Scurvy: The Stuff of Nightmares
If you needed something to remind you not to join any expeditions to the Arctic, this Lapham’s Quarterly piece about scurvy in sailors of centuries past should do the trick: (Trapped…
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Lauren O'Neal
914 posts
Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal.
Lies and the Lying Artists Who Tell Them
Art journalist Jen Graves was dismayed to discover she had been lied to by someone claiming to be an outsider artist who in fact had a fairly well-established career. But…
“Please Let It Go Okay”
Teaching is a complicated profession, especially in the field of creative writing where emotions run high. Does teaching hurt your writing? What if you’re an able writer but a mediocre…
Authors’ Pet Words and What They Reveal
How much do an author’s most-used words reveal about his or her thought process? Quite a lot, according to this New Yorker essay on pet words both common and uncommon, both…
The Stories Behind First Sentences
Granta is three posts into a new series in which authors unpack opening sentences they have written. Héctor Abad’s opening sentence is “The first thing I felt when I returned from…
Blow Your Mind with These Timelines
Using a series of timelines that represent increasingly large amounts of time, this blog post puts everything in perspective. Everything. It starts out simple—timelines of the last 24 hours, the last…
Dear Sugar Meets Half-Sister
“She’s not a hiker but … that hiking boot on the cover caught her eye. And she was just halfway into chapter one when she said she sat bolt upright…
September 11th from Spain
In fall of 2001, Molly Beer was in Spain, studying to become an ESL teacher and trying her hardest to win over the non-Americans who populated her program. Then September 11…
Remembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection…
Book Club Love
In a post titled “The New Golden Age of Online Book Clubs,” Flavorwire shouts out the Rumpus Book Club as one of many sites using new technology to recreate the…
Rest in Peace, Patriarchy
Yesterday, Slate announced the death of the patriarchy at the age of several thousand years. The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel has honored the dearly departed, which will be mourned by civilizations across the globe,…
“Kholden Kolfeeld’s” Russian Fans
Amid the flood of J. D. Salinger articles related to the upcoming biography and documentary about him, this New Yorker essay by Reed Johnson stands out. It has nothing to do…