Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“Fear and Anxiety…Link All of Us Across the Centuries”
An excerpt from Joel F. Harrington’s book The Faithful Executioners is a featured Longreads Members Pick and well worth a few minutes of your time. Starting with a creative nonfictional account of an executioner in Germany in the 1500s, the piece…
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250,000 Books Head to the Landfill
Book lovers, avert your eyes: the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia took a quarter million books and threw them in the trash. It’s common for libraries to prune their collections, getting rid of outdated or unpopular books in favor…
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Roxane Gay Fights the Good Fight
The Los Angeles Times has a great overview of our essays editor Roxane Gay’s latest efforts to spread diversity in the publishing world: “We can’t think of gender without also considering race, class, sexuality and ability,” Gay says. “As long as…
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Tales from the Shanghai Book Fair
If the expo serves as any indication, Shanghai has considerably more book enthusiasts than I had suspected, even though just a couple of days earlier The Atlantic had published an article about the decline of reading in China. For the LA…
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Lexicon Valley Now In Written Form
Slate‘s language podcast, Lexicon Valley, now has a blog component, by popular demand. (Surprise, surprise—word nerds want to read more.) So far, it’s mostly cross-posts from the always-wonderful Language Log on the topics of slang, translation, and the word meh. We look…
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Buy Robert Heinlein’s Bed
“How would you like to own Heinlein’s ‘second-best bed’?” asks this eBay listing, which is apparently legitimate. The bed was designed and built by the sci-fi writer himself, who built all kinds of nifty conveniences into it, including “a drawer,…
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¡Qué Vivan Los Exóticos!
Mexico’s lucha libre—professional wrestling conducted by bombastic masked luchadores—is fairly well known in the United States. But many of us haven’t heard of los exóticos, gay luchadores who often wear makeup and make a show of flirting with their opponents. NPR has…
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What Jhumpa Lahiri is Reading
If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant…
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“I Just Wasn’t In the Mood to Be Bossed Around”
In the latest installment of The Toast’s “unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems,” Rebecca Pederson relates everything she remembers about being hit by an intoxicated driver while crossing the street one night. It’s remarkable not just for the inherent…
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Shakespeare As It Was Meant to Be Heard
Via 22 Words, here’s a video demonstrating how Shakespeare plays sound when performed in their original pronunciation. That’s right: the sonorous received pronunciation we associate with Shakespeare didn’t evolve until long after the bard’s death. This new, old accent sounds…
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White Girls and Cultural Appropriation
White people clamoring to up their cred by appropriating nonwhite culture do so hoping to be rewarded for choices that are falsely seen as inherent in people of color. In an essay on cultural appropriation for the New Inquiry, Ayesha…
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Got a Question? Ask a Slave
Azie Dungey started her acting career as “the time-traveling black girl”: she played “every black woman of note that ever lived” in regional theaters and at historic sites around Washington, DC. One of those roles—as a slave at George Washington’s…