“I’m really interested in the power of humor to enlighten people and bring important issues to people’s attention.” “I’m obsessed with Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” she tells me when I ask her about her dream job. She’s very concerned with social justice. It’s apparent that Schwartz took the advice of her exit interview to heart, but as she relates the story, it’s equally clear that she finds this answer unsatisfying. It’s a voice so recognizable that just a few months after its inception, the account now has over 47 thousand followers. You realize Starbucks burns it's coffee, don't you? Take, for example, this ungrammatical nugget: He could be some guy in your writing workshop, but he could just as well be any over-confident boor at a bar, certain that you’re eager to hear his new and groundbreaking opinions. Indeed, part of what so compelling, is that you could find him anywhere. To most audience members, a normal person is prototypically male. In comedy writing, he told her, you always want the simplest route to a punch line, so you want your characters to be as normal as possible. At the end of the summer, during her debriefing, she asked one of the writers why. In her months on staff, she saw almost no skits featuring female performers. It wasn’t, however, without disappointments. “It was finally a round peg/round hole situation,” she says. Until recently, she was on a premed track but decided to shift gears after landing an internship in Los Angeles for TBS’s Conan. Over the course of an hour, I discover that, though she’s determined to become a writer, this was not Plan A. When I ask how much time she has, she says, “All day,” implying that I’m doing her a favor by supplying a valid excuse to put off homework. This, I’ve been told, is her usual haunt. On a cold day in February, I wade through the slush on the streets of Providence’s College Hill to a coffee shop on Thayer Street, where I find Schwartz crouched behind her laptop. She is, in point of fact, a senior at Brown named Dana Schwartz. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the human isn’t a guy, but nor is she a bored publishing assistant or even an MFA candidate. “Let’s just say I would have made a few corrections.” “Of course I’ve read The Corrections,” writes Guy. When I first discovered it last Fall, my assumption was that-like erstwhile Tumblr Life in Publishing or the awkward romance between the Twitter feeds of Harper Perennial and Melville House-it was the creation of bored publicists in one of the New York publishing houses and that, like those, it would gain some quick attention before slowly fading from manages to skewer every aspect of literary culture, from its constant hand-wringing over the line between high and low art to its obsession with New York, isn’t an insular concern. If the brilliance of was immediately apparent, its longevity was hardly certain.
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