Surely I’m not the only person who thinks that “Pick of the Issue” describes not only one of Emdashes’s more debate-worthy features but also the entirety of Brijit‘s business plan?
Don’t mistake that for a dis. Brijit (keep wanting to slip a d in there) certainly looks like a competent stab at the concept, and we wish it luck. I’m for any website that pays handsomely for reading and then writing about the experience. (That sector is having a hard time.) The concept, which the site describes as “great content in 100 words or less,” er, fewer (sue me, I’m an editor), reminds me of two other wonderfully terse sites, 75 or Less and A Brief Message. Brijit may be especially useful for me—an occupational hazard of mine is occasionally forgetting that there are magazines aside from The New Yorker! (Emily doesn’t exactly have this problem.)
I like the elegant way the three dots in Brijit’s name are spun out to the three points of the rating system. Of the hundreds of New Yorker articles rated on the site, I could only find two that garnered three dots (“exceptional, a must-read, not to be missed”), neither of which appeared as a Pick of the Issue, as it happens. We too sometimes skip the obvious praise for David Remnick or Oliver Sacks in favor of other accolades, so it’s not as though we disagree. To be fair, it does seem like an awful lot of New Yorker articles get two stars, which means they’re “special, worth making time for.”
Here’s hoping that Birjit doesn’t go the way of Plastic.com. (Oh wait, Plastic still exists.) —Martin Schneider