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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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A JOB FOR THE PANORAMA.- - - - If you live in the Bay Area, as we do, you may have noticed that Tuesday night a five-thousand-pound piece of steel fell off the top of the Bay Bridge and onto a small truck. Now the bridge (the whole bridge! Used by 280,000 drivers a day!) is closed indefinitely, the six-week-old emergency repair that put that piece of steel there has been called into question—and the twelve-year-old, $4.5-billion-over-budget Bay Bridge earthquake retrofit is looking more ill-conceived by the minute. What on earth is going on? It seems like as good a time as any to announce that our next issue will feature a genuinely groundbreaking report, written by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Bob Porterfield and structural-engineer-turned-reporter Patricia Decker, on just what has brought our dear bridge to where it is today. Our correspondents, with the help of San Francisco's Public Press, have been digging into this for months, following the money through Chinese steel refineries and Sacramento bureaucracies, and what they've found will recast the way Tuesday's bridge-breaking and the last decade of bridge-mending is understood. It's an incredible story, and we're going to shed more light on it than any investigation to date. You'll be able to read the whole thing in Issue 33, but you can also, right now, help Porterfield and Decker secure the resources they still need—we're funding their investigation through Spot.Us, and we're hoping that the next few weeks will see their budget goal reached. It's a new approach for us, but the prospect of reader support is what's making this piece possible. And, if you are wondering why we're running long-form investigative infrastructure reporting in our literary quarterly, it is because Issue 33 of McSweeney's is a one-time-only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper. We are calling it the San Francisco Panorama, and it may well be the biggest project we have ever undertaken. Included in its contents, besides a ninety-six page broadsheet dedicated to the news of the day and of the Bay, there is: • a sixteen-page, full-color, 15" x 22" comics section with work from Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman • extraordinary reportage from William T. Vollmann and Nicholson Baker • a 100+ page magazine featuring essays from Antarctica and Israel and Andrew Sean Greer at a NASCAR race • a 100+ page book review with new fiction by George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, James Franco interviewing Miranda July, and Joshuah Bearman on romance-novel cover models • China Miéville reviewing The Road and Stephen King watching the World Series • and also possibly, seriously, the best food section that has ever appeared in any newspaper anywhere, with an incredible modular ramen recipe from New York's own David Chang and a fifty-eight-step lamb-belly photo essay from San Francisco's Ryan Farr We have been working nonstop on this one since the spring, and we couldn't be more excited about every ounce of it—but as ever, this thing depends on the commitment of our readers, so if any of this sounds like something you'd like to see on your doorstep, sign up for it today. And if you are a store, any kind of store, or even a museum or something like that, and you are interested in carrying our paper in the Bay Area or anywhere else—well, e-mail adam[at]mcsweeneys[dot]net and he will sell it to you! Meanwhile: we will continue putting up glimpses of the issue on our site until it's out, so please do check back here as well. There's all kinds of exciting stuff to come. - - - -
OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES: - - - - A Job for the PanoramaYour Mother and I Will Enjoy A Lovely Night Without You By Brendon Lloyd Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea's Guide to a Bitchin' Girl's Night Out By Julia McCloy and James Steffen Announcements On the Back Labels of Poppy's Mix Products By D.P. Roth An Interview with Dr. Cruelty Regarding the Supervillain Sense of Humor By John Moe |
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