Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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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 16 percent in 1990, to the current figure. The Atlantic‘s Jordan…
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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 while living there: It’s no new trick for political parties…
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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 in yoga class, the discussion is focusing on intersectionality in…
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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 episode features Lucy Corin, Saeed Jones, Mac McClelland, and more…
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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 freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited…
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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. And although she has no problem with the infamous Google…
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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 on this during a certain night.” The blog Medieval Fragments…
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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 Gentry. Now Davis is running for governor of Texas, and…
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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.
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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 Body.” But lately it had become clear that Pete is…
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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. The way Noah Berlatsky sees it, mainstream culture and poets agree…
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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, for example, want to read Jane Austen’s masterpiece He Didn’t Want…