So many of you voted yesterday in our first round of polling, and it was exciting to go through the results. The top seeds sailed through, YA won all their match-ups, and plagiarists couldn’t deceive their way out of round one.
A few more notable results:
“PublishingPaidMe” blasted “I’m quitting Substack” out of the water, which tells me we don’t have a lot of voters who got six figure deals from the techie publishing platform.
“AI Apocalypse” didn’t manage to get out of round one—guess it’s not the future after all. This also proves once again that books people are some of the biggest LLM haters on the planet.
“Men don’t read” and “Duchess Goldblatt” were just a couple votes apart — 0.2% away from a dead tie. Just to clarify for the future: in the case of a 50-50, down the middle finish, we’ll flip a copy of The Coin to determine the winner.
“MFA vs. NYC” lost to “Name The Translator” which I think by the transitive property means that the best way to make a career in writing is by aggressively supporting translators.
I was surprised to see “Lauren Oyler pan day” lose to “people getting mad about bookshelf organizing!” A bit of a heartbreaker in the Lit Hub Slack. Could this be another indication that criticism is on the decline?
I was hoping Patricia Lockwood’s “So is Paris any good or not” Tweet would go farther. It’s such a perfect joke, so well written (the opening “so”, the phrasing “any good or not”, starting with the @ tag!) but some things are just too beautiful and burn too brightly for this world, I suppose.
Glad to see the “Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer emails” make it to round two. As a Twitter posting phenomenon the emails were a blast, but they’ve stayed on my mind because they feel much too close to my own emailed flirtations. Maybe it should be heartening that everyone sounds a little embarrassing when they try to make their daily life sound sexy and mysterious, and end up unspooling purple prose about the sound of guinea pigs. (This is James by the way—don’t want to include the whole staff under my umbrella of poor coquetry.)
Some interesting match-ups today in round two, though. In the Matters of Taste corner, there’s a good pairing of iconic Twitter accounts in “Merriam-Webster” vs “@GuyInYourMFA.” Nearby, “R.I.P. Literary Twitter” vs. “Literary Hats” is a fun, slightly oblique referendum on the future of media. And I’m wondering if “Margret Atwood on a scooter” can possibly outmaneuver the “Bad Art Friend drama.” Would love to see Atwood keep scooting.
It’s in your hands now, dear reader!
