Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
-
A Helpful Guide to Writing Children’s Books
If it’s always been your secret ambition to write a children’s picture book, Buzzfeed Books can help you get started with this handy-dandy thirteen-step guide, illustrated by the Rumpus’s own Jason Novak (with a little help from his daughter Gertie). There’s some golden advice…
-
PJ Harvey Tuesday #7: “A Perfect Day Elise”
PJ Harvey’s fourth studio album includes not one but two songs based on J. D. Salinger stories.
-
The Crossword Puzzle Turns 100
Word nerds, it’s time for a celebration: the crossword puzzle turned 100 years old over the weekend. See if you can solve the first one ever published—it was shaped like a diamond and called a “word-cross puzzle,” among other slightly…
-
Medieval Mongolia’s Undefeated Wrestling Princess
Genghis Khan had a great-granddaughter named Khutulun (the cousin of Kublai Khan), and it sounds like she was a total badass: As she grew older, she joined the public competitions and acquired great fame as the wrestler whom no man…
-
Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” Was Real and Terrifying
Ronald Reagan’s anecdotal speech about a “welfare queen” who bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars has largely been discredited as racist demagoguery, but it turns out that particular woman did exist—and welfare fraud was the least of…
-
A Portrait of the Bombers as Young Men
The Rolling Stone article “Jahar’s World,” which peered into the life of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has been lauded as one of the best longreads of the year. Now the Boston Globe has put out its own longread on the subject:…
-
To Sleep, Perchance to Write
You’ve read about famous authors’ workspaces, writing schedules, and semi-compulsive rituals, but have you read about their sleep habits? Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi and Rumpus illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to create a series of super-charming illustrations of…
-
“Little Black Girls Are Taught How to Be Silent”
The defenders always ask the same questions: How old is 14, really? Why didn’t they tell anyone sooner if they were so innocent? Why didn’t they say anything at all? Using the recent publicity about decades of allegations against R.…
-
Every Kiss Begins with Konspiracy
Sometimes, during the sparkly onslaught of holiday-season diamond commercials, someone you know might remark that diamonds aren’t inherently very valuable and that there’s a conspiracy among diamond dealers to keep supply low and demand high. As Edward Jay Epstein detailed…
-
“It Was Worth Every Minute and More”
Writing-biz veteran Lydia Laurenson once landed a translation deal for a book that involved her German publisher flying her to Germany for professional photography sessions and multiple TV appearances. “Yet, when I calculated it,” she writes, “I made way less…
-
Women Writing Weird Words
Somewhere between its Kmart and hysterical phases, literary realism got shaken up, when a group of young women writers began crafting a spectral brand of fantastical, strange fiction….Permeating the stories is a sense of omnipresent strangeness made visible. The Los Angeles…
-
Is It Time to Get Rid of College Essays?
Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utterwasteof their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. In a prickly and…