The Faces of Immigration 100 Years Ago
To celebrate the Senate’s approval of immigration-reform legislation, Buzzfeed has a collection of photos of immigrants who came through Ellis Island near the turn of the last century. From a…
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Lauren O'Neal
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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.
The Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia. Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But…
It’s All In Your Head…And the Rest of Your Body
You’re probably aware of the placebo effect—because you think it’s real medication, a sugar pill, for example, relieves your pain—but have you heard of its evil twin, the nocebo effect?…
LARB vs. NYRB
The East Coast and the West Coast have had their spats, but in the end, our respective lit scenes form one big, happy, bicoastal family, right? Right?! That might not…
Saying “The G-Word” Out Loud
Gentrification is a thorny subject in San Francisco these days, as it is in many American cities. A roundup post at SF Weekly blog The Snitch collects some of the best writing that’s sprung…
Three Ways of Looking at Sex and the City
In this week’s New Yorker, TV critic Emily Nussbaum grapples with the cultural legacy of Sex and the City: High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in…
Queer American History
This slideshow is a few weeks old, obviously, because it was posted for Independence Day, but there’s no wrong time to read about queer American history. Some topics covered: Was…
Advice on Writing for Free
In an “ask a freelancer” column for the Daily Dot, Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn receives a question on too many writers’ minds these days: Should I write for free? Short…
“Have You Ever Seen This Many Women On Screen Together?”
What I can tell you is that throughout every step of creating this show, I’m constantly struck by how many women I’m surrounded by—not just in the room, but beyond…
Steinitz’s Sense of Smell
If you can’t describe the color red to someone born blind, here are some scents you can’t describe to someone born anosmic, or without a sense of smell: “feet, chalk,…
Elif Batuman Makes “Allopatric Speciation” Interesting
You’d think an essay about Franco Moretti, morphology, and the diminution of classic novels to “five tiny dots in the graph of Figure 2” would be academic and sawdust-dry. Not…
Bill Murray: Actor, Comedian, and…Poetry Reader?
Open Culture has not one, not two, but three separate videos of Bill Murray performing at a poetry reading. The poems he’s chosen are “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins, “What We…