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New Yorker rejects New Yorker story

By Dan Brooks in Literature March 20, 2013 20 Comments

How did I miss this cover?

As a New Yorker subscriber, I am constantly A) reading Talk of the Town pieces from six weeks ago and B) enraged by the stories. The New Yorker is the best place you can publish your short story. Yet The New Yorker story is also its own recognizable brand of lame—the exemplar of what Michael Chabon called the “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” For writers of literary fiction, The New Yorker is Harvard: everybody knows it’s overrated, and everybody wants to get in. I was therefore extremely pleased to read this blog post in which several literary magazines, including The New Yorker, reject a story published in The New Yorker.

Tea Party video warns of dystopian present

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party March 19, 2013 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xReYMOL8nZY

The best part of this video for the Tea Party Patriots—if you’re going to make me choose—is the way it goes from dystopian fantasy to informative commercial in the last three seconds. The second best part is everything else. From the evocatively-named Development Party, with its eerily familiar emphasis on “progress,” to the vaguely Palin-esque woman gazing contentedly at the shores of liberty before she is kidnapped, this trailer captures everything the Tea Party is about. Specifically: a fantasy of persecution and revolt.

Two approaches to teen pregnancy

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas March 18, 2013 1 Comment

God, I wish you were a phone.

Here in New York, all anyone can talk about is the city’s recent campaign to shame teenagers out of getting pregnant. “Woo!” they say, “St. Patrick’s blleeaarggh!” It’s possible my man-on-the-street survey has been corrupted by outside forces. If the Times is any indication, however, it’s a hot issue. Richard Reeves’s defense of shame as an instrument of social change is compelling, particularly in its citation of how we shamed cigarettes. It seems like a great argument, until you remember that teenagers don’t get pregnant because they think it’s cool. Pregnancy is to smoking as having sex is to catching on fire. If we’re wondering what to do about teen pregnancy, perhaps we might consider a more reliable approach: abortion.

Friday links! Familiar ground edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links March 15, 2013 4 Comments

Welcome back, Friday lynx.

Greetings from Aaron’s futon, where I luxuriate in the scorched neurons and sleep-deprived biliousness of late morning in New York City. Obviously, I couldn’t just get in last night and curl up with a cup of chamomile and Right Ho, Jeeves. Back in New York means back in old habits, and I was drinking seven-dollar beers and dramatizing the interior lives of weird strangers until the wee hours of the morning. Now I am tired. Today is Friday, and the charms of the familiar remain as potent as ever. Won’t you clench your stomach and lurch back into the groove with me?

Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized March 14, 2013 3 Comments

By the time you read this, I will be winging my way to New York for the wedding of Miracle Mike Sebba. There is no Combat! blog to speak of today, so why don’t you fitfully amuse yourself by/after reading my column in the Missoula Independent? A lot of you have been writing in to ask about Governor Bullock’s proposed $400 property tax rebates for owners, and whether it would just be better to cut property taxes for corporations and individuals across the board. In terms of sheer number of reader emails, that subject is second only to requests for more drank rap. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links and probably drank rap.