Politics
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Literature Tricks or Political Threats?
So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief…
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Morris Collins
Trump is on the ballot; we don’t need weapons to repudiate him, but the Blackshirts are marching in our streets.
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We Tell Ourselves Stories to Tell Ourselves Stories
It’s not like we can all launch a Kickstarter or write a book—there’ve been hundreds of books about the border, and we still have the same problem. So I get angry, and perhaps it’s less about my feeling that all…
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FUNNY WOMEN #145: The Mother of All Jobs
Why do you think God gave you those narrow hips, if not for wearing blue suit pants?
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The Rumpus Review of Bridget Jones’s Baby
Perhaps Bridget fans who watched the movies but never read the books might not find this movie to be such a hard blow… But those who read the books—and those who loved the pilgrim soul in Bridget—will feel the loss…
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Padma Viswanathan
Is it that she is an immigrant to the US and was an immigrant to Canada before that, a brown woman on both sides of the border, viewed with suspicion that sometimes gets explicit?
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Year of Light and Dark
It isn’t much of a contest to say that Julie Coyne is the single most inspirational human being I have ever met. And I am here—in Xela—in part because I could use a little inspiration.
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Song of the Day: “Burn the Witch”
Radiohead is no stranger to anxiety. A tense tone—like a taut cord reverberating—runs through the high-energy opener “Burn the Witch,” from their latest record, A Moon Shaped Pool. Thom Yorke’s delicate wail floats over the brazen guitar and strings as the tempo speeds…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Michael Helm
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Michael Helm about his new novel After James, the line between paranoia and caution, and the use of poetry as a plot device.
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Leaving Aleppo: Crossing Syria’s Most Dangerous Checkpoints
After four years of ceaseless bombing and brutality, the security of life itself has been reduced in Aleppo to horror, terror, and scarcity of basic human resources.

