Tag Archives: The Rumpus

February 11, 2013 · 4:23 am

Sunday Scraps 93

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1. BOOKS: The always excellent, sharp-as-a-muhfucking-tack Margaret Atwood is interviewed for The Rumpus about Oryx and Crake, the state o’ the ladies, and how to write dystopia.

2. CHICAGO: Because I live in Chicago, when travel blog Go Go Go wrote a “How to Visit Chicago” post 8 MILLION people emailed me. He is mostly right. I try to avoid fights with homeless people, which he seems to think is kind of essential, but to each their differences.

3. NERDERY: Uuunnnnhhhh, this makes me so happy. The folks at the aptly titled Overthinking It have calculated President Bartlet’s West Wing approval ratings.

4. HISTORY: If you dig little-known stories about cool historical people who you’ve never heard of doing neat shit, this BuzzFeed piece about a 13-year-old girl who played pro baseball in the 20s is for you.

5. FOOTBALL: I read somewhere that at one point a third of the NFL coaches were disciples of Bill Walsh. Dude wrote a 500 page manifesto and it happens to be on every football coach’s shelf. Who knew? ESPN has the scoop.

6. GUNS: I missed this post-Newtown, but dang… this XOJane essay by Haley Elkins knocked me over. It’s about growing up with guns and why they (some of them anyway, in the right hands) should still scare the living shit out of you. Read it now, kthxbai.

Related Post: Sunday 92: My new favorite NBA player, 30 Rock goodbyes, pictures of people sleeping

Related Post: Sunday 91: McDonald’s and books? Sci-fi gender swapping, celebrity yearbook photos

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January 13, 2013 · 7:56 pm

Sunday Scraps 90

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1. HOLLYWOOD: It’s the piece everyone was talking about this week, so if you missed it, play catch-up with the Lindsay Lohan/James Deen/Bret Easton Ellis/”The Canyons” how-the-sausage-is-made essay.

2. INDEX: This is Indexed blogger/writer/drawer Jessica Hagy is interviewed for Fast Company about how she found her 3×5 sized internet niche.

3. WRITERS: The Rumpus interviews Zadie Smith about her novel NW, and why she doesn’t write autobiographically.

4. TINA + AMY: How pumped are you for tonight’s Golden Globes hosting-duo? Not enough? Get more so with NYMag’s recap of their friendship.

5. INDIA: I can’t even begin to describe how dead-on this opinion piece by Sohaila Abdulali is, so I’m just going to quote it: “Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.”

6. FRIDA: A closet full of Frida Kahlo’s personal items has been locked and guarded for 85 years and has just now been opened and explored.

Related Post: Sunday 89: Avalanches, Mr. Wright, pickpockets and Matt + Ben Forever.

Related Post: Sunday 88: Russian gymnasts, the Rockaways, origins of “doubt”, Moloch

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December 18, 2012 · 10:24 pm

The Best Things I Read on the Internet, 2012

Like last year, I’m doing a Best Things I read on the Internet list. This is obviously in no way complete or comprehensive, it is merely a tiny slice of the internet that I really enjoyed and I hope you enjoy too.

