DURING MY DAYS as a nine-to-fiver, I came to rely on the Wonderful World Wide Web to provide me with moments of respite from the daily tedium. (I still do, who are we kidding, but my need was more exigent when I was punching the proverbial clock).
In time, I developed a regular (a webular?) reading schedule: Monday, Sam Smith’s basketball column at The Chicago Tribune and Marc Stein’s NBA Power Rankings at ESPN.com; Tuesday, the new issue of The Onion, Gregg Easterbrook’s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” Peter Vescey’s “Hoop Du Jour”, and (if I was lucky) a new 3,000-word dispatch from Bill (“The Sports Guy”) Simmons; and so on.
I loved these writers, but I also liked the certainty of knowing when they would provide me with fresh content. This routine was a small pleasure I could rely on. Like my morning cup of light-and-sweet coffee and slice of marble poundcake, it improved, albeit in a small way, the quality of my life. Unlike my cup of light-and-sweet coffee and slice of marble poundcake, it did not make me fat.
Conversely, I never warmed to McSweeney’s, despite my fetish for irony and aspirations to hipsterhood, because I could never figure out what their deal was.
Nowadays, of course, there are many more web-based offerings than there were when I last worked in an office. Back then, I would have killed for The Nervous Breakdown, Grantland, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, The Millions, Largehearted Boy, Jezebel, Lit Park, 3 Guys 1 Book, The Bloggess, and all the other HTML giants that have exploded in the last ten years.
But this blog explosion has not come without collateral damage. Because of the up-to-the-instant nature of the blog form—which newspapers and magazines have also by and large adopted on their websites—there is a certain controlled chaos regarding when new material appears. There is more content—there is more better content, even—but I no longer have any idea when it will arrive. The McSweeney’s model has prevailed. For example, the wonderfully-named Jay Caspian Kang has a column over at Grantland called “Person of Interest” that I flat-out love, but if there’s some schedule for when it appears, his editors, no doubt taking a page from the Bill Belichick handbook, have not seen fit to disclose it.
Call me a relic, call me what you will, but I liked The Onion better when it was refreshed once a week, every Tuesday, no matter what (even the 2001 terrorist attacks did not prevent an update at America’s Finest News Source; suck on that, al-Qaeda), and there weren’t so many whistles and bells.
The Weeklings: Save the day with us!
It is in the spirit of this bedrock certainly that we have created The Weeklings. We pledge to provide you with a single post a day, every single day, without fail. (And twice on Sunday, in our “Sundays in the Park with Art” feature, edited by Les Castellanos, which I’m really excited about.)
Not only that, but the same writers will post on the same day of every week. Today is Tuesday, which is my day here at The Weeklings. Every Tuesday, you can expect a new post from Yours Truly. Tomorrow, it’s Sean Beaudoin. Thursday is Diana Spechler’s turn in the spotlight. Janet Steen occupies Friday. On Saturday, we make way for my co-editor, Jennifer Kabat, who is every bit as crazy masochistic enthusiastic as I am about the project. Rounding out the Cy Young-worthy rotation are Elissa Schappell and Alex Clark, on Sunday and Monday, respectively.
That’s a formidable (in both the English and French senses of the word) lineup, if I do say so myself. What’s really amazing isn’t that we were able to assemble such a versatile and talented group to crank out new pieces every week for your entertainment pleasure, but that we were able to do so without resorting to blackmail.
What will we be writing about? Everything from Jim Morrison to Lenny Bruce, from the proposed Breakfast Club sequel to the Steely Dan/ZZ Top dialectic, from balut as a protein source to which U.S. president had the biggest, ahem, package (hint: everything’s bigger in Texas)…and that’s just tomorrow’s post by Sean Beaudoin.
Because it’s all about you, Dear Reader. We want you to know that you can depend on us. Every day, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, Tim Tebow will not have sex, and a new Weeklings piece will post at 9 am Eastern time.
Make our day by letting us make yours.
Save the day with us!
—GMO
