Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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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 Romanian shepherd with an extremely intense hundred-yard stare to a group…
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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 do they really mean anything anymore? Click through to find…
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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? Through different biological mechanisms, it achieves something very similar to…
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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 seem like the case if you’re following the events outlined…
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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 up around the issue, including George Packer’s puzzled look at…
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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 its conception of character, “Sex and the City” was a…
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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 James Buchanan the first gay president? How important was same-sex…
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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 answer: yes, if you’ll enjoy it and it’ll help you…
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“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 it: the cast, the crew, the people in charge on…
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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, lilacs, gardenias, sour milk, rain, new cars, Chanel No. 5,…
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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 in the hands of Elif Batuman, who brings her wry…
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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 Miss” by Sarah Manguso, and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” by…