Here they come: The "Bail Out the Writers" articles

and just in the nick of time!  We all just finished explaining to our children why Santa skips every few years. From this weekend's Book Review:

I am not suggesting that a Rooseveltian approach to the writing crisis is inappropriate. Rather, we should look elsewhere in Roosevelt’s legacy for a modern solution. A good place to start would be the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. This entity recognized that an overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that over­capacity was needed.

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.  Read mas.

Perhaps not the best time ever for anyone to quit their day jobs, but when was it?

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