The winning stories were published before Bezos made the cuts. A good chunk of the writers in that collection aren't at the newspaper anymore. We'll see if the layoffs impact what they submit for next year's competition.
Today I had a bizarre experience. I went to a library. I spent a good 40+ minutes browsing through the aisles offering a truly intriguing selection acquiring a stack of books along the way and one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed.
A few of them were about how economically alienated Millennials are and why. One book with a broken piggy bank on the cover blamed boomers.
I mention this because I don't know how accurate my next claim is about to be because I put the books that may support my claim back on the shelf. If I hadn't then I would've just hedged my argument with "I need time to read these books but..."
It's a shame that Millennial's are yet to be able to turn what I'm going to call "The People's High-Brow Culture"—half-low-brow-half-high-brow—into sustainable media.
I think Tumblr was peak 'what I'm referring to'.
No, don't call it mid-brow. This is different. I think.
Who am I kidding.
I don't actually have to prove my point.
If I can get enough people to wax nostalgic about how everything they consumed online, particularly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, had just the right blend of dilettante mediocracy...passionate exchanges about art and culture without the professional affect is what I'm struggling to describe.
It's probably less a matter of economic alienation alone but an institutional kind as well. Maybe they're correlated. I did not get popular economics books that would help make my case here.
Vice may have been the closest real outlet to what I'm trying to describe but we should all know how that turned out.
I'm imagining a dilettante mediocracy...people who were too naive to know that the people working for the actual publications parallel to them could afford to loaf around and try to get paid for covering the things they wrote about.
It seems that alls left of this era is "BookTok" and "BookTube" and somehow apparently...Anthony Fantano.
This is not a good explanation of what I think. Sorry.
I'm tired of puffy stuffy "Bequest betwixt the classics, my dear" sort of media that Portico represents to me.
When do I get be middle-aged and affect my good taste on younger generations who are desperately in need of it. I don't wanna read about Myrtle Beach and Dean Martin or Marcus Aurelius!
> one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed
If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.
I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.
(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)
> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!
One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
> Brain was found dead in his office at Centennial Campus on November 20, 2024, at the age of 63.[21][22] His death certificate described the cause of death as suicide.[23] Two and a half hours before his body was discovered, he sent an email to over 30 recipients claiming that he had been forced into retirement at North Carolina State after filing an ethics complaint writing “I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university.”[24]
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