Try to resist the urge, upon learning of former House Speaker Tom Foley’s passing, to mull over what a mendacious scumbag George Nethercutt was and instead reflect on a decent man who dedicated his life to public service. You’ll feel better about yourself and your country.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People are always saying things on the Internet all the time. But they are such teases. We like details. So we have to ask.

No disrespect to the Nobel committee but one time I had to call Alice Munro about a fact checking issue and she answered on the first try.

— Lila Byock (@LByock) October 10, 2013

Lila! So what happened here?
From 2006 to 2010, I was a fact checker at The New Yorker. Famously, no section of the magazine is spared the scrutiny of the checker. Poetry, Shouts & Murmurs, cartoons: We do it all. Nobody likes to check the fiction, though. It can be tricky, wading through all those columns of prose with your red Uni-ball, in search of the one or two stray facts that might need attention. And then, on those scarce occasions when you have to call a writer about something, it’s always, “You’re calling why? It’s fiction, dummy.”

So I didn’t have much competition when I volunteered to check an Alice Munro story in June of 2006. I was a baby checker then, just a few months into the job, still dazzled by the glint of Tilley’s monocle. Of the many New Yorker contributors I admired, I was perhaps most in awe of Munro. The thought of actually working on one of her stories, playing some legitimate-if-microscopic role in transmitting Munro’s sentences from her brain into Caslon font… well, I was excited. All the more so when I stumbled onto a factual error in the very first graf.

The story is about a simple Ontario woman — a classic Munrovian protagonist — whose husband has been convicted of a grisly crime. The opening sentences describe the complicated journey the woman makes to visit her husband where he’s locked up:

Doree had to take three buses — one to Kincardine, where she waited for one to London, where she waited again, for the city bus out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles.

Except the draft I read didn’t say “hundred-odd.” Alice Munro, demigoddess, had understated the distance of the trip, as I quickly discerned from Google Maps. (I think she’d called it 80 miles, but I’d hate for anyone to fact check me on that.) On tenterhooks, I read through the rest of the story, failed to find any other errors, and walked down the hall to the office of Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor.

I expected Deborah to thank me curtly and send me on my way. Somehow, though, I left the office with Alice Munro’s home number and instructions to negotiate new wording with the author.

In retrospect, I think Deborah guessed what a thrill it would be for me to speak with Her Majesty. But she also thought Munro would get a kick out of the call.

I was nervous! In my nearly five years at the magazine I would go on to be yelled at, wept to, and cajoled by a whole spectrum of living legends. But the three-minute conversation I had with Munro that day remains among the highlights of my tenure. The line rang, and a male voice answered. I said, “Um, is Alice home?” (!!!). There was a pause, then footsteps, and then, finally, that affable, Canadian “Helloo?”

Deborah was right: She was amused and delighted, and apologized for the error. With a laugh, she said something like, “I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve traveled that route.” My memory flatters me by suggesting that I proposed the fudgey and quaint-sounding phrase “hundred-odd,” which she cheerfully accepted, but no doubt it was the other way around. In any event, we settled on an agreeable fix, exchanged thank yous, and that was sort of that.

What struck you most about Munro during and after your interactions with her?

A few years before I got to The New Yorker I’d done an MFA in fiction, and my classmates and I used to pore over the collected works of Alice Munro the way apprentice rabbis must study the Torah. After grad school I spent seven months on a writing fellowship, trying and failing to write a single satisfying short story. Every morning I would get up in the wintry dark and read a Munro story before starting in on my own work. People always say of their literary heroes, “So-and-so is the reason I became a writer.” In some fundamental way, Alice Munro is the reason I quit writing fiction. Toward the end of that fellowship I realized I would never be able to do what she did, so what was the point? I went and took a fact-checking gig instead.

All that is to say, Munro occupied a not-insignificant chunk of my headspace before I spoke to her. So I guess the thing that struck me most was just how unremarkable the whole interaction was. She was a little old lady from the provinces, passing the afternoon at home with her husband. She didn’t say anything exceptional, and my voice didn’t crack; we were just two normal people, doing our jobs. In a funny way, she’s the perfect embodiment of her own stories, in which the extraordinary is often disguised as mundane.

Lesson learned (if any)?

The distance from Kincardine, Ontario to London is just shy of a hundred miles.

Just one more thing.

The thing that keeps nagging at me is: Why not kilometers?

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York City.

