Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“The Sheer Fun of Researching” Cults
Sociologist Susan Palmer studies new religious movements—“cults,” as the rest of us might call them—not out of morbid fascination or a desire to catalog their evils, but because she considers them “beautiful life forms, mysterious and pulsating with charisma.” Of…
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Awesome Free Lit Fest Alert: Page Turner in Brooklyn
If you’re going to be in Brooklyn on Saturday, October 5, you won’t want to miss the Page Turner Literary Festival, a celebration of all corners of Asian American culture presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. It’ll feature events…
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New Kind of Art: A @horse_ebooks Roundup
For the past few years, the Twitter account @horse_ebooks has delighted hundreds of thousands of followers with algorithmically generated excerpts of found text like “Everything happens so much,” “Crying is great exercise,” and “Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.”…
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Happy Birthday, T. S. Eliot!
Don’t let that Oxford education and British citizenship fool you: 125 years ago today, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He went on to become one of the defining voices of the modernist movement with poems like The…
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The Return of the Indie Bookstore
Could Amazon actually be helping indie bookstores? It seems counterintuitive, but after a devastating reduction in numbers in the late ’90s, the American Booksellers’ Association has finally started to grow—albeit slowly—since 2005. Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader argues that…
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Reading Rainbow: The Next Generation
If you or your kids have been near a TV in the past few decades, you probably went gaga for Reading Rainbow, the PBS children’s show hosted by LeVar Burton that encouraged young people to read. The show is no…
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Test Scores Over Football Scores
Officials in Pasco County, Florida, have considered squeezing athletic budgets for each of the past six years. They’ve so far agreed to cut about 700 education jobs, and they extended winter break in 2011, but sports have been left mostly…
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“What the Hell Is A ‘Writer of Color,’ Anyway?”
As part of her latest push to get the literary community talking seriously about diversity, our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has a piece up at the Nation about some of the thrilling, confounding, challenging books by writers of color out right…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald Does Othello
In honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday a couple days ago, the Paris Review posted some audio clips of him reading passages from Keats and Shakespeare. “While he may not recite like a trained Shakespearean, his reading is clear, emotive, and…
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Meet the 2013 MacArthur Geniuses
Among this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship (or “Genius Grant”) are a paleobotanist, an atomic physicist, and two choreographers. But we are of course most thrilled to see Rumpus interviewee Karen Russell, whom the MacArthur site describes as a…
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Art and Money and Muppets
Because it taught children across the country, Henson became a household name, and through Sesame Street toys, Henson became a millionaire….However, licensing toys, to Henson, felt like selling out. The cage-match-to-the-death between art and business can be brutal, but Muppet-master Jim Henson…
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Ask Your Favorite Writers Anything
Social news site Reddit doesn’t have a reputation as the most literary place on the Internet, but its AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) subreddit can be a valuable way to connect authors and readers—sort of like a huge version of our…