Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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A Book Review Column That Isn’t All About White Men
As VIDA’s annual stats have made very clear, most publications favor male writers reviewing books by other male writers. Our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has also talked about the lack of representation of writers of color in many publications.…
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The Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of…
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The Bart Oates Sad Mall Nail Salon Shrine Mystery
In a nail salon tucked deep in a failing mall in South Jersey, there’s a small shrine to retired NFL player Bart Oates. The story behind it “is not the sexiest solution to the Bart Oates Sad Mall Nail Salon…
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“Don’t Let Them Call You Anything Else”
Tasbeeh Herwees has a fantastic essay up at the Toast about her Libyan mother’s insistence that Americans use her given name rather than an anglicized nickname, confusing though they may find it to pronounce. And apparently most Americans aren’t willing…
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Peter Orner’s Favorite Short Stories
I’ll say it: [“Idiots First”] is the most moving American story ever written. (Until I change my mind.) For online magazine Ozy, Rumpus columnist Peter Orner collects some of his very favorite short stories. They range from North American classics by…
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“Diversity Does Bring About Positive Change”
After public pressure came to a head, Saturday Night Live finally added a black woman to its cast: Sasheer Zamata, a comedian, actress, and veteran of improv group the Upright Citizens’ Brigade. Our essays editor Roxane Gay wrote an essay for Time…
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When Journalistic Ethics Aren’t So Ethical
In the course of writing a story about a golf club, a Grantland journalist named Caleb Hannan discovered that the club’s inventor was a transgender woman. She ended up committing suicide, which, though he doesn’t seem to realize it’s a…
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“A Fight Against the Language That’s Been Fucked Up”
Before this government, usually you would find people in the buses with their books and with their newspapers, now you can’t see that. When I read in the bus now, I become like an alien. People start looking at you…‘He’s reading.…
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What’s Sexist and What’s Not
Novelist Jennifer Weiner has long been an outspoken critic of literary sexism, vocally demanding respect for herself and other female authors and pushing back against stodgy heavyweights like Jonathan Franzen. But how much dismissal of Weiner can be attributed to…
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Artists’ Intoxicating Romance with Absinthe
The spirit was a muse extraordinaire from 1859, when Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker shocked the annual Salon de Paris, to 1914, when Pablo Picasso created his painted bronze sculpture, The Glass of Absinthe….It shaped Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism,…
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When Racist Stereotypes Work in Your Favor
At Slate, computer-science professor Philip Guo discusses an odd side effect of stereotypes about Asian men: when he was first learning to code, they actually worked in his favor. Even when Guo was a novice, people gave him the benefit of…
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On Leaving Your Literary Agent
A few months ago, writer Patrick Ross made a difficult and possibly regrettable decision: he left his literary agent. He didn’t have another agent lined up, or even any strong leads on where to find one; he’s currently sending his…