Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Maiden Aunt Takes Up Expensive, Time-Consuming Hobby
“How did a woman from a small village in Hampshire come to write six of the most beloved novels in the English language?” Humanities seeks to answer that question with a thorough sketch of Jane Austen’s life as she worked…
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The Sexism That Makes Facebook Run
When Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings, a book about the sexist culture she encountered while working at Facebook during its early days, came out, Melissa Gira Grant paid attention. Grant had worked for a Silicon Valley gossip blog during the same…
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Legs That Just Won’t Quit
Rumpus columnist Antonia Crane has a piece up at Salon about the curse/blessing of being a stripper with thick legs. A preview: We’d done this before, dancing for a week in Hawaii and making piles of cash. My goal was to…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
The Rumpus was packed like a tasty dumpling with features this weekend! Amy Fusellman has an essay about what she learned besides tightrope walking while taking a tightrope-walking class. Your One True Self: a comic by Yumi Sakugawa. Melissa Chadburn…
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The Wishing Tree
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings got her hands on a copy of William Faulkner’s only children’s book, written for his stepdaughter (and a few other children in his life) and published in a print run of 500. With words like…
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Copy Editors Are Your Friends
Proper copy editing includes examining the focus, dredging the main point up from the tenth paragraph to make it more prominent. Proper copy editing addresses the language: rooting out cliches, substituting an ordinary term for jargon when it would serve…
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The Dish Ran Away With the Andrew Sullivan Readers
Andrew Sullivan is lighting out on his own, hoping his blog The Dish will make enough money to stay afloat without the assistance of the Daily Beast or any other publication. His plan has a number of details that set it…
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On Being A “Vile, Loathsome, Despicable Pig”
Via Verge‘s best-of-2012 list, here’s an essay by Meghan Daum about the lakes of vitriol that make up so many online comments sections. She compares the unfavorable reaction to a somewhat naïve piece she wrote about safe sex in the ’90s…
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What’s the Deal With Seinfeld’s Dedication to His Craft?
The ’90s were so saturated with Jerry Seinfeld’s brand of humor that it’s easy to think of him as hacky. He’s not.
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Free Books Still Rad
Rumpus interviewee/contributor Scott Hutchins on the importance of libraries: “I’m from a town with no bookstore, so there would have been no option for books except for the library. The library was pretty much everything.” There are significantly fewer maternal…
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Goodreads Did Really Well in 2012
Goodreads has an end-of-the-year infographic that can only be described as nifty. Visually represented stats range from the book with the most popular quote of 2012 (The Fault in Our Stars by John Green) to the year’s largest Goodreads group…
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Writing in the Margins
Here’s a different kind of year-end book list: for the New York Times, Sam Anderson looks back at the notes he left in his reading material during 2012. Have you scribbled any memorable marginalia in your own books this year? Transcribe…