  • How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America – Gawker (Kiese Laymon): I’ve read this essay about violence and race and home and promise so many times. There are phrases I’m sure will stick with me forever, “I’m a waste of writing’s time,” and “I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.”
  • “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Sociopath?” – New York Times (Jennifer Kahn): In the wake of Sandy Hook, this investigation of psychopathy in children hits particularly hard. How early can you identify the traits of psychopathy, and what do you do about it?
  • “Expectations” – The New Yorker (Katherine Boo): This is the story of the uneasy relationship between an aspiring politician, Michael Bennet, and a high school on the edge of disfunction (or maybe over it?) in Denver. We talk about turnaround schools, benchmarks, races to the top, but what does that actually look like reflected back in the faces of teenagers?
  • “The Last Tower” - Harpers (Ben Austen) – For you Chicagoans, or those who wish to be Chicagoans, the towers of Cabrini-Green hold a particular and problematic place in our recent history. I walk by the remains of them every day. How did they start? Where they wrong from the beginning? Could they have been saved? Should they have been saved?
  • “Transformation and Transcendance: The Power of Female Friendship” – The Rumpus (Emily Rapp): I hate, hate, hate the title of this essay if only because of how many potential readers might be turned off by it’s hippie-dippy enlightenment vibe. It’s so amazing and fantastic that I want every single person to read it. This was the first thing I ever read of Rapp’s, and I’ve been hooked since.
  • “Click and Drag” - xkcd (Randall Munroe): This isn’t an essay, per se, but I find it profound and delightful nonetheless. In an interactive cartoon, “Click and Drag” is about finding small pleasures, and remembering how much of the world there always is to explore.
  • “Odd Blood: Serodiscordancy, or, Life with an HIV-Positive Partner” - The Atlantic (John Fram): A piece of the HIV puzzle we don’t see exposed very often, “Odd Blood” is a lyrically written account of a relationship in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is not.

Part 2 coming later this week!

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December 10, 2012 · 4:10 am

Sunday Scraps 86

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1. WRITING: Man, If only our shared first name meant I shared talent with Emily Rapp (Ditto Emily Nussbaum, Emily McCombs). In this essay for The Rumpus, Rapp writes about finding intimacy while her son continues to die. If that sounds sad, it is, but it’s also beautiful.

2. PARENTING: Emily McCombs, editor of XOJane, writes about her creative path towards motherhood and it’s pretty inspiring.

3. INSTAGRAM: Complete with lyrics (for your singalong desires), College Humor nails our obsession with Instagram with this parody of Nickelback’s “Photograph.”

4. SUFFRAGE: Weird and strange and weird again. Here’s a children’s book from 1910 against women’s suffrage.

5. TED: Anita Sarkeesian, from Feminist Frequency, speaks at TEDx Women on online harassment.

6. ROLES: Really interesting video imagining what club life (ha) would be like if the stereotypical roles of men and women were reversed. Who objectifies and gets objectified?

Related Post: Sunday 85: Painless? The path to the NFL, Ann Patchett’s new book store.

Related Post: Sunday 84: Astronaut letters, bedrooms around the world, women who model as men

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November 25, 2012 · 10:01 pm

Sunday Scraps 84

1. GENDER: Watch this Time interview with Casey Legler, a woman who works as a male model, and try not to drool.

2. BOOKS: A new anthology, My Ideal Bookshelf, creates colorful portraits of authors’ and celebrities’ book collections, includes David Sedaris and James Franco.

3. SUFFRAGE: Great collection from Sociological Images of vintage anti-suffrage ads.

4. WRITING: Chicago author Megan Stielstra on the stresses of new motherhood and the surprising support from a stranger.

5. ASTRONAUTS: Super sweet letters from astronaut Jerry Linenger to his 1-year-old son while he spent three months at a space station.

6. CHILDHOOD: What does a child’s bedroom look like? Depends on where they live, and damn, the range is pretty intense. Mother Jones has some examples. 

Related Post: Sunday 83: Stewart, language in the NYT, Mormons on the campaign trail

Related Post: Sunday 82: Kevin Durant, Maddow nails it, NYMag cover photos

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August 22, 2012 · 7:19 pm

Coping

Here are the words I can muster today: rape culture, rape apology, pseudo-science, control, misogyny, autonomy, willful misunderstanding, violence, rights, disrespect, faux apology, faux sentimentality, faux outrage, faux, faux, faux, phony, fake. Arrange them as you see fit.

