Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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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 a comic from Yumi Sakugawa. “What if we are stuck?…
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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 a whole feature devoted to Funny Women (plus we live in…
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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 jobs in academic history. The New York Times Magazine profiles Diederik Stapel, whose…
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“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 that’s where I step into the ring. At BuzzFeed, Saeed…
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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 Me, Spin talked to Harvey, her bandmates, and their legendary producer…
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“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 at whoever loved him? How must it feel to hate…
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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, but if you want to know what his tweets might…
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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 now there’s even a Twitter bot spinning verse out of 0s…
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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 focused on Gordon as a modern feminist hero rather than…
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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 the prize catch in terms of predicted auction money, but…
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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 and Tru Confessions, which was turned into a Disney Channel original movie.…
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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 flowers, and stars, and the smell of creosote after rain,…