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Unfortunately, as the gatekeeper I’m privy to the horrible truths about we the people, so I’m well aware that the stories that go to the moon are ones where people get killed on camera or ones in which a woman marries her look-alike sex doll. You can play along at home, as many of the Best Publications in the World have most read/most e-mailed boxes, which rarely correspond to what would populate the most-important-and-moving boxes which are as yet nonexistent. I’m also well aware of when and what people read of my own work, which I obviously have strong opinions about; my asinine but clever Cedric Benson Drunkenness Metric got lots of traffic; the thoughtful but depressing Notes on the Death of Paul Tilley, not so much. Perhaps the latter was stale and pedantic? The definitions keep shifting.
Some content that me or my colleagues produce gets ignored because it isn’t very interesting; some of it gets ignored because people aren’t very interesting; some of it gets ignored for reasons I’ll never understand. Now that the Internet has opened up a world of numbers, we know a lot more about who reads what when. Some of it’s heartening, a lot of it isn’t, a lot of it doesn’t make any sense at all.
