Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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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 talks.” Instead, you should say, “…decide whether to unconditionally attend…
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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 is “a place where marginalized queers can come to find…
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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 landscape” with exhibitions and panel discussions on topics like publishing…
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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 fiction written by organizers and activists,” and they only need…
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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 that use bands, records, and mix-tapes to strum at our…
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“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, among other things. I’m still not sure why you bought…
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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 email in his inbox (disparaging the choice he had made…
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“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 those bodies under the ground one day, too. I could…
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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 the bill for close to thirteen hours under the state…
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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 they have a language more complex than humans would ever…
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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 books he had reviewed during his career were by women.…
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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 that, both intentionally and not, warped our orthography. Just one…