Timothy McSweeney's One Shining Moment Involved Pretzels and an Industrial-Sized Tub of Onion Dip

Hello and welcome to the thirty-fifth edition of McSweeney’s Internet Substackency, the Substack of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor and satire website run by McSweeney’s Publishing.

March Madness is underway. It’s by far our favorite sporting event of the year. We’ve been obsessed with the tournament since we were young, even making our own brackets with our dad, complete with each team’s school colors and nicknames. We’re still doing this every year nearly fifty years later, now with our sons.

Hard at work on the board in 2014.

Mabel supervising in 2019.

This year’s board. We’ve been doing this for so long that when we first started making them (1977!), there was nothing really known as “brackets,” which is why ours looks a little different.

So, yep, we’re afflicted with the Madness. As for our Final Four picks? For the men, we’re taking Duke, Auburn, Florida, and Tennessee. For the women, we’re picking UCLA, UCONN, South Carolina, and Notre Dame. And to win it all? The Florida men and the UCLA women.

That’s it from the sports desk, Chet. Back to you, and on with the links…

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Much like the haunted collective first-person narrator in one of the darkest pop songs ever written, I was so gung-ho to lay down my life for the sake of—what I still maintain, despite the deafening silence of the other B-Ball Moms—was a pretty solid joke about how depressing it is to watch our bewildered and uncoordinated children get dog-walked, week after week, by remarkably better youth basketball teams. In fact, I think it was as sharp as knives (knives knives knives), and I won’t rest until at least one of you scrolls back up in the text chain and agrees. And yes, Mackenzie, I sort of think it should be you.

Please click and read the rest of this very sharp piece that turns Irish stereotypes on their end.

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SCHUMER: Look… I know everyone’s worried about this statue facing our gates. But I see this as a chess match between us and the Greeks—and I know chess. Our best play is to move the horse straight forward.

TOWNSMAN: Are you sure you know chess?

GUARD 1: Maybe we can compromise. What if we let in the horse—but surround it with men ready to stab anyone who jumps out?

SCHUMER: No dice. We’ll need everyone capable of wielding a blade to get to work on the thank-you sculpture we send back to Greece.

Please read the rest, and then consider calling your Representatives and Senators in Washington.

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A WORD OR TWO FROM OUR STORE…

In The Ocean Is Everyone’s But It Is Not Yours (the sixth short story in Dave Eggers’s Forgetters series of standalone hardcover minibooks), Aurora Mahoney runs one of three whale-watching businesses on the Monterey coast. It’s a life of great beauty, wonder and camaraderie, but after one of her fellow captains retires, a new, and decidedly different, sort of captain takes his place. What had been a simple and charmed life is clouded by a sinister, and yet aloof, new force on the waterfront. This is a page-turning examination of what makes a paradise, and how easily one human can destroy it.

Published in a pocket-sized hardcover with stunning cover art by Annie Dills, The Ocean Is Everyone’s But It Is Not Yours is available this March exclusively to McSweeney’s readers and subscribers, and in independent bookstores everywhere this summer.

To order this book alongside three additional installments of Dave Eggers’s The Forgetters, click here.

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Agencies should focus on eliminating as many punctuation marks as possible. Think. Do you really need that comma? Or is it a waste of taxpayer’s dollars? Come to think of it just forget about apostrophes. Just put them any’where. Or dont.

Click to the read the rest and then send it to every English teacher in your life.

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Finally, here’s this week’s BLAST FROM THE PAST, an older classic from our archives…

We shared the whole piece with you here, but please click over to the original, where you can zoom in for a little better look. Then put all your money on Florida, UCLA, and “Getting Locked Out in Slippers.”

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