Home /

Blooks?

/
/
/
723 Views

From Sewell Chan at City Room, we learn that Random House has published Ultimate Blogs, a collection of online work which “aspires to be a sort of Norton Anthology of Blogging, with excerpts from 27 blogs, 9 of them by people living in New York City.” I don’t know if I should feel like an under-informed loser or an over-informed loser, but I’m familiar with eight of the blogs on the list.

  • Cosmic Variance, a blog by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech.
  • Diary of Samuel Pepys, a blog that is run by the Web designer Phil Gyford and consists solely of entries from the renowned diaries of the 17th-century Londoner Samuel Pepys.
  • Get Your War On, a popular animated series about the war on terrorism by David Rees, which is published online and in Rolling Stone magazine.
  • A celebrity fashion blog by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. (The name of the blog is just this side of unprintable, at least for The New York Times.)
  • I Blame the Patriarchy, a blog by Jill Posey-Smith, who “describes herself as a queer pro-choice atheist and aesthete” in Texas, according to the book.
  • Language Log, a group blog founded by two linguists, Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Geoffrey Pullum of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist, is a regular contributor.
  • Matthew Yglesias, an associate editor of The Atlantic.
  • The Smoking Gun, a renowned Web site, founded in 1997, which published documents obtained through Freedom of Information laws.

Great stuff there, but I can’t imagine why The Smoking Gun would have been included in this collection, unless the editor decided to reprint The Falafel Papers. And while the Pepys diary is a fascinating read, at the end of the day it’s often just another blog about beating your child and trying to lay the maid.

All that aside, I can’t believe Sewell Chan witheld props from Ben Domenech, who pioneered the blog-to-book format nearly two years ago with his “literary journal” The Critical (a venture which is, I am sad to report, officially toe-up.) True, The Critical was cobbled together from P.J. O’Rourke jokes and inspirational monologues from Red Dawn, but its advisory editors included Hugh Hewitt and Adam Bellow, so you know it had to be good.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :