Dear World: Please stop sucking. *heart* Koog

Those ads never actually mentioned that it really functions as the web site for Brill's Content, a magazine whose purpose I've never really understood. The site itself is equally tough to discern. It seems to be half devoted to sales of physical books and magazine subscription, and half a subscription web site for online resources. Now, it seems to me that $19.95 a year isn't bad, considering that they also send you Brill's Content; but that's a value if and only if you'd read it.

The specific feature of the site that gave me the longest pause is its list of so-called Academic Experts. OK, I thought, it's going to be a list of English professors, maybe a few sociologists. Among the more esoteric subjects on which contentville.com keeps experts are James Bond Studies, Stand-up Comedy, Life in Brooklyn, Compassionate Conservatism, Aesthetic Manifestos, and Evil. Who knew?

Imagine the party conversation such a bunch could inspire:

"So, what do you do?"
"I'm an expert on Evil at the University of Maryland."
"Really? How would one go about becoming an expert in Evil?"
"Many, many years in prison."

The mind just boggles. If nothing else, the expertise on contentville's panel indicates that the people who wrote the material for the web site are profoundly ungifted. They describe Deborah Tannen as an expert in "Language in Daily Life," when a more apt description of her expertise might be "Interpersonal Communications."

In any case, it's not a bad looking site, but the ads are cooler, which figures.

before - after