When Good Grammar Is Actually Bad
Adverbs acting as manner adjuncts “do not occur between whether and infinitival to,” you guys. Duh. Or, in other words, you can’t say, “…decide whether unconditionally to attend the Geneva…
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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.
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Hope your Pride Weekend was pretty, witty, and gay. On that topic, we interviewed Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about her book The End of San Francisco, which asks the question: If San Francisco…
Tomorrow in SF: Digital Literary Conference digi.lit
Bay Area literary nonprofit Litquake is holding its first-ever digital literary conference in San Francisco on June 29. It’s called digi.lit, and it aims to “demystify the new digital publishing…
A Sci-Fi Anthology with a Mission
Racialicious links to a supercool Kickstarter for a project called Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. They describe it as “an anthology of radical science and speculative…
Rock Out to These Books About Music
Book Riot has a kickass playlist of books in which music is central. From the Scott Pilgrim series to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, they’re all books…
“Oprah Only Deals With Real Black Writers”
Hey Brandon, this is my fourteenth thorough revision for you in four years. I know I’m not changing your mind and that’s fine…My book is unapologetically an American race novel,…
The Greater Meaning of Goats and Gossip
If there’s anything worse than accidentally CCing someone on an unflattering email about them, it’s receiving an unflattering email you weren’t supposed to see. When Tim Kreider discovered such an…
“As Long As I’ve Been Alive I Have Known That I Am Going to Die”
At five, at six, I knew that the cemetery was full of dead bodies rotting away in boxes under the ground, and I knew that I would be one of…
Victories for Pro-Choicers, Gay Marriage; Defeat for Voting Rights
As you’re probably aware, we’ve been covering Texas’s grotesque anti-abortion bill SB5, and we’re overjoyed to report it did not pass. Texas State Senator (and now folk hero) Wendy Davis filibustered…
Language Log for Prairie Dogs
Con Slobodchikoff is a word nerd of a different sort than the ones we usually write about on the Rumpus. After studying prairie dogs for thirty years, he’s concluded that…
LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the…
No Wonder We Need Spelling Bees to Remember It All
Silent letters, multiple possible sounds per letter, counterintuitive letter combinations…why is English spelling so damn weird? David Crystal, author of linguistic history Spell It Out, explains the numerous and conflicting forces…