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.
For some writers, Twitter isn’t a newfangled distraction but rather an extension of the art they’ve been making all along. Lydia Davis, whose stories often span only a few sentences,…
While we were all shaking our heads about sexist changes to the “American Novelists” page, Wikipedia editor “Qworty” was taking action—by making a series of “revenge edits” to Amanda Filipacchi’s page.…
You can’t always get what you want…and if what Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wants is forgiveness for decades-old library fines, then he’s out of luck.
In an interview with addiction website The Fix, reprinted at Salon, memoirist and poet Mary Karr discusses getting clean, flouting rules, and how sobriety shaped her relationship with David Foster Wallace.…
What a cool way to celebrate Ireland’s storytelling tradition: a new Irish stamp features the text of an entire short-short by 17-year-old Dubliner Eoin Moore. Moore’s piece, about how “[t]he…
Loneliness is more than just a feeling, according to an article in the New Republic. It’s a biological process that activates your physical pain responses and trashes your immune system. Here’s…
“Achebe A Celebrated Storyteller, But No Father Of African Literature, Says Soyinka.” The headline sound sensationalistic and snipey, but this interview with Wole Soyinka about the death of Chinua Achebe is…
There’s lots of cool/gross stuff in this Michael Pollan article about the microbes in human bodies: “for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10…
On a blog for the Wall Street Journal (where else?), Emily Oster gives advice based on economic theory. For example: There is a model in economics called the “sS” model. It’s…
It’s always fun to compare your culture’s inexplicably expensive and complicated customs with another’s and realize that nothing makes sense anywhere in the world. For example, at the Billfold, Jia…
Crackerjack writer, porn actor, and Rumpus contributor Conner Habib has posted the latest in his “Guys I Wanted to Fuck in High School” series. It’s erotic and expansive and poignant,…