2017–18: Greates’hits
My Most-Read Writing on Medium This Past Year (or So)
In case you missed them, here are a few of my favorites from my past year or so on Medium. This is purely by views, in chronological order. I may do another later of ones I liked the most that were overlooked. Without further ado:
One. This was the first piece I wrote for Medium. A curator reached out to me in August 2017 about featuring it. I didn’t see his email. Seven months later, after the Partner Program was introduced, he reached out again. This time I saw it. It ran in early April. I did an audio version. It got read by a lot of people, many of whom liked it. It was pretty cool to have my first piece take off like that. Thanks, Medium Curator Who Shall Remain Unnamed because I’m leery about tagging people.
Two. This next piece followed the painting piece and was on the Humor page for a while. It got a decent amount of reads/claps. At this point, I thought I could do no wrong. I actually wrote this in 2005 or so. I wrote humor pretty intently from about 2004 to 2007 or so. In that time, I had a couple of pieces that ran in an incarnation of the National Lampoon as an online humor magazine that was actually pretty good. I made a few hundred bucks. It was fun. I came home from work and wrote every evening. (Needless to say, I was single.) This was a piece from that era that I always liked. I don’t remember where or if it ran.
Three. Pretty straightforward concept. I thought it’d do better than it did, but it sort of had a slow burn. I think it would have been better as “An Apolitical Guest’s Guide…”
Four. This was a prelude to my still-forthcoming takedown of P.J. O’Rourke, a review of his myopic, claptrapular book “analyzing” the 2016 election. He used to by an idol of mine. He still is as a humor writer. But as with most childhood idols, as you get older you see their hypocrisies and general crapulence. And so with Peej.
Five. Simple idea that had been rattling around my head for years through personal experience.
Six. This one had the highest percentage of full reads of out its views. Only somewhat exaggerated from a real experience.
Seven. I wish this had gotten a little more exposure. It was featured on Medium’s front page, but way down the scroll, in a food-related box with three other articles. I did a lot of research for this. So in addition to being pretty funny, it is actually a solid history of the subject. I’m still shopping it around in abridged form.
Eight. This one reminds me of something I would have written for The Phat Phree in 2007. It’s basically a list like you’d see on College Humor, so I am not exactly “proud” of it, but for something I wrote in about twelve minutes it did pretty well, and I do think it is a somewhat original thought on the topic of sports.
Nine. This is my most recent piece to be featured. It wasn’t on the front page (in fact, I still can’t figure out how to actually get to the page it’s on without a direct link). But it still got a decent amount of views by my (~300 follower) standards. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think it is a really tight piece of satire. I am not thrilled with the amount of cuts made by Medium’s editor, though. I thought it lost a little of the humor of the piece. C’est la vie.
Ten. This is a piece about canon. Specifically, the loss of a generally accepted canon in rock music due to the explosion of digital music and streaming and, simply, the ever increasing amount of time that has passed and will continue to since the dawn of the modern-music era.
Anyway, I hope it’s raining or you are sick so you will actually read this instead of enjoying this beautiful summer weekend and/or watching the World Cup. Enjoy!
