Posts by author

Lauren O’Neal

  • What They’re Reading When They’re Not Playing Video Games

    Teenagers aren’t exactly renowned for pouring out their feelings to the adults in their lives. “It makes me think that this is why The Catcher in the Rye is a classic,” writes Carolyn Ross at The Millions. “People are just…

  • A Newer, Cuter Approach to Cover Design

    Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sure try. At 22 Words, a six-year-old tries to suss out the plots of classic novels by looking at their cover art. Wuthering Heights is a bit tricky,…

  • Double Birthday Time!

    Happy birthday to Toni Morrison (who turns 82) and Audre Lorde (who would have turned 79)! It’s hard to overstate the importance of their fight to make the voices of women of color heard, and perhaps impossible to overstate how…

  • Biting the Hand That Stamps Your Library Book

    Last week, British children’s author Terry Deary (famous for his Horrible Histories series) declared that public libraries are unnecessary relics of a past age; they cheat authors of their rightful earnings and “are doing nothing for the book industry.” A…

  • Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    Here’s what happened on The Rumpus this weekend: We welcome our newest comics contributor, Yumi Sakugawa! She’s been doing Saturday Rumpus comics for several weeks, but now they’re officially part of a series called Yumi and Everyone We Know. Here…

  • “I Believed Anita Hill”

    “Professor Anita Hill lifted my feminism from my soul and inner circle of cohorts and into a public place.” For their Crush of the Week series, Racialicious highlights Anita Hill, recalling her dignity and quiet courage during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation…

  • Zine Anthologies from Small Presses

    We all love wiling away the workday on our favorite blogs, but don’t you miss the warm, light heft of a freshly photocopied zine? You may never again make those late-night treks to Kinko’s with folders full of riot-grrrl poetry…

  • Thoughts on Gender from A “Manic Depressive Nightmare Girl”

    Girls rule, etcetera. But men are not afraid of girls. Girls never did and don’t now “run the world,” and if we believe Bey when she sings so, it’s only because she’s a woman. For Vice, Sarah Nicole Prickett writes a…

  • “Music and Words Go Together So Nicely”

    If writing and rock music go together like peanut butter and jelly, this New York Times essay is the diagonally cut sandwich bread that delivers them to your taste buds. In it, J. Robert Lennon probes the economic and artistic similarities…

  • Books Through Time

    Writers might be interested in yesterday’s installment of Dinosaur Comics, about the development of books through history. If talking clip-art dinosaurs can’t figure it out, what hope do the rest of us have?

  • Why the Civil War Is Still Worth Talking About

    Byliner’s list of spectacular nonfiction articles of 2012 highlights two complementary essays from the Atlantic‘s Civil War issue. First, Yoni Appelbaum uses a hyperrealistic “cyclotron” painting of the Battle of Gettysburg as a pin to puncture the national narrative that the…

  • Books Elissa Bassist Thinks You Should Read

    The Equals Record asks Funny Women editor (and writer/motherfucker) Elissa Bassist what she’s reading offline. She responds with a whole shelf’s worth of books, from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest to fellow funny woman Tina Fey’s autobiographical comedy Bossypants. Read it,…