Imagine that you are a journalist, tasked with crafting a true, powerful, and insightful piece of writing about a well known celebrity that can puncture their veil of false mystique. Here is how it’s done.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably frustrated by the fact that, somewhere in your house or apartment, a smoke alarm with a dying battery is beeping, and beeping, and beeping—usually once every 60 seconds—but you cannot figure out where the alarm is located. The following solution to this problem will sound counter-intuitive, but it’s worked for me and others (Taylor Berman), so I’d like to share it with you:
Yesterday, every school in Los Angeles was closed after the city received an emailed threat of a terrorist attack. Later in the day, the city of New York revealed that it too had received a “similar” email, but did not deem it “credible,” which necessitated that officials in L.A. explain why they decided to abruptly tell some 600,000 kids to stay home.
Last night, around 4 a.m., a freight train carrying screaming sirens and old dial-up modem sounds crashed through my room. It was a government-issued FLASH FLOOD WARNING, sent express delivery from the darkest depths of Hell directly to my cellphone. Was it even raining when I received the urgent message? Who knows. Will I be cranky and tired all day? Emergency Alert: Yes.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner and the U.S. is barreling down on it like a salt-stained maroon Subaru Forester hydroplaning uncontrollably toward a utility pole on one of our nation's many fine turnpikes. That's because the country is currently being savagely walloped by what one can only assume are Storms of Thankfulness, born when citizens' prayers and glad tidings collided on their way to heaven with a low pressure system moving north off the Gulf and crystallized, thundering back down to earth in the form of deadly winter precipitation.
You've got a bunch of permanent markers, five lines, and a serious craving for drawing a great butt. Now what?
It's hot. The subways are crowded. People are peevish, sweating, and on edge. At times like this— when the social fabric of the city seems to hang by the thinnest of threads—it's important to relax, take a deep breath, and contemplate exactly who you hate in this godforsaken underground tunnel maze, and why.
The 84-year-old line cutter who was recently rewarded for jumping the queue at Publix with the largest single jackpot in American lottery history ($370.8 million), may have bought dinner for a restaurant full of strangers over the weekend. She also may have continued hoarding the millions all to herself, not givin' anyone shit. An employee of the Buddy Freddy's restaurant in Plant City, FL told the Tampa Bay Times that a woman who "sure looked like" Gloria MacKenzie paid for dinner for 180 people on Sunday. That woman told the employee that she sure wasn't Gloria MacKenzie; just some other mysterious 84-year-old millionaire from central Florida buying everyone dinner for no reason.
Let's just say for argument's sake that you enter a New York City subway station and step onto an escalator that's headed down towards the train tracks. At that moment, you must choose one of two clear courses of action: walk down the escalator, or stand still. Put more precisely, you can either walk down the escalator, or you deserve to be pushed down the escalator.
A Slovenian man attempting to show his buddies how to properly clear snow off a roof treated them instead to a potentially tragic demonstration of how to improperly clear snow off the roof — before unexpectedly turning the whole thing into a professional tutorial on how to properly clear snow off a roof when you're the luckiest man alive.
Working in journalism is, like life, harder for women than it is for men, what with the patriarchy and all. This point was driven home this week by Marin Cogan's New Republic story on the various sexual harassment-themed indignities of being a female reporter in Washington, and by the "Said to Lady Journos" Tumblr, which chronicles fun on-the-job remarks like, "Are you lost, little girl?"
As the Northeast braces for the storm of the century of the week, her citizens have turned into a population of old tabby house cats, arranging their nests as they prepare to die. In their desperate need to shop for anything, people have even cleared out the bad ice cream flavors from the grocery store shelves.
Welcome to How To Discipline Your Cat 101.
This week, internet website "The Awl" sparked a minor uproar when it ran an article parodying the voice of Business Insider's Henry Blodget under Blodget's byline—when, in fact, the article was written by someone at The Awl, as a parody. It's not hard to see the potential for confusion. How is the average reader supposed to know that Henry Blodget himself did not label his own career "a testament to the total decline in the traditional concepts of personal responsibility and moral behavior?"
