Writing Guidelines

The Weeklings is a daily magazine of cultural criticism.

We take aspects of the culture and comment on them in a personal, thoughtful, original, and meaningful way.

“The culture” covers a lot of ground. Politics, art, literature, music, film, television, theater, health, lifestyle, sex, travel—all of these fall under that banner heading. Jersey Shore and Keeping Up With the Kardashians are part of the culture. So too the War on Women, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty. Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight are as much a part of the culture as Ulysses and Lolita. All of this is fair game.

Trends are a part of the culture, because they hint at where the culture is heading. Reality TV, stay-at-home fathers, the shifting demographics of Montana and Arizona, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the number of novels about rock music or rock stars…we want to read about all of these things. High art and low, big picture and small, it’s all of interest to us.

“Criticism” is another vague word. Criticism can be blistering critique or academic commentary.  It can be funny or serious or someplace in between. It can be filtered through the personal experience and biases of the writer. It can compare one aspect of the culture with another (Thomas Kinkade as conceptual artist, Barack Obama as Stringer Bell).

Here are some examples of what we’re looking for:

• Sean Beaudoin, “Mitt Romney Translated Into English”
• Greg Olear, “Shock & Awe” and “Ga(tsb)y”
• Janet Steen, “Mother Love”
• Jennifer Kabat, “Snow Cowboys Farming the White Stuff”
• Lawrence Benner, “Some Thrive, Some Die”
• Elizabeth Eslami, “Lion Fever in Connecticut”
• Will Heinrich, “Composition with Black Lines”

These are, of course, just guidelines.