Sammy Davis Jr., George Washington, or Cream bassist Jack Bruce - anything might be The Simpleton's topic. There are usually cartoons and occasionally nothing else, but this Web site is really about essays, parodies, and links.
In a mock newsletter called Youth Discipline Industry News, Tim Cavanaugh imagines investors comparing pepper-spray and stun-gun market shares and an industry encouraged by the booming incarceration of teenage girls. It's parody, sure, but a link takes you to oppressive Cross Creek Manor in Utah, and you realize Cavanaugh's chilling private sector already exists. His writing gains power from the places he sends you.
This is great stuff. My only advice? I suspect Web ethos leads writers to pour forth content, but here less product and greater attention to writing might allow more of these pieces to rise above the interesting and witty and become (in Cavanaugh's words) "pants-pissingly funny."
The Simpleton: www.simpleton.com.
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