Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Vive Le Hashtag!
The French Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme has spoken: from now on, France’s government will not use the word “hashtag.” Instead, official government documents will substitute in the term “mot-dièse” (“sharp word”), so called because the hash mark…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Need to catch up on Rumpus features from this weekend? We’ve got you covered. “I evaded capture and the result became six month’s worth of daily mail: false reports, found objects, collages, poetic rants and obscenity-laden letters that I mailed…
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The Science of Silent Reading
In a New Yorker piece about how women became readers, Joan Acocella describes the moment St. Augustine saw “his mentor, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading without moving his lips”: “His heart searched out the sense,” [Augustine wrote,] “but his voice…
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Launch Party for Nick Flynn’s The Reenactments
Come join us tonight (Friday, January 25), at St. Cyprian’s Center to help Nick Flynn launch his new book, The Reenactments! There’ll be a reading, a conversation with Rebecca Solnit, and musical performances by Penelope Houston and Cass McCombs—plus lots of…
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Thou Art More Lovely and More Efficient
As the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data. Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more efficient—than hard drives: DNA itself.…
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“The Dean of the Clerks”
If the Strand is a palace for books, then Ben McFall is king—of its fiction section, at least. A New York Times profile of McFall discusses his history with, knowledge of, and love for the legendary bookstore: “It seems like a…
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The Millions Is Publishing Books Now!
Our friends over at The Millions are branching out: in addition to the features on their fantastic website, they’re starting to publish ebooks. The inaugural volume is called Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing…
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Tell Stories Better with Technology
Speaking of publishing innovations, SF Weekly‘s current cover story, “Storytelling 10110001101,” by Alee Karim, chronicles some recent forays into spinning narratives in the electronic age. Karim focuses on two enterprises. The first is Madefire, a company creating interactive comics for the…
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Turn Your Blog Into A Book
GIF connoisseurs and fanfic devotees, all that effort you’ve put into polishing your blog to a perfect gleam might finally pay off. Chronicle Books is looking for the next great humor book, and they want you to pitch them via…
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A Twitter Bot That Knows Its Poetry
Located, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming couplets. It’s unclear whether the account is a bot or a human with computer assistance…
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On the Internet, No One Knows You’re A Liar
Slate‘s recurring feature “The Longform Guide to…,” curated by Longform.org, is usually fascinating, and the most recent installment is no exception. In “honor” of the revelation that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend never existed, Max Linsky leads us through…
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The Reproductive Rights Stories You Haven’t Heard
As a historian, I amplify these echoes as reminders that the abortion movement was never monochromatically white. We can ill afford these silences at a time when women’s actions during pregnancy—whether choosing home birth, drug use, or merely delivering a…