Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Fact and Fiction in The Bell Jar
How much of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is autobiographical, and how much is fictional? Is her unflinching exploration of suicidal depression more meaningful if it’s a record of real life or if it’s invented? The Guardian tackles these questions (and posts a…
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In Space, No One Can Hear You Cry
Actually, according to this Atlantic blog post, in space, you can’t really cry at all. Astronauts can, certainly, tear up—they’re human, after all. But in zero gravity, the tears themselves can’t flow downward in the way they do on Earth. The…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Catch up with the Rumpus’s posts from this weekend! “I can’t say that my work never crosses over into my mothering life. Career choices often affect who we are as people, as parents, the same way filmmakers can’t watch a…
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On Buying Your Friends
The San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s current cover story is about the culture surrounding Twitter bots that artificially inflate your follower count: who buys them, why, and where you can buy them yourself. The story’s author, Caitlin Donohue, picked up a few…
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New York: Still Not the Only Interesting Place to Live
“Like many people who moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, I did it because San Francisco was cheap,” Ken Layne writes in a post for the Awl titled “Is San Francisco the Brooklyn to Silicon Valley’s Unbuilt Manhattan?”…
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After Garfield
The Economist has a comprehensive article up about how the Internet has revolutionized the stagnant comics industry by demolishing barriers to publication and enabling artists to make a profit in new ways. Sure, they’re five or ten years late to the…
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The Greatest Pickpocket in the World
There’s a reason everyone you know is tweeting links to the New Yorker story about a master pickpocket, and that reason is: it’s amazing. You can’t help but love the feats of thievery it describes—nabbing the sunglasses off someone’s face without…
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Tweeting Drone Strikes
I started this Twitter account because I expected no one to follow it. In some ways, that was the point — I didn’t really think anyone wanted to be interrupted by all this data. The fact that 19,000 people want…
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A Good Autodidact Is Hard to Find
For the Atlantic‘s “By Heart,” “a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature,” Jim Shepard discusses Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and the painfully fleeting nature of epiphany: This kind of conversion notion is based on…
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Tomorrow: Buy a Manuscript Consultation with A Famous Author
If you’ve ever dreamed of a manuscript consultation with your literary hero, here’s your chance to make it come true. For $1800, you can get advice on your writing from literary rock stars like Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, Karen Russell,…
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More on Memoir
Rumpus columnist Steve Almond weighs in on Stephen Elliott’s side of the is-memoir-an-acceptable-form-of-literature debate. “[Hamilton] Nolan is right to decry this kind of cynicism,” writes Almond. “But what he gets wrong in his piece is just as important as what…
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“I Bet You Could Sell Thousands of Them”
If there’s anything we in the United States know about economics, it’s that all you need to get rich is a stalwart work ethic and an original idea. If you also happen to have an MBA from Stanford to help…