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…
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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.
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,…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…