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We can try to perform our inner lives, but we can’t actually reveal them. We can create a simulacrum, which is so much of what I see on social media, and that simulacrum is entertainment. It’s exciting because we all love the whiff of authenticity, and the more mediated our culture feels, the more we crave it, but we can’t actually give it away. We cannot actually break through the barrier of our individual aloneness.
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We have to lead with our imagination, not with preconceived limitations.
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His story is more than just a story about space, but also a story about history and how it moves. How time and space bend, burn, warp, and ignore.
...moreOver at The Walrus, Fatima Syed looks to build space in popular culture for depictions of different types of Muslims. With a sinking feeling, Kristen Arnett looks inside herself and finds nothing but the swamp of Florida’s influence in a reflective essay for Lit Hub. Alcy Levya launches The Rumpus’s July series, #reclaimingpatriotism2017, with a powerful essay about his duties on the front lines […]
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Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from one […]
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Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
...moreThis week, we have two stories of time machines and space stations, but mostly of people who clean up messes. Amber Sparks’s second collection of short stories, The Unfinished World, published on Monday by Liveright, is a vivid and imaginative blend of sci-fi and fantasy, magical realism and surrealism. Her stories resist being contained in […]
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It is often said that who controls the past controls the future but Nietzsche is one of the first to anticipate the power of speculation—that he who controls the future, controls the present.
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It is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars for about a year, all by himself.
...moreGrumbling about technology. Reddit users can report harassment. Will it help? The New York Times and Buzzfeed published directly to Facebook, just like your mom. Is technology destroying men? Pooping in space!
...moreSpace sex! The science of being twitterpated. iPads can’t fix everything. The religion of technology. Need to police the police? There’s an app for that.
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Actually, according to this Atlantic blog post, in space, you can’t really cry at all. Astronauts can, certainly, tear up—they’re human, after all. But in zero gravity, the tears themselves can’t flow downward in the way they do on Earth. The moisture generated has nowhere to go. Tears, Feustel put it, “don’t fall off of your […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tracy K. Smith about her collection Life on Mars/
...moreDepartment of The Japanese are Better Than Us: polar bear clouds! Also on the Asian whimsy front, in Thailand you can have food served to you by a samurai robot. Gerry Canavan has kindly pointed us towards a rad MeFi post on the about to launch new spaceplane! (!!!) Well-lit abandoned places. It is hard […]
...moreClothing for the discerning clergyman. Sometimes people are really into typefaces but also have too much free time; those people do things like this. Hella sweet pictures of astronauts and such (warning: french text). The BBC is going to talk to you about plankton for a little while. Are you ready for spray-on liquid glass?
...moreToday’s theme is things that are good. These appeal to me on at least three levels: 1980’s subway photography. The top fonts of 2009. “The primary goal is to change the attitude towards living on a houseboat.” Seed Magazine on the relationship between Science Fiction and Science. Buy a space shuttle at half the price!
...moreI just finished this really interesting article on bionics at National Geographic, but for some reason, the link has gone wonky on me. Head over to the main page and find it–it’s worth the read. Noctilucent clouds are appearing more often, and does anyone want to guess why? Moon travelers will have to worry a […]
...moreImportant science news: the universe is delicious! Need a good hideout? Al Capone’s is for sale. The American Girl homeless doll is surprisingly expensive. Or maybe not surprisingly, I don’t even know anymore. On the distance between McDonald’s. The final boxes of Polaroid film are passing their sell-by date.
...moreSpace photography gets me every time. Maybe it’s because for the last six years I’ve lived in places where I’m lucky if I see a handful of stars because of all the light pollution, or maybe it’s all the Star Trek I’ve watched over the years, I don’t know, but photos of nebulas and sunspots […]
...more“I mean, when you’re forced to smuggle, by sheer necessity of survival, due to forces completely outside of your own control, when the power to decide your own destiny has been taken from you (as a nation), can it really be called smuggling anymore? Further, can smuggling really be considered an illegal or illicit act […]
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