Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Which Do You Spend More Money On: Ebooks or Lattes?
In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called “Books vs. Cigarettes,” trying to figure out which habit cost him more and whether books were simply out of some people’s financial reach. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç updates…
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What Child Abuse Looks Like Among Billionaires
You’d think teenage twins Georgia and Patterson Inman, heirs to millions and millions of dollars, would have the easiest lives in the world. According to this Rolling Stone profile, you’d be wrong: While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances,…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
There are no holiday weekends in August, but there are weekend Rumpus roundups. If you feel like you need a hundred-year-nap, you might relate to Saturday’s comic by Yumi Sakugawa. And on Sunday, Rob Roberge wrestled with the way fiction…
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Best Craigslist Missed Connection Ever—No, Seriously
A Twitter follower tipped us off to this Craigslist missed connection to end all Craigslist missed connections: My stop was Union Square, but at Union Square I decided to stay on, rationalizing that I could just as easily transfer to…
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Finally, an Honest Answer to the Question “Can Women Have It All?”
Judith Warner’s New York Times Magazine essay “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In” may be the first mainstream think piece about women in the workforce that actually investigates all the subtleties of women’s career decisions without any reactionary politics between the…
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Ask A Real Live Literary Agent
Rumpus readers will definitely want to read The Toast’s new series “A Literary Agent Answers Your Fevered Questions.” (NB—the questions cover a wide range of feverity, so if yours just kind of has a warm forehead, feel free to send…
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Get Ready To Tell Your Kids About Prince Dung Beetle
While the Brothers Grimm were collecting fairytales and folklore around Germany, another historian was doing the same thing. His name was Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, and the 500 fairytales he recorded in Bavaria were only recently uncovered. The Guardian has more on…
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Jason Novak in the New Yorker, Y’all!
Our beloved illustrator Jason Novak collaborated with Mike Duncan for a New Yorker piece about performance enhancement in baseball. You see, if we ban steroids because they’re unnatural, it only makes sense to “cleanse America’s pastime of all artificial enhancements.” Novak’s drawings…
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Teju Cole on Lagos
When I’m in the US, I argue with those who think Lagos is too dangerous a place to visit….I’m less defensive about Lagos when I’m actually there. After a few days back home, I begin to accumulate irritations and fears…The…
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“I Never Intended Anyone to Read These ‘Poems’”
Previously, we blogged about a reading by Victoria Chang from her new poetry collection The Boss. Here’s a Q&A with Chang about that book, her approach to poetry, and her day job in the business world. An excerpt: I wrote these…
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Killer App
The Claudius App, “a journal of fast poetry,” just released their fifth issue in a strange and exuberant form. Click around at will for poetry, essays, audio, video, and even a textual computer game called Titanichat. Get ready to be…
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We Love You Back, Andrew Sullivan!
We just noticed that Andrew Sullivan linked to our interview with Oliver Sacks on his website the Dish. (He also linked to an interview Sacks did with the superb radio show/podcast Radiolab. If you liked our interview, you’ll probably like that…