Last week, David Grann and I met in his office at The New Yorker, in midtown Manhattan. It is a glorious fire hazard because he doesn't throw anything away. Grann has been a staff writer at the magazine since 2003 and published two books, the enthralling The Lost City of Z, and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of his reportage. Stacks of papers related to finished stories ("That's Z, that's Cuba, that's Willingham…") line the walls, while the floor is devoted to a book-in-progress, as yet untitled, on the Osage Indian murders and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For fans, a new [...]

From time to time, The Awl offers its space to everyday citizens with something to say.

I am a newspaperman. Before my freelancing days, my business card had the name of my paper, and under that it said my own name, and then: "Staff Writer." These days, I'm barely getting by as a freelancer, and my business card has a little graphic of a quill by my name.

I often think about how different the media landscape would be if newspapers had invested in killing off the "Web content" people once they became a clear danger to journalism.

Assassination is a nasty business, and I am against it. Still, you [...]

You know how something happens and you look at Twitter (or learn about it from Twitter) and people are going insane within seconds of finding out about this news that probably doesn't even have anything to do with their lives or industry? How do people get wildly upset about something they just heard about? Isn't that the job of bloggers?

This is now a proven aspect of Twitter. The Pew Research Center studied Twitter users and found "the reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys." And they're not just excitable and wrong, they're also [...]

Long ago, before foreigners got the Internet, a real pleasure of foreign travel was picking up the International Herald Tribune and reading the Dave Barry column and some "Classic Peanuts" on the half page of comics. There was news, too, but you already knew the headlines from the BBC World Service or SkyNews or CNN International playing in the hotel lobby. Still, it was nice to sit in a cafe and not work and read a good newspaper, especially one with such a romantic name: The International Herald Tribune.

There were a handful of really good columnists and reporters (especially on the Arts, Fashion, Food and Architecture beats!) who were [...]

As you may have seen on Twitter yesterday, Burger King was either sold to McDonald's or taken over by crazy people. Both would be an improvement, as Burger King has a reputation as "the fast food that even fast-food lovers don't like at all." There has always been something off about this hamburger franchise business, especially the marketing. That's why cynical people looked at the supposed hacking of @BurgerKing and figured it was just another desperate try to get anyone to care about the perennial No. 2 hamburger brand.

Yakkin' About The Internet is an ongoing series by Whitney Phillips and Kate Miltner. Whitney recently completed her PhD dissertation on trolls; Kate wrote her Masters thesis on LOLCats—yep! Up for discussion today: William Shatner's visit to Reddit, community moderation, and the complexities of "free speech" on the internet.

Whitney: Two weeks ago, William Shatner tweeted with Chris Hadfield, an astronaut stationed at the International Space Station. This resulted in the ENTIRE INTERNET BEING WON by Shatner, at least according to this Reddit thread. Apparently the 81-year-old Shatner got wind of the thread, and promptly created an account. He then proceeded to spend the next [...]

No seriously, which demons did you confront via social media this weekend? Meghan McCain, for one, was busy. My only beef here, I guess, is that when you want to get into it with someone, you actually have to call them. The whole "call me" thing just doesn't work. (via)

Next Thursday, March 28th, I’ll be sad to see "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," a brilliant web series that adapts Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice to a modern-day California setting, come to a close with its 100th episode. Created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, both prolific producers of web-specific content, this series has, lamentably, reached the end of its source material.

Its premise is that Lizzie Bennet, a 24-year-old graduate student in mass communications, starts a video blog as a school project. Providentially, she starts this vlog just as rich med student Bing Lee moves to the neighborhood and starts macking on her sister, and everyone’s lives go bananas. [...]

Even speaking as someone with 126 emails—oh Lord, 128 since I started writing this—marked as "important and unread" that I really do intend to answer as soon as possible, which is proving to be something of a struggle, and also sort of humiliating given that some of them date back to, like, January, this claim that people are digitally wasting our time with politeness is, as the publisher of Little Brown put it this morning, pretty much the day civilization died.

But here's the deal. For each member of your family that your column cites, it becomes doubly as dubious. (This tactic is a hallmark of columns [...]

We really are living in the golden and ridiculous age of home delivery subscription startups. Ad Age has a list of its 14 wackiest subscription service startups—and perhaps I am lazy and entitled but almost none of them sound that zany to me. (Why is everyone making fun of HelloFlo, apart from its silly name, or any of the 1500 services that serve the lady-product market? I would be thrilled to receive tampons every month in the mail… if I had a doorman. Or someone to receive them for me regularly. Or yeah, guess it's "going to the deli" for me.)

My real beef with most of [...]

Budapest had never been my favorite European capital, but a job in a foreign city is always better than a job wherever I happen to be living at the moment. This is why, on a balmy Southern California morning in February of 1996, I voluntarily carried my only possessions to Los Angeles International Airport's Tom Bradley terminal the customary three hours prior to departure. The first two hours passed pleasantly at the airport lounge, where my friend Steve and I drank double Greyhounds served in pint glasses.

The Double Greyhound is just a lot of vodka with grapefruit juice to soften the blow. We had been drinking these regularly in [...]

"The online stranger is the great boogeyman of the information age; in the mid-2000s, media reports might have had you believe that MySpace was essentially an easily-searchable catalogue of fresh victims for serial killers, rapists, cyberstalkers, and Tila Tequila…. [But] Internet friendship yields a connection that is selfconsciously pointless and pointed at the same time: Out of all of the millions of bullshitters on the World Wide Web, we somehow found each other, liked each other enough to bullshit together, and built our own Fortress of Bullshit. The majority of my interactions with online friends is perpetuating some injoke so arcane that nobody remembers how it started or what [...]

As a Catholic, I'm not buying this. Popes don't just quit because they're tired. What's going on here??

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) February 11, 2013

When the most trusted man in America says something like "What's going on here?", then something is most certainly going on here. Popes, after all, do not "quit" like some deluded star of a network situation comedy. Popes "quit" in the way the mythological first pope, Saint Peter, gave up the duties of his office: by upside-down crucifixion. Or, more generally, death. As Joseph Ratzinger is not technically dead, he is the pope until death, unless he believes he is mightier than God [...]

Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PennSound. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001) and Day (2003) and Goldsmith's American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports, (2008). He is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (2011). As editor he published I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (2004) and is the co-editor of Against [...]