the Internet
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Stay Free: Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha
Cha constructs a Los Angeles sharply different from most representations of the city.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He…
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Erykah Badu on Cyberspace
Erykah Badu met up with okayplayer.’s program The Questions and the result is a meditation on what participation means in the digital age, among many other things. Watch the interview after the jump.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jacob Wren
Jacob Wren discusses his newest novel, Polyamorous Love Song, the relationship between art and ethics, and whether Kanye West is a force for good in the art and music world.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The (Online) Stories We Tell
Sometimes you want to dream about the life you didn’t get to have. Sometimes you want to see the life you were lucky to escape.
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A Modern-Day Typewriter
The personal computer may have revolutionized the way writers write, but distractions from the Internet and social media may not make it the ideal tool for writing. Designer Adam Leeb has created a hybrid typewriter called a Hemingwrite. Long battery life,…
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140 Keystrokes
It’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent essay on anxiety about poetry, in an Internet age. Is…
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Trolls Are “Sadists and Psychopaths”
Common wisdom has it that the Internet has disconnected people from their sense of empathy—but maybe it’s just exposed society at large to greater numbers of people who were already unempathetic. This Washington Post blog post reports on a Canadian study which…
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Magical Vanishing Google Results
When Graeme Wood saw an ultra-wealthy college classmate’s name popping up on weird, perfunctory websites, he suspected something was up. After some diligent sleuthing, he discovered he was right—the classmate had used an exorbitantly priced reputation-management service to throw Google…
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Improvising a Bone Graft
Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project.
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FUNNY WOMEN #97: The Whitest Album
It was a time in my life when I was frequently “tagged,” along with other Netizens who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch.
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Cut and Paste with Intention
However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control. Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting…