police
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Salt
A flash-fire covered the horizon all around and behind her, and my mother glowed genuine blue. I saw her skeleton, or maybe her white-hot soul. Something flew up and around our heads.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wa
It’s about greed; it’s about taking only the best part of things, the cream off the top, the fat. And this taking of the fat has reached a crisis point in America—a critical mass, if you will.
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Song of the Day: “Louder Than A Bomb”
“Rhythm is the rebel,” Chuck D raps on “Louder Than A Bomb,” one of many outstanding tracks from Public Enemy’s touchstone 1988 record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Of all the controversial and heartfelt statements…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Woman at Standing Rock
I think back and then here, where I can only think of beasts with stains: oil and blood. They have become as familiar as an oil-stained cloth in a garage, or the things we ignore, just there in the light.
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Missing Lorraine
I guess I was somewhat relieved that my aunt realized she wouldn’t survive another day in her apartment, and I cautiously believed that she did want to live, at least for the next ninety days.
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Boyz n the Hood, Chi-Raq, and America 2016
And while the faces and nomenclature between these historically discrete agents of change differ, the one governing commonality remains the same: unfettered gun ownership and correlative violence play a pivotal role.
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Weekly Geekery
New York Times readers who ignore The Economist: Danger, groupthink ahead. Data suggests police de-escalation can work. Goats have feelings, too. (Sheep, not so much.) Babies brainwash you with their cuteness. If the Ghostbusters need props, who you gonna call? MIT professors!
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Driving While Black in America
At The Toast, Katrina Otuonye discusses the inner pain and conflict of being unjustly stopped by the police as a black woman: My rule-abiding politeness, my inner drive to keep the peace, my outwardly even temper, none of these things…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This is supposed to be a story. This is the first sentence of “The Alive Sister,” a powerful new work of flash fiction by Megan Giddings published at The Offing on Monday. In it, two little black girls are playing…
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The Rumpus Interview with Cote Smith
Cote Smith talks about his debut novel, Hurt People, growing up in a prison town, using rejection as motivation, and brotherly love.
