Some people, including a surprising number of my colleagues, seem to think that getting sentimental about newspapers or websites closing down constitutes wasted emotional energy. That may be true, but first of all, I don't think it is technically "sentimental" to mourn the passing of good media, because sentimentality is unearned emotion and frankly, have we not for the love of the sweet, dark-skinned baby jesus christ, earned a little emotion?
Second of all is the whole issue of basic sympathy (if not, indeed, pre-empathy) for the good people who worked there. And third of all, you know, the dying world.
All of which is a preamble to saying farewell to The Awl, which announced today that it would be ceasing publication after nearly 10 years. (The Awl's satellite publication, the Hairpin, is also closing. Publisher Michael Macher confirmed that the other two sites on the Awl network, Splitsider and the Billfold, are not.)
In addition to being a reliable source of smart, funny, and inventive writing, the Awl was also one of the never-massively-abundant-and-now-vanishingly-scarce models for a blog that could lean heavily on culture writing but also do excellent political stuff and also be very funny while leaning on the expectation that many human beings were basically intelligent and capable of reason.
The balance was different from the one that prevails on Slog, which is dominated by news, but they had a similar shape, and a similar interest in trying to amass a collective voice out of many individual ones. The Awl did it all: good New Yorkery features, good arts, good politics, good asides, good personal things, especially good language bits, and lots more.
It was always full of good writing.
Common sense (and abominable phrases like "too clever by half") will suggest that leading with conspicuous smartness is no way to run a business in Internettia. But the saddest and truest thing I can think to think is that the fullness was actually more of a problem than the goodness.
As I now fear I have repeated 379 times, it's extraordinarily difficult for people to find time to properly read a whole thing now. Properly reading is the thing you can't do while you're doing something else (driving, listening to podcasts and music, binging a TV show, scanning social media feeds, shopping, texting, sexting, pretexting, groveling for a living wage), and a site like the Awl, which offers a profusion of intriguing reading material, presents a dilemma. Everybody wants too much of a good thing, which is what the internet has always been. The problem is: Once you get it, where do you put it?
You go to the site and see all the delicious pieces you want to read and save them for "later," maybe even open tabs for several, or perhaps a whole new browser window with nothing but Awl tabs, just waiting for the fantasy moment when the only thing you have to do is just read for pleasure. Then you keep them open for as long as you can stand to preserve the illusion that you will ever have enough time to read even one of them. Or until your computer slows down. Or until the site has to stop publishing and then you're just a digital Charles Foster Kane who never even had a Rosebud. You retain a dim memory of some article about the bear cam that you were absolutely sure you were going to read just a few days b— oh, man, is it already a month ago?
And that is just for the small fraction of the population that even wants to find time to read.
To paraphrase the murderous-suicidal child in Jude the Obscure, we really are too menny, and every day that doesn't include a death notice from a beloved publication is a good one.
Not to be confused with today, which is not. Many thanks and much respect to the Awl's editors, contributors, founders, and fellow readers for an excellent run.