Here are some words by other people that are pretty interesting.  Read when you have the time or the emotional energy to absorb them:

  • Lidia Yuknavitch wrote an essay for The Rumpus about growing up in a culture of sexual violence.
  • Charlotte Shane for The New Inquiry on why our insistence that rape be the “most devastating, world-rocking, soul-shattering” experience deprives women of the right to their individual reactions: “Though some feminists regard “rape equals devastation” as sacred fact, the notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available.”
  • Did you read MA Senator Scott Brown’s quote? “As a husband and father of two young women, I found Todd Akin’s comments about women and rape outrageous, inappropriate and wrong. There is no place in our public discourse for this type of offensive thinking. Not only should he apologize, but I believe Rep. Akin’s statement was so far out of bounds that he should resign the nomination for US Senate in Missouri.” I want to applaud, but I can’t because there are two many follow-up questions. You call yourself a Republican, Senator Brown, are you aware of the Republican Party’s official platform’s planks on abortion? Will you call for a change where it actually matters? The New Yorker has compiled seven other polite, carefully worded questions for Republicans as they feign (ahem) outrage over Akin’s comments.

And then there’s this video by Taylor Ferrera which is amazing, and is the bright spot in this week’s thundercloud of horribleness:

Some people give up. Some people write long eloquent essays. Some people link to other people’s long eloquent essays. Other people sing songs.

Related Post: The changing iconography of abortion.

Related Post: Daniel Tosh.

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July 1, 2012 · 2:15 pm

Sunday Scraps 64

1. WEIGHT: Super stellar essay from my recent Jezebel favorite, Lindy West, on the intricacies of talking to pre-teens about fitness, nutrition, weight, and body image.

2. ART: Ahhh, this short comic by Chelsea Martin, “Heavy-handed Acne”  is just so beautiful and poignant and I love it (via The Rumpus).

3. PRIDE: Buzzfeed collected 32 images from Pride that will probably make you cry… in the good way.

4. WORDS: Basic but superbly addictive word game from Shy Gypsy. Make word associations across the map to keep the game branching out (i.e. Cow and Horse share the word Cowboy).

5. TECH: Fabulous, fascinating interview with Genevieve Bell, the director of interaction and experience research at Intel,  about the contents of our cars and the life cycle of technology (Slate).

6. CAREER: The unbeatable Jessica Hagy (of This Is Indexed) has contributed a series of her trademark line graphs, on the subject of finding a career path, to Forbes.

Related Post: Sunday 63 (Cabrini-Green, Merkel vs. Rae Jepsen, Anne Friedman, school lunches)

Related Post: Sunday 62 (Is this racist? Authors in bikinis, Sandberg, grammar points)

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April 30, 2012 · 8:29 pm

There Goes The Neighborhood

There goes the neighborhood, or so they say.

I live in Lakeview, a piece of Chicago’s north side that is a mix of post-college 20-somethings dipping their toes gingerly into the real world, and new families who haven’t yet been compelled to move by Chicago’s atrocious educational options. It’s a mix of rowdy college sports fans, girls who treat yoga bags like extra appendages, and strollers barreling past the Panera. For now, I only check one of those boxes, and only sometimes.

I can feel the neighborhood changing every day, with the loss of a coffee shop or the addition of an Express (next to the Urban, across from the Ann Taylor), and I’ve only been a witness for two years. What evolution you must see if you pick a place and put down roots for twenty years! In this essay at The Rumpus, Zoe Zolbrod describes 20 years of being in love with Chicago:

Our favorite spot was what we called the “playground by the lake,” a one-block park and beach at Albion, separated from the continuous stretch of the Rogers Park beaches by buildings and rocks. Albion ends in a cul de sac, and while we lived nearby the city installed a few black benches just off the curb, facing the sand and water. Sitting there, I get the feeling I’m in Brighton Beach, or in Russia – two places that I’ve never been. One day someone staked Tibetan prayer flags into the sand, and their flutter reminds me of the Himalayas, the fartherest-away place I’ve ever reached and a symbol of what I’ve resisted in order to take root. Looking south, I see the outline of Chicago’s shore, the skyline of the city. The view instills me with the sense of fullness and possibility just barely tipped with melancholy. Time is passing. Time has passed. Choices have been made.

