My day job is driving on the ride sharing platform, Lyft. Several years ago, I retired from teaching school to devote myself to writing and painting and lived off savings until I couldn’t. Four years ago, I started driving Lyft so I wouldn’t have to take a straight job and could focus on my creative […]
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Comedian Sara Benincasa opens up about her latest book Real Artists Have Day Jobs, adjusting to success, Venn-diagramming love, and the loss of Morley Safer.
...moreAfter reading a spoof article where Sarah Palin was quoted as being a tad more incendiary than usual, Azealia Banks suggested via tweet that the former vice presidential candidate be sexually assaulted in a whole bunch of ways. Palin reacted by threatening a suit, and now Banks is eating her tweets (again). Moral of the story: […]
...moreFrom Lincoln’s famous love of quoting Shakespeare to George Bush’s prodigious reading habits, American politics have always mingled with the literary pantheon. Now that Sarah Palin is back in the news for her endorsement of Donald Trump, Jeet Heer traces her literary roots to Walt Whitman: This is democratic verse, that tries to encompass the […]
...moreThis month’s Believer Magazine has got a cornucopia of fall’s literary treats and some are available in full on their website. Here’s a review of Andrew Foster Altschul’s Deus Ex Machina, the Rumpus’ Book Club selection back in December. If you don’t remember, the book is something like ”a dark fable about the depravities of […]
...morePoetry is the literary art form that can most readily adapt the grammatically-fraught, political commentaries of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, apparently. Michael Solomon compiled and edited a bunch of Sarah Palin-isms in I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin. And now that Michele Bachmann’s always speaking in the spotlight, it looks […]
...moreThe Rumpus Book Club talks with Andrew Foster Altschul about Deus Ex Machina, Reality TV, the loss of truth, and what it’s like to visit a porn set in the name of research.
...moreThe “debate” over health care reform in this country has gotten out of hand. If you’ve followed this story at all over the last week, you’ve been treated to reports of disruptions and protests at Congressional town halls, comparisons of health care reform to Stalin’s regime and Hitler’s Final Solution (link opens a video), and […]
...moreMumpsimus was digging through his attic and found an old editorial his grandfather wrote for The Needham Times after the moon landing. Funny how a forty year old opinion piece is a million times more enlightened than Sarah Palin’s recent op-ed in The Washington Post. Here’s part of his grandfather’s piece: “Given a team approach of […]
...moreThe most amazing website on the Internet. (might want to turn the sound down on your computer, NSFW) Perhaps the real question here is why was Sarah Palin signing a baby? Judge Sotomayer v. 1977 Kansas City Royals. Watch people upload pictures on Twitter in real time. Go ahead, do it. The Guardian UK on […]
...moreOkay. Just so you know: the Top Ten Comedic News Stories of the Year are as different from the Top Ten Legitimate News Stories of the Year as a tarantula infested banana tree is from a small paper bag of locking quarter inch steel washers painted blue. Other stuff might have had a bigger impact […]
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