Weekend Rumpus Roundup
If your Cinco de Mayo was too excelente for you to spend much time online, here’s a recap of what happened on the Rumpus this weekend. An aquatic wonderland of…
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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.
Sorry, Fellas, You’re Not That Funny
Plenty of people, from Christopher Hitchens to Adam Carolla, have made the assertion that women aren’t funny. You can probably guess that we at the Rumpus disagree, since we have…
Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
What happens when you put a well-regarded social psychologist fixated on order in an academic system that rewards breakthrough experiments over failed ones? You get one of the biggest con…
“I’m Black. And I’m Gay.”
More than a few people have questioned, chafed, and commented on Collins’ decision to identify himself as a black gay man — rather than simply as a gay man. And…
Rid of Me Turns 20
It may be hard to believe, but neither you nor your favorite ’90s albums are teenagers anymore. To celebrate the 20th (!) anniversary of PJ Harvey’s seminal sophomore effort Rid of…
“Searching for A Memory That Wasn’t There”
I met my friends in San Francisco, and I felt safe. I kept thinking – so curiously! – that I hoped he was okay. How could someone be so angry…
Posthumous Oversharing from F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Fell in love on the 7th … Quarrel. Silence. Zelda sick … Discovery that Zelda’s class voted her prettiest & most attractive.” You can’t follow F. Scott Fitzgerald on Twitter,…
Computer Poets Not Half Bad
Using “Markov chains” and “pulling text from Project Gutenberg,” Paul Thompson wrote (er, “wrote”) computer-generated “snowball” poems in which each word is one letter longer than the last. Others joined in, and…
Is the Internet A Modern-Day “Dunciad”?
And so it proved, as music website after music website soon reported on the Gordon-Moore breakup in exactly those sort of exclamatory tones, completely ignoring the fact that the article…
Authors Deface Own Books for Charity
Literary organization English PEN has chosen an interesting way to raise funds: ask authors to annotate first editions of their books, and then auction them off. J. K. Rowling is…
Next Letter for Kids: Janet Tashjian
The next Letter for Kids, going out tomorrow, is from Janet Tashjian! Janet is the author of several award-winning books for children and young adults, including the My Life As A… series…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Check out these tasty Rumpus morsels, posted over the weekend! Wendy Ortiz interviews poet Louise Mathias about beauty, ecstasy, and eroticism…and “snakes and horses and sky and birds and hallucinogenic…