Reading the Internet Causes Brain Cavities
Not really, but if you bought that, you’d have been bluf’d. If you think you can fool people into believing you’re telling the truth when you’re not (or that you might not be telling the truth when you really are), you should enter our new contest with blufr, here. Whoever wins gets a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com, no lie. No, seriously—don’t you believe us?
Come on, you can’t hold that Gary Benchley thing against us forever.
Fall Intern Desired
Update: The applications window is now closed; thank you to everyone who got in touch.
The Morning News needs a fall intern to cuddle and train in the black arts. This is an unpaid internship where you supply your own computer and steam and we shower you with beer. Figure six to 10 hours a week of research, email, and editorial thingies. The ideal candidate will have edited before, know lots about the web and something about internet publishing, and be a reliably sane morning person who lives in the New York area (that last part’s not mandatory—we’ve had interns as far away as Florida). Email résumés and explanations to talk at tmn (no attachments). Thanks!
Mucking Up The Courts
It’s not often we hear about TMN playing a role in law enforcement, especially when it’s in a plagiarism case (since we’ve enjoyed promoting plagiarism in the past), but some of Matthew Baldwin’s stories are too good to keep to yourself:
Punishment Mounts for Missing JurorWe’d like to call attention to this sentence: “A court employee recognized phrases in the paper as phrases from an essay the employee had read elsewhere previously.” If that court employee could please get in touch, we’d like to offer them the TMN reader of the week award. (Note, this award has never been given out before, and we have no idea what it consists of.)
by Lisa Roose-Church, Daily Press & Argus
Livingston County Circuit Judge David Reader ordered Brandon Keith Dickens, 20, to sit in court three days and watch a civil trial for failing to return to jury duty after a lunch break in June.
However, Reader ordered Dickens to serve a fourth day and when asked why, Dickens said his paper “was not good enough.”
But when a court employee commented that the judge “wanted your own work,” Dickens smiled and contended he did not plagiarize the paper.
“I quoted it; I quoted a Seattle man’s experience,” he said.
Dickens’ copying of the paper was quickly discovered when he turned it in to the judge Aug. 30. A court employee recognized phrases in the paper as phrases from an essay the employee had read elsewhere previously.
A quick search on the Internet yielded the source of Dickens’ paper—a story by Seattle writer Matthew Baldwin called “Trials and Tribulations” that appeared in an online magazine, The Morning News.
Welcome Time Readers and Other New Friends
Since we always love to meet new readers, we were happy to learn that Time had picked The Morning News as one of this year’s coolest web sites, and we thought a short guide to the magazine might help newcomers find their way around.
TMN publishes a new feature (in the home page’s center column) and a new batch of headlines (in the home page’s right column) every weekday morning. In addition (in the center of the home page), on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you’ll get an update to our Digest section—a round-up of the week’s best books, mp3s, and web videos, respectively. Time mentioned that you should check out our Spoofs & Satire archive, but we’d also recommend looking through our Personal Essays or Op-Eds, or some of our more beloved series like Robert Birnbaum’s conversations with contemporary authors, The Non-Expert’s advice column, or even our new set of articles, “A Walk in the Park,” profiling the best of the world’s public parks. Our aim here at TMN is to publish an eclectic mix of the web’s smartest and funniest stories, so perhaps you’d like Clay Risen’s recent survey of the 10 best-named weathermen, or a gallery of Korean photographer Atta Kim’s latest work, or Lockie Hunter’s remembrance of her grandmother’s fear of ceiling fans.
(There’s also Matthew Baldwin’s and Goopymart’s recent storybook “Files Are Not For Sharing,” in case your kids are reading.)
Whatever you choose to read, we hope you come back tomorrow and read some more. Please let us know if you have any questions. You can click here if you’d like to learn a little more about the history of the magazine, or here to buy one of our Summer ‘06 T-shirts, or here to learn about how your company could advertise on TMN and a handful of other terrific sites with the Deck network. In any case, thanks for reading!
Rosecrans Baldwin & Andrew Womack, Founding Editors
Seasonal Shirts: Summer 2006, by Witold Riedel
We are very pleased to announce a new program starting this morning: Seasonal Shirts!
Each season a different artist is going to design a small batch of T-shirts for The Morning News to be sold until the next season starts, and to start us off for summer we asked artist Witold Riedel (who’s done lots of features for us before) to interpret “Brooklyn, TMN, and Summer.”
And somehow that led to giant crows attacking a Park Slope-ish brownstone birdhouse, no doubt trying to seize the adorable infants inside.
So get one while they last! Get four! The shirts are American Apparel, printed by the guys at Acme Prints, and they look gorgeous—a perfect gift for that special someone who fears being pecked to death in their sleep.
(You can still purchase an official TMN coffee mug or a 2006 Rooster T-shirt but we’ve decided, for quality’s sake, to take all our other merch into our own hands.)
» Click here for more Seasonal Shirts info and ordering options.
