new yorker
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A Brief History of the Author Interview
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 listen to author interviews for the same reason we read…
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World Wide Poetry
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 Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more…
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JHUMPA LAHIRI’S LOWLAND
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 books, and I felt that the characters were strong enough…
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Beauty as character
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 who possess it or the best chroniclers of it. In…
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The Greatest Pickpocket in the World
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 of thievery it describes—nabbing the sunglasses off someone’s face without…
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Great Novels with Bad Endings
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 collapses into your lap, and you mutter: seriously? In Joan…
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The King of the Word Nerds
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 hard truths about how your own crossword-puzzle prowess is not…
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Who’s the Fairest Skater of Them All?
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, one that chronicles skaters of all walks and ages and…
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Economists Set Phasers on Stun
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 inspiration for becoming an economist, a damned responsible one at…
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The Middle
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.
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“Getting bin Laden”
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 two Black Hawks, modified to fly undetected into Pakistani territory.…
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Sandberg in Silicon Valley
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 men executives. This essay discusses Sandberg’s history and theorizes about…