the awl
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Yuppies Read
Now’s your chance to get your very own piece of David Foster Wallace. Today in New York, Sotheby’s art auction house is offering a small collection of letters the post-post-/meta-modern literary great once sent to his old friend JT Jackson,…
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How to Write (for Actual Legal Tender)
Over at The Awl, Heather Havrilesky, a writer without an MFA, has some humorous and candid freelancing tips for her MFA students and us readers. Havrilesky knows we’ll appreciate this advice, since she’s “one of the only writers [her] students know…
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Your Fantasy Is Hurting You
When listening to a song, it becomes possible to slip out of reality and into a more idealized state as Chris Wallace writes in “Your Selfie Realization.” The trouble sets in when the fantasy self does not leave. As Wallace…
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Taking a Break from the Internet
We at the Rumpus love the Internet. We are, after all, a place to read, on the Internet (just check our Twitter bio). But sometimes it’s good to contemplate how exactly you’re using the Internet and why, as Matthew Gallaway…
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The gift of not responding
There’s a big secret Twitter doesn’t want you to know, as Choire Sicha writes in a recent article on The Awl. “You don’t have to respond to anyone on Twitter. Ever.” Sicha lists a number of reasons one might choose…
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Existence of Typewriter Confuses and Angers Internet
Shortly after moving to New York, writer C. D. Hermelin decided to try a cool busking experiment: he’d sit out in parks with an old typewriter and compose on-the-fly stories for passersby, asking them to donate what they could. It…
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“Typos on the Internet”
Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them….You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. For The…
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The Anti-Creative Writing Program Campaign
Jim Behrle has a satirical and biting take on the practicality of creative writing programs at The Awl this week. Not only does he urge students to refrain from digging themselves into a hole of student loan debt, but he…
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“In Praise of Editors”
All writers should go read every word of this essay by Maria Bustillos, written on the occasion of editor Carrie Frye’s departure from the Awl. The gist of it: your editor is your friend, not some censorious know-it-all trying to…
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What’s The Deal With Massive Open Online Courses?
MOOC’s are a word for forgetting that universities have never grown without being planted, for trusting that just as students can teach themselves, universities will magically grow themselves, too. In the 21st century, many universities have been changing their game…
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The Internet As Scarlet Letter
Though the Internet these days isn’t the Wild West it once was, there’s still plenty of vigilante justice going on, from the outing and firing of the man responsible for subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots to Jezebel’s public shaming of…
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Ask “What is it?” not “Why is it happening?”
How do we respond to art that seeks us out rather than the other way around? Whether it’s a storytelling mural, a simple tag on a trashcan, or more performative, like that guy in San Francisco who does a one-man…