Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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San Quentin Arts Project Exhibition at SFPL
If you’re in San Francisco, check out the San Francisco Public Library’s exhibition of art from the San Quentin Arts Project. See art by inmates ranging from “renaissance-style portraits in oils” to “a San Quentin cell to scale created from…
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Discussing Zealot without Zealotry
You may have seen, over the weekend, an exceedingly squirm-worthy video in which a Fox News correspondent grills religious historian and scholar Reza Aslan about why he’s written a book about Jesus despite being Muslim (completely ignoring his credentials, not…
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Writing and Drinking and Writing about Drinking
Alcohol and authors. It’s a subject so old and rich and fraught you could write a book on it—which is exactly what Olivia Laing did. That book is called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, and Blake Morrison’s review…
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Is the Caine Prize Controversy Overblown?
Last week, we wrote about the imbroglio surrounding Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s dismissive remarks about the prestigious Caine Prize: “I haven’t even read the stories—I’m just not very interested,” she said in an interview. “I don’t go to the Caine Prize…
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Don’t Tell Your Kids They’re Smart
One of the most important ways to encourage your children academically and intellectually is to praise them for being smart—or is it actually the complete opposite of that? For New York Magazine, Po Bronson investigates how praising children for intelligence rather…
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The Great Gatsby, Meticulously Mapped
If your love of great American literature is matched only by your love of streamlined visual data, have we got a poster for you. Electric Literature links to a print that charts the whereabouts of The Great Gatsby‘s characters through each…
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Some Tips for Emily Dickinson
We’ve all heard stories of publishing houses unwittingly rejecting future classics or bestsellers—most recently the detective novel J. K. Rowling wrote under a pseudonym. But have you ever wondered how your favorite authors would fare in a writing workshop? Jayne…
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“No Offense”
Poet and Twitter personality Patricia Lockwood has an intensely good (and just plain intense) poem up The Awl. It’s called “Rape Joke,” and it starts like this: The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke…
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A Tragic Passing
A great tragedy struck the world this week: Print is dead. The Onion has more information on the well-respected medium’s passing at age 1,803: “I’m in absolute shock right now,” said Charles Townsend, CEO of Condé Nast Publications, who reportedly worked…
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Self-Love at Size 24
I remember meeting with my thesis advisor in my final week of college. I was the thinnest I’d ever been, a size 12. Starvation shrank my stomach into a fist. I felt dizzy, but I felt light, and that was…
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There Are Liars, And Then There Are Fabulists
Len had led a grand life—dual citizenship in Israel and the United States, a stint in the IDF followed by apparent conscientious objection, elite schooling in Rome and Moscow, and the cultivation of a seemingly thorough knowledge in almost any…
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Next Letter in the Mail: Zoe Ruiz
Put on your party hats! The next Letter in the Mail, going out July 31, is from our Saturday editor Zoë Ruiz! In addition to putting together fabulous comics, interviews, essays, and link roundups every weekend here at the Rumpus,…