent Rumpus interviewee Adelle Waldman looks at the way men look at women. Beauty isn’t an ornament, either for the women…
There’s a reason everyone you know is tweeting links to the New Yorker story about a master pickpocket, and that reason is: it’s amazing. You can’t help but love the feats…
How many love affairs have you had with novels that ended abruptly, poorly, without cause or the “proper” resolution? You finish the last word, your arms hang limp, the novel…
Via Longform.org, a must-read ten-year-old New Yorker piece on the rarefied world of elite crossword-puzzle solvers. Warning: unless you are mentioned by name in the article, you will probably have to face some…
The New Yorker‘s James Guida comments on Transworld Skateboarding‘s 30th anniversary interviews with skating legends from across skateboarding’s long history. Guida sees the project as a kind of oral history,…
Nobel prize winning economist and NYT‘s columnist, Paul Krugman expresses his love for sci-fi and fantasy in an interview for Wired magazine. Krugman cites Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation as his…
In Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of short stories, Before the End, After the Beginning, we see people in transitional phases―neither flying nor drowing, but floating.
Nicholas Schmidle’s article in the New Yorker delves into the details of the night in Abottabad when Osama Bin Laden was killed. The band of 23 Navy SEALs concealed within…
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, is profiled in the New Yorker. The gender-divided executive culture in Silicon Valley is manifested in the seriously unbalanced ratio of women and…