Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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The Stick-Figure Antics of Hemingway’s Wartime Pals
What comes to mind when you think of Ernest Hemingway? Simple declarative sentences, the banal horror of war, endless rounds of booze, and…whimsical schoolboy-style doodles? Hemingway’s fellow ambulance drivers drew him some cartoons to cheer him up while he was…
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The Essay That Should End the Irony Wars
Irony can acknowledge our natural, justifiable feelings of insignificance, or show that we understand our subjectivity. With some humor, if we can manage it! Irony demonstrates that we know we are not the center of the universe, that we can…
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A Year in Reading
Instead of trying to wrestle a year’s worth of literature into one tidy little list, The Millions has asked various writers to simply discuss anything good they read this year, whether it was new or old or in between. So…
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Twitter Fiction Festival A Success
Previously, we blogged about Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt’s Twitter mystery. As it turns out, Rumpus contributor and interviewee Scott Hutchins wrote one as well, a San Francisco noir called “The Nanny.” They were both part of the five-day Twitter Fiction Festival,…
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Great Moments in Historical Cuteness
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the fact that Abraham Lincoln grew that iconic beard of his because a little girl asked him to in a letter. “I have got 4 brothers and part of them will vote for…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
If you were away from your computer this weekend, here’s what you missed at the Rumpus. Remember when we blogged about the responses Emily Rapp gets when writing about her terminally ill son? Here’s some of that writing, an emotional…
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When Schools Use the Police Station as a Principal’s Office
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the…
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Writers: Victims of a Dying Industry or Myopic Whiners?
“Writers have always been whiners,” begins Stephen Marche’s essay in the latest issue of Esquire. Fighting words! Brandish your swords! Then he describes the proliferation of excellent writing (both fiction and nonfiction), the increased access to the marketplace technology has…
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The King of the Word Nerds
Via Longform.org, a must-read ten-year-old New Yorker piece on the rarefied world of elite crossword-puzzle solvers. Warning: unless you are mentioned by name in the article, you will probably have to face some hard truths about how your own crossword-puzzle prowess is not…
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Today In Loss of Innocence
I saw Hanson twice in the ’90s and each time it epitomized joyful innocence. Which led me to wonder how only six years later, here I was, nodding out with a needle in my purse as the band covered “Optimistic”…
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Home Sweet Omaha
Nebraska: golden Midwestern land of corn, cows, and…call centers? Kathleen Massara writes for n+1 about growing up in Omaha. Massara’s Nebraska has a lot more frustrating cubicle jobs than, say, Willa Cather’s, but then again, maybe they aren’t so different…
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Protecting Possum Man’s Hard Drive
What do you do with a loved one’s letters, photos, and journals when they pass away? What about their emails, online accounts, and computer files? In an essay at Locus Online, Cory Doctorow describes his efforts to preserve the digital…