Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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“Pop,” “Soda,” or “Heaven Bubbles”?
You’ve probably seen this regional-dialect quiz from the New York Times making the rounds on your social networks. You answer questions about your vocabulary and pronunciation, and it tries to determine where in the United States you’re from. But the New Yorker‘s…
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Bad News for Journalism
The shape of journalism has been changing rapidly in the past several years, but it still comes as a shock to hear that a media company as dominant as Time Inc. is bulldozing the barrier between business and news. According…
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Poems from the South Pole
In a recent post about newly discovered undeveloped photos of a Shackleton expedition to Antarctica 100 years ago, we mentioned that Riverhead Books publicity director Jynne Dilling Martin is currently an artist-in-residence in Antarctica, and that she had written a…
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Fictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay,…
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Yumi Sakugawa on NPR Blog
We’re absolutely thrilled to see NPR’s Code Switch blog highlight Rumpus cartoonist Yumi Sakugawa and her new book, I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You. Here’s a small glimpse of her conversation with Code Switch’s Kat Chow, this bit on a…
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The Rumpus Interview with Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood, poet and author of the infamous “Rape Joke,” talks about her book Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s influence on her writing, and what fame means for poets in the age of social media.
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“Firecrackers and Wedding Music”
Granta has a stirring excerpt from Maria Choudhuri’s forthcoming memoir Beloved Strangers, about growing up in the capital of Bangladesh and then moving to New York. The excerpt starts to explore the topic of her parents’ arranged marriage and what it…
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Vikings Punter Fired for Supporting Gay Marriage?
So there you have it. It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards,…
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Writers on Time Spent Down and Out
George Orwell recounted his experiences with poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, and Paul Auster his in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. Rumpus contributor Kaya Genç writes about his own brush with running out of money,…
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100-Year-Old Predictions about 2014
To ring in the new year, xkcd’s Randall Munroe compiled some predictions from the early 1900s about the twenty-first century in general and 2014 in particular.
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“Lol My Thesis” Illuminates Academic Achievement
If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say? That’s the question posed by the Tumblr Lol My Thesis, and the answers are…pretty amazing. Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects,…
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A Ghost Story’s Ghost Story
Everyone loves a good ghost story, and one of the most popular ghost stories in the Chinese literary canon is that of Li Huiniang, a cruelly executed concubine who fights for justice from beyond the grave. At the Appendix, Maggie Greene…