What the articles in America’s Finest News Source℠ “share in common with the best opinion writing is an ability to elegantly locate and dismantle a problem with an economy of words. … The Onion has figured out a way to do a high-wire trick: they’ve made moral outrage funny without slipping into moralizing.”
Category: publishing
No, The Onion Isn’t Even Funny (A #SlatePitch Special)
David Weigel: “Where’s the fun in sticking up for an incredibly popular opinion? Well, here’s the fun: It’s really shareable on Facebook!”
The Onion‘s Editor On Walking The Tightrope
Editor-in-Chief Will Tracy: “What you have to be really careful about is what the target of the joke is. And if the target of the joke is wrong, if you’re targeting the victim or someone who doesn’t deserve our ire, then it doesn’t feel right and it also doesn’t feel funny.” (As in the paper’s notorious Oscars tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis.)
Libraries Reinvent Just When You Think They’re Obsolete
“Today the solid, reassuring presence of the civic library is threatened, and not just by government cuts; the internet, we are told, is obviating the need for books. Yet the recent explosion in the building of big, spectacular and self-consciously symbolic libraries around the world would seem to contradict that idea.”
Is It Easier To Run A Canadian Bookstore In Paris Than In Canada?
“Canada’s literary scene isn’t inherited. It’s built and rebuilt. It relies on these places. If Canadian bookstores aren’t viable here, then where?”
Why I Turned To Self-Publishing
“I was sick of rejection and waiting for agents to get back to me while my books waited in slushpiles. That route clearly didn’t work and I’d wasted enough time trying it.”
The Science Of Reviewing Books Without Reading Them
“If the idea of studying literature without reading it strikes you as somewhere between bizarre and dangerous, you’re not alone. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to dismissing such projects as hopeless (or trivial, or both) or denouncing them as the death of the humanities. But it’s worth asking what they entail and what they allow before we resign ourselves to living with the tremendous limitations of reading alone.”
Shanghai Opens Public Library In Subway System
“Shanghai’s Metro Line 2 is turning a new page with a library taking literally an online approach. Passengers will be able to select a book at one station, and return it to any of the other stations with customized bookshelves.”
Don’t Call His Novels “Hillbilly Noir”
Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone: “I guess I’m going to need a new hyphenate here, maybe ‘Semi-Southern’ or ‘Kinda Gothic’. … Most of my characters aren’t hillbillies anyway. Let’s just call them proletariat with a disposition towards criminal activity.”
Pshaw! A Humanities Degree Doesn’t Make Better People. Still…
“A humanities major may make an obvious contribution to everyone’s welfare. But the truth is that for every broadly humane, technological-minded guy who contributed one new gadget to our prosperity there are six narrow, on-the-spectrum techno-obsessives who contributed twenty.”