fourthirtythree is a new audio magazine. We’ll be broadcasting and podcasting short stories of around five minutes (up to 1,000 words), written and read by some of the best contemporary writers. We’re looking for edgy, engaging stories about modern life - stories which work well when read aloud.
When a handy label like “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges, it’s immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it’s short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you’ve written.
Andrew Price/Good Magazine Blog
Remember the 48Hr Magazine challenge a little while ago? The theme was “Hustle” and after it was revealed we all had one day to send in our submissions, they had one day to produce the magazine. Well the folks at Longshot are at it again… and the theme will be revealed today at noon Pacific time (I’ll let you do the math). More details, plus a reminder of issue zero, are available within.
The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. Thirty years ago, quicksand might have sprung up at recess, in pools of discolored asphalt or the dusty corners of the sandbox—step in the wrong place, and you’d die. But not anymore, a boy named Zayd tells me. “I think people used to be afraid of it,” he says. His classmates nod. “It was before we were born,” explains Owen. “Maybe it will come back one day.”
Daniel Engber/Slate
One of the topics from last week’s Slate Culture Gabfest was a discussion on provocative literary agent Andrew Wylie’s recent shift into the world of electronic text on behalf of his blue chip stable of clients (Updike, Mailer, Nabokov, Bellow, etc.) Will this signal a quantum shift from paper to lcd?
[I]n a world dominated by blurbs, tweets, and sound bites, we need more mailing lists, not fewer. Reader, I’m asking you to join me in a new mission—let’s save listservs! If you’ve got a favorite mailing list, e-mail me the name and topic or post a comment below—I’d like to learn about it even if it isn’t widely accessible or if it’s on a subject that I probably won’t care about (like sports).
Farhad Manjoo/Slate
You’ve done a damn good job of progressing from a few dumb rocks, flung out of the Big Bang, into monocellular creatures that learned how to make copies of themselves. Next, you grew into a complex, hyperaware species called Homo sapiens that extended its brain power through machines.
Abou Farman/Maisonneuve
