Solution: The New Yorker should be free online, but they should charge an exorbitant amount of money to submit. Why? Because they publish almost exclusively stories that have been broadcast to them by agents, and have publically admitted that 99.9% of their submission slush pile doesn’t get read, much less published. So: we have a bunch of kids whose parents paid for an MFA (you know the ones) submitting to the New Yorker. They charge the aforementioned Bullshit High Submission Fee to their dad’s credit card so that TNY’s expenses are covered and everyday people like me & you can read the (occasionally!!) good good stories inside that have been submitted by talented authors who got their start (and an agent) the hard but admirable way. This also circumvents the growing “more writers than readers” problem and helps blossoming writers who do get their work published in front of more eyeballs without sacrificing the pristege of getting published in The New Yorker. In conclusion: the rich should pay for the arts to be accessible to the masses. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[This post is in no way influenced by the fact that I’m out of free New Yorker stories for the month.]