betseyc

Dear TODers,

Remember how many wanted to help Chipsticks but felt too technically challenged to become a full-fledged mini-tyrant? This new feature is for you!

One of the many things I love about our community is the sharing of links to articles, photos, tweets, interviews, reviews. So the Sunday Lynx (meet our mascot!) will be a weekend reading feast, prepared by anyone who has a moment to post a link and a one line intro to it. You don’t have to go out of your way — if you regularly follow a favorite blog, newspaper, magazine, TV show, that can be your beat.

Unless it bears repeating, we won’t include links already posted on the front page, but you are welcome to include links you’ve posted in the comments during the week. Just put a sticky on your desktop and keep a copy of the links you post, then add them here on Sunday. That way people who don’t get to read all the comments during the week get a chance to see the links they’ve missed. We’re looking for connections to writers and thinkers who are both our frequent friends and also outside our usual resources. In the past couple of months I’ve followed TOD links to an article by a conservative writer bemoaning President Obama’s success in implementing his agenda (how often do we get to read that!), Melissa Harris Perry’s beautiful letter to a rape victim, a mother’s letter to her sons about how a real man treats women, one of the great scathing critiques from Jim at Stonekettle Station, and another from PM Carpenter. Though of course schadenfreude is wrong, it’s of course irresistible, so I always follow links to the few remaining sane Republicans writing about how far off the rails the party is going.

Everyone can join in, but it would be great to know that a certain number of you are on the beat and will be posting links regularly. Let us know in the comments and claim a beat! You can write your own intro sentence or bring out a tempting quote from the article. That way people know if it’s something they want to pursue.

Here’s an example from this week, using one of Charlie Pierce’s many wondrous zingers:

It seems that Max Baucus, the pestilential trout-mask replica from Montana, will be hanging them up at the end of this term….http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/max-baucus-retiring-042313

We might even go for the Zinger of the Week, though Pierce would dominate that category.

If your link has an endless string of letters and numbers for a URL, you can shorten it here: http://tinyurl.com or https://bitly.com. You paste the endless one in the box (right in the center on tiny; upper right on bitly) and it gets shortened for you. Copy that, and paste here. If that’s more than you want to do, just paste the endless one!