The successes and limitations of McSweeney's Panorama experiment have been duly noted and recorded, and now a new gang of print media die-hards are trying something different to bring some 21st century speed to the genre. 48 Hour Magazine is launching their Issue Zero at the end of next week, and submissions for the inaugural volume open and shut within 24 hours, with the whole thing sent to print 24 hours after that. more ›

Assuming you've given any thought at all to such things, you may have believed, as we did, that the Timothy McSweeney who figures in the name of Dave Eggers' ten-year-old literary journal and website was a fiction. It turns out, the man was real, and died last month, and Dave now explains for the first time that he was a mentally ill member of a family with the same last name as Eggers' maternal grandfather, and who used to write letters addressed to both Dave and his mother when Dave was a kid. It turns out that Eggers' grandfather was the attending obstetrician at Timothy McSweeney's birth in Boston, and from the birth certificate Timothy assumed that he was related to these McSweeneys. He taught studio art at Rutgers before later being confined to an institution, where he presumably still lives, from whence he wrote the letters that entranced little Dave and inspired the name for his quarterly concern. more ›

As promised, as part of their San Francisco Panorama broadsheet newspaper, the one-time printing of which is available today at various local booksellers for the special price $5, McSweeney's investigative report on the Bay Bridge is available online via The Public Press. The report includes multiple segments, including this nice timeline of the Bay Bridge's eastern span reconstruction, and this piece by Patricia Decker about the fabrication of the new span, which is being done by a Chinese vendor. more ›

This couldn't come at a better time, and leave it to a snapped eastern span Bay Bridge cable to make us find this: Baynewser reported just two weeks back about a joint venture between McSweeney's and the Public Press to examine (in old school investigative journalist style) and report on the whole Bay Bridge fiasco. The project to build a new eastern span is 6 BILLION DOLLARS over budget and already ABOUT A DECADE LATE, and honestly, today's event should be enough to make everyone who uses this bridge majorly fucking furious. It wasn't even an earthquake and that wasn't even a suspension span! more ›

San Francisco's favorite writer Dave Eggers was honored the other night in New York City for his charity work at 826 Valencia -- the organization that tutors kids in writing skills and now has chapters in six other cities besides SF. He gave a speech, reported in The New Yorker, in which he declared that print was not dead, and that anytime anyone thought it might be, or felt down about the state of publishing in general, they could email him at deggers@826national.org and he would cheer them up, or something. Most of the crowd cheered. As the New Yorker cheekily puts it: "For a night, at least, print lived." more ›

At these prices, Dave Eggers should be institutionalized and brutalized Frances Farmer-style. See, the McSweeney's Store is having a crazy fucking sale. Seriously. For the next three days everything, everything on their store site will cost $15, $10, $5 or $1. more ›