What would you do if you were attacked by a pack of coyotes on your way to your job? I mostly work from home so it hasn’t really come up yet, but I imagine if I were in the position of this Colorado man for whom this scenario was in fact quite real, I would pretty much just make a big doody in my pants and then lie on the ground crying until they ate my face off. Anyway, we’ll find out the answer soon enough, because as the wildlife expert in the story says here, and I am paraphrasing, adult coyotes are instructing their children to attack human beings and it is only a matter of time before all the animals rise up to eat all of our faces off, and really (and at this point this is me editorializing, not the wildlife expert warning us about our imminent destruction at the claws and teeth of wild marauding animals), can you blame them? We kind of deserve to have our faces eaten off. I mean, I know I do. Anyway, trigger warnings for those of you who have survived coyote attacks or have issues surrounding face-eating are in full effect here.

By this point there is no mystery left as to whether you love Sleigh Bells or not: You do. So I will simply step aside and let you enjoy this performance. There’s more here.

We have new rankings in the Wow This Website Is Abominably And Panderingly Stupid list — with a huge upset in the number one slot!

9. Gawker Dot Com
8. Probably a tie between The Bustle and The Daily Caller and The Blaze and Tumblr
7. Twitter Dot Com
6. Twitchy Dot Com
5. The Traffic-Getting Half of BuzzFeeᴅ Dot Com That Is Manipulative And Gross (Well?)
4. Elite Daily Dot Com
3. Weather Dot Com
2. Upworthy Dot Com
1. Viral Nova Dot Com

It’s a crazy day when Business Insider can’t even make this list. Thought Catalog? MORE LIKE PULITZER CATALOG.

Congratulations, Viral Nova! You’re HORRIFIC, ILLITERATE and MONSTROUS. You’re also named V I R A L N O V A. Which is hilarious! (via and via)

“Roughly 65 cases of 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon were stolen in what looks to be an inside job from a secure area at Buffalo Trace Distillery’s Frankfort facility, according to Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton. Melton said the theft was reported Tuesday and appears to have occurred over the past couple months. Detectives are investigating but have no suspects.”

“Eye contact makes you less likely to win an argument, probably because it’s creepy”

“Never has music been draped in so much irony as it is on ‘Daydream Nation’; though it sounds spontaneous and emotional, every literate move seems to have quotation marks around it. The album, with its references to the art world, is the aural equivalent of an exhibition somewhere between the work of Jeff Koons and Sherrie Levine, with ample doses of the comic painters Robert Williams and Gary Panter thrown in for humor and a taste of underbelly Americana. But ‘Daydream Nation’ is also a great-sounding record. It is rock-and-roll at its best: raw, metallically beautiful and funny, and at times completely dumb.”

“Daydream Nation gives this influential quartet its best forum yet for demonstrating the broad harmonic palette, sharply honed songwriting skills and sheer exhilarating drive that have resulted from seven years of what guitarist and vocalist Thurston Moore calls ‘Sonic Life.’ The twelve songs range from the driving slamtempo pop power of “Teen Age Riot” and the gorgeous ‘Candle,’ to the deliriously grungy noisefest of “Eric’s Trip,” to the ambitious, panoramic instrumental sound painting of ‘The Sprawl.’ And lest we forget that Sonic Youth were retrofitting Seventies rock tropes before the rest of the rock underground began to shake its Sixties fixations, there’s ‘Total Trash,’ a surging ode to disposable pop metal that wouldn’t have sounded terribly out of place on Alice Cooper’s School’s Out.”

“At a historical juncture we can only hope isn’t a fissure, a time when no sentient rock and roller could mistake extremism in the defense of liberty for a vice, the anarchic doomshows of Our Antiheroes’ static youth look moderately prophetic and sound better than they used to. But they don’t sound anywhere near as good as the happy-go-lucky careerism and four-on-the-floor maturity Our Heroes are indulging now. Whatever exactly their lyrics are saying — not that I can’t make them out, just that catch-phrases like ‘You’ve got it’ and ‘Just say yes’ and ‘It’s total trash’ and ‘You’re so soft you make me hard’ are all I need to know — their discordant never-let-up is a philosophical triumph. They’re not peering into the fissure, they’re barreling down the turnpike like the fissure ain’t there. And maybe they’re right — they were the first time.”

— Was it the last gasp of an independent movement that could no longer keep itself from being commodified or the first blast in a battle for the ears of those who knew nothing more than commodification? A marker of fresh intent or a final flag of surrender? The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? Or was it just a really good record, one that came out a quarter of a century ago today? Only history can judge, although I guess given the time we are probably at that point now. Anyway, maybe you have never heard of Daydream Nation. Good for you, you have no idea what you are about to learn.

Your head is full of garbage and sleeping helps you clear some of it out so you can go ahead and fill it with even more garbage when you wake up, over and over until you die, says Science.

“Last week, there were no murders at all. The drop comes even as officers are doing only about half as many stop-and-frisks as they did at the beginning of last year.”

Bill de Blasio’s New York is going to be:

A) A rainbow paradise

B) A gangster’s paradise

C) 1979

D) 1988

E) 1992