Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
-
Literary Mustaches of Note
To celebrate Movember or No-Shave November or whatever we’re calling it this year, Bookish has a fun little quiz about literary mustaches of note. See if you can tell whether those whiskers belong to Henry James or Thomas Hardy, or…
-
Hear Virginia Woolf’s Voice
Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. In the recording, Woolf reads from an essay on craft (which Popova conveniently reprints in the post): “How can we combine the old words in…
-
Roxane Gay on the Joys and Perils of Twitter
When we debate modernity, we tend to engage in all-or-nothing propositions. Technology is either wholly good or wholly destructive. Somewhere between these two extremes is where we will find the truth. Our rock-star essays editor Roxane Gay has an essay titled…
-
PJ Harvey Tuesday #4: “When Under Ether”
By 2007, PJ Harvey had released six studio albums, which ran the gamut in style from explosive blues-punk to near-industrial electronica to soulful pop rock. To the surprise of all (and dismay of many), her seventh album, White Chalk, marked…
-
“The Only Tamil Rapper”
NPR titled this interview “M.I.A. On Being Heard,” and they were not joking around. In it, the Sri Lankan-British rapper relates all the things she’s had to do over the years to convince people to pay attention to a woman…
-
A Different Kind of Courtroom Battle for Harper Lee
Well, this is all rather awkward: Harper Lee, who is now 87 and in an assisted-living facility, is suing the gift shop of a museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, for trademark infringement. The museum, “built around a refurbished version…
-
On Missing A Bikini Kill Show
It’s not just punk clubs in small towns that are fragile ecosystems. All the worlds we inhabit are malleable places, made and destroyed and made again. The Toast has a magnificent piece by Jessanne Collins on the riot-grrrl world as…
-
The Changing Face of Sex Work
A University of Chicago survey found that fewer men are paying for sex—or did it? In an interview with Slate‘s Amanda Hess, Post Whore America blogger Melissa Gira Grant takes a second look at the survey results and challenges the idea…
-
Terror in Mennonite Bolivia
In an extraordinarily disturbing Vice article, Jean Friedman-Rudovsky describes an ultra-conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia in which a horrifying series of rapes occurred (and may still be occurring): a group of men used aerosol cow tranquilizers to incapacitate entire households and then…
-
Modern Art in Nazi Germany
This BBC story goes into fascinating detail about the way the degenerate art was displayed alongside insulting graffiti, and, of course, what role Hitler’s youthful art education played in all this. (Via.) In 1937, the Nazi regime staged two simultaneous art…
-
Den Bechdel Testet
You may have heard of the Bechdel test, named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who popularized it in one of her comics: A movie or book passes the test if it contains a) at least two female characters, who b) talk…
-
Turning the Clock Forward
Most Americans probably enjoyed the extra hour of sleep they got this weekend when daylight saving time ended, but was it the product of an antiquated, inconvenient method of timekeeping? The Atlantic‘s Allison Schrager says yes, but she doesn’t stop there:…