America Not Exactly a Nation of Book Lovers
According to a recent Pew poll, 23 percent of Americans didn’t read even a single book last year. That number has been rising steadily, from 8 percent in 1978, to…
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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.
In India, the Onion Is No Laughing Matter
In India, an onion shortage means more than just a few lackluster dinners. It’s a cipher for a whole dictionary of political and cultural meanings, as Karolle Rabarison found out…
How Toxic Is Online Feminism?
There’s a heated conversation about online feminism happening—where else?—online right now. Ignited by a piece in the Nation about Internet toxicity as well as an ill-advised xoJane piece about white privilege…
Pretend You’re at Our LitQuake Event with LitCast
LitCast, the podcast arm of San Francisco’s annual LitQuake festival, has a new episode up featuring your favorite literary website: the Rumpus! Recorded live at our last LitQuake event, the…
How Has the Internet Changed Longform Journalism?
Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but…
How the Tech Industry Could Fix Gentrification
We’ve previously written a bit about gentrification, particularly in San Francisco and usually from the perspective of the people being pushed out of their neighborhoods. TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler has a different perspective, one from inside the tech industry.…
Cats Haven’t Changed Much Since the 1400s
Elegant words from a manuscript painstakingly illustrated by a fifteenth-century scribe: “Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam.” Translation: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated…
More Misogyny in Texas
Last year, we covered Wendy Davis’s heroic attempt to prevent a draconian anti-abortion bill from passing in Texas with two phenomenal essays, one by Callie Collins and one by Amy…
PJ Harvey Tuesday #9: “The Last Living Rose”
In 2011, two decades after her debut, PJ Harvey released what might actually be her best album ever: Let England Shake. Recorded in a church in Dorset, LES takes as its subjects homeland and war.
RIP Pete Seeger
Folk-music legend Pete Seeger passed away at 94 yesterday. In his memory, we’d like to highlight Nell Boeschenstein’s Rumpus essay about him, “Pete Seeger: The Voice That Belongs to the…
Poetry Is Useful—Or At Least It Can Be
Poetry is always already revolutionary, then. What it says hardly matters. Poetry is useful because of its useless essence, not because of its individual meaning. Of course, this is nonsense.…
I Can’t Believe This One Weird Trick to Make Book Titles More Clickable
What if classic authors had been raised in the era of Upworthy headlines and titled their books accordingly? At the Millions, Janet Potter rewrites book titles as clickbait. Who wouldn’t,…