CJR asked several cartoonists to offer their two cents on the controversial cover, including Ruben Bolling ("Tom the Dancing Bug"), Derf ("The City"), Matt Bors ("The Idiot Box") and Keith Knight ("The K Chronicles"). The responses vary, with Derf staking out the most uncompromising position: "I thought it was hilarious," says Cleveland's edgiest and tallest cartoonist. "So many people are misinformed, and you can't draw to the morons of America. If you don't know that Obama isn't a Muslim, we can't help you."

Continue ReadingAlt-Weekly Cartoonists Respond to The New Yorker’s Obama Cover

So says Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson, who describes ex-Omaha Weekly (now Omaha Reader) news editor Jonathan Segura's "Occupational Hazards" as "a savagely funny first novel" that tells a "dungeon-dark tale of low-rent journalism, political corruption and rampant degeneracy in a hellish Omaha." According to Anderson, Segura joins ex-Philadelphia City Paper editor Duane Swierczynski as mystery writers whose work is part of a new trend in the publishing business of releasing offbeat novels direct to paperback.

Continue ReadingFormer Altie Writes Book for the “Young, Hip, Cynical and Degenerate”

Gustavo Arellano will headline an exciting weekend of education and inspiration when AAN's annual writers workshop descends on the leafy campus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern Univ. in Evanston, Ill. on Aug. 15-16. Writers who register by Aug. 1 will be able to participate in a personal writing critique, during which their work will be analyzed by a small group led by an experienced AAN editor.

Continue ReadingWriters Workshop Program Announced

Friday was Bradley Steinbacher's last day at The Stranger. The paper's nameplate (pictured) was adjusted this week in his honor, and the staff celebrated with a tenderly worded send-off from public editor A. Birch Steen, along with a series of blog posts too voluminous to link to, including this one, which was iPhoned in by Brad's boss, Dan.

Continue ReadingThe Stranger Honors Departing Managing Editor

After writing a couple of significant freelance pieces for the Weekly, Evan Wright embedded with the U.S. Marines' in 2003 as they crossed the Kuwaiti border at the beginning of the Iraq War. Wright wrote a book about the experience called "Generation Kill," and the creators of the widely lauded HBO series "The Wire" made the book into a seven-episode miniseries that premiered last night on the pay-cable network.

Continue ReadingFormer LA Weekly Writer Talks About New HBO Series

The "Commie Girl" columnist and former OC Weekly staffer was named editor of Los Angeles CityBeat this Spring amidst a relaunch of the paper. She says she's already receiving hate mail. One person wrote in to ask: "'Who's this inane, vulgar, rambling, trite girl who's a terrible writer and has a potty mouth'," she tells the Guardian. "And I was like, 'You live in Los Angeles, are you really that sheltered?'" Schoenkopf also says that she's now realized she willing blinded herself about notoriously conservative Orange County while she was there. "It's not the conservatism that bothers me: it's the nastiness," she says The nattering classes I'd thought were fringey were in fact the decision makers."

Continue ReadingRebecca Schoenkopf on Taking Over at CityBeat and Leaving the OC