obama
-
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jennifer Baker
The more variation we see in life, the more it becomes less about seeing one type of book by marginalized people.
-
The President’s Holiday Reading List
Electric Literature has the scoop on the list of books President Obama and his family bought during their recent excursion on Small Business Saturday. Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Franzen made their way onto the President’s reading list.
-
This Week in Indie Bookstores
To celebrate Small Business Saturday, President Obama shopped at Upshur Street Books in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington DC. Magers & Quinn, an independent Minneapolis bookseller, has been open on Thanksgiving for the last thirteen years—mostly to provide employees without family…
-
The Big Idea: Mark Bittman
Suzanne Koven talks to food journalist, author, and activist Mark Bittman about his “Big Idea”—how food has changed in the last fifty years, and how to teach our children to eat better.
-
The President Chats Up Marilynne Robinson
We already know that President Obama is a well-read man, his trips to the bookstore always yielding stacks of books to devour, and now he tries his hand at interviewing one of his favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson. The New York…
-
Learning Outside the Classroom
With the goal of “encouraging kids to become lifelong readers,” the Obama administration has teamed up with charities and publishers to offer digital books to children of low-income families. The books will be made available through an app developed with the…
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off.…
-
A College Education, Measured and Graded and Ranked and Weighed
The [Department of Education’s] report states: “In today’s world, college is not a luxury that only some Americans can afford to enjoy; it is an economic, civic, and personal necessity for all Americans.” Most defenders of the liberal arts would…
-
Ferguson: A Rumpus Roundup
On Saturday, August 9, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. The boy was on his way home from a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, where about two-thirds…
-
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…
-
The Pleasure (and Privilege) of Indignation
Indignation clicks on in moments of perceived injustice. Unchecked, it rolls quickly out of control, gaining momentum at the expense of perspective.
-
The Last City I Loved: Washington D.C.
DC is traffic circles, non-working fountains in some circles’ centers, jammed downtown corridors and quiet Anacostia neighborhood streets no taxi driver wants to know after midnight. It’s Muslim taxi drivers unfurling prayer mats in alleyways near the homeless guy singing to…