From Wicker Park (when there were no ATMs!) to Uptown, and then Rogers Park, Zolbrod’s path is one that I might someday want to follow. Not the precise pattern of neighborhood hopscotch, per se, but the idea of allowing the changes in your life to dictate the changes in your surroundings. For me, it’s the idea that I could live here forever, and never get bored.

I mean, come on, look at this:

I spend my whole life in the same narrow channel, bordered by Armitage, Addison, Southport and the Lake. Excursions to Noble Square or Bucktown or Logan Square are just that, excursions. Chicago has 77 named neighborhoods (of which I could maybe name 50) and I’ve spent the last five years in exactly three of them. I’ve frequented with regularity maybe five more. Frankly, I’m probably giving myself too much credit.

Related Post: Things TV gets wrong about Chicago.

Related Post: My five year anniversary love letter to Chicago.

Related Post: Maptastic about Chicago. 

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April 26, 2012 · 7:59 pm

Rules

Saturday was a big deal birthday for my mother. I’m not sure whether she wants me to reveal her age or not, so I’ll err on the side of caution (against all of my instincts).

The Rumpus published a piece by Judy Bolton-Fasman last week called “A Jubana Mother Gives Advice to her Tragically Gringa Daughter.” A Jubana is a woman of Jewish and Cuban descent. Given that I am not Cuban and only sort of a little bit sometimes Jewish, I can’t comment on the relevance of this advice for women who fit this specific profile. What I can comment on is the style of the advice, which is offered in pat, pearls of wisdom like:

  • Never talk to a man who has a tattoo.
  • Do not scream in labor. Be a lady.
  • Do not marry again when you’re old. You do not want to get stuck taking care of some old man you hardly know.
  • Do not wear sleeveless shirts. Chusmas wear sleeveless shirts.
I recognize that this is a piece of creative writing, and the whole of it is indeed lyrical and lovely. What I’m also struck by, however, is how little wiggle room these pieces of advice leave for grey area, going with your gut, trusting your instincts, and rolling with the punches. The kind of parenting I received (and now admire from the far side of childhood) had very few pieces of concrete advice. I’m hard pressed to come up with any, now that I put my mind to it, and I don’t think that’s a failure.
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Do you remember the scene in Freaky Friday when Jamie Lee Curtis yells out the car window, “Make good choices!”? That was my parents’ model, more time spent learning how to ask questions, weigh options, and make decisions in the grey area, less time on rules.
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April 23, 2012 · 2:43 pm

S(Monday) Scraps 56

1. HERPES: Fantastic essay from The Hairpin about the perks of having Herpes. Yep, you read that right.

2. VLOG: My lovely friend Bryn and her friend Caro have officially launched their new vlog, Come to Bed with Bryn and Caro, which is “devoted to sitting in bed, eating snacks, and discussing important queer lady issues like alternative lifestyle haircuts, hot celebs, and the butch/femme dichotomy!”

3. JULY: The Rumpus interviews writer/actress/director Miranda July about her latest project, which involves interviewing people who sell objects on the internet.

4. BARNEY: Oh man, do I love Barney Frank. The Masschusetts congressman speaks to New York Magazine about his impending retirement, being the first congressman to come out, and the excessively divisive political landscape. One of my favorite lines (of many): “Half of them are Michele Bachmann. The other half are afraid of losing a primary to Michele Bachmann.”

5. PLAYBOY: The Chicago Tribune publishes an open thank you letter from Hugh Hefner to the city of Chicago, where he founded Playboy (and built the first Playboy mansion) 60 years ago.

6. EVERNOTE: The New York Times interview with Phil Libin, founder of everyone’s favorite memory aid, Evernote, on his approach to developing company culture by adding cool training shit and removing unnecesary technology (no desk phones!).

Related Post: Sunday 55: Juvenile detention centers, geeky tattoos, deal breakers, etc.

Related Post: Sunday 54: Peter Dinklage, baby ear piercings, remixing gendered advertising.

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