• CRAP! We were going to write our novel start­ing next week! The New York Observer critic says that the novel, as an artform, has completely bypassed the Ameri­can reading public, and novel­ists are better curators than writers. “For better or for worse, the great­est story­tellers of our time are the non-fiction writers,” he writes, as numer­ous writers cry in their Earl Grey tea. Siegel thinks the overanaly­sis of the artform has turned into something readers can’t simply appre­ci­ate. Siegel’s critics argue that liter­ary critics in general avoid more modern forms of liter­a­ture, such as blogs and genre fiction. We argue that whether or not the novel is dead, idiotic postur­ing by people on ivory towers that has no effect on every­day life is alive and well. source

• I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apolo­gize to all involved. Through­out my many years of service to the people of North Carolina, I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect. No matter how intru­sive and parti­san our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.
• Rep. Bob Etheridge • Regard­ing the alter­ca­tion he had with a couple of “college students” recently. After being asked if he supported the Obama agenda, he got angry, said “who are you?” repeat­edly and started hitting the kids. While dude’s reaction wasn’t exactly called for, we argue this state­ment on BigGovernment.com is just as bad: “Expect more of this. It is going to be a long, hot summer.” Yeah, sure guys. Make more of these stupid fake contro­ver­sies to draw atten­tion to your crappy site. Play to the worst tenden­cies of politics. source

• A talking greet­ing card that is clearly labeled as being about space used the phrase “black holes.” The NAACP for some reason thought it sounded like something else. Now they want a formal apology. Dudes, do you remem­ber why people laugh at PETA? It’s because of stuff like this. You guys have a stellar reputa­tion. Why waste it on stuff like this? To its credit, Hallmark pulled the card, despite the fact that they had a pretty sound case for ignor­ing the claim. source

• Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornitho­log­i­cal contexts, ‘tweet’ has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.
• New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett • For some reason fight­ing the flow of the English language, which has already decided to call Twitter posts “tweets” (lower­case). Corbett calls the word “inher­ently silly” and says it’s possi­ble people may not even be using the site in a year. OK, this would be fine if he had any good recom­men­da­tions. But what does he come up with? “But let’s look for deft, English alter­na­tives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve estab­lished that Twitter is the medium, simply use ‘say’ or ‘write.’ ” In other words, he has no good ideas for what to call this thing that he’s railing against. How about we call it “tweet,” Phil? Seems like a reason­able name. It also seems dumb for a guy who uses “ornitho­log­i­cal” to complain about the clarity of language.  source

• The Pulse app is better than the NYT app. There, we said it. The New York Times didn’t put all of this money and time into an iPad app to see their hard work upstaged by a couple of upstarts. Which is why the Times’ lawyers sent Apple an angry letter asking them to pull the Pulse app – which Steve Jobs had big-upped just yester­day – because of the way it uses their RSS feeds. Apple took it down, and now it’s back up. But these guys have had a pretty mirac­u­lous ride. Some quick tidbits on that ride:

• four number of weeks the app was developed by two Stanford students
• #1 the app's peak on the "paid apps" chart since its fairly recent release
• yes the app has gotten a big wet kiss of a profile in the Times already source

• YES but only after they got
  stuck for a while source

• OH THE HUMANITY! BP has screwed up like four dozen times in the last month, so why wouldn’t the saw they were using to cut the pipe in the oil spill get stuck IN THE PIPE? Seriously. We bet you all thought it was going to be a bunch of aliens that were going to end the human race. But no. It’s a saw blade stuck in a #(&(@(&! pipe that did it. (Above is a clip from the most rivet­ing televi­sion on the air right now, the oil spill webcam.) source

• Hey, it’s like we’re looking at us. Except not as good. Time’s new Newsfeed blog has a similar news+short approach to us, except with one major differ­ence. (OK, two; it has a budget.) It’s super-cluttered. The headlines are too bold. There are too many images. The bar on the left gets in the way. And it doesn’t do anything inter­est­ing with the idea. There are other sites that do way more inter­est­ing things with this idea. The Atlantic Wire, for example. source

• one It was announced on a blog which covers South Carolina politics, by the guy who founded the blog.
• two The blog is getting a lot of atten­tion as a result of the whole thing, which boosts their adver­tis­ing revenue and SEO.
• three They’ve posted multi­ple times about a scandal that THEY created; seems weird to us, y’know. source

• » We have an announce­ment to make, guys: We had a polit­i­cally damag­ing (Nikki Haley) scandal fall into our lap (Nikki Haley) for the purposes of increas­ing our SEO. Doesn’t matter what it was (Nikki Haley) but we’re really sorry (Nikki Haley) that it happened. This is our last state­ment (Nikki Haley) but only our first post about it. We’re going to do as much cover­age (Nikki Haley) as we possi­bly can.