Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
-
Sometimes It’s Okay to Read the Comments
It’s a truism among people who spend a lot of time online that you should never, under any circumstances, read the comments—especially not YouTube comments. But when writer Mark Slutsky broke that rule, he found unexpected flashes of genuine emotion…
-
Millennials of Color Don’t Fit Your Stereotypes
There have been a lot of hand-wringing thinkpieces about Millennials in the media, but most of them are just wordy ways to say, “Kids these days.” As Mike Dang points out, these thinkpieces also fail to take race into account, which…
-
Armchair/Shotgun‘s 5th Anniversary Party
Literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun—winner of the 2012 Saboteur award, one of the New York Times Magazine‘s ten “literary heirs,” and subject of an upcoming Rumpus interview—is turning five years old! Go celebrate with them tomorrow, February 7, at 7:30 PM at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore.…
-
Before the “Dumb Blonde” Joke
Literary blondes have always held a totemic power….Sex, politics, and power: fictional blondes had it all. For the Toast, Stassa Edwards looks back at centuries of literature and culture—Petrarch’s Laura, Middlemarch‘s Rosamond Vincy, Taylor Swift—to parse the semiotics of blondness. From…
-
The State of American Poetry
If you liked David Biepsiel’s State of American Poetry address, here’s a nice counterpart by Natasha Trethewey at the Virginia Quarterly Review. “Despair about the place of poetry in American culture is nothing new,” she begins, and goes on to…
-
“Give Me Your Little Paw”
In a luminous essay for the Morning News, Julia Phillips describes tagging along with the mushers of the Beringia, a Russian dogsled race that’s like the Iditarod but even more intense. It’s a definite must-read in which Phillips deftly chronicles…
-
Go Ahead, Break Some Grammar Rules
It’s actually the opposite. Most people break grammar rules so they can be more precise. For Full Stop, Catie Disabato writes about prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and why “bad” grammar can be a good thing. Her data points include Burger…
-
“Start Your Year with Something Sweet”
The lunar new year has come and gone, but Charlene Cheung’s essay about what Chinese New Year celebrations meant to her growing up is still ripe for reading. It’s a lovingly rendered flashback to when Cheung was still eager to…
-
How Much Coffee Did Balzac Really Drink?
It has long been a favorite factoid of writers that Honoré de Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day. But is it true? The Airship’s Freddie Moore has put an admirable amount of research into investigating the claim, dividing…
-
VONA Workshop for Writers of Color
The Voices of Our Nation Arts foundation is now accepting submissions for its summer workshop! Founded in 1999 by, among others, Junot Díaz, VONA helps writers of color develop their work in all genres, from fiction to memoir to graphic…
-
Lemony Snicket Interviews Newbery Winner
Parents, kids, and other fans of children’s literature will enjoy renowned YA author Lemony Snicket’s interview with Kate DiCamillo, who just won the Newbery Medal for her novel Flora & Ulysses. DiCamillo is also the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature…
-
TSA Employee Reveals Airport Security Secrets
…one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines. “They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat…