Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“Give Me A Peanut Now, Human”
Corvids, a family of birds including crows, ravens, and scrub jays, are famed for their intelligence. They can play, use tools, and remember where they’ve hidden food with remarkable accuracy. They can also form relationships with humans like Annalee Newitz,…
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A Very Medieval Holiday Season
If the usual array of winter holidays is simply not enough for you, you might consider checking out the medieval December saints calendar (part 1 and part 2). Who needs “New Year’s Eve” when you can have the Feast of…
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Bigfoot Is Real!
The director of genetic-testing lab DNA Diagnostics claims to have sequenced the DNA of a Bigfoot-type creature from a population that arose when “male, non-human primates mated with early human females.” One of the genetic samples used in the sequencing…
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Literature’s Most Famous Party Hosts
Some writers are almost as famous for their raucous boozing as they are for their prose. You could fill a book with tales of literary parties—in fact, professional party planner Suzette Field did just that. The book is called A Curious…
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The Cleverest Boy in the World
There are many things about legendary comic-book writer Alan Moore that are difficult to understand: why he’s turned down so much of the money from film adaptations of graphic novels like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, why he still lives in rundown…
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Copyediting George Saunders
How delightful is this style sheet used by the editors of George Saunders’s forthcoming short-story collection? Highlights include the distinction between “pity whoop” (noun) and “pity-whoop” (verb), the hyphenation of “pre-boner,” and how to put “Darkenfloxx” in the past tense.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
We ran some really fabulous pieces this weekend that you’ll definitely want to read (or reread). We interviewed Nataly Kelly about the immense weight that rests on the shoulders of translators, whether they’re translating poetry or interpreting 911 calls. Elizabeth…
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A Virtual Tour of Austin Publishing
The Austin Chronicle has a nice roundup of the Austin publishing scene, from speculative-fiction journal Unstuck to a small press run by an ex-military spoken-word poet, to A Strange Object, the phoenix currently poised to rise from the ashes of American Short Fiction. It’s…
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The Strange Power of Suttree
There’s this deeply cool new magazine about literature and rock music called Radio Silence, which we reviewed back in June, and they recently posted an essay titled “The Bottom” that will just about cave your head in. In it, Jim White…
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Thomas Page McBee on Words and Writing
The Dictionary Project interviews Thomas Page McBee about language, the definitions of words, and of course, his Self-Made Man column here on The Rumpus. A tiny preview: For The Rumpus, you write a column—or essays in installments—entitled Self-Made Man? If…
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Crunching the Numbers in My Ideal Bookshelf
What do Stephen Merritt, Hilton Als, and Tony Hawk have in common? According to Fred Benenson’s data, nothing—not even the books on their shelves. Benenson’s “girlfriend/lady partner” Thessaly La Force is one of the two minds behind My Ideal Bookshelf (the…
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Fact-Checking Little House on the Prairie
Several months ago, Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s account of her family’s brush with a trio of serial-killer siblings and her decision to leave the gruesome tale out of her Little House on the Prairie books. The details of…