Pass the Eye

Peeling Back the Layers of "The Onion"

Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life" usually leaves me lukewarm, but I love their profile of the editorial process at "The Onion." It's not a scant account. The show gets into the trenches as the staff at Onion separates comic wheat from chaffe.

In two meetings each week, the crew reportedly wades through 600 headlines to find the 16 that will make it into the paper.

Some headlines that didn't make it:

--"Spork Used as Knife"
--"Man Evidently Thinks Sideburns Make Him Look Cool"
--"Nation's Girlfriends Call for More Quality Time"

Some that did:

--"World's Most Depressing Technical College Creates World's Most Depressing Bus Ad"
--"Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice to Look Like"
--"Local Girlfriend Always Wants to Do Stuff"
--"Beauty Regimen Horrifying"

Some that were funny, but didn't appear in the paper:

--"Gay Retard Teased"
--"Infertile Woman Treats Frog Shaped Humidifier as Human Child"
--"Biologist Realizes He's Been Studying Cadbury Egg"

It's reason #342 I should be supporting public radio ...

Why You Should Read 'The New Yorker' This Week

I can't remember the last time I urged somebody to pick up an issue of The New Yorker. Even though I've been a long-time subscriber, the "must-read" issues seem few and far between these days.

Then the March 31st issue showed up, and swimming through the flood of "blow-ins" -- those ignoring subscription postcards that Conde Nast is so fond of -- suddenly seems worthwhile. There's a long, in-depth profile from the formidable John Cassidy of former Merrill Lynch head Stan O'Neal; a nimble piece on what really motivates the Dalai Lama (with some surprising wisdom from Hannah Arendt); and a dash of quirk from the marketing "genius" behind Pom, the Franklin Mint, and Teleflora -- yes, they're all the same person.

There's also a piece on how digital is continuing to hurt the profit margins of newspapers, which I read with interest. Not a lot of new information here, but I did find the context (the Walter Lippman vs. John Dewey debate over the goals of the media, for instance) interesting.

I even got the little cartoon interstitials in the issue. So either the Omega-3s are kicking in, or the editors at The New Yorker are working a little harder to court me -- one of the most endangered species: The magazine subscriber.