Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Writers Sign Petition Against Mass Surveillance
A whole raft of writers, from Margaret Atwood to Arundhati Roy to Orhan Pamuk, have joined forces to take a stand against mass surveillance in the digital age. A petition put together by Writers Against Mass Surveillance was signed by…
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #6: “The Dancer”
If you’ve only heard one PJ Harvey song, it’s probably “Down by the Water” off her 1995 album To Bring You My Love. A runaway hit that broke the top 50 on UK and US music charts, it epitomized the…
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Ernest Hemingway Was…
You may have seen the recent series of UN Women ads using screenshots of Google auto-complete suggestions to educate viewers about sexist stereotypes. This Book Riot post does the same thing but with famous authors—for example, when you type in “Ernest…
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“Black Eyes and Oozing Bullet Wounds”
Liz Wyckoff’s interview with Laura van den Berg for Tin House is a nice complement to our own. They talk about cohesion in short-story collections, faraway settings, and van den Berg’s collection of ceramic Loch Ness monsters. A preview: …the women…
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The Remarkable Life of China’s “AIDS Granny”
In the 1980s, when it became apparent that HIV was blood-borne, China banned blood donations from outside the country—but instituted no other HIV-related tests or regulations, not even against reusing needles. HIV quickly began to spread among those giving and receiving…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
If your fingers aren’t too frozen to click, here’s the weekend Rumpus roundup. First, our film editor Anisse Gross reviewed Hilton Als’s new book White Girls: Each time I took it out of my bag, people glanced at me wide-eyed, as…
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Pong Was Not For Boys
How did video games go from being completely gender-neutral to being the centerpiece of a male-dominated, often misogynistic subculture? Polygon’s Tracy Lien investigates in a fascinating history of the industry’s relationship to gender. It’s interesting whether you’re into video games…
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This Woman Does Practice Santeria
If all you know about Santería is that it’s a line in that one Sublime song, you should check out this interview with Caridad, a Santería priestess, over at the Hairpin. Caridad explains the basics of her religion (more accurately…
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Writing Even Though You Can’t Make A Living Off It
The best things on my CV—the ones I almost want to use comic sans for, just so they’ll stand out—haven’t paid me. In an essay for The Toast, Jilly Gagnon lays bare the realities of the writing life: handling 3,128…
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Michelle Obama: Not Feminist Enough?
I was not heretofore aware feminists were disappointed in [Michelle] Obama and how she chooses to live her life. I was not aware that Obama was not an activist. Now I know. For Salon, our essays editor Roxane Gay takes on a…
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A Journalist Reports on Herself
Last November, journalist Leonora LaPeter Anton profiled a woman named Gretchen Molannen, who had been living for years with an almost unbearable chronic illness: persistent genital arousal disorder. The day after the piece was published, Anton was notified that Molannen…
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DADT Activist Now Struggling
When she saw him in the morning, Dan was still on the couch in front of the TV, speaking in fragments, muttering to himself, screaming obscenities, bursting into sobs. Now and then, he was mute, retreating to his bedroom with…