Write No Evil 2.0

WNE has changed a bit and will continue to. I had been planning on acknowledging it in a post but couldn't figure out quite the right time or what to say until I read an article in The New York Review of Books about blogging. I just finished it in fact.
Sarah Boxer writes about her findings for a new book chronicling blogs -think something like The Best American Blog Writing. She has a lot to say including what works on blogs and what doesn't, and an accurate description of the meaninglessness of it. In particular I sensed a strong disdain for the linking feature of blogs. There are also some constructive nuggets of wisdom here, including the fact that blogging is both tough and unique. I also learned that the movie Juno which is the subject of the current WNE poll, was written by a stripper with a trivial blog. That explains so much about that movie. My vote in the poll went to Juno.
Blogs can be very powerful in breaking news and uncovering scandal, or in some cases, creating them, Boxer notes.
Also, most blogs will not become rockstars. Depressing yes, but also something we at WNE came to terms with pretty much at the moment of the site's conception. The most popular blogs, according to Boxer, are the ones that are crude, vulgar, angry, sexual, partisan, and outrageous in every way imaginable. That's not us though. WNE is meant to be more like The New York Review of Books in that we read, see, think, or do something that's seems interesting and share it. The writing in the Review of Books is inspired by books. The idea is that books are an essential part of life and a source of everything creative and constructive. WNE will of course never be as successful as the Review of Books but that's what we're trying to achieve here: a home for what interests us.
I want to model Write No Evil after three intellectual entities:
The New York Review of Books for its genuine passion in the topics it examines and respect for literature.
The New Yorker because I love The New Yorker, along with, unusually, a large portion of the student body at Michigan.
And finally, a now deceased blog called Elm Rock City.
I feel an explanation is necessary for this last one. I discovered the blog a little less than a year ago while searching for a piece in The New Yorker on a pair of philosophers (the Churchlands). The blog is a mix of the highly intellectual -specifically post-modernism, the humorous -anything funny that happens in the author's -who refers to herself as Elm Rock City or ERC for short- life, the personal, and of course the responsive to aspects of culture that interests her. This last attribute is an ingredient in every college blog in existence so nothing new there. Nobody said ERC wasn't a cliche.
But it is charming and an exception to Boxer's laws of a successful blog. ERC writes about the Virginia Quarterly, and her classes, and pop culture, and psychological post-modernism and literary post-modernism. I could go on. Over the blog's lifespan it gained notoriety around the Yale campus, although not as much as the simply annoying Johnny Quest here. (I'm not jealous, I just would like to think that my classmates are interested in things other than what sorority was ranked the highest this year) As Boxer writes, part of being a blogger, like being a writer, includes a desire for a large audience. The more attention, the better. That would be nice but it's probably not going to happen. I want WNE to please the friends of those who post on it and maybe spark a discussion or two. I also want to write for WNE because it's fun.

Pictured: (top photo) Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. (bottom photo) Elm Rock City.